Hindi language

“ We have to adopt one language, one script, one literature, one ideal and one nation, but the adoption of a single language precedes all the other unities, so they we can communicate with and comprehend each other. A Punjabi and a Madrasi must not sit together mute at a gathering, but try to communicate their ideas and emotions, and this should be done in our own language, Hindi, rather than in an alien language like English. ”

“ 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 ”

“ We shall plead with the supporters of Hindi that, ultimately and certainly, only Hindi will be the language of the whole Bharat, but it will be more convenient to propagate it from now on. Punjabi will become like Hindi by adopting the script and then all the differences will disappear; and it is desirable, too that common people could be educated which is possible only through our own language in our own script. ”

“ The spoken language varies so much in different parts of the country and among different classes of people, that it would be hopeless to attempt any thing like a complete vocabulary of names as pronounced by the people of the different provinces of which Hindi and Bengali are the vernaculars. ”

“ It must be noticed that the words borrowed from other languages have all to conform to the genius of the languages into which they are adopted. This is what takes place in the Bengali language and this is what as a matter of course takes place in Hindi even though the speakers, through whose agency the adoption is accomplished, are Muhammadans. [2] That an adherence to an unscientific situation has a mischievous effect on education must be duly appreciated. ”

“ Before proceeding I must premise, for the information of some readers, that it has been a question among learned Orientalists, whether the refined Sanscrit was the parent of the common Hindi, the latter being a corruption, or whether the Hindi formed the basis or substratum of a common Indian language, adopted by the Brahmans on their entry into Hindustan, but polished by improvements and enriched by the addition of scientific and other terms, especially astrological ones, brought with them on their emigration. ”

“ We wish our Muslim brothers, while sticking to their religion, think of Indianising themselves like Kamal the Turk. India's salvation is possible only that way. Instead of making language a communal question, we should adopt a wide perspective.
We will now return to the problem of Hindi and Punjabi. Many idealists entertain a vision of the world turned into one single nation, one global nation. This ideal is beautiful and one should keep it before oneself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In India there are tribes Aryan by language, but whose physique is rather of indigenous type, and whose ancestry is mainly from indigenous stocks with more or less mixture of the dominant Hindu. Some tribes coming under this category, as among the Bhils and Kulis of the 50Bombay Presidency, speak dialects which are Hindi in vocabulary at least, whether or not in grammatical structure, and yet the people themselves are lower in culture than some Hinduized nations who have retained their original Dravidian speech, the Tamils for instance. ”

“ What I want to bring out prominently is that, we cannot study the phonetic changes in a speech without taking the speakers of it into account. After observing the differences among the sister dialects, we raise the question, why the parent tongue underwent different sorts of changes in different provinces, we ask why the "apabhramśa" forms in use in Hindi for example, did not become current in Bengali? What were the solvent elements in different provinces that brought about the characteristic changes noticeable in different speeches of common origin? ”

“ Non-হসন্ত words of one letter, i.e., to say non-হসন্ত single consonants treated as words must take 'এর' to maintain their distinctness as words; e.g., ক-এর আঁকড়ী, শ (contracted form of শব) -এর কড়ি, etc.; contrast with them কবিতায়, যত-র সঙ্গে এত-র ভাল মিল হয়না. (4) Words ending with compound letters always generate non-হসন্ত sounds (unlike what it is in Hindi) in Bengali and yet they take এর্ and not র as we may notice in কষ্টের, গন্ধের, চন্দ্রের, etc. In Eastern Bengal, however, simple র is affixed in such cases in spoken language following perhaps the general rule which is in the air. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Men who are preparing for the Civil Service in India learn Sanskrit; not because the Government is interested in the training of their minds, but because this is the key to the spoken dialects of India. As this dead language is practically useful in learning Hindi or Bengali, so Latin is practically useful in learning Italian or French. Then again, the grammatical drill is much more rigid and effective in teaching Latin than in teaching French, Italian, or even German. ”

