Page:EB1911 - Volume 14.djvu/517

 very common locative suffix -ē. This can be traced through the Apabhraṁśa -hi to the Pali -dhi. There all Indian clues cease, and it is not till we recognize its relationship to the Greek - that we understand that it is an ancient Indo-European termination kept alive in India by some of the Primary Prakrits, but ignored both by the dialect of the Rig-Veda and by literary Sanskrit. With this reservation, a short comparison of Sanskrit with the Secondary and Tertiary Prakrit developments will be of interest. As the Pali and Prakrit stages are fully treated under their proper heads, very brief references to them will be sufficient.

A. Vocabulary.—The ground of all the vocabularies of the modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars is, of course, the vocabulary of Aryan India in the Vedic period. Thousands of words have descended from the earliest times and are still in existence, after passing through certain changes subject to well-known phonetic laws. As many of these laws are the same for every language, it follows that a large stock of words, which principally differ in inflection, is common to all these modern forms of speech. These words, which natives believe to be derived from Sanskrit itself, are called by them tadbhava, i.e. “having ’that’ (sc. Sanskrit, or, more correctly, the Primary Prakrit) for its origin.” As the language of the Midland is derived from the old dialect of which Sanskrit is the “polished” form, it is approximately true to say that it is derived from that form of speech, and its native vocabulary (allowing for phonetic development) may be said to be the same as that of Sanskrit. But the farther we go from the Midland, the more examples we meet of a new class of words which natives of India call dēśya or “country-born.” Most of these are really also tadbhavas, descendants of the old Primary Prakrit dialects spoken outside the Midland, of whose existence native scholars took no account. Finally, owing to the ever-present influence of literary Sanskrit, words are, and have been for many generations, borrowed direct from that language. Some of these borrowed words are due to the existence of Sanskrit as the language of religion. Their use is paralleled by the employment of Greek and Latin words for religious technical terms in all the languages of Europe. Others are technical terms of arts and sciences, but most of those which we meet are simply employed for the sake of fine language, much as if some purist were to insist on employing hlāford instead of “lord” in writing English. These Sanskrit words are known as tatsama or “the same as ‘that’ (sc. Sanskrit).” The number of tatsamas employed varies much. In languages such as Panjabi which have little or no literature, and in the speech of the peasantry all over India, they are few in number. In the modern literary Bengali a false standard of literary taste has led to their employment in overwhelming numbers, and the homely vigorous home-speech, which is itself capable of expressing every idea that the mind of man can conceive, flounders about awkwardly enough under the weight of its borrowed plumes. The native vocabulary of the modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars is thus made up of tadbhavas, dēśyas and tatsamas.

The Dravidian languages of southern India have also contributed a small quota to the Indo-Aryan vocabulary. Most of the words have been given a colour of contempt in the process of borrowing. Thus the word pillā, a cub, is really the Dravidian pillai, a son. But the most important accretion from outside comes from Persian, and (through Persian) from Arabic. This is due to Mahommedan influence. In the Mogul courts Persian was for long the language of politeness and literature, and words belonging to it filtered into all stages of society. The proportion of these Persian words varies greatly in the different languages. In some forms of Western Hindī they have almost monopolized the vocabulary, while in others, such as Bengali and Marathi, the number is very few. Instances of borrowing from other languages are of small importance.

B. Phonetics.—The alphabet of the Indo-Aryan languages is, on the whole, the same as that of (q.v.), and the system of transliteration adopted for that language is also followed for them. Some new sounds have, however, developed in the Secondary and Tertiary Prakrits. New signs will be used for them, and will be explained in the proper places. Sanskrit knew only long ē and ō, but already in the Secondary Prakrits we find a corresponding short pair, e and o, of which the use is considerably extended in the tertiary stage. The Sanskrit diphthongs āi and āu disappeared in the secondary stage, ē and ō being substituted for them respectively. On the other hand, in the same stage, we frequently come across pairs of vowels, such as aï, aü, with a hiatus between the two members. In the tertiary stage, these pairs have been combined into new diphthongs ai and au, shorter in pronunciation than āi and āu. The pronunciation of āi and ai may be compared with that of the English “aye” and “I” respectively. In the languages of the Outer Band, there is again a tendency to weaken this new ai to ē, and the new au to ō. All the tertiary languages weaken a short final vowel. In most it is elided altogether in prose, but in some of those of the Outer Band (Kashmiri, Sindhi and Bihari) it is half pronounced. Some of the Outer languages have also developed a new a-sound, corresponding to that of a in the German Mann. The stress-accent of classical Sanskrit has as a rule been preserved throughout. In the tertiary stage it generally resolves itself into falling on the ante-penultimate, if the penultimate is short. If the latter is long it takes the accent. In the eastern-languages there is a tendency to throw the accent even farther back. There is also everywhere a tendency to lighten the pronunciation of a short vowel after an accented syllable, so that it is barely audible. Thus, cálatā for cálatā. In some dialects, e.g. the Urdu form of Western Hindi, this “imperfect” vowel has altogether disappeared, as in cáltā.

