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THE INDIAN VERNACULARS.
Fourfoldcom po-sition ofthe verna-culars :
(1) Prakritelement;
(2) Abori-ginalelement;
The sevenAryanverna-culars :
(1) Sindhi;
(2) Pun-jabi ;
At present, therefore, we cannot advance farther than thefour following conclusions :—First, that in grammatical struc-ture and in their vocabularies, the modern analytical ver-naculars of India represent the old synthetic Prakrits; after aprocess of development, decay, and regeneration, which hasbeen going on, as the result of definite linguistic laws, duringthe past fifteen hundred years. Second, that the modernvernaculars contain a non-Aryan element, derived from theso-called aborigines of India ; but that this element has veryslightly affected their grammatical structure, and that theproportion which it holds in their vocabularies is yet undeter-mined. Third, that the modern vernaculars have enrichedthemselves, for literary and philosophical purposes, by directand conscious borrowings from the Sanskrit . Fourth, thatthey have also imported many terms connected with theadministration, the land revenue, judicial business, and officiallife, from the Persian court language of the Afghan andMughal dynasties.
The Aryan vernaculars of modern India may be distributedaccording to their geographical areas into seven main lan-guages.
Towards the North-Western frontier, Sindhi is spoken by thedescendants of the shepherd tribes and the settlements whowere left behind by the main stream of the prehistoric Aryanimmigrants. The Sindhi language abounds in words of non-Aryan origin; it contains very few Tatsamas, i.e. Sanskrit words in their original shape ; and it is almost destitute of anoriginal literature. The Punjabi language is spoken in the
thus—What are the aboriginal elements in Sanskrit and Prakrit ? Thevernaculars arose from Prakrit (and in a certain sense from Sanskrit )according to certain phonetic laws peculiar to the Aryan languages.Hence it is next to useless to try to refer Bihari (or any Aryan) vernacularwords direct to the Dravidian. They must in the first place be referredback (by the well-known Aryan phonetic laws) to their earlier forms inPrakrit and Sanskrit . Only when this is done, the question can properlybe asked whether they are Aryan or non-Aryan. And in order to decidethis question, it will, among other points, have to be considered whetherthey possess correlates in the other Aryan languages ( e.g . of Europe ). Butthere is every probability that there is a considerable number of words inSanskrit and Prakrit which are not 'Aryan, but only Aryanized, Thequestion, however, has never been systematically or satisfactorily in-vestigated. Some attempts have latterly been made in this direction, byshowing that not a few Sanskrit words are, in reality, Prakrit wordsSanskritized. The next step will be to show that some Prakrit words arenon-Aryan words Prakritized (i.e. Aryanized).’