694 INTRODUCTION. 



that is nowadays so prevalent. We are nurtured on the 

 persianised Urdu of the munshi, and the language of the Higher 

 Standard Hindustani is the polished language of Delhi city. 

 Nothing is more useless for an understanding of the thought 

 and wants of the villagers. At the present moment there is 

 but one officer in the Panjab Commission who has passed the 

 higher standard in Sanskrit and but three who have satisfied 

 the same test in Hindi, and not one of those three is a member 

 of the Indian Civil Service. I have often regretted for my 



own 



The object of the present notes is an attempt to simplify 

 the work of the Englishmen who will serve in Rohtak in the 

 future. It has perplexed me considerably to know how best to 

 do this. One method that suggested itself was to record only 

 such words as were to be found in no standard dictionary or 

 were omitted from a given standard dictionary such as that of 

 Platts. Even the latter of these alternatives seemed open to 

 considerabl 



a modification of form would entitle a word to inclusion in the 

 glossary. Another course was to make a frank revelation of 

 the extent of my own ignorance and to record only such words 

 as were new to mys-lf. It would be a bold assumption 

 however — and, I trust, a groundless one — to suppose that all 

 future officers would be as ignorant of Hindi as I was when 1 

 came to the district : it seemed on the other hand conceivable 

 that a few might be even more stupendously ignorant. Ulti- 

 mately I have attempted to include all the words in common 

 use in Rohtak which so far as I knew were not in common use 

 among educated Indians; it will be found that almost all are 

 Hindi, but there are a few which are corruptions of Persian, or 

 of English. The Hindi words are either ; tatsamas ' borrowed 



langu 



Sanskrit or ' tadbhavas ' which have come into the 



Not all the words however are in common use, for I have 



even 7 



strange word in it, and there are some which are hardly known 

 outside the quotation. On the other hand there are doubtless 

 many instances of omission of words in common use. These 

 I hope will be supplied by some future district officer. They 

 must be written from the speech, proverbs or songs of the 

 people, for the language has no literature. 



I have divided my notes into three parts. The first is 

 grammatical and assumes on the part of the reader a know- 

 ledge of Hindustani grammar. I have thought it unnecessary 

 to repeat forms that are identical with the latter. The second 

 is the Jatii- English glossary, and here I have followed Mr ; 

 O'Brien's original model in his " Glossary of the Multam 

 Language," interpolating proverbs and riddles in illustration 

 of the words. Of the utility of the third part, or English 



