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Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. 



[No. 4, 



the laws on which the dignity of a science is claimed for lano-ua^e and 

 on which Babu Eajendra Lai Mitra has based his strongest arguments 

 is that of phonetic corruption and grammatical regeneration, whereas 

 it is impossible to arrive at a Sanskrit origin for the vernaculars of 

 upper India, or for the Hindi dialect at least, without violating this 

 law, and admitting grammatical or structural corruption as far more 

 serious than anything that has taken place in phonetics. I do not at 

 all wish to dispute the position, for, as I before said, the balance of 

 evidence is certainly now in its favour ; but the subject is not ex- 

 hausted, and cannot be exhausted until we know more of the numerous 

 dialects which are spoken by those rude people who inhabit the 

 fastnesses of our central and frontier ranges of mountains. These 

 dialects we may count almost by scores, but of the most of them we 

 literally know nothing, and until we do, it is almost impossible to say 

 what influence, (if any) they have exercised on the modern verna- 

 culars, or even the older dialects of India. The learned lecturer has 

 drawn attention in the opening of his paper, to the influence that 

 special knowledge has had on discussions on this highly interesting 

 subject, but in admitting the justness of his remarks, it becomes 

 doubly necessary to guard against falling into the very error of which 

 he has warned us. It is not very long ago, indeed the time is so 

 short, that it will be in the memory of most here present, that all 

 language was supposed to be of Semitic origin : our sacred Scriptures 

 were written in Hebrew ; our earliest history records were transmitted 

 to us through that medium ; all the dialects which are now current 

 in the regions of its birth, and all those which existed for ages past 

 and were lost, were asserted to have sprung from this most ancient of 

 all languages. But little more than half a century ago, the researches 

 of Sir William Jones, Colebrooke and other distinguished members of 

 this Society, and addresses read from the very chair, which I now 

 accidentally and unworthily fill, let in a flood of new light, which has 

 since revolutionized European ideas on the subject of language ; and 

 it is not twenty, nay it h hardly fifteen years ago, that the antiquity 

 claimed for Sanskrit was resolutely disputed by men of high attain- 

 ment. For the last ten or fifteen years, however, everything has 

 been Sanskrit ; and the learned lecturer, in common with most others 

 who have written on the subject, has traced all our Indian dialects 

 back to that mother tongue. Now., at the present day ? it is impos- 



