Page:The history of the Bengali language (1920).pdf/9



The following lectures on the History of the Bengali Language are intended to give a sketch, in broad outline, of the origins of that language and the various influences, linguistic, ethnic, social, that shaped and moulded its earlier history. One essential requirement of a scientific procedure in an investigation of this sort, I have steadily kept in view. The ethnic as well as the social history of a people or group of peoples must corroborate and light up the linguistic history, if the latter is to be rescued from the realm of prehistoric romance to which the story of philological origins, as so often told, must be however reluctantly assigned by the critical or scientific historian of to-day. One or two incidental results of my application of this anthropological test may be here mentioned. I have had no occasion to invent different Aryan belts for the imaginary migratory movements of some unknowable patois-speaking hordes, to account for the distinctive and peculiar phenomena of the provincial languages or dialects, e.g., those of Bengal: they are fitly explained by the successive ethnic contacts and mixtures with neighbouring or surrounding indigenous peoples. Similarly I have had no hesitation in recognizing within proper limits, the principle of miscegenation in the growth of language, as of race, provided that the organic accretions from outside grow to the living radicle or nucleus which persists as an independent or individual entity. In this way I have sought to explain many of the phenomena, regarding the grafting of Dravidian structural and syntactical elements, on some languages or dialects of so-called Aryan stock (including those of Bengal). One interesting example of this is to be seen in