1885.] F. E. Pargiter — Notes on the Ghittacjong Dialect. 157 



were unnoticed and liow miicli remains to be filled in to render his 

 stetcli thoroughly serviceable. These notes were collected some years ago 

 when he was residing in Chittagong. Several of the peculiarities noticed 

 are not confined to Chittagong, but prevail genei-ally throughout Eastern 

 Bengal, though not in so marked a degree. He hoped, however, that these 

 notes, incomplete though they are, might be of use to others, whether as 

 an aid in learning the vernacular, or as an inducement to supply what 

 was wanting. 



The language spoken in Chittagong is a dialect of Bengali, but great- 

 ly corrupted owing to the remote position of the district, the strong 

 Muhammadan element in the population, and the tendency in East 

 Bengal to speak quickly and clip the words. 



These causes have been at work in Bakarganj and the country 

 east of the Meghna, and the language spoken there differs from ordinary 

 good Bengali, the difference increasing with the distance south-eastward. 

 The extreme is reached in Chittagong where the difference is so marked 

 that a native from other parts of Bengal does not readily understand 

 the language. 



The paper will be published in full in the Journal, Part I. 



De. Hoeenle remarked that he had listened with very great interest 

 to the paper which had just been read. Any contributions to our 

 knowledge of the dialects of the North Indian languages were specially 

 welcome in the present day when so much attention was beginning to be 

 bestowed on the comparative study of them. There were only two of 

 those languages which had hitherto received any closer examination 

 with respect to their dialects. These were the Hindi and the Bihari 

 languages. It was well-known that the other Gaudian languages, and 

 especially the Bangali possessed equally distinct and instructive dialects ; 

 but, hitherto, but very little had been made known about them beyond the 

 fact of their existence. It was, therefore, of peculiar interest to receive 

 some information on the Chittagong dialect, one of the most curious, in 

 many ways, of the Bangali language. Listening to the paper as it was 

 he had marked down a few points which had specially struck him. The 

 process of phonetic detrition in some respects was carried a step beyond 

 the stage in which it was usually found in the Gaudians. The dissimilar 

 Sanskrit conjunct lish was assimilated in Prakrit to hlcTi, and in Gaudian 

 simplified to kh or reduced to h^ but in the Chittagong dialect it was found 

 altogether dropped, as in de'ite ' to see ' for the ordinary Bangali dehhite. 

 This change was said to be " almost invariable, if the second vowel be 

 i or 1" But that it occurred also under other conditions was shown by the 

 instance of hwnnd (w^j) for suhVnd (^[^»rT) . The change of an initial 

 sibilant or of a clih to h was almost invariable in the Chittagong dialect, 



