1874.] F. S. Growse— The Etymology of Local Names in N. India . 325 
of ‘ Mathura, a District Memoir,’ from which all the illustrations of my 
present argument will be drawn. 
It seems a very obvious truism and one that requires no elaborate 
defence to maintain that the names of a country and of the places in it 
should prima facie and in default of any direct evidence to the contrary be 
referred to the language of the people who inhabit them rather than to any 
foreign source. This, however, is the very point which most writers on the 
subject have failed to see. In order to explain why the founder of an In¬ 
dian village gave his infant settlement the name by which it is still known 
among his descendants, our laborious philologists have ransacked vocabula¬ 
ries of all the obscurest dialects of Europe, but have left their Sanskrit and 
Hindi dictionaries absolutely unopened. 
A more curious illustration of a deliberate resolve to ignore obvious 
facts for the sake of introducing a startling theory based on some obscure 
and utterly problematical analogy could scarcely be found than is afforded 
by Dr. Hunter in his dissertation' on non-Aryan languages. In this he 
refers the familiar local termination gdnw (which argumenti gratia he 
spells gang or gaong , though never so written in any Indian vernacular) 
to the Chinese hiang , the Tibetan thiong , the Lepcha Jcyong , &c., &c., 
and refuses to acknowledge any connexion between it and the Sanskrit 
grama. Yet as certainly as Anglo-Saxon was once the language of Eng¬ 
land, so was Sanskrit of Upper India ; and it seems as reasonable to deny 
the relationship between grama and gdnw as between the English affix 
bury or borough and the Saxon burgh. The formation is strictly in accord 
with the rules laid down by the Prakrit grammarians, centuries before 
the word gcniw had actually come in existence. Thus by Vararuchi’s 
Sutra— Sarvatra la-va-ram III, 3—the letter r when compounded with 
another consonant, whether it stands first or last, is always to be elided ; 
as we see in the Hindi bat for the Sanskrit vdrta, in Icos for hrosa , a 
measure of distance, and in pem for preman , love. So grama passes into 
gama , and whether this latter form or game is used depends simply upon 
the will of the speaker ; one man calls the place where he lives Naugama, 
another calls it Nauganw, in the same way as it is optional to say Edinbro’ 
or Edinborough. For in Hindi as in Sanskrit a nasal can always be insert¬ 
ed at pleasure, according to the memorial line— Savindukdvindulcagoh sydd 
abhede na halpanam: and the distinction between m and v or tv has always 
been very slightly marked : for example, dhimar is the recognized literary 
Hindi form of the Sanskrit dhivar, and at the present day villagers generally 
write Bhamani for Bhawani , though the latter form only is admitted in 
printed books. If speculation is allowed to run riot with regard to the 
paternity of such a word as gdnw , every step in the descent of which is 
capable of the clearest proof, then philology is still a science of the future, 
