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09-04-495
495
BAGH.
The Bagh
form of the Simla Hill dialects centres round the State of Baghat. It is also
spoken in the Pinjaur and Dharampur Thns
of the State of Patiala, immediate- ly to the south and south-east of Baghat,
in the States of Bija and Kuthar to its east, and in the Bharauli Pargana of
the Simla District to its north. To its east the dialect is the Sirmaur
of the State of Sirmaur, to its north the Ki
hal
of the 
rnagar
Thn
of Patiala, to its west the Ha
r
of Mailog, and to its south the Western Hind
of Ambala.
The number of its speakers is as follows:-
| Baghat... |
7,337
|
| Patiala... |
6,000
|
| Simla (Bharauli)... |
4,000
|
| Kuthr... |
3,789
|
| Bija... |
1,069
|
|
TOTAL.
|
22,195
|
Of the above figures those for Patiala and Simla (Bharauli) are only rough esti- mates, as no separate figures are available for these tracts.
Bagh
is closely allied to Sirmaur.
Its principal point of difference is the univer- sal use of the letter
as the termination of the oblique form of nouns ending in conson- ants, and
the use of d
instead of
d
or d
as the postposition of the ablative. There are many other minor points of difference,
but these are the ones which at once strike the observer.
So far as the writer is at present aware, the only previous account of Bagh
that has been printed is the short, but excellent, sketch of the dialect contained
in the Rev. T. Grahame Bailey's Languages of the Northern Himalayas, published
by the Royal Asiatic Society in 1908.
In writing this account of Bagh, the task has been materially
lightened by the help derived from the grammar of the Rev. T. Grahame Bailey.
The present notes are based on the specimens (a version of the Parable of the
Prodigal Son, and the statement of an accused person in a police court) and
on the list of words printed on pp. 531 ff., with occasional help from Mr. Bailey's
work. It will be seen that the language is practically identical with that described
by Mr. Bailey, and that most of the additional forms are little more than variations
of spelling.
Pronunciation.-The pronunciation of Bagh
does not differ from that of Sir- maur
and other cognate languages. There is the same confusion between a and 
,
I and 
,
and , and
(or u) and .
There is the same tendency to drop h as in b
for bh, also;
d for dh,
a daughter; and in some cases it is even transferred as in mhr
for mhr,
our; gh
for gh,
a horse. The word ghar, a house, is pronounced gaur. There is also the same
tendency to pronounce 
,
where Hind
has s, as in da,
ten. The letter t (representing an original tr) becomes ch as in khch
(Hind kht,
Sanskrit kshtra),
a field. As a special point, not hitherto noted, we may draw attention to the
occasional pronunciation of ch as ts and of j as z as in 
r,
to graze (cattle); z-r,
good, beautiful. This, as will be seen elsewhere, is a common incident in the
pronunciation of the Picha
languages of the North-West Frontier, including Ksh-