The Indo-Aryan language family is a branch of the Indo-European phylum, and includes Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Kashmiri and Gujarati. First published in 1875, this three-volume comparative grammar of the family was written by the British civil servant John Beames (1837-1902). From 1866 he spent twelve years in India, during which he gathered data for what he intended to be the first comprehensive and accurate Indo-Aryan grammar. Volume 2 focuses on nouns and pronouns. It begins by looking at the stems and suffixes that form Indo-Aryan nouns, and compares their systems of inflection for gender, number, possession and case. It moves on to explore their pronoun systems, showing how they operate in terms of interrogatives, reciprocals, indefinites and demonstratives, and how person is expressed. Beames' findings remain central to the work of general linguists, grammarians and language typologists.
