The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language/Part 1/Foreword
FOREWORD
It gives me great pleasure to have this opportunity of publicly wishing God-speed to Professor Chatterji’s admirable work and of recommending it to all students of the modern languages of India.
There are two possible lines of investigation of this subject. In one, we can follow the example of Beames and view all the forms of speech as a whole, comparing them with each other, and thence deducing general rules. The other is to follow Trumpp, Hoernle, and Bloch, in taking one particular language as our text, examining it exhaustively, and comparing it with what is known of the others. Professor Chatterji, in taking Bengali as the basis of his work, has adopted the latter procedure and, if I may express my own opinion, the more profitable one. The ultimate object of all students must, of course, be to follow the lines so excellently laid down by Beames, and to give a general comparative grammar of the Indo-Aryan languages; but such an attempt;—admirable though Beames’s work was,—cannot be really successful till each of the different languages has been separately aud minutely dissected under the strictest scientific rules. The palace of comparative grammar cannot be built without bricks, and the bricks are made up of the facts of each particular language.
For many reasons, Bengali, in itself, is specially deserving of careful study. With a literature going back for several centuries, and preserved with some care, it gives opportunities for the study of its history that are wanting in some other forms of Indian speech. It ts a typical descendant of the great language that, under the name of Māgadhī Prakrit, was the vernacular of eastern North India for many centuries. This was the official language of the great Emperor Aśōka, and an allied dialect was used by the Buddha and by Mahāvīra, the apostle of Jainism, in their early preaching. With the shifting of political gravity at a later epoch, it became superseded as a literary form of speech by dialects current farther to the West, but as a spoken language it has developed into the modern Bengali, Oṛiyā, Bihārī, and Assamese.
itherto the ordinary Bengali grammars have been silent about the history of the language and the origin of its forms, and in popular books published in India, the wildest theories about these have occasionally been put forth without a shadow of justification. On the other hand, Beames, Hoernle, and Bhandarkar have written much that is illuminating in regard to if, but sufficient materials were not available to any of them for dealing with the many points of phonetics, accidence, and vocabulary that present themselves on closer examination. For this reason we can heartily welcome the ripe fruits of Professor Chatterji’s labours that are to be gathered from the following pages. Endowed with a thorough familiarity with Bengali,—his native tongue,—he has been able to bring together an amount of material which no European could ever have hoped to collect; and he has had the further advantage of pursuing his theoretical studies under the guidance of some of the greatest European authorities on Indian philology. This work is accordingly the result of a happy combination of proficiency in facts and of familiarity with theory and exhibits a mastery of detail controlled and ordered by the sobriety of true scholarship.
In a work of this kind, necessarily offering conclusions here and there on points which in the present state of our linguistic knowledge cannot be decided with absolute certainty, it is not to be expected that all scholars will agree with every statement contained in it; and, as regards myself, I must confess that he has not convinced me that I am wrong in one or two matters in which he has lucidly expressed his disagreement. But, unless we searchers after knowledge sometimes differed, learning would not progress, and there would he the less chance of arriving at the ultimate truth. I therefore welcome his criticisms, and if his arguments, on further consideration, prove that he is right, I shall be among the first to congratulate him. These points are, however, of minor importance, and in no way affect the main thesis of his book,—to give a clear and accurate account of the origins and growth of the Bengali language. In this respect, every one who reads it will admit that the author has succeeded and that his volume is a fine example of wide knowledge, and of scholarly research.
Rathfarnam,
Camberley (Surrey),
October, 1925.
George A. Grierson.