Page:On the Non-Aryan Languages of India.djvu/7

 ON THE

BY

E. L. BRANDRETH,.

the Address delivered by him at the Second International Congress of Orientalists, in 1874, Prof. Max Müller remarks, "No real advance has been made in the classification of the Non-Aryan Indian dialects since the time when I endeavoured, some twenty years ago, to sum up what was then known on that subject in my letter to Bunsen, 'On the Turanian Languages.'" A table of the Indian languages is given by Max Müller in that most popular work of his, eight editions of which have already been published, the Lectures on the Science of Language. A very few lines are devoted to these languages in the Lectures: for further particulars we are referred to the above-mentioned letter on the Turanian languages. Some important materials, however, for the study of the Indian languages, have been collected since that letter was published; and it is evident that, if Max Müller had had those materials before him, he would have written about the languages of India in some respects very differently. He would not, for instance, have remarked, regarding that enormous number of languages on our northern and eastern frontiers which he calls Sub-Himalayan and Lohitic, that, "with the exception of the Naga dialects, none distinguishes the persons of the verb by either affixes or prefixes;" because many other languages besides the Naga do thus distinguish the persons of the verb, and in some of them the structure of the verb is of the most