189 
1877.] G. A. Grierson — Notes on the Rangpur Dialect. 
them which might please even a fastidious taste, and one already mention¬ 
ed deserves special notice. It is of considerable length, about seven hun¬ 
dred and fifty verses, and has been handed down by word of mouth for 
generations in a family of Yogins , who make their living by singing it 
and other songs. It is a kind of epic, and describes the life of two ancient 
kings of Rangpur, who lived in the Satya Yuga , named Manik Chandra 
and Gopi Chandra. I have been fortunate enough to obtain a copy, 
taken down from the Yogins as they recite it ; and I hope at some future 
date to be able to give a full account of it. Amidst much that is puerile 
and exaggerated, it contains many true touches of poetry, and gives some 
valuable information as to the customs of the country in bygone days. It 
has of course undergone many changes in its passages from mouth to 
mouth, but from internal evidence, as I have already said, I believe it to 
have been originally composed before the Musalman invasion. 
This and other northern country songs, it should be noted, are remark¬ 
able for their hatred of the dakshina desa , from which the evil-mind Van- 
gala comes. 
The songs of the south are, on the contrary, either short erotic lyrics, 
of which the less said the better, or hymns sung in honour of Nudum Deo 
or at the Kartrika puja, which surpass even them in obscenity. Destitute 
alike of wit and of poetical feeling, they can do nothing but disgust the 
most unimpassioned and impartial investigator. 
I propose now to give a short sketch of the grammar of the very pecu¬ 
liar dialect spoken in Rangpur, with a few specimens of the songs which 
are best adapted to illustrate my remarks thereon. 
The Alphadet. 
The Alphabet of course is nominally the same as that of Bengali, but 
it contains sounds which are, I believe, unknown to that language. 
For instance there is a liquid, generally a substitute for a regular 
ril ( e . g. fhfTJT for irf^rTR), which is much more nearly the 
Tamil lingual l than any other sound with which I am acquainted. It is 
sometimes heard at home in the London streets, when in the morning the 
milkmen cry “ millc 
With regard to the pronunciation of ordinary letters it must be re¬ 
marked that— 
(1.) An initial \ r is almost always elided, and generally a following 
^ a vriddhied into a. Thus randhite “ to cook ” and ^?r rava 
“ voice ” are always pronounced andhite , und a-o respectively. 
Sometimes a reverse process takes place and a T r is supplied where not re¬ 
quired. A good example is revenue agent , which is pro¬ 
nounced iviniu rejent. 
