20 I Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. [June, 



of the languago under notice. The Rambler alone cannot decide 

 that the language in which it is written is Johnsonese, and not 

 English. In the same way calisthenic corsets and trichosarons 

 for bodices and hair brushes may appear pedantic to a foreigner 

 like me, but if they occur in the every-day language of fashionable 

 English ladies, they cease to be so. The extracts given by 

 the Pandit are taken from standard books in every-day use in the 

 schools of Orissa, and to dismiss them by branding them as pedan- 

 tic is, in my humble opinion, altogether to beg the question at 

 issue. It is doubtless true that the predominance of any particular 

 class of words in any piece of writing cannot decide the character 

 of a language, but in the Uriya over ninety per cent, of its vocables 

 are Sanskrit, or corruptions of Sanskrit, and those corruptions have 

 taken the same turn which corruptions in Bengali have done, and 

 appear to be the results of the same laws of decay and regeneration 

 which have produced the Bengali language. 



The crucial test which Mr. B e a m e s suggests is "to place toge- 

 ther a chdsa of Dacca and a chdsd of Grumsur, and to see how much 

 they understood of each other's talk." The result of this experiment 

 would probably go against the Pandit. But the same experiment 

 tried between a cockney and a farm labourer in Yorkshire would 

 in the same way, I fancy, decide the fate of English in the two 

 places. For my part, though a native of Bengal for the last four and 

 twenty generations, I would be sorry to face a chdsa from Comil- 

 lah if the issue was to decide whether we could understand each 

 other through the medium of our common language, the Bengali. 

 The fact is, that local peculiarities of pronunciation do not consti- 

 tute language, and. therefore no notice should be taken of them in 

 deciding questions of linguistic classification. My Lord Dundreary 

 may " thee a thea thowpent thwiming on the buthoin of the thea," 

 but no philologist will be bold enough to spy in it a sister language 

 of the English. 



The first subject treated by Mr. Boames in regard to the gram- 

 mar of the Uriya language, is conjugation, but the comparison hav- 

 ing been made with the Bengali as revised and recast by our indi- 

 genous writers within the lust fifty years or so, the result is very 

 differenl from what the Pandit lias arrived at. The examples lie 



