Page:Growth of Asamiya Language.pdf/11

ONE GROWTH OF THE STUDY OF MODERN INDIAN LANGUAGES Before coming to a study of the history of growth of Asamiya, or any Indian language for that matter, it may be found necessary to come to a study of the growth of history of Indian languages in general. As carly as 1317, Amir Khusru attempted a survey of modern Indian lan- guages referring to Sindhi, Lahori, Kasluiri, Dogra (Dugard), Dhuar Samandar (Kanarese), Tilang (Telugu), Cryerali (Guxerati), Ma'ber (Tamil), Gaur (North Bengal). Audh. Then one finds mention of some of the Indian languages in the accounts of Abul Fazal before oming to the names of such carly European linguists as Terry. Froyer, Ogilby, Daniel Morrer-Chmidt and Schulze doing the spade work for a scientific study of the modern Indian languages. Discovery of Sanskrit made by European scholars and the first recog. nition of it as a member of the Indo-European family of languages by Sir William Jones in 1796 must be the beginning of the beginning of the study of comparative philology of Indian langunges, all maiden attempts of earlier scholars despite. Whatever may have been the fate of his other speculations in regard to modern Indian languages, one thing proved to be more and more certain in the light of further research that Sanskrit was definitely connected with the great European Languages. It was re-affirmed and confirmed by the new researches of Franz Bopp in 1816, and the publication of Bopp's grammar in 1853 became the first milestone in modern comparative philology. In between, William Carey, J. Marshman and W. Ward collected specimens of as manyons 33 Indian languages and Brian Houghton Hodgson produced a paper on the langunge, literature and religion of the Bauddhas of Nepal and Bhutan in 1828. Then Hodgson issued a series of articles on the ethnology of Nepal, and also a comparative vocabulary of sub-Himalayan dialects in 1817. IIe really compiled com- parative vocabularies of nearly all the languages of the Tibeto-Chinese group spoken in India and also of the Munda and Dravidian languages. Hodgson was the first scholar to discover and give the name Dra- vidian to that group of dialects, but he included the Munda group in it It was no other person than Max Muller who in his letter to Chevalier Bunsen in 1854 established the Munda group as an independent family of non-Aryan languages. In 1853 Sir Erskine Perry published his