Page:The history of the Bengali language (1920).pdf/99

Rh saṁvṛta sound has come down to us through Pāli and other later Māgadhi Prākṛtas, for we have no Prākṛta Prātiśākhyas to bear evidence to such a transmission. No doubt in Pāli, i.e., in the old Māgadhi Prākṛta, all nouns ending with the vowel sound of অ are found in the form নরো, ধম্মো, etc., in nominative singular, but this cannot perhaps be said to have been due to the peculiarity of the pronunciation of অ at the end of a word, for though there was no visarjania in use in Pāli, it may be said that, in its origin the sound came out of an elision of visarjania. It is, however, worth noting, that besides a general saṁvṛta sound for অ, we can detect in the Vedic itself a tendency of অ (as final) to be reduced to the sound of ও when joined to the visarjaniya: we first notice it very unmistakably in several euphonic combinations, where the final অ sound with the conjoined visarjaniya is reduced to ও; we again may notice that the dual form of দেবঃ, for example, is দেবৌ; the word দেবঃ must have been pronounced as দেবো (as in Pāli) for, to create a dual form by the lengthening of the final sound, the long sound of ও (which is ঔ) was reached, and this became the dual denoting suffix. It should be mentioned here, that the dual with ঔ is later in date in the Vedic language, and that the earlier বিভক্তি is noticed as আ in Chāndasa.

In consequence of their settled habit of pronouncing অ with its long and open sound, the people of Upper India, when pronouncing such words as 'long,' 'follow,' etc., by half adopting them in Hindi, utter those words as লাঙ্গ, ফালো, etc. The Bengali boys on the other hand, not being accustomed to emit the sound of 'i' and 'u' as in 'bird' and 'cut,' pronounce them as বা-র্ড (bard) and কা-ট, etc.

We gather from the works on Vedic phonology, that both অ and আ carried in their full-bodied open utterance, a half-distinct nasal sound. We can detect that the