Page:A grammar of the Teloogoo language.djvu/28

xvi While I coincide in opinion with Dr. Carey, that, “among these five languages, the Telinga appears to be the most polished, and though confessedly a very difficult language, it must be numbered with those which are the most worthy of cultivation, its variety of inflection being such as to give it a capacity of expressing ideas with a high degree of facility, justness, and elegance;” with deference, I submit that he has given an erroneous view of the structure and derivation of the Teloogoo. In common with every other tongue now spoken in India, modern Teloogoo abounds with Sanscrit words, perhaps it has a greater proportion of them than any of the other southern dialects; nevertheless there is reason to believe that the origin of the two languages is altogether distinct.

With the exception of a few letters peculiar to Sanscrit words, and evidently taken from the Nagree alphabet, the round and flowing characters of the Teloogoo bear no resemblance to the square Devanagree: and even if the Teloogoo alphabet were found to be derived from the Nagree, it would only prove that the people of Telingana had borrowed the invention of a more civilized nation. The origin of their language might still be as different from that of their alphabet, as the origin of our present Roman characters, from that of our Saxon words.

It has already been mentioned that all the Native Teloogoo Grammars are written by Bramins, in the Sanscrit tongue; and that their arrangement of the alphabet, their illustrations, and their comparisons, are necessarily borrowed from the language in which they write. This circumstance might justify the supposition that the Bramins were the first who cultivated the Teloogoo, and brought it under fixed rules: but it cannot be urged in proof of any radical connexion between the Teloogoo and the Sanscrit.

It has also been noticed that, in speaking the Teloogoo, the Soodras use very few Sanscrit words: among the superior classes of Vysyus, and pretenders to the Rajah cast, Sanscrit terms are used only in proportion to their greater intimacy with the Bramins, and their books; and, when we find even such Sanscrit words as these classes do adopt, pronounced by them in so improper and rude a manner as to be a common jest to the Bramins, who, at the same time, never question their