Excerpt from The Student's Marathi Grammar This is a new and enlarged edition of the "Student's Manual of Marathi Grammar," designed equally for beginners and advanced students. The former are advised to pass over the Notes, printed in small type, as well as the portions in the text which are specified as useful at an advanced stage of study. I have given copious explanations, not seldom venturing to offer a rationale of the facts or forms discussed, as intelligent students, in these days, are expected to know more than what is merely elementary and practical. I have also endeavoured to determine the exact form and sense of every grammatical word and inflection; and the value of definite opinions on these points can be truly estimated only by those who are acquainted with the present painful state of uncertainty and doubt that generally prevails. I have, moreover, attempted to simplify and systematise several difficult departments of Marathi grammar. I would specially cite, by way of example, the Declension of Nouns. The number of the Declensions has been reduced from six or seven to three, if not absolutely to one, while a most simple method of deriving the crude-form has been suggested. By the aid of two pronominal letters any Marathi noun could be declined with absolute certainty. For this and other important changes in my book, I am indebted chiefly to the Comparative Grammar of Bopp, a work which is not more valuable for what it explicitly teaches than for what it obscurely suggests. It is by a study of this wonderful work that I have been led to look for something deeper, truer, and more spiritual in words than what their external form reveals, and it is under its guidance that, I believe, I have attained, though but imperfectly, to the hidden life of some of the Marathi words and inflections. Indeed, there is nothing arbitrary and conventional in language: every form of it is instinct with life and reason. 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."
