Gujarati language

“ 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has not, as in the case of Sindhi and Panjabi, where the Musulman population is greatly in excess of the Hindu, quite superseded the practice of borrowing from Sanskrit ”

“ Formal Gujarati literature is said to commence with the poet Narsingh Mētā in the 15th century. Rajasthani literature has received but small attention from European or native scholars, and we are as yet unable to say how far back the language goes.
Both Gujarati and Rajasthani are usually written in current scripts related to the well-known Nāgarī alphabet (see Sanskrit) . The form employed in Rajputana is known all over northern India as the “Mahājanī” alphabet, being used by bankers or Mahājans, most of whom are Marwaris. ”

“ Tukaram and Ramdas who have enriched the Marathi language were not ia the least under the obligation of the English language. English cannot claim any credit for the contribution to Gujarati literature of poets from Parmanand and Samel Bhat down to Dalpatram. When we consider how languages grow, we come to the conclusion that a language is but the reflection of the character of the people that speak it. Language depends upon the peculiar genius and occupation of a people. ”

“ Near the original Midland there are few traces of the Outer language, but as we go farther and farther away from that centre we find, as might be expected, the influence of the Midland language becoming weaker and weaker, and traces of the Outer language becoming more and more evident, until in Gujarati we recognize several important survivals of the old language once spoken by the earlier Aryan inhabitants. ”

“ The Ludiana missionaries' Panjabi work is a meritorious and accurate performance, but it can scarcely be called a dictionary, and the same may be said of Captain Stack’s vocabularies of Sindhi. Shahpurji Edalji’s Gujarati dictionary is a very inferior and scanty contribution to our knowledge, and I am driven, by comparison with works written in that language, to doubt its accuracy in more than one instance. By far the best of the whole set is Molesworth’s Marathi dictionary. ”

“ Their language is a mixture of Hindostani and Gujarati with a heterogeneous vocabulary.
Phonetics.—With a few exceptions to be mentioned below, the sound-system of the two languages is the same as that of Sanskrit, and is represented in the same manner in the Roman character (see Sanskrit) . The simplest method for considering the subject in regard to Gujarati is to compare it with the phonetical system of Hindostani (q.v.) . As a rule, Rajasthani closely follows Gujarati and need not be referred to except in special cases. G. invariably simplifies a medial Pr. ”

“ Hindi, English, and 14 other official languages—Bengali, Telgu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Sanskrit; 24 languages spoken by a million or more persons each; numerous other languages and dialects, for the most part mutually unintelligible; Hindi is the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people; English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication ”

“ The interpreters are expected to perform the Herculean task of interpreting successfully in four languages, viz., Tamil, Telugu, Hindustani and Gujarati. The trading Indian invariably speaks Hindustani or Gujarati. Those who speak Hindustani only, speak high Hindustani. The interpreters, with one exception, speak the local Hindustani, which is a grotesque mixture of Tamil, Gujarati and other Indian languages, clothed in extremely bad Hindustani grammar. Very naturally, the interpreter has to argue with the witness before he can get at his meaning. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In Gujarati he naturally speaks with greater rapidity than in English, but with even less variation of voice. He never waves his arms, seldom moves a finger, but the force of his own conviction, his mode, sty, and his logic carries his hearers with him. Few can withstand the charm of his personality. ”

“ The uneducated Hindus do not pronounce the language in the same way as their betters, and this difference is accentuated in northern Gujarat, where the lower classes substitute ē for ī, c for k, ch for kh, s for c and ch, h for s, and drop h as readily as any cockney. ”

“ The verb is, as in other languages, composed chiefly of participial forms combined with the three auxiliaries, but, like Gujarati, the future, as well as the indefinite present, shows signs of the synthetical system of Sanskrit, and in some other respects also is less purely analytical than Hindi. The passive in particular exhibits a system of combination in which a tendency to analytical treatment is not fully emancipated from synthetical ideas. ”

“ For a moment he thought of attempting to enlist the Marathas on his side. They were Hindus; the Gujarati was a Muslim; and they must surely feel that, once he was among his co-religionists in Cutch, in some pirate stronghold, they would run a very poor chance of getting fair treatment. But he soon dismissed the idea. The Gujarati must seem to them much more formidable than the stripling against whom he was plotting. The Hindu, even more than the average human being elsewhere, is inclined to attach importance to might and bulk--even to mere fat. ”

“ Consequently the new structure which becomes wholly separate and independent cannot be said to be mixed as a language in the individuated form. No language of this world can coincide with another, for every language has its own separate grammar or structure; but it can be shown that in their growth many languages in India incorporated many foreign elements and had adopted foreign methods of expression. We can only say that no two languages are identical, but as in the case of human races, so in the case of human speeches, absolute purity cannot be thought of. ”

“ Their ignorance of Indianness and Indian literature is the main reason of this. When they cannot imbibe Indianness, how can their literature make us Indian? Students confined to the study of urdu cannot attain the knowledge of the classical literature of India. It is not that these texts cannot be translated into a literary language like urdu, but it will be useful only to a Persian in his pursuit concerning Indian literature. ”

“ In India, with its numerous and various races, there are said to be two hundred and forty languages, some of them differing from others as much as French from Greek, and three hundred dialects. The most generally prevalent of them is modern, being only three hundred years old—Hindustani, formed by the combination of the Persian and Arabic of the Mussulman conquerors with the native Hindi. Conquerors and conquered quickly forgot their own language to take up a new one adapted to the conditions of a mixed people. ”

