George Abraham Grierson

“ Each decade it has become more and more the slave of Sanskrit. It has had some excellent writers, notably the late Bankim Candra, whose novels have received the honour of being translated into several languages, including English. Even he, however, sometimes laboured under the fetters imposed upon him by a strange vocabulary, and all competent European scholars are agreed that no work of first-class originality has much chance of arising in Bengal till some great genius purges the language of its pseudo-classical element. ”

“ When we talk of Prakrit without any qualifying epithet, we usually mean this later stage of the Secondary Prakrits, when they had developed beyond the stage of Pāli, but before they had reached the analytic stage of the modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars. The next, and final, stage of the Secondary Prakrits was that of the Apabhraṁśas. The word Apabhraṁśa means “corrupt” or “decayed,” and was applied to the vernaculars in contrast to the Prakrit par excellence, which had in its turn (like Sanskrit and Pali) become stereotyped by being employed for literature. ”

“ The word is not an Indian one, and both pronunciations, with ō and with ū, are current in India at the present day, but that with ō is unquestionably the one demanded by the history of the word and of the form which other Persian words take on Indian soil. On the other hand “Hindu” is too firmly established in English for us to suggest the spelling “Hindo.”. The word “Hindī” has another derivation, being formed from the Persian Hind, India (Avesta hindu, Sanskrit sindhu, the Indus) . “Hindi” means “of or belonging to India,” while “Hindu” now means “a person of the Hindu religion.” ”

“ It is not always decent, but is immensely popular. Upēndra Bhañja, Rājā of Gumsur, a petty hill state, is the most famous of Oriya poets, and was the most prolific. His work is insipid to a European taste, and when not unintelligible is often obscene. Oriya poetry, from first to last, has been an artificial production, the work of paṇḍits, who clung to the rules of Sanskrit rhetoric, and loaded their verses with so many ideas and words borrowed from that language that it is rarely understood, except by the learned. ”

“ Māhārāṣṭrī Prakrit, the most independent of the Outer languages, was distinguished by the large proportion of these dēśyas found in its vocabulary, and the same is consequently the case in Marathi. The Brahmins of the Maratha country have always had a great reputation for learning, and their efforts to create a literary language out of their vernacular took, as in other parts of India, the direction of borrowing tatsamas from Sanskrit, to lend what they considered to be dignity to their sentences. ”

“ Kanauji is very closely allied to Braj Bhasha, and these two share with Awadhi the honour of being the great literary speeches of northern India. Nearly all the classical literature of India is religious in character, and we may say that, as a broad rule, Awadhi literature is devoted to the Ramaite religion and the epic poetry connected with it, while that of Braj Bhasha is concerned with the religion of Krishna. Vernacular Hindostani has no literature of its own, but as the lingua franca now to be described it has a large one. Panjabi has one dialect, Dōgrī, spoken in the Himalayas. ”

“ Hāla's work is important, not only on its own account, but also as showing the existence of a large Prakrit literature at the time when it was compiled. Most of this is now lost. There are some scholars (including the present writer) who believe that Sanskrit literature owes more than is generally admitted to works in the vernacular, and that even the Mahābhārata first took its form as a folk-epic in an early Prakrit, and was subsequently translated into Sanskrit, in which language it was further manipulated, added to, and received its final shape. ”

“ But the richness of the language in dēśya words has often rendered such borrowing unnecessary, and has saved Marathi, although the proportion of tatsamas to tadbhavas [5] in the language is more than sufficiently high, from the fate of the Pandit-ridden literary Bengali, in which 80 to 90% of the vocabulary is pure Sanskrit. There is indeed a tradition of stylistic chastity in the Maratha country from the earliest times, and even Sanskrit writers contrasted the simple elegance of the Deccan (or Vaidarbhī) style with the flowery complexity of eastern India. ”

