Indo-Aryan languages

“ We shall consider the Paisaci languages first. The Aryan family of languages is well known to belong to the Indo-European languages. This Aryan family, according to the latest researches is sub-divided into (1) Iranian (Eranian or Erano-Aryan) languages (2) Indo Aryan or Sanskritic Indo-Aryan languages, Iranian being also grouped into persian and non-Persian. Of these the Paisaci languages include Pashai, spoken in Laghman in Afghanistan ; a number of Kafir dialects of which the principal are Bashgai, Wai, and Kalasha ”

“ By ascertaining what words are common to the Indo-Germanic languages, we may easily find how far in civilization those had progressed who spoke the old Aryan, the common mother of the languages of Europe, India, and Persia, ere they parted to form new tribes, with new tongues. ”

“ Bands of them kept travelling always farther and farther west; and it is from their language that most of the tongues spoken in Europe are derived. These bands left their friends and relations and country, just as young men and women nowadays leave the homes of their parents to go and settle in distant countries. The Indo-European is also called the Aryan family of languages. Altogether, it embraces seven great languages— (1) The Indian or Sanskrit; (2) Persic; (3) Greek; (4) Latin; (5) Keltic; (6) Teutonic ”

“ The Aryan or Indo-European languages fall into six leading groups (leaving Albanian and Armenian out of account) , thus:—
I. Indo-Iranian or Arian, divisible into two branches:
(a) Indian branch, including Sanskrit, now dead, but dating in its literature to at least 1000 b.c., and the descendant modern (dialects or) languages, such as Hindustani, Bengali, and Mahratti. ”

“ The decay in Aryan may be largely attributed to the power, which this group developed beyond any other, of making compounds which in practice took the place of subordinate sentences to a large extent. The causes for the modifications which the Latin verb system has undergone are more obscure, but they are shared not only by its immediate neighbours the other Italic dialects, but also to a great degree by the more remote Celtic dialects.
The origin and spread of the Indo-European languages has long been, and remains, a vexed question. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The languages of white men mostly belong to two great families, the Aryan and Semitic. First as to the Aryan family, called also Indo-European, which takes in the languages of part of South and West Asia, and almost the whole of Europe. The original tongue whence these are all descended may be called the Primitive Aryan. What the roots of this ancient language were like, and how they were put together into words, the student may gain an idea from Greek and Latin, but a still better from Sanskrit, where both roots and inflexions have been kept up in a more perfect and regular state. ”

“ Here we propose to offer a brief review of the special course of their development in India.
Most of the Indo-Aryans branched off from the common Aryan stock in the highlands of Khokand and Badakshan, and marched south into what is now eastern Afghanistan. Here some of them settled, while others entered the Punjab by the valley of the river Kabul. This last migration was a gradual process extending over several centuries, and at different epochs different tribes came in, speaking different dialects of the common language. ”

“ We partly know and partly conjecture that there was once a race of men whom we may conveniently call Indo-Europeans who spoke the parent-speech of the modern languages of Europe, Armenia, Persia, and northern India. Probably the Panjāb in very early times was occupied by several immigrations of Indo-European folk, for in the earliest days of which we have any knowledge, the land of the Five Rivers is already the home of many Indo-Aryan tribes, who live at enmity with one another, and have a fraternal habit of speaking of one another as unintelligible barbarians. ”

“ Even this very crude summary, it is true, shows at least three great groups of languages, Dravidian in the south, Indo-European in the west and north-west, Tibeto-Burman in the north and the north-east. There are in fact five separate families of human speech which have their homes in India; the Aryan, the Dravidian, the Mundā, the Mon-Khmer, and the Tibeto-Chinese. The lateral spread of these is, of course, no real indication of the present habitat of five different races of men. ”

“ The Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit forms have been added to show the degree of relationship of the Germanic to the cognate groups of the Aryan or Indo-European family of languages. The primitive tongue is understood to be the mother of all, and gives the forms from which linguistic scholars derive those of the most ancient as well as of the modern Aryan dialects. ”

