| abstract
| - The structural peculiarities of a language cannot be surveyed in a short note. Comparative philology is a science almost as exact as mathematics and its laws are very similar to those of statistics. In the limited space available to us, we can only touch the outer-most fringes of this vast subject, so as to arouse popular interest in it. There has been a good deal of discussion, of late, whether Punjabi is a full-fledged language or a mere dialect. The question has been discussed more often by political propagandists than by scholars and the objectivity of the problem has been completely masked by the heaps of vile propaganda, indulged in by the supporters as well as opponents of Punjabi. Punjabi is a language and not a dialect of any other language. It leads an independent life, like other well-known languages - Hindi, Bengali, English or German. The study of this language is important, not only because it is one of the most widely spoken languages of India, but also because Punjabi has preserved some of the rarest phonological and structural peculiarities of the ancient Aryan speech, from which have sprung up the majority of Indian and European languages of today. No student of Aryan philology can, therefore, afford to ignore Punjabi. The evolution of Punjabi from the original Aryan speech, of which Sanskrit is the best representative extant, has followed exactly the same rules of transformation, as governed the evolution of modern Teutonic and Roman languages from the parent speech. The main Teutonic languages are German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and English and owe their birth to a common source. The family of Romance languages includes French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian. They are more or less direct descendants of Latin. Both old Teutonic and Latin, along with Slavonic, Armenian and Sanskrit, are believed to have originated from a common parent speech, called by German scholars, the Ursprache. The transformation of the parent language into its derivatives follows certain general physical trends, or speech habits, of the speakers, and as a rule, similar geographical or ethnological factors produce similar changes in the language. Our business today is to show that transformation of Sanskrit into Punjabi has followed the same lines, more or less, as the transformation of Latin into its modern off-shoots, principally Italian. The change from the classical to the modern language has taken place in accordance with certain rules, which have, of course, a number of exceptions. Let us now examine some of these rules.#
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