08 Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. [March, 



Nor arc these vocables alone peculiar in the Kashmiri : its system of 

 inflections and conjugations, as far as may be traced in the essays 

 under notice, are equally foreign to the Sanskrit. The nomi- 

 native appears without a case mark, as it does in all the 

 other Indian vernaculars, but the genitive takes the particle sund 

 which has no analogy with any Sanskrit inflection. It changes into 

 hand, sanz, hanz, sanza, hanza, uk, ik, ich, &c. under different cir- 

 cumstances, and all of them, except the last three, arc entirely foreign. 

 It should be observed, however, that Mr. Edgeworth devotes only a 

 page and a half, and Major Leech only a page to declensions, and it 

 would be unsafe to draw any conclusion from them as to how far the 

 cases given by them are indicated by inflectional particles, and how 

 far they are made up by altering the words from one part of speech 

 to another. The neuter genitive in uk and ik looks very much as if 

 it were an adjective and not a substantive. 



Major Leech is averse to what he calls " labouriously manufactured 

 tenses of verbs." He thinks " much labour and time would be 

 saved and every ordinary purpose answered, if, in case of minor 

 dialects, a vocabulary only of words and a collection of sentences 

 actually heard spoken, were made in the Roman character." It is 

 not to be expected, therefore, that he would be very elaborate in the 

 paradigms of his verbs. They hereby occupy three and a half pages. 

 But Mr. Edgeworth gives a pretty long list of verbs, and from it, it 

 is evident, that most of the roots are derived from the Sanskrit, and 

 that the changes they have undergone are such as are inevitable to 

 all languages in course of time, the decay of primitive forms and 

 sounds, and their replacement by easier forms and combinations. 



The most important test word in verbs, is the verb " to be," 

 Sanskrit as. It occurs with but slight variations in all Aryan lan- 

 guages, and is not wanting in the Kashmiri. In the form of as, ach, 

 and chi, the Bengali dchi, it is met with very largely, and by itself 

 would be a strong proof of the Sanskrit origin of the Kashmiri, but 

 in this, as in declensions, further enquiry is necessary to prove 

 in detail the analogy it bears to the Sanskrit in all its different 

 moods and tenses. 



Tie' pronouns are all of obvious Sanskrit origin, and so are most of 

 the leading adjectives and words indicative of number; but they 



