198 



3. Had Forbes taken the Passive view, he would not have been 

 under the necessity of writing (p. 105) : " The only real difficulty likely 

 to arrest the progress of the learner consists, not in the use of ne to 

 express the agent, but in that of ho to define the object of a transitive 

 verb {scil. in a preterite tense.)" IN'othing could be more conclusive ; he 

 calls the verb, when ne is used, transitive. 



4. Dr. Porbes says, again, that it does not fall within his province 

 to account philosophically for the mode in which this particle {7ie) is 

 applied. If he had held the Passive doctrine, he would have been in 

 no want of philosophy. 



5. *'Itis a form of construction," he adds, "very common in San- 

 skrit." So it is, but he derived no light from the Sanskrit. In this 

 language the past participle is often verbalized by putting a pronoun 

 or noun before it, and then both constitute a preterite passive, which is 

 followed, when needful, by the instrumental case. In Sanskrit, the 

 most common termination of this case is na, which is the origin of the 

 Hindustani postposition ne. I refer to Professor "Williams' Sanskrit 

 Grammar, p. 320, where, however, he graciously leaves me the honour 

 of establishing the legitimacy of the Preterite tenses to a purely Passive 

 character. The Sanskrit constraction here noticed is, without doubt, 

 the origin of the like form in the Hindustani ; and is in itself a conclu- 

 sive demonstration of the correctness of the judgment which pronounces 

 the Ur^clii Preterites to be pure Passives — a judgment which I propose 

 to establish by a rigid investigation. 



The Passive character will be easily ascertained from the examina- 

 tion of a few simple sentences, presenting all the varieties connected 

 with the Preterite tenses. To understand the argument, all that is 

 necessary is a knowledge of any inflected language, of the true nature 

 of a Passive phrase, which our Hindustani scholars appear to have 

 ignored, and of these few particulars : A postposition requires the pre- 

 ceding noun or pronoun to be inflected, visibly or virtually. Feminine 

 nouns are not inflected in the singular ; nor masculine (including par- 

 ticiples), unless they end in alif {a). The plural inflection always ends 

 in on. The termination (a) is mas. sing. ; e is the corresponding plural ; 

 t is fem. sing. ; in its plural. The present participle ends in ta, and is 

 verbalized by simply giving it a subject ; the passive drops the t, is ver- 

 balized in the same way, and thus affords the Preterite tenses. These 

 I take to be pure Passives. The received opinion is, that the Passive 

 voice can be formed only by means of the auxiliary /awa, "to go, or 

 to be ;" but a Passive, even of this kind, is rejected by the ablest of the 

 native grammarians, of whom the most distinguished is Muhammad 

 Ibrahim, of Bombay. — ( Vide Tufhde MpMnstone.) 



The character of the verb is assertion. When the verb is Active, its 

 subject is the agent of the action ; its object, the thing acted upon. 

 When the verb is Passive, the object of the Active form becomes the 

 subject of the assertion, and therefore is in the nominative case; and 

 the agent is in an inflected case, with or without a governing prepo- 

 sition : that this should not be superfluous seems strange. 



