A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India v1.c4.35

v1.c4.35

It is to the Tadbhavas that we must turn if we would become acquainted with the secrets of the phonetic machinery of the Aryan Indians. Of these there are two sorts, so distinguished from one another that it is impossible to mistake them. The one class consists of those words which were in use in Prakrit, and in which the Prakrit processes have been carried one step further. The other contains words which apparently have not come through Prakrit, as they exhibit a more perfect form, and a nearer approach to the Sanskrit than the Prakrit form does. 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*, *nâgarî*, *gaja*, where Prakrit has only *râi*, *râä*, *nâarî*, *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. Even in India, where people perhaps think more about the languages they speak than we do in Europe, the majority of speakers, after *râi* had been in use for several generations, would not be aware that the letters *tr* had dropped out; and even if they became aware of this fact, no one would go about to restore them. How many Englishmen know that a *g* has dropped out of such words as *say*, *day*, *nail*, *sail*, *rain*,¹ and how many, if they knew it, would care to make the innovation of putting them back again? In the Spanish of Cervantes, when Don Quixote, in one of his lofty flights, used the then rapidly obsolescent forms *fermosa*, *fazañas*, *facienda*, *amabades*, and the like, for the more usual *hermosa*, *hazañas*, *hacienda*, *amabais*, he is held up to ridicule, even though some of his hearers were educated men, and must have known the Latin *formosa*, *facinus*, *facienda*, *amabatis*.