signifies young: hence گاو جان a young horse or colt; a young bull or calf: and from this root I should very naturally derive the Persian word jawán, the Celtic jevangh, the Latin juvenis, the Armoric jovank, the Saxon yeong, till I come at last to our English word young: but our Sanscrit scholars tell us that the whole is derived from yowán and yowáná signifying young and youth in that dialect; and I will so far accord with them, that the jobá and jóban of the Hindustani have that immediate derivation. Like myself, every scholar of the old school looked up to Sir W. Jones as the English father of the Persian language and literature; and his grammar and annual discourses as our only rational manuals of the Persian studies; yet could he now look up himself from his grave, his placid countenance would assume that smile, which used in the society of his friends so often on similar instances of simplicity to illuminate it, at finding in the fourteenth year since the institution of the college at Haileybury, that grammar-elegant as the English language can make it, but barren and miserably defective in its rules-the only initiatory tract or introduction, which the Persian scholar there has to the rudiments of so nice, and comparatively now so well-explored a language. They manage otherwise at the parent seminary of Calcutta; but there again they have overdone the job by making two folio volumes of it, as much as they have left it underdone here. In that grammar Sir William was so unfortunate as to call that ancient, beautiful, and most useful dialect the Hindi" the jargon of Hindostan !"-And though he became afterwards as sensible of its charms as any of us, and translated many beautiful poems from it; and though any young writer or cadet was in those days ashamed of having any native about him beyond six months from his arrival in Bengal, (I speak not of Madras or Bombay,) that could speak English, yet our learned and elegant Orientalist, and I state the fact from noticing it repeatedly at his own table, was obliged after four years residence, and I fancy till his death, to have a special servant that could speak English attendance behind his chair, in attendance behind his chair, through whom he issued his domestic orders. It was the same with the other judges of the supreme court, the members of government with the exception of Mr. Hastings, and all the leading men about Calcutta; so that a young man in those days, if he happened to be stationed at the presidency, had, in imitation servants about him, who in picking of his seniors, a set of worthless up a smattering of English had got hold of all our worst vices; and, in his ignorance of this only means of communication with the natives of the interior, our youth found After the peace of 1783 some of the young officers made interest, with literary objects, for permission to reside on their full pay among the natives; accordingly Lieut. Wilford of the engineers, and Lieut. Mullock of the infantry, and some others, availed themselves of this license, chiefly with the view of studying the Hindustani: but Dr. John B. Gilchrist, who retired for this same purpose to the city of Fayzabad, the ancient capital of Oude, and resid ed there for some years as the only European at the place, and where, on marching across the country in 1786 I recollect first meeting him, was soon known to have made such progress in a grammar and dictionary of that grand and popular dialect, that his competitors turned their thoughts to other studies, and Lieut. W. in particular to that of the Sanscrit, which his fortunate residence at Benares enabled him to perfect himself in, so as to become one of the most voluminous and interesting correspondents of the Asiatic Society, then also just established at Calcutta. قناج By this time Sir W. Jones had formed more accurate notions of the value as well as antiquity of this Hindi dialect; for in his third discourse, delivered to this Society on the 2d of February of this year, he laments, that the Greeks under Alexander took no pains to inform themselves of the languages of either Persia or India; but that the Mohammedans, more accurate, observant, and just, mention a Bháshá or living tongue, so called in opposition to the Sanscrit or dead language, as spoken through out the upper provinces of Hindustan, of which CANAJ was in those days, A. D. 800, the capital; and as the general effect of conquest is to leave the current language of the conquered people unchanged, though it may after get deluged with the exotic names both for articles and for actions, we may by analogy believe, that the pure Hindi was primeval in Upper India; into which not the Sanscrit, but the then spoken dialect of the Brahmans, was introduced by one set of conquerors at a inore remote age, and the Persian and Arabic at the era now alluded to. Thus might we account for ninetenths perhaps of the ancient Hindi being Sanscrit, and ninetenths of the present Hindustani wards being Persian and Arabic; but what are we to call the remaining tenth, which forms the real basis of the language, and whence did it derive its idiom or grammar, which is neither Sanscrit nor Persian? dart of the دري دري Like the Persians, the arabi of the Arabs, and the Celtic of Europe, it drew its origin immediately from some primeval language, which was cotemporary with the confusion of Babel, and the origin of all the ancient languages: with the exception of the Sanscrit of the Brahmans, the Zand of Zartasht, the Tází of the Koran, and perhaps the Hebrew of our Bible, which were of human fabrication, and the slotrah of the priesthood. The drama is supposed to preserve the manners of the age, in which it was written, more correctly than any other literary composition; and in the drama of the Brahmans, the Sanscrit dialogue is never put into the mouth of any but the gods or priests, whereas the Pracrit, or more common dialect, is spoken by genii and the better sort of