A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India v1.c4.48

v1.c4.48

¹ I have placed these four languages alone, because, down to the fifteenth century, the Panjabi and Gujarati are little more than dialects of the Hindi; and the Oriya, till the time of Upendra Bhanj and Dînkrishna Dâs, has no literary existence, and we cannot tell what the spoken language was like, because poets always wrote a language of their own, having no care to keep their works on the level of the spoken dialects. The poems of the earliest Bengali writers also present very few of the grammatical peculiarities of modern Bengali; they, like Chand, and even like much later writers, Tulsi Dâs and Bihâri Lâl, resemble the writings of the Troubadours and Trouvères, in which the old synthetical languages with their array of inflections have fallen into decadence and disuse, while the analytical system of modern time has not yet obtained its full development.