66 BENGALI LITERATURE that this unintelligible jargon is not Bengali at all : and | Wilkins himself confesses in the pre- ৭ face to that work that he had been as unable to obtain a Bengali rendering (which language he thought to be all but extinct !) but that he had written a Malay version in the so-called Bengali character. Grierson also mentions! that in the Orcentalisch-und-oceidentalischer Sprachmeister compiled by Johann Friedrich Fritz (Leipzig, 1748); the Bengali alphabet given asa specimen is said to have been taken from the durenck Szeb. apparently a life of Ae a Aurangzeb, by Georg Jacob Kehr. But of this latter book 100 trace remains. Leaving aside these isolated and tentative efforts, real attempt at sustained Bengali composition did not begin till the time when the Portuguese, before the inglish, had begun to establish themselves in Bengal. The Portuguese, by 1530, had settled পা t y ৪ রর ্ি - = the Portuguese nin many parts of this country and Bengal. carried on an extensive trade in the chief sea-ports. The number of. people claiming themselves to be of Portuguese descent was in the 17th century very large and Portuguese language had established itself as the lingua franca of the country.2 Among these Portuguese adventurers and pirates, however, we can never expect any serious attempt at literary com position : but the Portuguese missionaries seem to have done some work in this direction. Bernier,® about 1660, speaks of ‘Portugal fathers and missionaries” in Bengal and says that in Bengal there are
1 Grierson, Linguistic Survey, loc. cit. ° The Portuguese language has bequeathed a large number of expressions to the vernacular tongue, 3 Travels, p. 27.
