THE SINHALESE LANGUAGE. 



39 



©f blood and race, may originally have subsisted between the 

 northern aborigines and the southern — whatever ethnological evi- 

 dences of their identity may be supposed to exist, — when we view 

 the question philologically, and with reference to the evidence 

 which is furnished by their languages alone, the hypothesis of 

 their identity does not appear to me to have been established. It 

 may be true that various analogies in point of grammatical structure 

 appear to connect the Un- Sanscrit element, which is contained in 

 the North-Indian idioms, with the Scythian or Tartar tongues. 

 This connection, however, amounts only to a general relationship 

 to the entire group of Scythian languages; and no special relation- 

 ship to the Dravidian languages, in contra-distinction to those of 

 the Turkish, the Finnish, or any other Scythian family, has yet 

 been proved to exist. Indeed I conceive that the Scythian sub- 

 stratum of the North-Indian idioms presents a greater number of 

 points of agreement with the Oriental Turkish, or with that Scy- 

 thian tongue or family of tongues by which the New Persian has 

 been modified, than with any of the Dravidian languages. 



" The principal particulars in which the grammar of the North- 

 Indian idioms accords with that of the Dravidian languages are as 

 follows:— (1), the inflexion of nouns by means of separate post-fixed 

 particles; (2), the inflexion of the plural by annexing to the unvary- 

 ing sign of plurality the same suffixes of case as those by which the 

 singular is inflected; (3), the use of a dative or dative-accusative 

 in * ko ' or 4 ku:' (4), the use in several of the northern idioms of 

 two pronouns of the first person plural, the one including, the other 

 excluding the party addressed; (5), the use of post-positions, 

 instead of prepositions; (6), the formation of verbal tenses by means 

 of participles; (7), the situation of the governing word after the 

 word governed. In the particulars above-mentioned the grammar 

 of the North-Indian idioms undoubtedly resembles that of the 

 Dravidian family: but the argument founded upon this general 

 agreement is to a considerable extent neutralised by the circum- 

 stance that those idioms accord in the very same particulars, and 