“ The vocabulary of Panjabi and Eastern Hindi is very similar to that of Western Hindi. Panjabi has no literature to speak of and is free from the burden of words borrowed from Persian or Sanskrit, only the commonest and simplest of such being found in it. ”

“ As a further guide we may say that sex is usually distinguished by the use of the masculine and feminine genders, and that large and powerful inanimate objects are generally masculine, while small, delicate things are generally feminine. In the case of some animals (as in our “horse” and “mare”) sex is distinguished by the use of different words; e.g. bōkaḍ, he-goat, and śēḷī, a nanny-goat.
The nominative form of a tadbhava word is derived from the nominative form in Sanskrit and Prakrit, but tatsama words are generally borrowed in the form of the Sanskrit crude base. ”

“ It bears much the same relationship to Siamese and Shan that Latin does to Italian. It is more nearly related to modern Siamese than to modern Shan, but possesses many groups of consonants which have become simplified in both. It is a language of the isolating class, in which every word is a monosyllable, and may be employed either as a noun or as a verb according to its context and its position in a sentence. In the order of words, the genitive follows the noun it governs, and, as usual in such cases, the relations of time and place are indicated by prefixes, not by suffixes. ”

“ Declension.—Both languages have lost the neuter gender, all nouns being either masculine or feminine. The rules for distinguishing gender are much as in Hindostani. As in other Indo-Aryan languages, nouns may be either strong or weak, the strong forms being derived from nouns with the pleonastic Sanskrit suffix ka (see Hindostani and Marathi) , In Sindhi a masculine weak form in u corresponds to the strong one in ō, and feminine weak forms in a and e to a strong one in i. In Lahnda weak forms have dropped the final short vowel, and the strong forms end in ā (masc.) ”

“ An important source of our knowledge of Prakrit, and especially of dialectic Prakrit, is the Sanskrit drama. It has already been pointed out that in works of this class many of the characters speak in Prakrit, different dialects being employed for different purposes. Generally speaking, Śaurasēnī is employed for prose and Māhārāṣṭri (the language of lyric poetry) for the songs, but special characters also speak special dialects according to their supposed nationality or profession. In India there is nothing extraordinary in such a polyglot medley. ”

“ Strong adjectives, including genitives, can be declined like substantives, and agree with the qualified noun in gender, number and case. When the substantive is in an oblique case, the adjective is put into the general oblique form without any defining postposition, which is added to the substantive alone. Weak adjectives are not inflected in modern prose, but are inflected in poetry. As in other Indo-Aryan languages, comparison is effected by putting the noun with which comparison is made in the ablative case. ”

“ Every noun can have three forms, a short, a long and a redundant. The short form is sometimes weak and sometimes strong. Occasionally both weak and strong forms occur for the same word; thus, short weak, ghōṛ; short strong, ghōṛā; long, ghoṛawā; redundant, ghoṛauwā. This superfluity of forms is due to the existence of the pleonastic suffix -ka- in the Prakrit stage of the language (see Prakrit) . In that stage the k of the suffix was already elided, so that we have the stages:—Skr. ”

“ All the Skr. cases are preserve except the dative, which has altogether disappeared in the Midland, but has survived in the singular number in the Outer languages. Everywhere the genitive can be employed in its place. Most of the case-forms are derived from Sanskrit according to the phonetic rules, but Ap. has a number of dialectic forms which cannot be referred to that language (cf. the remarks above about -hi = θι) . It also rarely distinguishes between the nominative and the accusative. As an example, we may give the commoner forms of the declension of the Skr. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Declension.—Marathi and Gujarati are the only Indo-Aryan languages which have retained the three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, of Sanskrit and Prakrit. In rural dialects of Western Hindi and of Rajasthani sporadic instances of the neuter gender have survived, but elsewhere the only example occurs in the interrogative pronoun. In Marathi the neuter denotes not only inanimate things but also animate beings when both sexes are included, or when the sex is left undecided. ”

