340 Major- General John Briggs on the 



To Dr Reinhold Rost of Berlin I am deeply indebted for 

 the aid which he has afforded me in my philological inves- 

 tigations, from his accurate knowledge of the Sanscrit and 

 some of the languages of Southern India. He admits the 

 propriety of classing the languages of India into the northern 

 and southern groups, and allows that the former contain a 

 very large proportion of Sanscrit words with a certain ad- 

 mixture of words of the southern group. He remarks that 

 the palatial sounds of the letters r, d, 7, ^, are confined to 

 India, and cannot, as stated by Dr Stevenson, be pronounced 

 without difficulty by any but by a native of the province in 

 which the language containing them is spoken. These sounds 

 are unknown in Sanscrit. 



He is disposed to think that the Sanscrit of the languages 

 spoken in the northern group owes its present grammatical 

 construction to the gradual adoption of the forms of speech 

 of the abnormal nations, this construction being universal 

 throughout India, even among the Hill tribes, and so different 

 from the rules of Sanscrit construction, that it is impossible 

 to conceive the one to be derived from the other. The simi- 

 larity of words and formation of sentences in the language of 

 the Todas on the Nilgherry Hills, and that of the Gonds on the 

 Nerbudda, is very remarkable ; and it is stated on good autho- 

 rity, that some American missionaries, who had long resided 

 in Mysore, could understand and make themselves under- 

 stood when they spoke the Canarese language among the 

 Gonds at Amarkantak. The identity of the Gond language 

 with those of the south of India has been proved by myself in 

 comparing 350 words of Gondi, Telingi, Mharatti, Marwari, 

 and Guzeratti together, and of these scarcely one word occurs 

 that is not common to one or more of those languages. 



The peculiarity of construction of all these languages dif- 

 fering from the Sanscrit, consists, — 1. In the termination 

 and in the conjugation of the verbs ; 2. In the preposition of 

 the Sanscrit, and the languages derived from it, becoming in 

 India a postposition ; 3. In the several meanings of the plural ; 

 being inclusive and exclusive, such as, We — including the 

 person spoken to and the speaker, that is — You and I, only ; 

 while another plural form signifies, Tf^e ourselves only, and 



