Page:The history of the Bengali language (1920).pdf/139



We should do well to proceed now to ascertain the character of the Bengali accent of olden days, by examining the metrical system, preserved in the poetical works of old Bengal. Adverting to the fact, that the early Vaiṣṇava poets of Bengal treated each and every letter as a syllable, and made the final consonantal sounds non-hasanta, by imitating the old fashionable poet Vidyāpati of Mithilā, many people have formed two wrong notions; one is that Bengali was derived from Maithili, and the other is that our mode of pronunciation and of counting syllables, was of the type presented by those poets. Mithilā became no doubt, at one time, a portion of old Gauḍ which extended to the foot of Nepal if not into Nepal itself, but the Maithili speech of the days of the Vaiṣṇava poets, had nothing to do with our Bengali language. As to elements, common to Bengali and Maithili, we have to look to the older Māgadhi speech of which, notice will be taken later on. From the earliest known time, our Bengali poets (excepting those who followed the Maithili fashion) have uniformly composed their poems, not by counting letters but by counting syllables. Looking to the fact, that the fourteen letters of the পয়ার verse for example, are the same as fourteen mātrās of fourteen syllables, the পয়ার may be seemingly regarded as composed of fourteen letters; but that it is a syllable (which may consist of more than