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. ”

“ 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 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Rarely, and quite exceptionally, occur such words as taḥsîlnâ, ḳabûlnâ, dâg͟hnâ, where Arabic and Persian nouns have been furnished with a Hindi termination, but the usual form is taḥsîl karnâ, where the Hindi verb does all the grammatical work, and the Arabic noun is unaltered and uninflected throughout. When they are used as nouns, they take the usual postpositions indicative of case, but as these postpositions are merely appended to them without causing any internal change in their structure, it cannot be said that they are at all affected. ”

“ In point of development, we do not get lower down than about the first century of our era; for even if we get a Jain book written in the fifth or sixth century, we shall find it composed in the language of the first or second, just as a Sanskrit work written yesterday is composed in a form of speech which has not been current for twenty-seven centuries. The curtain falls on Indian languages, then, about the first century, and does not rise again till the tenth ”

“ Going east we come into the great central Hindi area, where the balance between the two races is more even, the numerical superiority of the Hindus being balanced by the greater intelligence of the Muhammadans, and here we find consequently the habit of borrowing from Persian kept up side by side with recurrence to Sanskrit, such recurrence, however, being less frequent in consequence of the already existing abundance of Tadbhava words. Further east again, in Bengal and Orissa, there is an immense majority of Hindus, and as a natural result a maximum of Tatsamas. ”

“ 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 the pronouns, each case must be derived from the corresponding case in Sanskrit, just as in an Italian verb each person of each tense is a distinct corruption of the corresponding Latin person and tense. But with the Hindi noun the case is different. The noun owes to Sanskrit merely its base, or crude form. All its cases are formed out of its own resources, resources perhaps themselves of Sanskrit origin, but put together and employed in a way quite foreign to Sanskrit ideas. ”

“ In some languages, notably in Bengali, Tatsama words have been borrowed from Sanskrit, and employed in written works, in cases where there already existed good serviceable Tadbhavas. The result has been that the unfortunate peasant who knows no Sanskrit finds it more and more difficult every day to acquire knowledge, and the education of the masses is thus retarded. ”

“ Only one tense is synthetical, the indefinite present, corrupted from the present indicative of the Sanskrit.
Panjabi follows Hindi as regards its nouns, having the same simplicity of declension and the same absence of inflection; although the particles used to denote cases are different from those used in Hindi, yet the method of their use is precisely the same; only bases ending in â are subject to modification, all others remain unchanged. The verb is identical in structure with Hindi, and the differences of form are hardly more than dialectic. ”