Excerpt from A History of Hindi Literature In the last stage of the Prakrits, before the modern Indo-Aryan languages developed from them, they are known as Apabhramaas, These are the direct parents of the modern vernaculars of North India, namely, Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, etc., which came into existence somewhere about 1000 a.d., though the date differs considerably in the case of different languages. These modern languages are no longer synthetic but analytic. Hindi. - It is most important to understand clearly what we mean by Hindi, as the word is often used ambiguously. It is often, for instance, applied in a loose sense to the vernacular speech of the whole of North India between the Punjab and Sindh on the West, and Bengal on the East. But the philological researches of scholars, such as Sir George Grierson, have shown that there are really four chief languages in this area, namely, Rajasthani, Western Hindi, Eastern Hindi, and Bihari, each having a different parentage. Bihari really belongs to a group of languages of which Bengali is another member. Western Hindi is closely connected in origin with Panjabi. The word Hindi is also often used to denote modern literary High Hindi in contradistinction to Urdu; but both High Hindi and Urdu were, as will be shown below, developed from a dialect of Western Hindi. Hindustani (or Hindostan!) is also a name used sometimes to denote the vernaculars of all Hindustan, that is the country between the Punjab and Sindh and Bengal, but is also sometimes used to mean the simpler speech which is the lingua franca of modern India, and of which both Urdu and High Hindi are literary developments. Scope of this Book. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."