John Beames

“ In the Bengali noun we have a purely inflectional genitive, the legitimate descendant of the Sanskrit termination -asya. Bengali and Oṛiya are like overgrown children, always returning to suck the mother’s breast, when they ought to be supporting themselves on other food. Consequently the written Bengali, afraid to enter boldly on the path of development, hugs the ancient Sanskrit forms as closely as it can, and misleads the reader by exhibiting as genuine Bengali what is merely a resuscitation of classical Sanskrit. ”

“ I have left myself no space to finish this Pallab, or to make remarks on the peculiarities of the language, which in the older masters would more properly be called old Maithila than Bengali. It is nearly identical with the language still spoken in Tirhut, the ancient Mithili, and in Munger and Bhâgalpur, the ancient Magadha, than modern Bengali. As the Aryan race grew and multiplied it naturally poured out its surplus population in Bengal, and it is not only philologically obvious that Bengali is nothing more than a further, and very modern development of the extreme eastern dialect of Hindi. ”

“ So completely did this idea prevail, that the honest old Tadbhavas were entirely banished from books, and a host of Tatsamas dug up from their graves, and resuscitated for daily use. That the Sanskrit, like every other language, was subject to the laws of development, and that Bengali, like every other language, was merely the natural result of those laws, never occurred to Carey, Yates, and their brethren; and if such an idea had crossed their minds, it would have been banished as a heresy by the Pandits. ”

“ The problem which has to be explained is this, whence comes it that words in the modern languages preserve a greater degree of resemblance to Sanskrit or old Aryan, than the Prakrits do? How is it, for instance, that Hindi has rât, râg, nâgarî, gaj, for Sanskrit râtri, râga, nâgari, gaja, where Prakrit has only râï, râä, nâari, gaä? If these modern languages were regularly descended, in respect of such words as these, from Sanskrit through Prakrit, the letters which had been lost in the latter could never have been restored. The masses speak by ear, and by habit. ”

“ The language spoken in those places, the Hindi, thus became rich in Tadbhavas. In the remote marshes of Bengal and the isolated coast-line of Orissa the Aryan pulse beat but feebly. Life was ruder and less civilized, and non-Aryan tribes mustered in great force in the plains as well as in the hills. The extremities lagged behind the heart, words which had a meaning in the courts and cities of Northern and Western India were not known to or required by the nearly naked Bengali crouching in his reed hut in those outlying regions. ”

“ It was on his return from Gayâ, when he was about 23 years of age, that he began seriously to start his new creed. "It was now," writes Babu Jagadishnath, "that he openly condemned the Hindu ritualistic system of ceremonies as being a body without a soul, disowned the institution of caste as being abhorrent to a loving god all whose creatures were one in his eyes, preached the efficacy of adoration and love and extolled the excellence and sanctity of the name, and the uttering and singing of the name of god as infinitely superior to barren system without faith." ”

“ It seems, unhappily, to have been the fate of every Indian language, that directly men began to write in it, they ceased to be natural, and adopted a literary style which was handed down from one generation of writers to another, almost, if not entirely, unchanged. Thus not only has the Sanskrit remained fixed and unaltered through all the ages, but the Buddhists have fossilized one dialect of Prakrit, and the Jains another ”

“ It is difficult for the European mind, trained to draw a broad distinction between the love of God and love for another human being, to enter into a state of feeling in which the earthly and sensual is made a type of the heavenly and spiritual, but a large-souled charity may be perhaps able to admit that by this process, strange though it be to its own habits and experiences, there may have been some improvement wrought in the inner life of men brought up in other schools of thought ”

“ Acting upon this assumption, if we find a word retaining, in spite of various changes in its form in other respects, the accent on the same syllable as in Sanskrit, it will not be altogether unreasonable to conclude that it was derived from that language, at a time when it was still spoken among learned men, or, at all events, when a knowledge of its true pronunciation had not died out, and we may, therefore, ascribe to it an antiquity of no mean kind. ”

“ It was not till the thirteenth century that some great minds broke through the prejudices of their age, and, influenced by a strong desire of being intelligible to the mass of their countrymen, commenced timidly and half apologetically to write in the vulgar tongue. If then this was the case in Southern Europe, we are justified, by the known analogy between the Romance processes of development and those of the modern Aryans, in believing that the same thing took place in India. ”

“ We want no non-Aryan influence to account for a natural and regular process in all languages of Indo-Germanic build. When, by lapse of time and the effect of those numerous changes which words necessarily undergo in transmission from generation to generation, the terminations of nouns and verbs have been worn down, so that they no longer afford sufficiently clear indications of time, person, or relation, some other means of marking these necessary distinctions silently grows up. In the case of European languages there were prepositions for the noun and auxiliaries for the verb. ”

“ Marathi is one of those languages which one may call playful—it delights in all sorts of jingling formations, and has struck out a larger quantity of secondary and tertiary words, diminutives, and the like, than any of the cognate tongues. ”

“ It is not advisable here to stop to examine why this is; it is enough to say that where Bengali, Oriya, and Marathi have recourse to Sanskrit, Hindi, Panjabi, Sindhi, and Gujarati in a great measure recur to Arabic and Persian; but as the proportions of the Hindu [21] and Musulman population are more evenly balanced in the area occupied by Hindi than in that of any other language, the tendency to borrow from Arabic has not, as in the case of Sindhi and Panjabi, where the Musulman population is greatly in excess of the Hindu, quite superseded the practice of borrowing from Sanskrit ”

