He will not tell a lie, pa teazu ma zumbeetsu.
Come here, yage aroong.

Do not come here, yagee taroo.

He will not come here, pa yage marootsu.

He did not come, pa maroo.

Go and bring wood, soong beneeā wāng.
Wood is brought, toong aben.

The translation of the above words and phrases was made by labourers among the Nagas connected with the American Baptist Mission.

ART. XII. The Gaurian compared with the Romance Languages. Part I. By Mr. E. L. BRANDRETH.

BY "Gaurian " are meant what Mr. Beames, in his comparative grammar, has called the "Modern Aryan Languages of India," but, as this last is too long a title for frequent use, and as the name, Gaurian, given by Professor Hoernle, has been adopted by Dr. Caldwell, I may venture to make use of it also. These languages, in order to mark their origin, may also sometimes be termed the Neo-Sanskrit languages, as the Romance are spoken of for the same purpose as the NeoLatin or Novo-Latin languages. The object of this paper is to show that Sanskrit becomes Gaurian much in the same way that Latin becomes Romance. All the Aryan languages have undergone somewhat similar changes. The changes which have produced modern Persian and English are even more sweeping in a great part of their grammar. interest of the comparison I have in view lies in this, that there is a very close resemblance, especially in the consonants, between Sanskrit and Latin, and that the resemblance is equally marked between their modern representatives, and this extends to points in which the modern languages differ most from the ancient, showing that the same phonetic laws. have operated in both groups. This paper is not the result of any independent research. I have gone, for most of my information, to the best known works on the grammar of each group, such as those of Beames, Trumpp, and Hoernle, on the Gaurian, and of Diez, Littré, and Brachet, on the Romance languages.

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The

The Gaurian languages, which form the subject of Beames's grammar, are the Hindi (H.),1 Panjābī (P.), Sindhi (S.), Gujarāti (G.), Marāṭhī (M.), Oṛīya (O.), Bangālī (B.); while Diez's grammar of the Romance languages treats of the Italian (It.), Spanish (Sp.), Portuguese (Port.), Provençal (Prov.), French (Fr.), and Walachian. I shall take no account of the Walachian, because, in consequence of its earlier separation from the common stock, it differs, in some important respects, from the other languages :-the Latin letters, for instance, are not subject to change or syncope in Walachian, at all in the same degree that they are in the other languages; and this is one of the most important respects, as will be seen, in which the Gaurian and Romance languages resemble each other. With regard to the other languages, both Gaurian and Romance, while dealing generally with the resemblance between the two groups, I shall take my illlustrations principally from the Sindhi and Hindi among the Gaurian languages, and from the Italian and French in the Romance group. These, besides being well-known languages in each group, have had the most attention bestowed on them by philologists, and will perhaps serve also to show some of the most divergent characteristics of each group. It would, moreover, quite exceed the limits of such a paper as this to adduce examples from every language. The Sindhi is, of course, the language of the province of Sindh. By the Hindi I mean generally what is also called High Hindi. It is a literary language, and is based upon the Braj, the popular language of the Upper Doab, of which Agra and Delhi are the principal towns, with some intermixture of words and forms traceable to other dialects; where these occur, it may sometimes be necessary to instance a Braj instead of a Hindi word. Almost all the early Hindi literature is in this dialect.

Besides the languages treated of by Beames, Northern Gaurian, including Garhwali Kamaoni and Naipāli, Bhojpūrī, and even Marwari, and Asamese, have been claimed as

1 The letters following the names show the abbreviations used for them.

separate languages. But those that form the subject of Beames's work are more than sufficient for my purpose. There are also the Kashmiri and Sinhala (Sinhalese) languages belonging to the Neo-Sanskrit group. These languages have a greater abundance of grammatical forms than the languages which form the subject of Beames's work, besides which, in other respects also, they differ more, and especially the Sinhala, from Beames's languages, than any one of those languages does from the others. No doubt the study of Kashmiri and Sinhala is of great importance for a comparative grammar of the Neo-Sanskrit languages, but they are of less use for my comparison than the other languages, on account of their more complicated grammar. The similarity in letter changes by which the Prakrit and Romance are distinguished has been remarked upon by Diez, and has also been treated of by Dr. Muir, in the second volume of his Sanskrit Texts; and in greater detail in a pamphlet published in 1869, entitled, "Vergleichung des Prakrit mit dem Romanischen Sprachen," von Friederich Haag. I hope, however, to show that the resemblance between Gaurian and its contemporary Romance is still more striking, and extends into more details even in phonology; while the resemblance is not confined to phonology only, as is the case with that between Prakrit and Romance, but extends to the rest of the grammar also.

The languages of both the Gaurian and Romance groups have become to a great extent analytical, that is, the relations of words expressed in Skr. and Pr., or Lat., by complex forms, are now, generally, signified by the addition of independent words. The losses as regards the original declensions are very great in both. Both groups still distinguish the singular and the plural by flexion. Most of the Gaurian languages have a nominative and an oblique form, which may be compared with the two cases preserved in Old Fr. and Prov. Other Gaurian languages, again, have no cases, and thus resemble all the Romance languages in their present state. The Gaurian languages, also, like the Romance, have discarded the neut., with the exception of

M. and G. The dual of the Skr. has also disappeared in Gaurian, as it had indeed already done in Pr. In regard to adjectives, the old suffixes of comparison have disappeared in both groups. Changes have also occurred to a great extent in the verbs of both groups. Compound tenses often take the place of the original complex structure. Both groups make new compounds for the future. In both a past tense is formed with the past participle and an auxiliary verb. In both, also, with the exception of S., the original passive voice has been lost, and its place supplied by a new compound. The present paper will treat principally of the phonology; in another paper, I propose to compare the other parts of the grammar of each group.

But it is not only in a general way that the two groups are to be compared; particular languages also may be compared. Thus S. may be compared with It. in regard to its words always ending in vowels, its extensive use of diminutives, its use of pronominal suffixes to express the object of the verb, and especially its assimilating one of two conjunct consonants to the other. H. again may be compared with Fr. in its greater curtailment of words, in its mute a required to complete the metre in poetry, like the mute e of the Fr., and in its rejecting, instead of assimilating, one of two conjunct consonants; such rejection, if of a preceding n or m, being accompanied with the nasalization of the preceding vowel.

The earliest Gaurian literature, the great poem of Chand Bardai, the Prithīrājā Rāso, in Old H., belongs to the end of the twelfth century A.D. He was the court bard of Pirthīrāj, the last Hindu King of Delhi. The first specimens of Romance, which are those of the French language, are of an earlier date. The celebrated Strasbourg Oaths belong to the middle of the ninth century, but in them the language is not yet disengaged from Latin influences. In the tenth century we have the legend of St. Eulalie in French verse, and one or two other documents; and after the middle of the eleventh century there sprang up an original poetical literature, the numerous chansons de geste.