Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/75

Rh seem the completer and finer language. The pronoun is very little removed from pure Prakrit, combining inflectional peculiarities of a distinctly Prakrit nature with the postpositions which it possesses in common with its cognate languages. The verb is to a certain extent participial in its formation, but retains the indefinite present, though in modern usage in a preterite sense, and an inflectional future. It has also a partially inflectional subjunctive. Its combinations are fewer and simpler than those of the Gujarati; and in all its tenses the auxiliary verb, especially in the second person singular and third person plural, is so intimately bound up with the participle as to exhibit a pseudo-inflectional appearance. Though suṭatos, "thou dost get loose," and suṭatât, "they get loose," look like inflections, they are really combinations of suṭato asi and suṭatâ santi respectively.

In the Bengali noun we have a purely inflectional genitive, the legitimate descendant of the Sanskrit termination -asya. Bengali and Oṛiya are like overgrown children, always returning to suck the mother’s breast, when they ought to be supporting themselves on other food. Consequently the written Bengali, afraid to enter boldly on the path of development, hugs the ancient Sanskrit forms as closely as it can, and misleads the reader by exhibiting as genuine Bengali what is merely a resuscitation of classical Sanskrit. In the peasant-speech, however, which is the true Bengali, and for which the philologist must always search, putting aside the unreal formations which Pandits would offer him, there is much that is analytical, though in the noun the genitive, dative, locative, ablative, and instrumental are synthetical, as is also the nominative plural. The rest of the plural, and sometimes the nominative also, is formed by the addition of particles expressive of number, as gaṇ, dig, and others, to which the signs of case are appended. There is no preparation of the base in Bengali, or very little. Gender is practically neglected.