1864.] 



Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. 



471 



which the Babu has frequently referred in his lecture, may have been 

 prepared in this country ; on that point I am not informed, but it 

 was published in a foreign journal and must be credited to the country 

 to which that journal belongs. While expressing, however, my great 

 satisfaction at the manner in which the subject has been handled, I 

 must correct an error into which the Babu has fallen, in stating that 

 I had said that the Hindvi or Hindi had no alphabet of its own. 

 He has been led into this error probably by an imperfect recollection 

 of what I said, as when he has had the benefit of reading my paper in 

 print, he will see that what I did say has quite a contrary sense. 

 The language which I said had no alphabet was the Hindustani, and 

 the only difference between us appear to be that while he has consi- 

 dered the Hindvi or Hindi, the Hindustani, and the Urdu as one 

 language, I have considered them as three languages. If it be 

 admitted, what is asserted, that ninety per cent, of the vocables of 

 Hindi are Sanscrit, which I think is probably true, I am not at all 

 prepared to admit that in Urdu the proportion of Arabic and Persian 

 words is only fifty per cent. In ancient Urdu, it was much less ; but 

 if the Babu had read the Soroor i-Sultani and many modern works 

 published at Lucknow and Agra, he would find that the percentage 

 of Indian words in them is quite as few as the percentage of foreign 

 words in Hindi. In short, it is so infinitesimal, that this element can 

 hardly be recognised at all ; and to such a language, I think the Deva 

 Nagri Alphabet would be quite as inapplicable, as the Eoman alphabet 

 would be to Hindi. I think, moreover, that my learned friend has 

 laid too much stress on the influence the origin of a language ought 

 to have on the characters in which it is written. This, in my opi- 

 nion, has very little to do with the question, as alphabets in all 

 countries of the west have been children of adoption, foreign to the 

 countries and the languages which have adopted them. Turning 

 again to the more immediate subject of the lecture, I am quite 

 prepared to admit, that the balance of evidence in regard to the 

 grammatical structure of Hindi, in common with the other Vernacular 

 dialects of the Upper half of India, is strongly in favour of its having 

 reached us through the Prakrit from the Sanskrit; but I do not think 

 that the arguments used by Dr. Trumpp, nor yet the additional 

 arguments that we have heard this evening, are sufficient to satisfy 

 those who hold opposite views. It must be borne in mind that one of 



