A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India v1.c4.74

v1.c4.74

The materials being thus defective, an opinion can only be given with some hesitation; but in a general way it may be said that the proportion of Tatsama words is greatest in Bengali, Oriya, and Marathi; less in Hindi and Gujarati; and least in Panjabi and Sindhi. In the latter language, in fact, a pure Sanskrit word in its original shape is hardly ever met with. This position is easily explained by geographical and historical considerations. The first province of India which was conquered by foreigners was Sindh, the next the Panjab. These provinces, especially the former, adopted the Muham-madan religion at an early date.¹ Brahmans are, and have long been, comparatively scarce in both places. The Prakrits in use in both, especially in Sindh, were always noted for their extreme corruptness. A soil, for the most part sterile, and more suited to a pastoral than to an agricultural people, was left by the main stream of the Aryan immigrants to the cattle-tending Abhiri, or Ahirs, and to the Gujars and other rude tribes, to whom supervened the Jats, a branch of the great Kshatriya or Rajput caste, who had been excluded from fellowship for some reason which has not yet been fathomed. With so rude a population as this it is not wonderful that the language became debased, and that the constant state of warfare and turmoil in which the people lived for ages, the perpetual sieges of their towns, pillagings of their humble dwellings, wholesale slaughter of their cattle, and the other annually recurring horrors with which they were visited, should have left them neither opportunity nor inclination for literary pursuits, by which alone their language could have been polished and continually renewed by resuscitations of pure Sanskrit words.