human beings; as the Apabhransa, or dialect where the rules of grammar are still more neglected than in the Pracrit, confined to the vulgar Or, to compare them with the languages Celtic as Sanscrit, or rather, as I of Europe, we might consider the said before, the spoken language of the Brahmans; the Saxon, Greek, and Latin, as Pracrit; and all our modern Europe dialects as Apabhransa: and indeed it is the opprobrium of our species, with all our pride of improvement, that our language-what we ought to feel most interested in refining -is every successive age getting I have noticed in my Essay of last more vulgar or ungrammatical! June the or rhythmical pe riods of the Persian; but what shall we say to a long sentence, nay long periods, not periods of words, but words consisting of periods, each of them being combined, like the elements of a sin gle word in the Sanscrit, for the purpose of improving the euphony or sweetness of the sound; and could we call such composition the language of nature, or what could have ever been currently spoken? Brahmans may have taught themselves to speak it, as the people at the fairs in Hindustan have, as I have stated in my essay of last October, to communicate their ideas by an arithmetical notation; گ مرا کویر که بنشین که مرا کویر که رو گاه را پس راند و گاهم بخواند پیشتر که بهنري كويرم روتي کهن پاني پهن * كرمري يا جب جهي كورا سرا جرا مكر Being, subsequently to the interval above adverted to, occupied at Dinagepore in Bengal, in collating the second volume of Sadi's works for the Calcutta press, I had a copy of the poem, in which these lines occur, sent in August 1793, as a literary curiosity, to Sir W. Jones, with a request, that he would at his leisure explain the difficult and various idioms; but he promptly answered, with his accustomed modesty, that his friends were pleased to flatter in supposing him capable of interpreting all the dialects of the east; and dying early next year, it does not appear whether he had leisure afterwards to attempt it. Dohras or couplets, and cabits or stanzas, in the Hindi, often occur in the Ghazls of Amir Khosró and Amir Hasaní, both elegant Persian poets, who resided at Delhi and were cotemporaries of Sadí, as well as in the diwans of Malik Mohammed Jaisi, of Mohammed Afzal and Amir-Khan Anjam, who flourished at the courts of Jihángír and Shah-jihán; and most of the poetry written entirely in this dialect is the exclusive production of Sandar Mutiram and other Hindwi poets, who flourished during the reign of the last mentioned great Moghul, and of the Dehli Mohammedan princes previous to him. In the various provinces of Hindustan and the Dakhin, which composed the extensive empire of the once Great Moghul, there are several dialects of Hindi, and poems written in each; as for example, the Khéáls or Tappás, so familiar to many of us that had a taste for Hindustani music, are written in the language of the Pancháb or Panchah-nadah; but the Dhurpads, or regular Rags of the last-mentioned special Hindi poets, are composed in the Rekhtah or Ordú zibán of the royal camp and court. If Sir W. Jones was esteemed by us as the father of the rational study of the Persian language, in how much a greater degree ought Dr. Gilchrist to be considered as the father of the modern Hindi? for any assistance we could derive from Hadley's and other vocabu laries before his time, only con firmed us in that barbarous jargon, which reciprocal mistakes had introduced between Europeans gabbling what they called Moors, and their native servants and dependants aping the English of their masters. Accordingly having in 1788 published his grammar and dictionary of the Hindustani lan hend, simplify, and impart. For example, Murd-ne upnee lurkee dek'hee, or murd-ne upnee lurkee ko dek'ha, in the classical Hindustani, will always be expressed by every native gentleman in India versant in the respective idioms thus, Murd dokhturi khood-ra deed, perhaps with or without the ra, in Persian مرد دختر خود دید or مرد دختر خود را guage, when a seminary was in 1796 first projected in Calcutta for teaching that dialect and the Persian grammatically, he and Mr. Gladwin were then judiciously selected to superintend those respective departments; and four years afterwards, when Lord Mornington added an English, Latin, and Greek professor, with a provost and deputy provost, and gave it the designation of a college, those two gentlemen still retained the superintendance of the chief oriental departments. I have heard the Hindustani universally spoken in every province immediately dependent on Bengal, in Oude, at Delhi, and Agra, throughout the Marattah States to the west and south; and found individuals who understood it in Assam and Butant to the east, in Orissa, at Madras, at Colombo, in Ceylon, and Achin in the island of Sumatra; at all which places I have had occasions, during my marches, voyages, and travels, to communicate my wants, and always met numbers of respectable natives or travellers that could converse with me in this elegant dialect, comprehending an extent cf country equal to all Europe and containing a larger population! << a man saw his or in English, own daughter," but never according to this theoretic tutor of the Hindustani scholar, Az murd, or bu murd, dokhturi 6 deedu shood. Orthoepy is another branch of learning which Dr. Gilchrist has assiduously cultivated; and he must be cheered and gratified by the concluding paragraph of an article on a proposition for a Universal Alphabet, in the Edinburgh Review just published, which says: "We are ready to acknowledge "the benefits that would result "from the adoption of an univer"sal alphabet in facilitating inter 66 course, promoting civilization, "and diffusing knowledge.... For "the really practical question at "present is, whether elementary "works for the instruction of "students in the oriental lan "guages might not advanta"geously be composed in such a "conventional character? By "substituting this for the va"rious alphabets now used, some "trouble might certainly be saved "to beginners, and much expense "to the East-India Company. The "experience and acknowledged "success of Dr. J. B. Gilchrist, "in teaching Hindustani by an "analogous method, affords some "confirmation to the theory of "M. de Volney."