________________
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[OCTOBER, 1899.
Már-al-as
Similarly, the Bengali chalilám originally meant it was gone by me,' hence, I went.' In process of time the way in which this word was built was forgotten, and the past tense in Bengali is now conjugated as if it was an ordinary active verb. The particular enclitic pronouns which are used in the Magadhi-derived languages vary in form from dialect to dialect, and for the purpose of comparison with Eastern Hindi, it will be convenient to consider those in use in the Bhojpuri dialect of Bihari.
Eastern Hindt combines the poouliarities of the Saurasont and of the Magadhi languages. The typical letter of its past tense is not the Mâgadh l but the Saurasêni i or y. On the other hand, the past participle cannot stand by itself, but takes the same enclitic pronouns as those used by Bhojpuri. In order to show this clearly, the masculine singular of the Past tenses of Eastern Hindi and Bhojpuri are here given side by side. In each case the root, the tense characteristic, and the enclitic pronoun are separated by hyphens. In reading the Eastern Hindi forme, it should be remembered that, in this language, ya, e, and i are practically interchangeable, some localities favouring one spelling, and some another. The spelling given below is that of the Awadhi dialect :English. Eastern Hindi.
Bhojpurt. I struck Már-e
M&r-alThou strackest Mar-j-8
Már-al-as He struck
Már-i-s If we spell the Eastern Hindi words as follows, as is often done, we see the connexion, on the one hand, with the Saurasênt dialect, and, on the other, with Bhojpuri, even more clearly.
Mar-y-aữ Mar-y-as W
Mar-y-a.a These are the original forms, of which the forms with i and e are corruptions. This Past Tense, with, according to local spelling, the third person singular ending in is, es, or yas, is pre-eminently the typical shibboleth of a speaker of Eastern Hindi. In conversation this form of a verb naturally oocars with great frequency, and is hence continually heard. Speakers of the language from Oudh cover the whole of Northern India, for they are great wanderers in search of service, and, even in Calcutta, nothing is more common for a European to hear than an up-country syce saying words like 'kahis,' he said, or máris,' he struck. Sach expressions must be familiar to every Englishman, and most people wonld be astonished to hear that they were relics of a mixture of Sauraseni and Magadhi Prakrit.
In this tense, Eastern Hindi has another strong point of resemblance with the Saurasêni group of dialects. I have already pointed out that in the Magadhi languages, the memory of the fact that these past tenses are really passive in character has been lost. The suffixing of the enclitic pronoups has given the tense the appearance of an ordinary past tense of an Active verb. In Eastern Hindi we see this process of forgetting actually going on. The memory of the passive character of the tense has been partly preserved by the fact that the language possesses a literature. In the old poetry of Malik Muhammad and Tulasi Dås the fact that the tense is passive is rarely forgotten. The subject is put into the case of the Agent, whicb in this dialect does not end in ne, but is the same as the ordinary oblique form, and the verb is made to agree in gender and number, not with the subject, but with the object. In accordance with this, the verb has still, to the present day, a feminine form in the past tenses, and, as we go west, where the influence of the neighbouring Saaragêni dialects has helped to keep the memory alive, the subject of such tenses of transitive verbs is still in the case of the Agent. Thus, in Eastern Oudh'he struok' is 'll máris,' in which is in the Nominative case, and means he'; but in Unao in Western Oudh, the expression used iswi miris, in which wi is in the oblique form and means by him. The nominative singular of ui is 08.
The Future Tense. The case of the Fatore Tense is similar, but more complicated. In Sanskrit there are two ways of saying he will go. It may be said either actively or passively,
