1898.] Annual Address. ■ 79 



From the point of view of linguistics Dr. Grierson, in his note, shows 

 that many new facts have come to light confirminj? my original theory. 

 For instance, there is his discovery of the North- Western family, which 

 completes the " wedge " theory. Then dividing the Aryan languages of 

 India into two main families, a Central and a Non-Centra,l, he shows 

 that there is a rematkable series of opposed linguistic facts in the two. 

 The Central family represents the new comers ; the non-Central repre- 

 sents the first comers. Thus, the Central family is in the main a set of 

 languages which are in the analytic stage. The original inflections 

 have in the main disappeared, and grammatical needs are supplied by 

 the addition of auxiliary wor<^s which have not yet become a part 

 of the main wox'ds tQ which they are attached. Examples are the 

 genitive suffix ka and the auxiliary verbs. Languages of the non- 

 Central family have gone a stage further in linguistic evolution. They 

 were once, in their Sanskrit form, synthetic ; then they passed through 

 an analytic stage — some are only passing out of that stage now, and are, 

 like Ka9miri, so to speak, caught in the act — , and are again become 

 synthetic, by the incorporation of the auxiliary words, used in the 

 analytic stage, with the main words to which they were originally 

 attached. Examples are genitive terminations like the Baggali er, or 

 verbal terminations like the Baggali am. 



Then, again. Dr. Grierson points out that the non-Central languages 

 evidently used enclitic pronouns from the first. Hence we find them 

 using pronominal suffixes freely, all using them for verbs, and some for 

 nouns. In the Central languages, on the contrary, pronominal suffixes 

 are, so far as he is at present aware, unknown. 



In pronunciation also, he shows, that the two main families are 

 sharply opposed. It is hardly necessary to dwell on the well-known 

 preference of the Central languages for o-sounds, and of the other lan- 

 guages for e-sounds This is as old as the A9oka inscriptions. There 

 are other preferences to which it is quite unnecessary to refer : they 

 will at once occur to every philologist. A very remarkable difference is 

 the treatment of the sibilants. The Central family hardens them : evei-y 

 sibilant is pronounced as a hard dental s. The non-Central languages 

 seem unable to pronounce an s clearly. In the extreme west, the Greeks 

 found s pronounced like h ; and in the east, the Prakrit grammarians 

 found it softened to a sh sound, which they represented by p. At the 

 present day we find the same shibboleth a test of nationality : in Bengal 

 and part of Maratha s is weakened to sh, and in Eastern Bengal and 

 Assam it is further weakened, till its pronunciation resembles that of a 

 German ch, and again on the North- Western frontier and in Kacmir 

 it has become an h, pure and simple. 



