The Ethnology of India. 85 
pying the richer valley of the Ganges. My conjecture is that the 
Rajpoots are an earlier wave from the same source, and who came in 
by the same route, who have farther advanced and have been more 
completely Hinduised, while the Jats have come in behind them. 
The Jat or Punjabee language is but a dialect, bearing somewhat 
the same relation to the Hindee of the Rajpoots and other Hindustanees 
that Lowland Scotch bears to English. In its main grammatical and 
essential features it is not widely different. There are certainly in it 
many words which sound strange to a Huropean only superficially 
acquainted with the common Hindustanee, and it would be very 
interesting to examine all these words and ascertain whether any and 
what foreign elements can be found. But I may state broadly that 
by far the greater number of these words are really of plain Sanscrit 
origin, and very many of them are quite familiar to those well 
acquainted with the purer Hindee dialects. I have been surprised to 
find how Sanscrit are most of the words which (little linguist that 
Iam) I had supposed to be peculiarly Punjabee. Indeed the Rev. 
Mr. Trump broadly states the Jat language to be one of the most 
Pracrit of Indian Vernaculars, and so it clearly is. There remains 
the old question which concerns it equally with the Hindee, whether 
the grammar can be derived from the Sanscrit. It seems very im- 
probable that so great a mass of people as the Jats should have lost 
all traces of a separate language, if they ever had one. Ii so, it may 
surely be recognised in some Punjabee words. For the rest, the 
only doubt seems to be whether the Jats and Rajpoots, speaking an 
Indo-Germanic tongue allied to the Sanscrit, may have brought with 
them the grammar which now distinguishes the Punjabee and 
Hindee ; or whether the Bramins, when they spread wide over 
Hindustan and mixed among a large Aboriginal population, adopted 
some Aboriginal grammar, and fitted into it their own vocabulary, 
making a language which Jats and Rajpoots also have received in 
India; or whether in fact all these tribes have derived a common 
tongue by direct Pracrit descent from the Sanscrit. 
Tur Raspoors. 
I have already made so many allusions to the Rajpoots, that I have 
half anticipated my description of them, The best proof that they 