“ These peoples—with as different physical 124 characteristics as have Indians and Norseman, or Russians and Spaniards, who spoke Indo-European, or, as German scholars have patriotically adapted the term, Indo-Germanic languages—were regarded by ethnologists of the "philological school" as members of the one Indo-European or Aryan race or "family". Language, however, is no sure indication of race. The spread of a language over wide areas may be accounted for by trade or political influence or cultural contact. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By perhaps the majority of students of language it is, as a generally descriptive title, restricted to that family and one other, the Indo-European or Indo-Germanic, but such a classification is not to be approved, for, in respect to this characteristic, Indo-European speech ranks not with Semitic but with the great body of agglutinative tongues. To few of these can the name be altogether denied, since there is hardly a body of related dialects in existence that does not exhibit some items of “inflective” structure; the Aryan is only the one among them that has most to show. ”

“ The Tibeto-Burman languages of the north-eastern frontier are the simple and primitive speech of semi-savage men. For such languages, contact with the Aryan languages means rapid decay and dissolution.
Hindu civilisation and Hindu religion find easy converts in the rude and simple Mongoloid people of the north-east, and acceptance of Hindu manners and customs almost always results in a rapid change of language. So again, the Iranian languages represent the final stage in the advance of Islam and its languages as a conquering religion. ”

“ And again, there is an accepted connection in myth and language between all Aryan languages and Sanskrit. According to Sir George Dasent, "The whole human race has sprung from one stock planted in the East, which has stretched its boughs and branches laden with the fruit of language and bright with the bloom of song and story, by successive offshoots to the utmost parts of the earth." ”

“ 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 may be accepted as a well-established fact, that the Aryan race entered India not all at once, nor in one body, but in successive waves of immigration. The tribes of which the nation was composed must therefore have spoken many dialects of the common speech. ”

“ There are consequently to be found even in Sanskrit some words which have a very un-Aryan look, and the number of such words is much greater still in the modern languages, and there exists therefore a temptation to attribute to non-Aryan sources any words whose origin it is difficult to trace from Aryan beginnings. ”

“ But the surviving European languages are mostly sturdy and vigorous, and do not readily yield place to one another. In India the process of linguistic invasion is going on before our eyes, attendant on the gradual growth of Hindu civilisation and religion, which {4} disdains to practise open and reasoned proselytism, but extends its borders nevertheless, and carries with it one or another of the Aryan dialects. ”

“ And in the [72] days when civilization first grew up there, there is no sign or trace of the languages we call inflectional. The speakers of Aryan dialects, whom we find in classical times in Media or Persia or North-Western India, belong to a later epoch; the old belief in the Asiatic cradle of the Aryan tongues has long since been given up by the anthropologist and comparative philologist, [67] and it is recognized that if we are to look for it anywhere it must be in Eastern Europe. The Semitic languages are equally absent ”

“ Nothing can be more erroneous than the inference that the North American Indian dialects differ in this respect from those of Asia and Europe. In the previous comparison numerous examples present themselves in which the same words unequivocally exhibit at once both the roots and the inflections of words belonging to the languages termed Indo-European, as in Patam-awan, Patam-awos, Kis-ina, M. huk, Mok-um, Khe-cush, Nimp-amino, &c.! ”

“ Sanskrit itself is not the parent, but the sister of the other ancient members of the family (of languages) and the great distance between Sanskrit and all other non-Iranian languages of Western Asia, makes it evident that the formation must have existed as a distinct one from the Semitic, Scythic, and Tibetan, long before the Aryan races occupied N.W. India, while it is also certain that the Semitic variety of the same race, whether it be, or be not, the parent of the Iranian—must have been located in Western Asia from a still more remote period. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Still the mass of non-Aryans residing in the valley of the Ganges who were absorbed at all, must have been absorbed not only many generations, but many centuries, before the Aryan languages began to show any signs of a tendency to analytical construction. It is my belief that the Indian languages did not begin to be analytical till about the ninth or tenth century, much about the same time that the European languages began to be so. Chand, though his structure is analytical, retains much that is synthetical still, and his particles and auxiliaries are in a very crude and unformed state. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”