On the non-Aryan languages of India

ON THE
^^ON-A^RYAISr LANGUAGES OF INDIA.
BY
E. L. BRAiN'DRETH, Esq.
Ix the Address delivered by him at the Second International
Congress of Orientalists, in 1874, Prof. Max Miiller re-
marks, " No real advance has been made in the classification
of the Non- Aryan Indian dialects since the time when I
endeavoured, some twenty years ago, to sum up what was
then known on that subject in my letter to Bunsen, *0n the
Turanian Languages.' " A table of the Indian languages is
given by Max Miiller in that most popular work of his, eight
editions of which have already been published, the Lectures
on the Science of Language. A very few lines are devoted
to these languages in the Lectures : for further particulars
we are referred to the above-mentioned letter on the
Turanian languages. Some important materials, however,
for the stud}?- of the Indian languages, have been collected
since that letter was published; and it is evident that, if Max
Miiller had had those materials before him, he would have
written about the languages of India in some respects very
dilFerentl3\ He would not, for instance, have remarked, re-
garding that enormous number of languages on our northern
and eastern frontiers which he calls Sub-Himalayan and
Lohitic, that, "with the exception of the Naga dialects,
none distinguishes the persons of the verb by either affixes
or prefixes ;
" because many other languages besides the
Naga do thus distinguish the persons of the verb, and in
some of them the structure of the verb is of the most com-