1S2 liajcndvalala Mitra — On the term Ganrian. [Nov. 



desip^ned to indicate the Nepali, the Kaslimiri, tlie Punjabi or the Sindhi, 

 and he will not question that the vernacular of the Chilas mountain and of 

 the Shiah Posh Kaffirs of Hindu Kush are Sanskritic vernaculars. If so, 

 ipso facto \\\% tennis faulty from being incomprehensive. It is a mediaeval 

 Indian word with a iixed meanino-, and he, as a foreigner, has no right to 

 make it mean more than what it does, so as to include all the languages he 

 wishes to treat of, unless he chooses to call it a word of his own, and not a 

 Sanskrit term, for it has no inherent power of its own to expand and 

 comprehend more than what it has hitherto comprehended. Had the word 

 Dravida been the generic name of countries inhabited by the Tamilian or 

 aboriginal races, and Gauda been its correlative to indicate countries occupied 

 by the Ar^^an races, the case would have been different ; but as the terms 

 never had such meanings, derivatives from them must remain as confined 

 as the originals. 



" I object to the term Gaurian the more because it is not by any means ^en 

 equal in precision to the words which are now in common use. Dr. Hoernle 

 says, Gaurian is a compact word complete in itself. But so is Sanskritic or 

 Indo- Aryan. Gaurian is an adjective, and must be followed by a noun ; so is 

 Sanskritic ; and if we put vernacular after it, it can only indicate those current 

 spoken dialects of India whose prevailing grammatical and morphological 

 characters are of Sanskrit origin, and no other. Joined to language or dialect, 

 it would still imply them as also the different Prakrits. Dr. Hoernle says, 

 " It may denote any language which stands in any sort of connexion with 

 Sanskrit ; any language in fact within the whole range of the Indo-European 

 glottic family." But how it is to do so I cannot imagine. I have been 

 alwa^^s under the impression that the leading European languages were 

 sisters of the Sanskrit, born of one common parent, the Aryan, and not the 

 descendants of Sanskrit, and therefore could not be called Sanskritic. Indeed, 

 I am not a little surprised that a professed philologist of Dr. Hoernle's 

 standing should so confound the parent Aryan of the plateau of Central 

 Asia with her descendant, the Indian Sanskrit, as to take them to be the 

 same, and make the latter the parent of the European languages against the 

 concurrent testimony of the leading professors of the modern science of 

 language. No one I imagine will ever call the English, or the Portuguese, 

 a Sanskritic language, and therefore the apprehension Dr. Hoernle entertains 

 of people being misled, is all but an impossible contingency. 



" Nor are the examples he has given of the cumbrous nature of the com- 

 pounds which the use of the word Sanskritic would lead to at all to the point. 

 " Sanskritic languages of North India," and " the modern Sanskritic lan- 

 guages of Nortli India" which he has put forth, appear very like giants 

 created witli a view to destroy them, for they are incorrect on their very face, 

 and I have not advocated their use. He thinks " Gaurian languages" very^ 



