208 Proceedings of the Asiatic Society, [June, 



such phrases as gaoh ha saba hdti phelild ;loka saba thild, are very common. 

 These facts, I trust, will shew that the Uriya, instead of being a 

 " self-contained and independent member of the Aryan Indian ver- 

 naculars," is most closely and intimately connected with the Bengali, 

 and the Pandit has very good reasons to take it to be a daughter 

 and not a sister of the vernacular of this province. The exact rela- 

 tionship may be reversed ; but even a cursory glance at the old 

 literatures of the two languages shew them to have been at one time 

 one, and their differences to be due to later or modern growth. 



Mr. Beames has devoted a good portion of his paper to the dis- 

 cussion of Uriya phonetics. But they call for no remark. It has 

 not been denied by the Pandit, and no body will venture to gainsay, 

 that Uriya pronunciation is different from that of Bengal. The 

 question is, are they such as to justify our taking the Uriya to be 

 an independant language ? and I maintain that the phonetics of 

 the two dialects do not suffice to solve it. In an excellent paper on 

 the Bhojpuri dialect, Mr. Beames has shewn that, notwithstand- 

 ing much graver differences in glossology and grammar — in declen- 

 sion and conjugation, — in pronouns and the degrees of comparison, — 

 in adjectives and conjunctions — than what obtains in Uriya and 

 Bengali, the Bhojpuri is a dialect of the Hindi ; and by a parity of 

 reasoning, I expect he will admit the Uriya, in a like manner, to be 

 a daughter of the Bengali. Phonetic peculiarities such as he has 

 noticed, and such as may be multiplied ad infinitum, do not constitute 

 language, and therefore do not affect the question at issue in any 

 way. I have no doubt that every member here present will bear 

 me out when I say that such peculiarities exist in almost every 

 county in England, but they do not suffice to divide the English 

 language into a number of sister dialects. In the districts of Ben; 

 gal, we have the same peculiarity in even a more marked degree. 

 I well remember a remark of the late Eaja of Krishnanagar who 

 once told me that his pronunciation must be more correct than 

 mine, because his district was once the seat of government, and he 

 had therefore every right to lay down the law in such cases. To 

 put this more clearly, I beg to draw the attention of the meeting to 

 a comparative table (Vide p. 215) which I once prepared to illustrate 

 the differences of the Orissa, the Calcutta and the Dacca dialects. 



