Page:The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language (Volume 1).pdf/3



It gives me great pleasure to have this opportunity of publicly wishing God-speed to Professor Chatterji’s admirable work and of recommending it to all students of the modern languages of India.

There are two possible lines of investigation of this subject. In one, we can follow the example of Beames and view all the forms of speech as a whole, comparing them with each other, and thence deducing general rules. The other is to follow Trumpp, Hoernle, and Bloch, in taking one particular language as our text, examining it exhaustively, and comparing it with what is known of the others. Professor Chatterji, in taking Bengali as the basis of his work, has adopted the latter procedure and, if I may express my own opinion, the more profitable one. The ultimate object of all students must, of course, be to follow the lines so excellently laid down by Beames, and to give a general comparative grammar of the Indo-Aryan languages; but such an attempt;—admirable though Beames’s work was,—cannot be really successful till each of the different languages has been separately aud minutely dissected under the strictest scientific rules. The palace of comparative grammar cannot be built without bricks, and the bricks are made up of the facts of each particular language.

For many reasons, Bengali, in itself, is specially deserving of careful study. With a literature going back for several centuries, and preserved