Page:On the Non-Aryan Languages of India.djvu/13

Rh genitive suffix twice repeated. The Kolarian languages generally express grammatical relations by suffixes, and add the postpositions directly to the root, without the intervention of an oblique form or genitive or other suffix. They agree with the Dravidian in having inclusive and exclusive forms for the plural of the first personal pronoun, in using a relative participle instead of a relative pronoun, in the position of the governing word, and in the possession of a true causal form of the verb. They have a dual which the Dravidians have not, but they have no negative voice. Counting is by twenties, instead of by tens, as in the Dravidian.

The Santáli verb, according to Skrefsrud, has 23 tenses, and for every tense two forms of the participle and a gerund. The root is the future, and the various tense signs are suffixed thereto. The verb, by incorporating the short forms of the pronouns, expresses number and person of both an animate subject and object: thus Thākur kakai-ko e-dandom-ko-a 'God sinners will punish.' The pronominal form denoting the subject may be either prefixed or made the last suffixed syllable; that denoting the object is inserted between the tense sign and the following a, which is a sort of verbal base, by means of which any part of speech may be used as a verb. In the above instance dandom is the root, which signifies 'will punish '; e is the pronominal denoting that the subject is animate and singular; ko that the object is animate and plural. For the dual the pronominal form is kin. If the subject and object in the above example had been inanimate, then both the e and ko would have been omitted. In Ho and Mundari, the pronominal form which points to the animate subject of the verb often comes both before and after the verb; thus, if a pronoun is the subject, it may be repeated three times: at the beginning of the sentence and before and after the verb. It is very good Mundari to say Ain ka-in jmtana-in='I not—I am-eating—I,'that is, 'I am not eating.'

A peculiar characteristic of the Kolarian group is that there are two forms for each tense. In Santáli these two forms represent the different relations of the objects to the verb—thus we have ti e-tiar-ad-in-a 'he stretched the hand