On the Origin of the Hindvi Language. 



499 



1864.] 



into smin after words of the class " Purva, $fc" and this smin seems 

 to have been adopted as a general termination for the locative in the 

 Pali. In the Prakrita it merged into mmi, and in the Hindvi the mmi 

 appears in the different forms of men, mai, mon, man, mahi, &c. Dr. 

 Trumpp has overlooked this obvious derivation in his " Declensional 

 Features of the North Indian Vernacular," in which he says, " In 

 Hindvi and Hindustani the locative, as a case, has been quite lost, and 

 only some vestiges of it remain, as : %ir, or emphatic %T?T?t, ' in 

 being,' and thus a locative can be formed with all participles, present 

 or past, which are generally looked upon by our European gramma- 

 rians as indeclinable participles, but which are in reality only locatives 

 as it is most clearly borne out by comparing the cognate dialects."* 

 In some forms of the Hindvi, the me of the locative is replaced by 

 pai and rarely by pain, the origin of which we can trace only to the 

 Sanskrita preposition upara " upon" which first changed to par in 

 such sentences as mupar " on me," and subsequently to pai, the nasal 

 affix being a euphonic adjunct which in the Braja Bhasha is largely 

 introduced often without any obvious reason. The same was the case 

 in the Bengali four hundred years ago, and the Ohaitanya Charitd- 

 mrata affords innumerable instances of its use in words like jdyind, 

 Jchanyinyd for the modern jdyiyd, Jchdyiyd, &c. 



The vocative in the Hindvi is identically the same as in most forms 

 of the Sanskrita, being formed by the addition of the interjections he, 

 re, ahe (for ayi,) &c. A few of the interjections are peculiar to the 

 Hindvi, but they offer nothing of importance for comment. 



The personal pronouns are so obviously Sanskritic that we need not 

 swell this paper by tracing the gradual changes which they have 

 undergone from the time of the Prakritas to our own day. The 

 only word which appears to some to be of doubtful origin is the third 

 person vah plural vai, but the difficulty vanishes if the Sanskrit asau 

 be taken as its archtype. 



The verb generally undergoes a greater variety of changes than any 

 other class of words. It is said that in some American languages, 

 verbal roots may appear in no less than six thousand different forms. 

 In Sanskrita, the changes are not so numerous, still they exceed three 

 hundred. In Greek and Latin they are less, and in modern 

 European languages generally very few ; in English the least—not 

 * Journal El. As, Soc. Vol. XIX. p. 398. 



