Page:The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language (Volume 1).pdf/4

vi with some care, it gives opportunities for the study of its history that are wanting in some other forms of Indian speech. It ts a typical descendant of the great language that, under the name of Māgadhī Prakrit, was the vernacular of eastern North India for many centuries. This was the official language of the great Emperor Aśōka, and an allied dialect was used by the Buddha and by Mahāvīra, the apostle of Jainism, in their early preaching. With the shifting of political gravity at a later epoch, it became superseded as a literary form of speech by dialects current farther to the West, but as a spoken language it has developed into the modern Bengali, Oṛiyā, Bihārī, and Assamese.

itherto the ordinary Bengali grammars have been silent about the history of the language and the origin of its forms, and in popular books published in India, the wildest theories about these have occasionally been put forth without a shadow of justification. On the other hand, Beames, Hoernle, and Bhandarkar have written much that is illuminating in regard to if, but sufficient materials were not available to any of them for dealing with the many points of phonetics, accidence, and vocabulary that present themselves on closer examination. For this reason we can heartily welcome the ripe fruits of Professor Chatterji’s labours that are to be gathered from the following pages. Endowed with a thorough familiarity with Bengali,—his native tongue,—he has been able to bring together an amount of material which no European could ever have hoped to collect; and he has had the further advantage of pursuing his theoretical studies under the guidance of some of the greatest European authorities on Indian philology. This work is accordingly the result of a happy combination of proficiency in facts and of familiarity with theory