Page:On the Non-Aryan Languages of India.djvu/14

8 towards me'; tanga e-rech-ked-in-a 'he took the axe from me.' In these instances ad and ked are two different forms of the recent past tense, and the pronoun in 'me' of the remoter object is incorporated with the verb. In Ho and Mundari, however, the two sets of tense forms are explained in a different way, namely, as serving to distinguish a transitive from an intransitive verb, which is a distinction not made in Santáli. Kolarian grammar apparently recognizes none of the root-changes of the Dravidian, but derivative forms are not always indicated by affixed particles only, but occasionally by infixes—thus in Santáli a noun may be formed by infixing t, p, or n with the same vowel as that of the root, for instance, ra-pa-j 'a collection of kings,' from raj 'a king'; u-nu-m 'immersion,' from um 'to bathe.' The reciprocal active voice is formed in a similar manner by the insertion of p; thus, da-pa-l 'strike together,' from dal 'to strike.' Besides its numerous tenses and participles, the Santáli verb has four voices and several moods, and every voice has four forms. The other dialects have not apparently nearly so many verbal forms as the Santáli, but most of them are alike in regard to the most characteristic features of their grammars. Kharria would seem, from Col. Dalton's specimen, to have lost its dual and plural forms; and perhaps the same is the case with Juang, which most resembles Kharria, and of which we have only a bare vocabulary of a few words.

The two groups of which I have spoken, the Dravidian and Kolarian, are the principal, and probably the only groups of languages south of or included within the limits of the Vindhya mountains. There are, however, many other aboriginal tribes, such as Bhíls, Baigás, Boyars, Kaurs, Rautias, and others, that have lost their language, but are generally ethnologically said to belong either to the Dravidian or Kolarian group.

The non-Aryan languages south of the Vindhya are separated by a very broad belt of Aryan tongues from the non-Aryan languages of our northern and eastern frontiers. The chief group we then come to is what has been called the Tibeto-Burman, from the two principal languages included in