With regard to the other changes, which are less easily explainable, we must, I think, have recourse to the argument that the medieval Aryans, before entirely doing away with any peculiarity in the structure of the ancient language, began to be careless about its use, just as in the Merovingian period in France, the Latin case-endings were used carelessly one for the other, till confusion resulted in their eventual abolition. So in the decay of gender, which has evidently taken place in the Indian group; the first step was a careless and irregular use of the genders of individual words, by which, if any one word of very common usage were feminine, a whole group of other words of similar sound would be made feminine too, and the same with any familiar masculine word. $37. That the use of gender has shown signs of becoming less habitual, and gradually dying out, is undeniable. While it has died out entirely from B. and O., it is not much regarded in H. and P., and only two genders remain in S. The full The full range of three genders remains only in M. and G. When we cross the frontier into the territory of the Iranian languages, we find no gender at all. To ask why this is so, would be to ask a question which is virtually unanswerable. The neuter is certainly a very useless abstraction, and it is not surprising to find it the first to be thrown aside. In the modern Romance languages this has happened as much as in all the modern Aryan languages except G. and M., which have no parallel except in Modern High German. In the Indian group, the Prakrits retain all three genders; but the earliest mediæval Hindi has only two, the masculine and feminine, and even these two are much confused. It can hardly be said that Chand deliberately means to use a neuter, when he claps on an anuswâra to a formless nominal stem to eke out his metre, or uses a word in its original Sanskrit form, as in the lines VOL. II. 12 प्रथमं भुजंगी सुधारी ग्रहनं ॥ जिने नाम एकं अनेकं कहनं ॥ "First (there is) a taking of the well-adorned Bhujangi, Whose name (though) one is taken in many ways."—i. 5. Here the numerous anuswâras are introduced merely to make the line scan, the metre being U-10-10~~10~~1 and a nasal is commonly doubled by prefixing anuswâra: thus ग्रहनं is to be read as though it were written ग्रहन्नम्, and प्रथमं as . Frequently, too, we find a masculine participle or adjective with a feminine noun. Thus, while in one line we have पुत्र होत भई मृत्य ॥ - where भई “she became” agrees with fifa "queen" in a previous line-there occurs, a few lines below, कन्या कियो अन्दोह “the bride made lamentation,” where the verb is masculine, and in the next line if "took," which is also masculine, refers to the same noun. The same indifference to gender, even with living beings, exists occasionally throughout the poem, and it may therefore be concluded that at that age, or before it, the strict observance of the three genders of Skr. had ceased to be usual. The masculine being the most common of the two genders that remained after the disuse of the neuter, gradually absorbed the feminine in ordinary writing, unless there was any special necessity for the employment of the latter, as, for instance, in the case of living beings. While, however, the poets retain tolerably accurately the two principal genders, the people must have grown careless about them at a comparatively early date; for Nepali, whose origin as an independent language dates from A.D. 1322, has little or no cognizance of them; and the earliest Bengali and Oriya poets, who wrote in the first part of the fifteenth century, show no traces 1 Though we may here argue that we have an instance of the objective construction, though the subject is not, as it should be with that construction, in the instrumental. It will, however, be seen from Chapter III. § 57, that the early and mediæval poets regularly omit the instrumental in the objective construction. of the feminine as attached to anything but living beings. Grammatical gender had perished in the eastern area of the seven languages, then, by the fourteenth century, leaving only natural gender, and even that but indifferently attended to. It is not surprising that Bengali and Oriya should have lost the distinction of gender earlier than the other languages, seeing that they had so little occasion to use it. In these two languages the participial forms of the verb, which have in the other languages usurped the place of nearly all the old synthetical tenses, do not exist; and by their absence a great and constantly occurring necessity for the use of gender was taken away. Thus in Hindi the verb has only one synthetic or Prakritic tense remaining, namely, the indefinite present, the third person singular of which ends in (=), as in "he does," and the third plural in , as in All the other tenses are formed by participles: as "they do." Although the future is not a participle, but formed by adding to the indefinite present, yet this T, like the terminations of the present and future, changes its vowel for gender and number, and makes a feminine, pl. m., f. . So that in all three tenses there exists a necessity for remembering the gender, so as to make the verb agree with its subject or object, according to the nature of the construction. But in Bengali there is no such custom, thus: None of these tenses change their form in any way for gender, and there is therefore no need to remember the gender of the subject; the objective construction also is fortunately unknown in those two languages. If to this potent reason for disuse of gender we add the universal shortening of final long syllables, which led ultimately to their suppression, it will be readily understood that languages, which had no means left of marking gender, should soon cease to be aware of its existence at all, and in this respect should go even further than English. While our language retains distinct words for natural gender in the pronoun of the third person, these two do not; means "he," or "she," or "it," and all the cases of this pronoun are the same throughout, as will be seen more in detail in the Chapter on the Pronouns. Seeing how much the existence of distinctions of gender tends to make a language difficult to foreigners, it is not perhaps a mistake to regret that all the seven languages have not followed the example of these two, and got rid of gender before literature stepped in to arrest their development, and stereotype the forms they at present possess; and we may certainly set our faces against the obnoxious pedantry of some modern Bengali writers, who, in resuscitating a Sanskrit adjective, bring back with it the gender which the spoken language has long ago got rid of. CHAPTER III. DECLENSION. CONTENTS.- 38. INFLECTION.-§ 39. PREPARATION OF THE STEM IN ORIYA § 38. THE modern noun in all the seven languages has the same number of cases as in Sanskrit, nominative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, locative, and vocative. In Sanskrit these cases are distinguished by changes in termination, as naras, naram, narena, naraya, narât, narasya, nare, nara. This is the fashion with the old inflectional languagesa cumbrous and somewhat clumsy system, which the human race, in its onward march, has now in many instances discarded for the simpler and more spiritual method of detached particles. In the Indian group, Hindi stands, as usual, prominently forward in this respect; while the opposite pole is represented by Sindhi, the rude and complicated speech of backward and un |