490 



On the origin of the Hindvi Language, 



[No. 5, 



dialect to be written down in the Eoman characters. It may not be 

 uninteresting therefore to enquire ,what is the origin of the Hindvi, the 

 parent of the Hindustani, and how far is it removed from the original 

 Sanskrita to be disentitled to the use of theNagari alphabet as its natural 

 symbolical representative ; although in making the enquiry, I shall 

 necessarily be obliged to run over ground which has already been very 

 carefully traversed by some of the most distinguished philologers of the 

 day, and to repeat much that is generally well known and admitted. 



The Hindvi is by far the most important of all the vernacular 

 dialects of India, It is the language of the most civilised portion of 

 the Hindu race, from the eastern boundary of Behar to the foot of 

 the Solimani Earjge, and from the Yindhya to the Terai. The Gur- 

 khas have carried it to Kemaoon and Nepal, and as a lingua franca 

 it is intelligible everywhere from the Kohistan of Peshawar to Assam, 

 and from Kashmir to Cape Comorin. Its history is traceable for a 

 thousand years, and its literary treasures are richer and more extensive 

 than, of any other modern Indian dialect, the Telegoo excepted. No 

 doubt it has not always been the same, nor is it exactly alike every 

 where over the vast tract of country in which it prevails. For a 

 living language growing with the progress of time, and diversely 

 influenced in different places by various physical, political and ethnic 

 causes, such a thing would be impossible. But there is sufficient 

 similitude between the language of the Prithvirdya-R&so, the most 

 ancient Hindvi work extant, and the Hindvi of our day, and between 

 the several dialects of Hindvi, Hindustani, Braja Bhasha, and Eangri 

 into which the modern Hindvi is divided, to shew that they are all 

 essentially one — dialectic varieties of the same language— branches of 

 the same stem, and not issues from different trunks. 



The Prithviraya-B&so was written nearly nine hundred years ago, 

 and yet the difference between its language and that of the Premasdgar 

 one of the most modern books in the Hindvi, is not even so great as 

 — certainly not greater than — that between the languages of Chaucer 

 and of the Times newspaper, and whatever that is, it is due more to the 

 "use of obsolete and uncouth words than to any marked formal pecu- 

 liarities. Chand, the author of the Prithviraya-Raso, has been very 

 aptly described by the learned de Tassy as the Homer of the Bajputs. # 



# Chand, qu' on a nomme 1' Homere des Rajpouts, est certainement le plus 

 populaire des poetes Hindvi, De Tassy' s Rudiments de la Langue hindvi, p. 7. 



