134 Contributions towards Vernacular Lexicography. [No. 2, 



When the people came in contact with the Muhammad ans who 

 were then the rulers of the land, sounds like <3, '?, j puzzled the 

 people, and they would have been obliged to invent if not now 

 letters, at least such modifying signs as to indicate the peculiar 

 sounds, had the real pronunciation of the same been preserved. The 

 Urdu had occasion to represent the Hindi sound 1* and it soon 

 adapted itself. The enervating influence of the climate, however, 

 so far affected the Hindus, that soon after the period of the 

 Vedas, the big 3R" that guttural sound so much resembling the Ara- 

 bic <3 was lost, and not even a trace of its existence could now 

 be found except in the very oldest works of Nirukta. It is not 

 for me to trace the several shades of change through which the Na- 

 gari has passed before it assumed the Bengali form. Suffice it to 

 say that the connecting link is the character known as Gaudhja 

 found in some inscriptions. 



The language, however, has undergone serious changes, and in 

 its way has adopted so many foreign elements, that to eliminate 

 them now is more than impossible. As the adoption of foreign 

 words to represent new and foreign ideas rests with the common 

 people, they are faster adopted and modified in sound than the 

 adoption of foreign characters. All new words of a scientific or 

 philosophical nature are formed in the laboratories of the learned, 

 and the Sanscrit roots are the elements of which they are com- 

 pounds. Every nation with which the Bengalis came in contact 

 contributed more or less according to the duration of contact, to the 

 enrichment of the language. 



The great bulk of the words of the language is Sanscrit, so 

 slightly modified that the original Sanscrit words are in many in- 

 stances identical with them, and in some may be easily detected, 

 there being only three cases in the Bengali and scarcely any varia- 

 tion in the terminal modifications of tenses or persons of verbs. 



It is not very far from the truth to say that the Bengali language 

 originated in the hearth with the illiterate women of the country, 

 whose shortness of breath and ignorance of the laws of grammar 

 and untrained tongue and hasty utterance soon modified the original 

 Sanscrit into a distinct, coarse and feminine dialect. The Pali and 

 the Prakrit are the immediate degenerated descendants of tho 



