146 Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. [July, 



have an adequate notion of the basis upon which it is to be built. 

 It has always occurred to me, that a new terminology cannot be 

 introduced into a nation, without a strict adherence to what I should 

 say on organic as contradistinguished from a mechanical law : that 

 is to say not by a law of superposition, but by a law of incorporation. 

 And the great test by which we are to detect whether such a law has 

 been observed or not in any particular case, is by an appeal to the 

 consensus of the nation, or in other words, to its invisible consent. 

 "To explain myself : — 



" A living language, as a great writer has said, is one in which a 

 vital formative energy is at work ; and in the course of its evolution, 

 it appropriates and incorporates to itself what it anywhere finds 

 congenial to its own life, multiplying its wealth and increasing its 

 resources, not by an evanescent and sporadic process, but by a fixed 

 and an organic law, casting off from its vocabulary cumbrous forms 

 and useless and uncongenial words, and by a reactive energy reject- 

 ing from the body of the language the foreign and the heterogeneous, 

 which through conquest or other intercourse may have been forced 

 upon it. Many foreign words have been introduced into our language 

 under the above process, and many also rejected. For example 

 the word jahaz (which is a foreign word) is used in preference to 

 nauka for a ship. The word nauka in common parlance means 

 boat. I cannot do better than quote the striking observation made 

 by the Rev. K. M. Banerjea in his Encyclopaedia Benyalensis. 



a ' Where words are required that are not in common use, I draw 

 from the Sanscrit, if that can be readily done without having recourse . 

 to far-fetched inventions. Where an idea can be easily expressed by 

 a Persian or Hindustani word already current, I make no scruple to 

 adopt it, in case no Sanscrit or Bengali word can be found equally 

 apt for the purpose. Where Persian or Hindustani words have been 

 almost naturalised in Bengali, I do not fastidiously reject them, even 

 though there may be corresponding Bengali words with the same 

 meaning. In such cases I use the Bengali and the Hindustani, 

 indifferently, only taking care not to shock my readers by disregarding 

 their taste in this respect. The word thousand, for instance, I have 

 sometimes translated by hdzar, sometimes by sahasra. It is, I think, 

 an advantage where foreign words may be introduced into a language 