“ Linguistics as a modern science is still in its infancy in India, and the meagre dose of ‘Comparative Philology’ or ‘Historical Grammar’ which our college students reading advanced courses in Sanskrit or English, not supplementing it by any acquaintance with another cognate language of equal importance, most unwillingly gulp down, is hopelessly inadequate to create an intelligent interest in the subject. ”

“ Relations with other Indo-Aryan Languages.—Marathi has to its north, in order from west to east, Gujarati, Rajasthani, Western Hindi and Eastern Hindi. To its east and south it has the Dravidian languages, Gondi, Telugu and Kanarese. Elsewhere in India Aryan languages gradually fade away into each other, so that it is impossible to fix any definite boundary line between them. But this is not the case with Marathi. ”

“ The principal Aryan dialects at present are Bengali, Hindi, and Mahratta, all of them lineal descendants of the Devanagari or Sanskrit, which is no longer a spoken language. Hindustani, though mainly Aryan in its vocabulary, and wholly so in its structure, is rather the language of general communication than a distinct dialect. ”

“ The literary dialect is very difficult to master. That is the reason why Telugus who have received the best Western culture are unable to cultivate composition in Telugu. They are afraid or committing blunders, and give up the attempt in despair. Spontaneous writing is out of the question, when one has to write a language which he has to learn from books and is in mortal dread of violating grammar or usage at every step. ”

“ This Hindi, which is an altogether artificial product of the English, is hardly ever used for poetry. 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. ”

“ In India we witness a constant simplification of grammar from Sanskrit through Prakrit and Pali to the modern languages, Hindi, Hindostani (Urdu) , Bengali, etc. Outside the Aryan world we see the same movement: Hebrew is simpler and more regular than Assyrian, and spoken Arabic than the old classical language, Koptic than Old Egyptian. Of most of the other languages we are not in possession of written records from very early times; still, we may affirm that in Turkish there has been an evolution, though rather a slow one, of a similar kind ”

“ From the cumulative evidence it is rather clear that the literary Vedic speech stood in a close relationship with many provincial dialects, some of which at least continued through all ages, to live to be transformed into later vernaculars, and that the Classical Sanskrit, on the other hand, came into existence as an artificial language. ”

“ Starting from their ancient source in the north-west, they have overflowed in more and more diverging streams the whole peninsula except the extreme south-east. The beginnings of these popular dialects go back to a period of great antiquity. Even at the time when the Vedic hymns were composed, there must have existed a popular language which already differed widely in its phonetic aspect from the literary dialect. ”

“ There are two principal dialects in Telugu, one an archaic and artificial literary dialect and the other, the living polite dialect. The facts of the two dialects differ considerably and since grammar is a statement of facts, each dialect has a grammar of its own which takes account of its facts. The literary dialect acquired grammatical fixity centuries back. In other words it did not keep pace with the changes undergone by living speech. It is, therefore, a dead language and its facts are found in books. The facts of polite speech are in the mouths of the best society. ”

“ Properly speaking, no general secular literature existed in the provincial dialects, to give models of language to the Prākṛta-speaking people of successive generations. The people continued to speak in their Prākṛta speeches, but serious literature was always being composed by the learned in Sanskrit. When, therefore any good or elevated thought had to be expressed in a public document for universal use, in any Prākṛta dialect, a great want was felt in getting adequate terms in the current speech of the people. ”

“ I have also said how words of foreign origin may simulate the appearance of Aryan words, and how by comparing the roots and idioms of different languages we have to determine the real character of the words. Some additional examples are adduced here to make the matter convincing. কটু, কুটি, or কুটীর, কুটুম্ব, and খট্টা, are words without roots in the Sanskrit language, while they are found well-rooted in the Tamil speech and they are there in the company of many words derived from their living roots. ”

“ Moreover, when a people loses its homogeneity, or when class differences occur because of cultural difference, and as a compensating measure a wide mass education through the standard literary language is not adopted, provincial dialects grow with great vigour, and no class, howsoever influential, can keep the literary speech alive. We notice a gap between the language of the Vedas, and that of the Brāhmaṇas, and a wider gap between the language of the Brāhmaṇas and the language which may very fitly be designated as Sanskṛta, to signify its character as dressed up, polished or perfected. ”

“ Of the many languages of India, Urdu (Hindustani) is the most widely known, especially in Upper India. Both as a written and a spoken language it has a reputation throughout Asia for elegance and expressiveness. Until the time of Muhammad Shah, Indian poetry was written in Persian. But that monarch, who mounted the throne of Delhi in 1719, greatly desired to make Urdu the vogue, and under his patronage and approval, Hatim, one of his ministers, and Wali of the Deccan, wrote Diwans in Urdu. ”

“ Though traces of a north Indian influence are palpable in ail of them that have come down to us (see, e.g., T. W. Ellis’s notes to the KuraV) , we can at the same time perceive, as we must certainly appreciate, the desire of the authors to oppose the influence of Brahmanical writings, and create a literature that should rival Sanskrit books and appeal to the sentiments of the people at large. But the refinement of the poetical language, as adapted to the genius of Tamil, has been carried to greater excess than in Sanskrit ”