2. The Udiya, of Cuttack and Orissa, with a per-centage of Sanskrit greater than that of the Marathi, but less than that of—
3. The Bengali. Here it is at its maximum, and amounts to nine-tenths.
4. The Hindú, of Oude, and the parts between Bengal and the Punjâb, falling into the subordinate dialects of the Rajpút country.
5. The Gujerathi of Gujerat.
6. The Scindian of Scinde.
7. The Multani of Múltan; probably a dialect of either the Gujerathi or[153]—
8. The Punjabi of the Punjâb.
By going into minor differences this list might be enlarged.
None of the previous languages were mentioned in the last chapter; in fact, they were those different Hindú tongues which were contrasted with the Tamulian, and which, in the northern part of the Peninsula had effected those displacements which separated, or were supposed to separate, the Rajmahali, Kól, and Khond dialects from each other. They formed the sea of speech, in which those tongues were islands.
Now what is the inference from these per-centages? from such a one as the Bengali, of ninety out of one hundred? What do they prove as to the character of the language in which they occur? Do they make the Sanskrit the basis of the tongue, just as the Anglo-Saxon is of the English, or do they merely show it as a superadded foreign element, like the Norman—like that in kind, but far greater in degree? The answer to this will give us the philological position of the North-Indian tongues. It will make the Bengali either Tamul, with an unprecedented amount of foreign vocables, or Sanskrit, with a few words of the older native tongue retained.