Page:A grammar of the Teloogoo language.djvu/26

xiv people, that even to the learned, the use of commentaries is indispensable for the correct understanding of many of their best works. This peculiarity of two dialects is common to the Teloogoo, with the Tamil and the Karnataca. In the course of this work, I propose to give all the rules for the superior dialect, as being that from which the other is derived, but I shall carefully notice the peculiarities of the common dialect. The reader will bear in mind that in conversation and official business, the inferior is used to the entire exclusion of the superior dialect, and that in all books or studied compositions, a contrary rule obtains.

Such as have acquired a knowledge of the Teloogoo language merely with a view to colloquial intercourse with the people, or to the transaction of official business, and have confined their studies exclusively to the inferior dialect, may accuse me of entering on an unprofitable and unnecessary task, in treating of the other, which, in their estimation, may be deemed altogether foreign to the Teloogoo. An attentive examination of the two may possibly lead to a very different conclusion: at all events, as this work is intended as much to enable the student to understand the rules which regulate the classical compositions of the Natives, as to teach him to speak or write the common Teloogoo, I have deemed it my duty to follow the Native Grammarians by tracing the language to its original source in the superior dialect—at the same time, I have not neglected its more useful branches in the inferior dialect, which, as being vulgar, Native authors have considered beneath the notice of the learned.

The Teloogoo is spoken with the greatest purity in the Northern Circars, and with much of its native simplicity by the Ratsawars, Velmawars, and other superior classes in those districts. More conversant with arms, however, than with books, the Ratsawars and Velmawars are in general ignorant of the