VII] L4NG UA GES 3 73
far as the modern Marathi extends. In the Bombay Presidency
MarathI covers the north of the Deccan plateau and the strip of
country between the Gh1ts and the Arabian Sea. It is also the
language of Berar and of a good portion of the north-west of
the Nizam's Dominions. It stretches across the south of the
Central Provinces (except a small portion of the extreme south,
in which Telugu is the language, and, in a very corrupt form,
occupies most of the State of Bastar. Here it merges into
Oriy! through the Bhatri dialect of that language. It has to its
north, in order from west to east, Gujarati, Rajasthani, Western
Hindi, and Eastern Hindi. The first three are connected
with the Midland, and Marathi does not merge into them.
On the contrary, there is a sharp border-line between the two
forms of speech. In the east it shows several points of agree-
ment with the neighbouring Chhattisgarhi dialect of Eastern
Hindi, and it shades off gradually into Oriyg, both these
languages being based on Prakrits of the Outer Band. Oriya.
is its near neighbour to the east. On the south lie Dravidian
languages, and it is bounded on the west by the Arabian Sea.
In Marathi we first meet in general use a past participle, and its
resulting past tense, of which the characteristic is the letter 1.
This extends through all the remaining languages of the Outer
Band-Oriya, Bengali, Bihari, and Assamese. It is also found,
in restricted use, in Gujarati, alongside of the Midland form
without the 4, and is there one of the relics of the old Saurashi-
tri Prakrit. This i-participle, therefore, not only covers the
whole of Aryan East India, but reaches, through an almost
unbroken chain of dialects all imperceptibly shading off into
each other, to the Arabian Sea. This illustrates the intimate
relationship which exists among all these forms of speech; and
although Assamese is widely different from Marathi, and
although a speaker of the one would be entirely unintelligible to
a speaker of the other, a man could almost walk for 1,500 miles,
from Dibrugarh to Goa, without being able to point (except,
perhaps, in Bastar) to a single stage where he had passed from
one language to another.
Marathi has a copious literature of great popularity. The
poets wrote in the true vernacular of the country, and employed
a vocabulary mostly composed of honest tadbhavas. The
result is that the language at the present day is rich in them;
and though the scholars for whom the MarathA country is
famous have in later times striven with some success to
heighten the style of the language by the use of tatsanmas, these
parasites have not obtained the complete mastery over the
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