“ A more important dialectic difference in Bengali is that between the literary speech and the vernacular. The literary vocabulary is highly Sanskritized, so much so that it is not understood by any native of Bengal who has not received special instruction in it. Its grammar preserves numerous archaic or pseudo-archaic forms, which are invariably contracted in the colloquial speech of even the most highly educated. For instance, “I do” is expressed in the literary dialect by karitēchi, but in the vernacular by kȯrcci or kȯcci. Oriya and Assamese may be said to have no dialects. ”

“ For this the indigenous dialects (usually Awadhi or Braj Bhasha) are nearly always employed by Hindus. Urdu, on the other hand, having had a natural growth, has a vigorous poetical literature. Modern Hindi prose is often disfigured by that too free borrowing of Sanskrit words instead of using home-born tadbhavas, which has been the ruin of Bengali, and it is rapidly becoming a Hindu counterpart of the Persianized Urdu, neither of which is intelligible except to persons of high education. ”

“ Very probably, although the distinction is not observed in writing, and has not been noticed by native scholars, these vowels are also pronounced short in the standard dialect under the circumstances to be now described. When a long ā, ī or ū precedes an accented syllable it is usually shortened. In the case of ā the shortening is not indicated by the spelling, but the written long ā is pronounced short like the ă in the Italian ballo. Thus, the dative of pīk, a ripe crop, is pikā̇s, and that of hāt, a hand, is hātā̇s, pronounced hătā̇s. ”

“ The sound of such a final a is in all three languages the same as that of the second o in “promote”; thus, the Bg. bara is pronounced bȯṛō. In Bg. a medial a sometimes has the sound of the first o in “promote,” as, for instance, in the word ban (bon) , a forest. In A. and Eastern Bg. a medial a is often sounded like the a in “ball,” and is then transliterated ȧ. Ā has preserved as a rule its proper sound of a in “father.” The distinction between i and ī and between u and ū is everywhere lost in pronunciation, although in tatsama words the Sanskrit spelling is followed in literature. ”

“ Conjugation.—It is in the conjugation of the verb that colloquial Bg. differs most from the literary dialect. There is no distinction in any of the three languages between singular and plural. Most of the old singular forms have survived in a non-honorific sense, but they are rarely employed in polite language except in the third person. The old plural forms are generally employed for the singular also. The usual base for the verb substantive, when employed as an auxiliary, is ach, be, derived from the Skr. ”

“ In Nepal, Khas-kuṛa is the language only of the Aryan population, the mother tongue of most of the inhabitants being some form or other of Tibeto-Burman speech (see Tibeto-Burman Languages) , not Indo-Aryan. As may be expected, Khas-kuṛa is mainly differentiated from Central Pahari through its being affected, both in grammar and vocabulary, by Tibeto-Burman idioms. The speakers of Central and Western Pahari have not been brought into close association with Tibeto-Burmans, and their language is therefore purely Aryan. ”

“ Most of them have fallen into disuse in the modern prose language. We may note the following, some of which have preserved the Māhārāṣṭrī forms, while others are directly derived from the Apabhraṁśa stage of the language. We content ourselves with giving some of the synthetic cases of one noun, a weak neuter a-base, ghar, a house.
As already stated, in Prakrit the genitive is employed instead of the dative, and thus forms the basis of the Marathi dative singular. The genitive plural is not used as a dative plural in Marathi, but it is the basis of the plural general oblique case. ”

“ Many of the above forms will be intelligible from a consideration of the closely allied Sanskrit, although they are not derived from that language; but some (e.g. those of the second person singular) can only be explained by the analogy of the Iranian and of the Piśāca languages.
The present participle is formed by adding ān to the root; thus, karān, making. It does not change for gender. From this we get a present and an imperfect, formed by adding respectively the present and past tenses of the auxiliary verb. Thus, kāran chus, I (masculine) am making, I make ”

“ Assamese Literature.—The Assamese are justly proud of their national literature. It has an independent growth, and its strength lies in history, a branch of letters in which other Indian languages are almost entirely wanting. ”