resuscitated for daily use. That the Sanskrit, like every other language, was subject to the laws of development, and that Bengali, like every other language, was merely the natural result of those laws, never occurred to Carey, Yates, and their brethren; and if such an idea had crossed their minds, it would have been banished as a heresy by the Pandits. Orissa at a later date followed the lead of Bengal, and from the causes above mentioned it has resulted that in both provinces the national speech has been banished from books, and now lives only in the mouths of the people; and even they, as soon as they get a little learning, begin to ape their betters and come out with the Tatsamas with which both languages are now completely flooded.[1]
In Marathi the preponderance of Tatsama words, though sufficiently marked, is not so much so as in Bengali. The Marathi country was not invaded by the Musulmans till a comparatively late period, and as the Brahmans of that province have always been distinguished for learning, their efforts to retain a high type for their language, originally one of the rudest of the group, took the direction as usual in India of resuscitating Sanskrit words, and the process has not been carried so far as in Bengali only because the vernacular was richer. Marathi is one of those languages which one may call playful—it delights in all sorts of jingling formations, and has struck out a larger quantity of secondary and tertiary words, diminutives, and the like, than any of the cognate tongues.
- ↑ Yates's Bengali Grammar initiates the student into all the mysteries of Sandhi as though they were still in use, and his distress, when he is obliged to give a genuine vernacular form instead of some stilted Sanskritism, is quite ludicrous. Thus, in introducing the common pronouns mui, tui, which are of course the real original pronouns of the language, he says, "It would be well for the first and second of these pronouns, and for the verbs that agree with them, to be expunged from the language." (!) One feels tempted to ask why he did not try to expunge I and thou from English, and to substitute the much more elegant phrases, "Your humble servant" and "Your worship."