“ Eastern Hindi is very like Panjabi in this respect, but for a different reason. In it were written the works of Tulsī Dās, one of the greatest writers that India has produced, and his influence on the language has been as great as that of Shakespeare on English. The peasantry are continually quoting him without knowing it, and his style, simple and yet vigorous, thoroughly Indian and yet free from purism, has set a model which is everywhere followed except in the large towns where Urdu or Sanskritized Hindi prevails. ”

“ The central mountainous region and the table-lands of the Dekhan yet belong to the aboriginal tribes, who in the north were crowded out or subjugated, at a period lying only just beyond the ken of recorded history, by the Indo-European races, as they intruded themselves through the avenue, the passes on the north-western frontier, by which the conquerors of India have in all ages found entrance. The principal modern dialects of our kindred are the Hindi, Bengali, and Mahratta, each with various subdivisions, and each with a literature of its own, running back only a few centuries. ”

“ Like the greater part of those from Arabic and Persian, they are chiefly nouns, and may be regarded rather as excrescences which have sprung up casually and have attached themselves to the original trunk than as ingredients duly incorporated in the body. In the case of the Persian and Arabic element, indeed, we do find not a few instances in which nouns have been furnished with a Hindi termination, e.g. kharīdnā, badalnā, guzarnā, dāghnā, bakhshnaā, kamīnapan, &c.; but the European element cannot be said to have at all woven itself into the grammar of the language. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hindi and Hindustani are the most widely spread modern languages or group of dialects of India. Hindustani is generally understood to be the polite speech of all India, and especially of Hindustan. Hindi, in the wider sense of the term, is spoken by 97,000,000 of people, mainly of northern India. The darker non-Aryans and Mongolians alone of India nearly equal the population of the United States. There are one hundred and forty-seven peoples or tribes speaking different languages. ”

“ What is said of the Bengalis may not be true of the inhabitants of Madras or Bombay, and the converse.
All the languages of India have been affected by intercourse with conquering nations, who, pouring down from the north-west, have in successive ages made themselves masters of great portions of the land. In all of them Sanscrit, the sacred and classic language of the Hindus, forms a large element, but in a constantly diminishing proportion as you journey from the north to the south. ”

“ In Hindu {78} India, on the other hand, almost every act of a man's life has some religious or superstitious significance, and hence all the Aryan languages in the mouths of Hindus are markedly different from the shape they assume when spoken by Musalmāns. In the case of western Hindi we have the recognised Muhammadan dialect of Urdū, but in other languages too there is a Muhammadan dialect or patois, even if it has no separate name. A curious exception, however, occurs in eastern Bengal, where the bulk of the population is Musalmān. ”

“ Hindostani as a Lingua Franca.—It has often been said that Hindostani is a mongrel “pigeon” form of speech made up of contributions from the various languages which met in Delhi bazaar, but this theory has now been proved to be unfounded, owing to the discovery of the fact that it is an actual living dialect of Western Hindi, existing for centuries in its present habitat, and the direct descendant of Śaurasēnī Prakrit. ”

“ However much the শিষ্ট people kept themselves aloof, they could not possibly create a narrow little world of theirs but had to hold conversation at least with their wives, who could not but speak the vulgar tongue, being always in close touch with the neighbours; howsoever easy it might be for the sons of the শিষ্টs to learn their শিষ্ট speech, they could not lisp in Classical Sanskrit, when in the arms of their nurses. The influence of the real language of the people could never be kept off by setting up a barrier-wall of culture. ”

“ Though not spoken today by any tribe or people, it is not a dead language, for it is the religious tongue of India. The best thought, the deepest philosophy, the highest religious aspiration, the laws, customs and legends of the people are treasured in that tongue. All who would know the religious life and thought of India at its best and in its sources, should study Sanskrit. From it have sprung many of the languages of Modern India. In the northern and northwestern parts, the Aryan tongues find supremacy. ”

“ It being considered that few save students who are compelled to study the Hindi original would be likely to peruse the work, the translation has been made as literal as it was possible to make it without doing unpardonable violence to English idiom. All difficulties have been boldly, if not successfully, met ”

“ 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. ”