Marathi language

“ But it is very wonderful that when people from countries bordering Gujarat on the south, as the Konkan, Maharashtra, &c. 671 (i.e. people speaking Marathi) come to Gujarat, the Gujarati people do not in the least comprehend what they say.” This isolated character of Marathi is partly due to the barrier of the Vindhya range which lies to its north, and partly to the fact that none of the northern languages belongs now to the Outer Band, but are in more or less close relationship to the language of the Midland. ”

“ In the formation of the plural the Prakrit declensions are very closely followed by Marathi. We shall confine our remarks to a-bases, which may be either weak or strong forms, and of which the feminine ends sometimes in ā, and sometimes in ī. In Prakrit the nom. plur. of these nouns ends masc. ā, fem. āō, īō, neut. āiṁ. We thus get the following:—
Several of the old synthetic cases have survived in Marathi, especially in the antique form of the language preserved in poetry. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Elsewhere (p. 38) he uses language which would easily well apply to Māhārāṣṭrī Prakrit when he says, “Marathi is one of those languages which we 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,” and again (p. 52) :—
“In Marathi we see the results of the Pandit’s file applied to a form of speech originally possessed of much natural wildness and licence. ”

“ It is also the base of the Marathi future. These three tenses, the habitual past, the imperative and the future, are conjugated as follows. They should be compared with the corresponding forms in the article Prakrit. The verb selected is the root uṭh, rise, of the first conjugation.
As in Rajasthani, Bihari and the Indo-Aryan language of Nepal (see Pahari) , the future is formed by adding l, or in the first person singular n, to the old present. In the second person singular the l has been added to a form derived from the Pr. ”

“ General Character of the Language.—In the following account of the main features of Marathi, the reader is presumed to be familiar with the leading facts stated in the articles Indo-Aryan Languages and Prakrit. In the Prakrit stage of the Indo-Aryan languages we can divide the Prakrits into two well-defined groups, an Inner, Śaurasēnī and its connected dialects on the one hand, and an Outer, Māhārāṣṭrī, Ardhamāgadhī, and Māgadhī with their connected dialects on the other. ”

“ In Marathi, Canarese, Tamil and Telegu, অ is pronounced as short আ; this sound is exactly similar to our short unaccented আ sound as in আমার, আন্দাজ, আচার, etc. The Mundās and the Orāons of Bengal frontier do also pronounce অ as আ short. The Bengali sound of অ, as verging upon the sound of 'ও,' is naturally subdued when it is in the beginning or in the middle of a word, but it is distinct at the end of a word, when the final vowel, as a matter of course, is not হসন্ত in sound. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the various dialects of Apabhraṁśa Prakrit kr̥tas became (strong form) kida-u or kia-u, kr̥tyas became kicca-u, and kāryas became kēra-u or kajja-u, the initial k of which is liable to elision after a vowel. With the exception of Gujarati (and perhaps Marathi, q.v.) every Indo-Aryan language has genitive postpositions derived from one or other of these forms. Thus from (ki) da-u we have Panjabi dā ”

“ It is in Bengali that we get the forms করিয়া, প্রকাশিয়া, etc., exactly corresponding to the standard প্রাকৃত forms, and these forms or rather this form cannot be met with either in Marathi or in Hindi. It may be noted that the contracted Bengali form করি or প্রকাশি for করিয়া or প্রকাশিয়া, is in use in Oriya. (2) The case-denoting suffix ই of the so-called Mahārāṣṭri Prākṛta, as occurs extensively in the Setu Bandha for example, is in use in Bengali in its later form এ; in our modern literary Bengali this 'এ' is written as 'য়' ”

“ Ramusi themselves connected by tradition and creed, with the Lingait Buddugurs. But not by language; or at any rate not wholly so. The Ramusi dialect is a mixture of Tulava and Marathi—the former being undoubted Tamul, but the latter in the same category with the Udiya. [144]
The continuous Tamul languages are now left to the south of us, and the hill-tribes next in order, will have unlearnt their native tongues, and be found speaking the Hindú dialects of the countries around them. Hence, the evidence of their Tamulian descent will be less conclusive. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Though traces of a north Indian influence are palpable in all of them that have come down to us (see, e.g., F. W. Ellis's notes to the Kuṛaḷ) , 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ We should, therefore, welcome ídiomatic renderings in real Telugu of good English, French or other originals and original experiments in living prose, tales of current life handled freely and with an imagination untrammelled by stereotyped Lakshana, recondite allusions and stale conventional figures and images.
We desire discussion on the art of writing; thus, How may the living tongue be made an artistic medium? What devices in harmony with the genius of the language can we adopt and adapt from English or other writers, whereby variety, emphasis, lucidity, and strength may be attained? ”

“ A familiarity with the spoken Telugu as already alluded to, gives so little aid in reading the superior language used in poems, that some have hence imagined the latter to be obsolete: just as the Telugus, Canarese or Tamils, however fluent in colloquial English, are unable to read English poems; which we look upon as perfectly easy. And yet their poets are read with delight by persons of ordinary education: a fact which led me to the conclusion that the “high or Sanscrit dialect” was neither obsolete nor in general pedantic. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When it is wished to emphasize the sense of a present indicative, the syllable -lā is suffixed. The same suffix is employed in Rajasthani, Naipali and Marathi to form the future, and in Bh. it is often also used with a future sense. The past tense is formed, as in Mth.-Mg., by adding pronominal suffixes to the past participle; thus, maralī̃ (māra + lī̃) , I struck, as explained above. Similarly, for the first and second persons of the future we have marabī̃, I shall strike, and so on, but the third person is mārī (Pr. mārēhi) , he will strike, marihen (Pr. mārēhinti) , they will strike. ”

“ To aid them in English has been one of my principle objects in writing this grammar. It may be worth while to remark that household servants at Madras talk a broken English with fluency; but the learner will find it profitable to employ only those domesticks who will speak to him in the language he is studying; such are always to be had. Our initiatory native instructors also speak English: but we should as soon as possible lay aside such aid and employ a teacher who speaks Telugu alone. ”

“ 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. ”