Page:The history of the Bengali language (1920).pdf/39

Rh cannot necessarily postulate a unity or homogeneity of race. We cannot necessarily formulate the theory that either there has been a thorough-going miscegenation of blood among all the sections, or that these sections do not represent different races of bygone days. I purposely strike this note of caution, though I am perfectly aware that there has been considerable miscegenation of blood among many races of India, for I consider it unsafe to draw any conclusion from facts furnished by linguistic investigation alone.

We are not much concerned in this inquiry with those linguistic phenomena which fall legitimately within the province of the physiologists, though it is pretty certain that the time is not distant when to explain even the ordinary phonetic changes in a speech, the help of the physiologists will be requisitioned in preference to that of the linguists as philologists. We shall have to study carefully the settled and abiding peculiarities of some races of men in the matter of their accent systems and syntactical forms to measure the influence of those races in the upbuilding of our language, but as to how a particular race became settled in its habits to a particular mode of thinking or in a particular way of intonating certain sounds, will not concern us in pushing on our research. Practically speaking, accent being a thing of very hard growth, it survives through many changes; as such a comparative study of the accent system of different races may help us in determining the origin of many peculiarities disclosed by the people of different provinces of Bengal.

Rh