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 2 A KIStQRY OF HINDI LITERATURE and received literary culture, such for instance as Pali. In the last stage of the Prakrits, before the modern Indo-Aryan languages developed from them, they are known as Apabhrarh^as. These are the direct parents of the modern vernaculars of North India, namely, Hindi, Punjabi, MarathI, etc., which came into exis- tence somewhere about 1000 a.d., though the date differs considerably in the case of different languages. These modern languages are no longer synthetic but analytic. Hindi.— It is m.ost important to understand clearly what we mean by Hindi, as the word is often used ambiguously. It is often, for instance, applied in a loose sense to the vernacular speech of the whole of North India between the Punjab and Sindh on the West, and Bengal on the East. But the philological researches of scholars, such as Sir George Grierson, have shown that there are really four chief languages in this area, namely, Rajasthanl, Western Hindi, Eastern Hindi, and Biharl, each having a different parentage. Biharl really belongs to a group of lan- guages of which Bengali is another member. West- ern Hindi is closely connected in origin with Panjabi. The word Hindi is also often used to denote modern literary High Hindi in contradistinction to Urdu ; but both High Hindi and Urdu were, as will be shown below, developed from a dialect of Western Hindi. Hindustani (or Hindostani) is also a name used sometimes to denote the vernaculars of all Hindustan, that is the country between the Punjab and Sindh and Bengal, but is also sometimes used to mean the simpler speech which is the li7igua franca of modern India, and of which both Urdu and High Hindi are literary developments. Scope of this Book.— The literature whose history will be described in this book will include RajasthanI, Western Hindi, Eastern Hindi, and Biharl literature but not Urdu. It may seem at first sight somewhat arbitrary to group together the literatures of these languages which are believed to have been distinct in development, and when Western Hindi, for instance, is