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 European 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 

 I am) 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. If 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. 



The Rajpoots. 

 I have already made so many allusions to the Rajpoots, that I have 

 half anticipated my description of them. The best proof that they 



