1850.] 



Language of the Gonds. 



49 



blance would be closer. It seems to me useless to pick out words 

 when the connexion, and idiom of two or three sentences are so close. 

 It is not impossible that out of ancient Tamil compositions some sim- 

 ple sentences might be selected which the modern unlettered khonds 

 would, in the general purport, understand. 



Discursive Remarks. 



I here take occasion to notice that, a twelve month since, I receiv 

 ed from the Rev, Dr. Schmid, now at Ootacamund, a paper contain- 

 ing remarks on essays by Captain Congreve, and myself, in the Literary 

 Journal, Nos. 32 and 33, which he had also forwarded to Dr. Wilson 

 at Bombay, for the Oriental Spectator. On this latter ground the 

 remarks were not deemed admissible to the Madras Journal ; but as 

 I have received permission from Dr. Schmid to make public use of 

 the contents, together with those of an accompanying letter to myself, 

 I take leave here to select two brief extracts from the letter as fol- 

 lows : 



" My vocabulary which I have lately completed, shows, to a de- 

 monstration, that the Todaver language is a genuine, but very rude 

 dialect of the ancient Tamil ; the words of which are so greatly chang- 

 ed, but changed according to certain rules, that only a deeper study 

 could enable me to recognize the identity of both languages ; and a 

 comparison of these Todaver words, with the Budagherand Canarese 

 words, shows to evidence that the Tamil, Todaver, Budagher and Ca- 

 narese languages are links of a closely connected, and unbroken chain 

 of dialects of one original language ; but that the Tadover dialect is 

 by far more closely connected with the Tamil than with the Cana- 

 rese." 



" In reference to a question started by the Rev. W. Taylor in 

 the Madras Journal of Literature and Science, for July — De- 

 cember, 1847, No. 33, page 94, I have to state two facts. Dr. Riic- 

 kert, Professor of the Oriental languages at the University of Ber- 

 lin, who is equally well acquainted with Sanscrit, Arabic, Persian, and 

 the Tatar dialect, and who studied Tamil, assisted in part by books I 

 had lent him, told me that the Tamil language is most remarkably ana- 

 logous to the Tatar dialects. This strengthened my idea which I had 

 already long before conceived, by comparing the genius of the Tamil 



G 