“ There seems to exist among words, even as among living beings, a struggle for existence, terminating in the "survival of the fittest." It is clear from all that has hitherto been discovered in linguistic science that the progress of development of all languages is from the harsh and complicated to the smooth and simple. The words in ancient languages are cumbered with a mass of letters, sounds, and combinations, which in the course of ages wear away by use, leaving short simple words behind. ”

“ In truth the accent is always a difficult and obscure matter, and it is the more so in the modern languages, because they have passed through a period, a very long period, of their existence without a literature. ”

“ I am very imperfectly acquainted with the non-Aryan languages; and with those which impinge most closely upon the Aryan area, very few persons can pretend to be familiar. But it seems advisable once again to raise a warning voice against the rash speculations which are the bane of philology more than of any other science, and which have so frequently been the cause of the science itself being turned into ridicule. ”

“ Languages, like trees, grow and develope, and their stages of growth are well marked in the abstract, though we cannot point to any language which has gone through all the stages within historical times. The first stage is that in which all words are monosyllables without inflections or power of internal modification; and when strung together to make sentences, the same word is at one time a verb, at another a noun, at a third a particle, according to its place in the sentence. ”

“ It betrays therefore a radical misunderstanding of the whole bearings of the question, and of the whole science of philology, to speak of Urdu and Hindi as two distinct languages. When certain agitators cry out that the language of the English courts of law in Hindustan should be Hindi and not Urdu, what they mean is that clerks and native writers should be restrained from importing too many Persian and Arabic words into their writings, and should use instead the honest old Sanskrit Tadbhavas with which the Hindi abounds. ”

“ Indian Pandits will not often waste their time on the vernaculars, and, if they do, are content to note such words as afford examples of any of the rules of Vararuchi or his successors, and to set down all words which cannot by the operation of these rules be at once transformed into Sanskrit as Deśaja. European scholars also have got no further than Prakrit, and seem to believe that the modern dialects are merely corruptions of Prakrit forms. ”

“ The Aryan dialects remained purely synthetical for many centuries after the race entered this country. When it first came here, it found the land covered with non-Aryan races, and it is almost certain that it came more into contact with them during those early ages than it did in later times, because these alien races were after a time either driven out altogether, or remained and were absorbed into the conquering body, where they took rank at the bottom of the social system as Sudras, and learnt the speech of their conquerors, which speech in those days was Prakrit in some form or other. ”

“ We can only move slowly, slowly, stablishing our feet firmly on one point before we pass to another. Data are scanty, and facts hard to get at. In the above remarks all that has been done is to show how great is the à priori improbability of the theory that the present structure of the modern Aryan tongues is in any great degree due to non-Aryan influence. It has been said languages borrow words but never grammar. ”

“ Thus, a vulgar Aryan who said homi, for "I am," would have had to re-construct out of his inner consciousness the older form bhavâmi, and, not content with that, to further resolve bhavâmi into its component elements of bhû and âmi, and henceforth to use these two words adjacent to each other, but unincorporated. This we see at once is out of the question, and absurd. What our vulgar Aryan really did was in course of time to drop the final i of homi, and to nasalize the m, at the same time imparting a broader and more rustic pronunciation to the vowel, thus producing हौं haun. ”

“ But it may be stated as a general proposition, that in the whole realm of linguistic science there exists no more remarkable similarity than that between the history of the development down to its minutest particulars of the Romance group of languages, the Provençal, Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and the indications, we cannot call it history, of the origin and growth of the Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, and Sindhi. ”

“ Moreover, works continued to be composed in Sanskrit long after the rise of the modern vernaculars, and it is a singular coincidence in point of time, that Chand, the earliest writer in any modern Indian language, is very nearly contemporaneous with the predecessors of Dante; so that the human mind in India broke itself free from the shackles of a dead language very much about the same time as in Europe. ”

“ The ordinary business of life could not have been carried on amidst such a Babel of conflicting tongues. Perhaps the best solution of the difficulty is to suppose that the play-writers mimicked the local peculiarities of the various provinces, and as in India in the present day great men fill their palaces with servants drawn from all parts of the country, so it may have been then. A Bengali Zemindar employs men from the Panjab and Hindustan as guards and doorkeepers; his palanqueen-bearers come from Orissa, his coachmen and water-carriers from Northern Bengal, and so on. ”

“ Moreover, it will always be found that no language is purely analytical. The most advanced languages, such as English, still retain traces of the synthetical phase through which they have formerly passed. Thou goest, he goes or goeth, went, gone, though much altered from their original form, still exhibit the inflectional or synthetic type. ”

“ In Sindhi the preparation of the base for reception of the case particles assumes great importance, there being in nearly every case three separate base-forms in the singular, one for the nominative, a second for the oblique, and a third for the vocative; and three in the plural, the plural forms being in addition various and numerous for the oblique and vocative. That these forms result from a partial retention or half-effaced recollection of the Sanskrit inflectional system is apparent, and this fact places Sindhi in an inferior stage of development to that of the fore-named languages. ”

“ Passing from the consideration of the constituent elements of this group of languages, to that of their structure and inflections, we are again met by the question of non-Aryan influence. It has been said that contact with the savage races of India had on the Aryans the effect of breaking down their rigid inflectional system, and causing them to substitute, for case-endings in nouns and verbs, distinct particles and auxiliaries, and that under this influence the Sanskrit gradually became modified into the present forms. ”