ISO Objections to the modern style of official Hindustani. [No. 3, 



deplores the fact that the language of the courts is not the language 

 of the country. Similar statements may he found passim in the 

 newspapers written and edited by English speaking natives. And it 

 is by no means uncommon to find really well educated Hindus, who 

 will readily admit that they most imperfectly understand and would 

 be quite unable to write the dialect of the kachahri munshis. And as 

 a further proof, the official translations of laws and circulars in this 

 pseudo-vernacular are absolutely unintelligible, till they have been 

 interpreted by some one who can compare them with the original 

 English. No doubt there are several current law phrases, for which, 

 as Mr. Beames says, it would now be difficult to find the Hindi 

 equivalents, and I have no objection to their retention; I think, however, 

 their number is not so great as is generally supposed, and should not be 

 unnecessarily increased. For instance, marhum-i-bdla or mazkur i-sadr 

 is the accepted phrase for aforesaid, but it would be incorrect to allege 

 that there was no Hindi equivalent for it, since upar ulrta, though 

 now somewhat unfamiliar, is equally elegant and correct. I think too 

 that Mr. Beames is scarcely fair in some points of his comparison 

 between Hindi and Persian ; malum and matlab are generally repre- 

 sented by some tense of the verbs jdnnd and chdhnd ; tajwiz in 

 colloquial language is accurately expressed by soch and bichdr, either 

 separately or together, and judicially by nirnay ; zarur is supplied by 

 chdhiye ; maivdshi by pohe. And I am certainly surprised to see bim 

 rank jangal amongst the foreign words, whereas it is in fact Sanskrit, 

 Nor should I translate shakhs by log, but by /cm, which, so far as my 

 experience goes, is universally used by natives when talking amongst 

 themselves, and is perfectly good Sanskrit, though the munshis, for 

 some reason or other, have taken a dislike to it, probably because it 

 begins with the letter j. 



5. The Urdu of the period is not only unintelligble, but it perpe- 

 tuates and confirms ignorance. It is so completely an alien form of 

 speech, that in the case of those whom Government compels to employ 

 it, the whole time available for education is spent in acquiring it ; 

 and the consequence is, that, as a rule, these Urdu speakers are, in 

 matters of general information, the most ignorant class in the commu- 

 nity. In every other case the acquisition of a new language opens a 

 new door of knowledge ; but this artificial dialect has neither history 



