122 INDO-IRANIAN LANGUAGES 



words has been carried in some of the literary vernaculars, notably 

 Bengali. Among these vernaculars, Hindustani, which came into 

 literary use in the sixteenth century and is also the lingua franca of 

 India, is perhaps of least importance from a linguistic point of view, 

 since it is a form of the Sanskritic Western Hindi which has been 

 artificially filled with Persian words. The unadulterated natural 

 vernaculars often present features of great interest to the philo- 

 logist. Thus in the speech of Kashmir we see a language which is 

 caught in the act of transforming itself from the analytic into the 

 synthetic stage, and thus reentering the linguistic cycle through 

 which it has already passed. The chief problems which these 

 vernaculars present to the philologist are the accurate demarcation 

 of the main languages, as well as of their numerous dialects, and 

 the influence which has been exercised by foreign languages on 

 their phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Thus not only 

 have many Persian words been adopted by Hindustani, but sev- 

 eral have found their way even into the non-literary vernaculars. 

 Again, we already know that the Dravidian languages have af- 

 fected the phonology not only of Sanskrit and the old Prakrits, 

 but also of the modern vernaculars. It has also, for instance, been 

 shown with probability that contact with the Tibeto-Burmese lan- 

 guages has introduced a certain form of passive construction into 

 the Aryan vernaculars. 



By the side of the Sanskritic tongues, the language spoken by 

 the aborigines of India who were conquered by the invading Aryans 

 still survives in various forms. Spoken by about sixty millions of 

 the inhabitants of India, it is represented by two main branches, 

 the Dravidian and the Munda, which have the common character- 

 istics of being agglutinative in formation and of possessing only 

 two genders, the one designating animate and the other inanimate 

 objects. The four main Dravidian languages are Telugu, with a 

 population of about 21,000,000, Tamil with 16,500,000, Canarese 

 with over 10,000,000, and Malayalam with 6,000,000. These four 

 languages have already been the subject of considerable study, 

 almost entirely on the part of missionaries, who have often acquired 

 a thorough practical and literary knowledge of them. But the 

 linguistic value of the work, in other respects often important, pub- 

 lished by these scholars is considerably diminished by the absence 

 of philological training. The dangers arising from the lack of such 

 a qualification may be illustrated by the following example. An 

 acquaintance of mine, who possesses a very extensive linguistic and 

 literary knowledge of one of the non- Aryan tongues of India, one day 

 remarked to me : " What a strange thing it is that the Sanskrit word 

 for horse and the English for donkey should be the same " [meaning 

 asva and ass]. A remark like that throws a flood of light on a man's 



