12 ON THE ORIGIN OP 



peculiarity noticed by Dr. Stevenson. This admission however 

 does not at all militate against the position, that the Sinhalese and 

 her North-Indian sieters are indebted for this grammatical form to 

 other than Dravidian influences. It is true that the Sanskrit 

 takes the augment a in the [Hiyattani, Ajjatani, and Kalatipatti] 

 past tenses ; but the Pali, which is the dialect which exhibits the 

 nearest approximation to the Sanskrits, shows the earliest traces of 

 a departure from this rule. For, on reference to Kachchayna 's Pali 

 Grammar [lib. vi.chap.iv. §38] it will be seen that this change of the 

 present into the past by the augment a, is " optional ;"e. g. a-gam&=* 

 gama * he went.' After the Pali had taken this first step of depar- 

 ture from the Sanskrit the other Prakrit dialects have followed 

 the secondary formation of the Pali preterite. See Vararuchi's 

 Prakrit Grammar, sec. viii. § 23. Not only they but the North- 

 Indian Vernaculars have along with the Sinhalese, and some of the 

 Indo-European languages * followed the practice of retaining the 

 radical without a prefix in the aorist, e. g. amo i amavi, Latin; do, 

 did ; Eng., etc., etc. Caldwell in summing- up the relations which 

 several languages bear to each other in the formation of the preterite, 

 says 'In a large proportion of the verbs in the Germanic tongues, 

 in the modern Persian, in the Turkish and Finish families of lan- 

 guages, in the vernacular languages of Northern India, and, with a 

 few exceptions, in the Dravidian languages, the preterite is formed 

 by suffixing to the verbal theme a particle, generally a single con- 

 sonant only, which is significant of past tense. 



The future tense. — The characteristic sign of the future in the 

 Dravidian dialects is a# or b. The Bengali has also adopted a b, 

 which Professor Max Muller identifies with the & or be i which forms 

 characteristic sign of the Latin future, and which is considered to 

 be a relic of an old substantive verb.' Now the Sinhalese future 

 has no sign in common with any of these languages. It takes 



* Caldwell, p. 391, 



