1870.] Contributions towards Vernacular Lexicography. 133 



man for conveying his ideas to his fellows. Ocular evidence is 

 more easily comprehended, and is less liable to he misundersto od 

 than auricular ones. Permanent marks or an enduring collection 

 of signs conveying ideas are more advantageous and useful than 

 temporary and evanescent figures by a move of the hand or 

 a nod or a wink. Words are permanently fixed by writing, 

 and then they are susceptible of such changes only as the forms 

 of the characters admit of. Roughly speaking, however, the 

 Bengali language and the Bengali characters are contemporane- 

 ous, they are derivations of the Sanscrit and Nagari respectively, 

 and the difference between the derivative and the original languages 

 is so well proportionate to that between the original and the deriva- 

 tive characters, that excepting a few exotics and lately introduced 

 foreigners, the progress of the language may be said to be always 

 cotemporary with that of the characters. 



The characters, as they are now, are more true to the original 

 stock, the Nagari of the Gupta type, from which they have been 

 derived, than the language ; and the reason for this difference is 

 obvious. The Bengali recension of the Nagari characters is of later 

 date than the Bengali recension of the Sanscrit language. Both, 

 however, have gradually receded from the original stock, and this 

 difference in the degree of divergence in the two, the language and 

 the characters, can only be explained by supposing that the charac- 

 ters were later adopted than the language. The characters again 

 were less frequently used, and this, though true of all the languages 

 of the world, speaks of a low state of civilization in the earlier history 

 of Bengal. Since the breaking up of the petty Hindu dynasties that 

 ruled in Bengal, and the arrival of the Muhammadans in this country, 

 it sank into the position of a third class subordinate province. 

 Excluded from the sunshine of the Emperors of Delhi and governed 

 by everchanging Subahdars and Nawabs, Bengal occupied an 

 obscure corner in the empire of Hindustan, and would have dwindled 

 into a jungly forest, had not fate brought the Briton to its shores. 

 Energy had failed the Bengalis for some centuries, and literature 

 was a mere name. 



The signs are about eighty in number, and are therefore quite 

 sufficient to represent all the sounds which had to be represented. 



