Page:The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language (Volume 1).pdf/13

Rh and it is here presented as an Essay towards an Historical and Comparative Grammar of Bengali, and as a contribution towards the scientific study of the Modern Aryan languages of India.

Linguistics as a modern science is still in its infancy in India, and the meagre dose of ‘Comparative Philology’ or ‘Historical Grammar’ which our college students reading advanced courses in Sanskrit or English, not supplementing it by any acquaintance with another cognate language of equal importance, most unwillingly gulp down, is hopelessly inadequate to create an intelligent interest in the subject. Added to this initial difficulty, Indo-Aryan linguistics both of the classical and modern periods has formed the favourite haunt of mere amateurs who seek to compensate for their want of knowledge of the principles of historical grammar and of the modern science of language by professing utter contempt of it; and the professed student of literature who knows the language but not its history shares in this contempt. To make confusion worse confounded, the spirit of scholasticism is not yet dead; we have elaborate grammars of Sanskrit masquerading as Bengali grammar, in which the genuine Bengali forms have been branded as valear (asādhu) beside the so-called ‘polite’ (sādhu) forms borrowed from Sanskrit. The first professedly historical grammar and etymological dictionary of Bengali (by that erudite and versatile scholar Rāi Bahādur Yogesh Chandra Rāy Vidyānidhi, published by the Vangīya Sāhitya Pariṣad, Bengali year 1319-1322), for instance, has not been able to shake off the Sanskrit idea by appreciating the true line of linguistic development. A historical grammar of Bengali in the true sense of the term there has never been in Bengali; and there has not been a work exclusively on Bengali by any European scholar, on the lines of Trumpp’s Sindhī Grammar, or Kellogg’s Hindī Grammar, or C. J. Lyall’s Sketch of Hindustani, to guide the Bengali scholar in acquiring a true perspective which the too hear presence of Sanskrit and the fact of the language being his mother- tongue generally blur for him. But there have at times been refreshing manifestations of common sense in writing grammars of Bengali. The first Bengali to write a grammar of his mother-tongue was the Father