A Comparative Grammer of the Modern Aryan Languages of India

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1875 Excerpt: ... oblique form are added the case-particles, as tft% «ift "to a horse," vflf t "to horses." Exempted from this rule are those nouns in & derived from Skr. nouns whose nom. is already d; as 4j4fl "king," dlW "giver:" these do not change in the singular oblique, or nom. pi.; thus they say Nl t "to a king," TtTT "givers." The rule is carelessly kept in old writers, and even in the present day among the peasantry one may often hear ftTT t; moreover, the neglect of the plural is very common, and it is colloquially more usual to employ the singular, as fa tft " twenty horses." Instances of neglect of the rule in Old-Hindi poets are these--faff TT &ft 3it II %r Tiff UTT II "At that time came somehow Into the tent a snake."--Chand, i. 246. Where we should expect "?T. A similar passage is TTr wn %rr Tfa II "The king came into his tent."--Chand, i. 194. And in the Bhaktamala occur cfizlT "in the cup," dR4il % "of the boy" (Namdev.). The feminine noun in I undergoes no change in the oblique singular; in the plural the inflection of plurality is appended to the simple unchanged stem, as?nffr «fft " to a daughter," %Zf t "to daughters." No other preparation of the stem occurs in Hindi, which is thus, except in the one instance of nouns in d, as simple as Bengali or Oriya. Panjabi retains unchanged all nouns ending in a consonant; those which end in a vowel are treated much as in Hindi. Thus--ow. «rftnt!obi. txiFw Panjabi has no fear of the hiatus, any more than Hindi has, and even in. nouns where the final & is preceded by a vowel, it makes no effort to prevent collision; one instance in point is the word last q...