The tertiary languages have on the whole preserved the consonantal system of the secondary stage, preferring, however, as a rule, to simplify double consonants, with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel. Thus, for Sanskrit hasta-, a hand, we have Secondary Prakrit hattha-, Tertiary hāth. Some tertiary languages have both hatth and hāth: others (like Gujarati) have only hāth: while others (like Panjabi) have only hatth. In the extreme north-west, Sindhi and Lahnda, under the influence of the Pisaca languages, simplify the double consonant without compensatory lengthening, so that we have hath. Again, many languages of the Outer Band show a tendency to avoid aspiration, so that Kashmiri, Marathi, Bengali and others have hāt. It is well known that the Iranian languages change s to h. The Tertiary Prakrits of the Outer Band find analogous difficulty in pronouncing a sibilant. The north-western languages change it to h as in Persian. Marathi changes s to ś before palatal sounds, and the same change occurs in Bengali in the case of every uncompounded sibilant. Eastern Bengali and Assamese go farther. Here s is again sounded almost like h. On the other hand, in the Midland, s rarely becomes h and then only when medial. In the Outer languages the palatal consonants are also liable to change; j and jh approach the sound of z, and c and ch often become ts, or, in the East, a simple s. Thus, the Midland cākar. a servant, is pronounced tsākar in Marathi, and the Midland māch, a fish, is sounded mās in Marathi, Bengali and Assamese.

C. Declension.—In the latest stage of the Secondary Prakrits the neuter gender begins to disappear, and in the tertiary stage, except in Gujarati and Marathi, it is nearly altogether wanting. Elsewhere we only come across occasional relics of its employment. In some of the tertiary languages grammatical gender, as distinct from sexual gender, has disappeared as entirely as it has in English. The dual number had already fallen into disuse in the Secondary Prakrits. In the secondary stage we see a gradual simplification of grammatical form and a disappearance of case endings. The complicated Sanskrit system is more and more superseded by the simple uniformity of the declension of a-bases. One by one the case endings were discarded, and cases were confounded with one another till at length in Apabhramśa only one or two forms remained for each number. In the tertiary stage there remain in most languages only two cases, which we may call the nominative and the oblique. The latter can be employed for any case except the nominative, but the sense is usually defined by the aid of help-words called postpositions. It is a linguistic rule that languages in which the genitive precedes the governing noun prefer suffixes to prefixes and vice versa; and, as the genius of the Indo-Aryan languages does require the genitive to be prefixed, these help-words take the form of suffixes. In the Midland they are still separate words, but in the Outer Band each has in general become incorporated with the main word to which it is attached. Thus, the Midland ghōṛā, a horse, has its oblique form ghōṛē, genitive ghōṛē ker, but Bengali has oblique form ghōṛā, genitive gkōṛār contracted from ghōṛā + (k)ar. The ground principles of declension in all tertiary languages are the same, but as each employs different postpositions the systems of declension vary considerably. Marathi is the only true Indo-Aryan language which has preserved anything more than sporadic relics of the old system of case terminations.

D. Conjugation.—Two tenses, the present and the imperative, of the old synthetic system of conjugation have survived in all the Tertiary Prakrits, and in some of them we also find the ancient future. All other tenses are now made periphrastically, mostly with the aid of participles to which auxiliary verbs may or may not be added. The participles employed are all survivals of the old participles of the present, of the past and (in some languages) of the