-Yours, GULCHIN. One of Dr. Gilchrist's former English pupils has ventured upon several innovations in constructing a grammar of this dialect: but the chief, and perhaps only one of moment, is that of the nice management of the particle ne, which really required a man, like the Doctor, of innate genius oriental words in Roman letters; and therefore for analysing the elements of language and much practice with the natives of Hindustan, to appre- friendship-Eau. It is observable that our Correspondent, though he coincides with Dr. Gilchrist in the principles of Hindustani Grammar, has adopted his mode of orthography for expressing not his adducing the opinion of a third party, the incidental testimony of a public critic in favour of that mode, is a rare instance of candour, or of consistency, ready almost to sacrifice itself to ACCOUNT OF THE SPASMODIC CHOLERA. FROM HINDOO WRITERS. THIS interesting specimen of medical learning among the Hindoos is part of a letter which appeared in the Madras Courier of 12th Jan. The other part, which related to Vaccination, we have already given in Vol. viii. page 27. The following account of the Spasmodic Cholera, and of the remedies applicable to it, taken from works in general use antong the Hindu medical practitioners, will at least gratify curiosity, and as the formulas of the medicines are given in the original languages, may be productive of utility. The extracts I shall make will, I think, shew that the treatment of this disease, which, although so eminently successful here and elsewhere, must, I believe, in the strictness of regular practice, be pronounced somewhat empirical, if not borrowed from the Hindus, is closely correspondent with that indicated in their medical writings. To say generally that the doctrine taught in these books, which, as will be observed, encourages the free exhibition of mercury and the metallic calxes, displays similar coincidence in many points with the oriental practice of our physicians, would not be a departure from the fact. The native practitioners, though they agree generally in the diagnostics of the disease, differ as to its pathology and systematic classification. Some hold that the Spasmodic Cholera belongs to a class of diseases known by the generic term Sannipúta, which includes every species of paralytic and spasmodic affection, the principal symptom being spasms or convulsions of part or the whole of the body. Of the diseases belonging to this class, thirteen species are enumerated, of which some are accounted curable and some incurable. Others rank this disease in a class called Ajirna Dyspepsia, the principal symptom of which is indigestion; under this four species are reckoned, the third of which, Vidhúma Vishúchi, is identified with the Spasmodic Cholera. It will not be thought strange that this difference of opinion should exist, when it is considered that even those versed in European science have not yet agreed as to the pathology of this epidemic; though the unlearned must think it strange that an inflammatory cause should be assigned to a disease, which, without any appareut previous excitation, prostrates the strength, as it were, at oue blow, and sinks the patient in a few hours from a state of health and vigour to the lowest degree of debility. It would be presump tion in me to venture a decision "when doctors disagree," or even to enter at all into the merits of either controversy; I may be permitted, however, to add, with respect to the Hindu classification of the disease, that they who deny that the Spasmodic Cholera, in the form in which it has spread over India, is properly designated by the terms Sitánga-Sannipáta, admit that the main, if not the only dif ference between it and the Vidhúms Vishuchi, is, that the former is simply spasmodic, aud, though usually, not suddenly, fatal, while the latter is epidemical and most rapid in its progress. The following extracts, taken from medical writings in Sanscrit and Tamil, in which the several species of diseases included in the two classes are noticed, the distinguishing symptoms of those identified with the Spasmodic Cholera detailed, and the remedies prescribed for them stated, seem to suggest, as a necessary corollary, that the disease first described is the same as the latter, when its progress is accele rated, and its virulence increased, by its having become epidemic. These extracts have been translated with reference to the Commentaries, by which all Indiau writings of a similar nature are accompanied. The literary wealth of the Telugu language consists chiefly in the excellent Ticas written in that dialect on Sanscrit works of all descriptions, by one of which the copy of the Chintamani here used is accompanied. All manuscripts on scientific subjects, which have been repeatedly copied by ignoraut scribes, must be subject to multiplied error, and medical writings in Sanscrit and Tamil are proverbially so: I have been obliged, therefore, to restore the scuse, with the assistance of the commentators, in some of the passages cited, by conjectural emendations; these, however, in no instauce affect the general meaning. The thirteen species belonging to the class denominated Sannipátaca (from the root pat full, combined with the collective preposition sam and the intensitive ni) are described in the Sanscrit medical work Chintamani, attributed to Dhan wantari, a mythological personage, who is said to have been produced by the churning of the milky ocean, whence he issued bearing the Amrita Calasa, the vase coutaining the quor of immortality: "he coincides in character with the Esculapius of the Grecks. |