ABSTRACT
The Chentsu tribe, whose language, as here exhibited, is almost entirely corrupt Hindi and U'rdu, with a few additions from Bengali, affords one more example to the many forthcoming of an uncultivated aboriginal race having abandoned their own tongue. Such relinquishment of the mother-tongue has been so general that throughout Hindustan Proper and the vVestern Himalaya, as well as throughout the whole of the vast Sub-Himalayan tract denominated the Tarai, not excluding the contiguous valley of Assam, there are but a few exceptions to this the general state of the case; whilst in the Central Himalaya the aboriginal tongues are daily giving way before the Khas language, which, though originally and still traceably Tartaric, has been yet more altered by Arian influences than even the cultivated Dravirian tongues. The very significant cause of this phenomenon it will be our business to explain by and by. In the meanwhile the fact is well deserving of
this passing notice, with reference to the erroneous impression abroad as to the relative amounts of Arian and non-Arian elements in the population of India-an impression deepened and propagated by the further fact, still demonstrable among many of these altered aborigines, of the abandonment of their creed and customs, as well as tongue, for those of the Arians. We thence learn the value, in all ethnological researches, of physiological evidence, which, in regard to all these altered tribes, is sufficient to decide their non-Arian lineage, and to link them, past doubt, with the HiMtlayan and Indo-Chinese conterminous tribes on the east and north. It should be added, however, that, in a sheerly philological point of view, it becomes much more difficult to determine who are the borrowers and who the borrowed from, wh~n both are non-Arians, than when one is Arian and the other non-Arian; and that, for instance, and in reference to the present vocabularies, we can decide at once that the Kondh numerals (save the two first) are borrowed from the Arian vernaculars, whereas it is by no means so certain that the Gadada and Yerukala numerals are borrowed from the Telugu and Karnata respectively, merely because they coincide; and so also of the pronouns where the same coincidence recurs. All such questions, hovvever, are subordinate and secondary; and if we succeed in determining with precision-by physiological, lingual, and other helps-the entire Tllranian element of our population, we shall then be able to advance another step and show the respective special affinities of the several cultivated and uncultivated Turanian tribes of India to each other and to certain of the tribes lying beyond India towards Burmah and Tibet, with at least an approximation to the relative antiquity of the successive immigrations into India.
