Page:A grammar of the Teloogoo language.djvu/30

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xviii
INTRODUCTION.

added అన్యదేశ్యము foreign words or those from other lands.

As this arrangement is essential to a proper illustration of the structure of the Teloogoo language, it will be adhered to in the following work. Of the different classes of words specified above, the tree first only are mentioned in the Telinga Grammar by Dr. Carey; the first is there stated to comprize “words current in the country of which the derivaton is uncertain,” a “large proportion” of which are allowed to be included in the language; the second is stated to contain “pure Sungskrita words;” and the third “words derived from the Sungskrita, but written and pronounced differently.”

The words included in the first class, which I have denominated the language of the land, are not only a “large proportion” of words, but the most numerous in the language, and the model by which those included in the other classes are modified and altered, from the diffrent languages to which they originally belong. Why the origin of this class of terms is supposed to be unascertained has not been stated; nor can I conceive how so erroneous a conclusion could have been adopted; for the name given to them by all Sanscrit Grammarians, by the whole body of the people, and by Dr. Carey himself, at once points out their derivation. This name is దేశ్యము, a noun used either as a substantive or an adjective, in the former sense denoting a country or land, in the latter, in which it is here used, implying that which belongs to the country or land; it marks the words in question, not as merely “current in the country,” but as the growth and produce of the land; it would be difficult to define more precisely the origin of any words, and to this class must we look for the pure Teloogoo—for the true language of the land.

The second class of words I have termed Sanscrit derivatives, and I prefer this denomination to that; of “pure Sungskrita words” given to it by Dr. Carey; for although the words included in it contain the crude forms of pure Sanscrit words, they cannot appear in Teloogoo in their