1872.] On Inflexional Post-positions in Hindi declension. 99 



proper name for a part of Bengal extending from Mithila to Orissa, and its 

 derivative Gaudiya could not comprehend all the Sanskritic vernaculars to 

 which the author of the paper proposed to apply them. In another sense it 

 was a common name for five provinces, viz.^ Kanyakubja, Sarasvata, Gauda, 

 Mithila, and Utkala. The original settlers, particularly Brahmans, of those 

 places, call themselves Gaiida, and everything relating to them, including 

 their languages, is named Gaudiya. But this classification has not been 

 adopted to mark any linguistic peculiarities, and inasmuch as it excludes 

 from the Gaudiya class the Marhatti, which occupies a very prominent place 

 among the Prakrita or Indo-Aryan dialects, it cannot be used without assign- 

 ing to it a much greater comprehensiveness of meaning than the Hindus, 

 whose term it is, ever attached to it. The Kashmiri, the Nepali, the As- 

 samese, the Uriya and other languages will have to be included in it, which 

 it never indicated. To the European it will be literally unmeaning, and to 

 the Hindus misleading, and it could not, therefore, be preferred to the terra 

 in common use, the Indo-Aryan or Sanskritic, which was well understood 

 and as precise as a technical term need be. A writer once suggested Cis- Vin- 

 dhyian as an appropriate term for the Sanskritic vernaculars, but it was as 

 defective as the Gaudiyan, inasmuch as it also excluded the bulk of the Mar- 

 hatti. 



Dr. Collis asked, why, if the term Dravidian be accepted, the term 

 Gaurian should be objected to ; the Pancli Gaur and Pancli Dravid 

 being apparently terms of equal value, why should one be objected to and 

 the other be retained ? 



Babu Eajendralala Mitra, in reply, said that he was not prepared 

 to defend the use of the word Dravidian, in the sense in which Cald- 

 well and other Tamil scholars had used it, for, like the Gauda, its 

 radical Dravida had been used by the Hindus to indicate five different 

 provinces south of the Yindhya, the Pancha Dravida including Dra- 

 vida, Karnata, Gujjarata, Maharashtra, and Tailinga country, the lan- 

 guage of two of which (Gujjarata and Maharashtra) were Sanskritic, and 

 not Tamilian. But the use of the word in this comprehensive sense was 

 now obsolete, and since it was now restricted to the Coromandel Coast, from 

 Madras to Cape Comorin, its derivation may be used to indicate languages 

 allied to the Tamilian without causing misapprehension. It can plead like- 

 wise the sanction of usage, which cannot be predicated of Gauria)i. When 

 a new term has to be coined, it should be so formed as to connote exactly 

 what is wanted, neither more nor less. The terms Sanskritic and Indo- 

 Aryan had great advantage in this respect over what has been recommended 

 to replace them, and he could not therefore accept it, as superior or more 

 appropriate. 



