The Diseases of Language 411
the present stem and past stem respectively Thus the present tense of
the verb khandan (to buy) is:
mikharam mikharim
rmkhan mikkand
mikharad mkharand
The corresponding past tenses are: khandam, kharidi, etc (I bought,
you bought, etc,)> and mtkhandam^ mikhandi> etc (I was buying, you
were buying, etc ). For perfected action, future time, and the passive
voice, constructions involving helper verbs do service: budan for the
first, khastan (to wish) for the second, and shodan (to become) for the
third.
Though the modern Indie languages of Aryan origin have not
covered the same distance as Persian, they have travelled in the same
direction. Sir George Gnerson, who was in charge of the Linguistic
Survey of Indza, writes of the Hindi dialects.
Some of these dialects are as analytical as English, others are as syn-
thetic as German Some have the simplest grammar, with every word-
relationship indicated, not by declension or conjugation, but by the use
of help-words, while others have grammars more complicated than that
of Latin, with verbs that change their forms not only in agreement with
the subject, but even with the object
According to the prevalence of isolating and flexional features, we
can divide modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars (17 standard languages with
345 dialects, spoken by some 230 millions) into two classes, one covering
the centre of the North Indian plain, called Midland, the other, called
the Outer, surrounding it in three-quarters of a circle The former is
represented by Western Hindis Panjabt, Rajasiham, and Gujarati^ the
latter by vernaculars such as Ldhnda^ Sindhi; Maratkt3 Bihan, Bengali.
Gnerson says.
"The languages of the Outer sub-branch have gone a stage further in
linguistic evolution They were once, in their Sanskrit form, synthetic;
then they passed through an analytical stage—some are passing out of
that stage only now, and are, like Smdhi and Kashmiri, so to speak
caught in the act—and have again become synthetic by the incorporation
of the auxiliary words, used in the analytical stage, with the main words
to which they are attached, . . . The grammar of each of the Inner lan-
guages can be written on a few leaves, while, in order to acquire an
acquaintance with one of the Outer languages, page after page of more
or less complicated declensions and conjugations must be mastered."
Bengali is spoken in the delta of the Ganges, and north and east to