THE
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPiMENT OF
THE BENGALI LANGUAGE
BY
SUNITI KUMAR CHA T l KRJI
iM.A. (Calcutta), D.Lit (I.ondon)
Khaira Professor of Indian Linguistics and Phonetics and Lecturer in
English and Comparative Philology in the University of Calcutta
With a Foreword by
SIR GEORGE ABRAHAM (.RIERSON. k.CI.E.
In Two Parts
Part I : I itroduction. Phonology
Cka.
CALCITTA UNIVERSITY PRKSS
1926
I
PBIMTKD BT BHUPBNDRALAL BANBBJZE
Al TH£ CALCUTTA UNIVBRSITT PBXSS, SBNATB HOUBV, CALCUTTA
I
FOREWORD
It i^ives me ijjreat pleasure to have this opportunity of publicly wishing^
God-speed to Professor Chatterji's admirable work and of reeommendins:
it to all students of the modern lanoruages 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 laniraasje 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 mv 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 and minutely dissected under
the strictest scieiititic 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
vi FOREWORD
with some care, it i^ives oj^portunities for the study of it> hi^^torv that arT
wantini: in some other forms of Indian speech. It is a t\i>ical desrend;iiiT
of the i?reat language that, under thf nanir of Mai^adhl Prakrit, \sa-
the vernacular of eastern North India for many centuries. This wa^ the
official lanj^uajje of the srreat Empen»r Asoka, and an alhed <lialf*ct wa-
ased by the Buddha and by Mahavira, the aposth- of Jainism, ui their early
preachin<?. With the ^hiftinir of i^olitici] irravity at a later rjHx h, it
became superseded as a literar\ fonn of speech by dia^•et^ eurtvnt farthn
to the W^, but as a s[)oken lanu'uaire it ha- (h-velopiMl into the mo'l«'in
Bengali, Oriyft, Biharl, and Assamese.
Hitherto the ordinary Benijali ^jrammars have bern silent about
the history of the lansruaire and the orii^in of its forms, and in popular book«
published in India, the wildest theories about these have oeeasionally
been put forth without a shadow of justification. On the other hand,
Beames, Hoernle, and Bhandarkar have written much that is illuminatinir
in regard to it, but sufficient materials were not available to any of them
for dealing with the many points of phonetics, accidt nee, 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 pa^es. Endowed with a thorough
familiarity with Bengali, — his native tongue, — he has been able to brinir
together an amount of material which no European eonkl ever have hoped
to collect ; and he has had the furtl)er advantai^e of pursuing his
theoretical studies under the guidance of some of the greatest European
authorities on Indian philology. This work is accord iui^ly the result of
a happy combination of proficiency in facts and of familiarity with theory
FOREWORD Tii
and exhibits a mastery of detail controlled and ordered by the sobriety of
true scholarship. •
In a work of this kind, necessarily ofFerinjJ conclusions here and
there on points which in the present state of our linguistic knowledgt^
cannot be decided with absolute certainty, it is not to be expected that
all scholars will a^ree with every statement contained in it ; and, as
regards myself, 1 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 be the less chance
of arriving at the ultimate truth. I therefore welcome his criticisms,
and ii his arfjumfnts, on fuither 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 ^ho reads it will admit
that the author has suct'( eded and that his volume is a fine example of
wide knowledge, and of scholarly research.
Rathfarnham,
(/AMBKRI.EY (StRHK^ ),
October, VJ2b.
(rKORGK A. GeIERSON,
i'hun njima rsibhyah purvajebhiali
pdr vebh ya h pat h i kf dbh iah
nvfr avir nia Tdhi
uiA tvah pa§yan na dadar^a v^cam
ut^ tvah synvan na 6fn5ti enam
ut6 tuasmai tanuarh vi sasre
jaygva patye usati suvasah
PREFACK
In the Univ-ersity of London accoptei my thesis on 'the
Orififin and Development of the Bengali Langniije ' for the dei^ree of
' Doctor of Literature.' The present work is substantially the same thesis,
but it has been entirely re-written and in some portions re-arraD^^^ed, and
has also been considerably augtueuted by the inclusion of some new
matter.
The idea of systematically in vtstieatinj; the histor} of my mother-
toQgiie first struck me over twelve years ai^o when I was at college in
my native tov-^n of Calcutta readinij^ for the Master of Arts examination in
English with Old and Middle Ent^Hsa and History of the English
Lan^uaije and a little Germanic Philology as my special subjects. The
modern methodi? of lin<2:aistic iuvestii^ation which I saw applied to English
filled me with adraiiation and enthu^uism; and as the problem of ludo-
European is equally connected with my own speech, ray interests naturally
besjan to turn wistfully in that direction. From Morris and Skeat, Sweet
and %Vrii>ht, and Jesper^en and the re?t, and from Kelfenstein and Briig-
mann, — masters of Lido- Aryan philoIoGTy like Uhlnnbeek and Wackernagel,
Whitney and Pisehel, Bearaes and Bban^larkar, Hoernle and Grierson
and others were naturally approached and studied for cjuidaace and light ;
and I becyj^n also to look round mvself, to observe facts in the words as
written and as actually spoken. A f. \v year.-^ of haphazard readin^^ and
observation, and taking notes, and stuinbiinu^ on in thi^ way, while working
as Assistant Professor and Lecturer in English and in Comparative Philology
in the University of Calcutta; and then in 1916 I presented as a three
vears' research pro^rramme for the Premchand Roychand Studentship of
the Calcutta University a scheme for ' an Essay towards an Historical and
xii
PREFACE
Comparative Grammar of the PeiiLT'^li Lariijuafje,' ^'ith a specimen of mv
work embodietl in a tht >i- o?, * the Sontnl'^ of >ro'lern Benijali ' a^ a
preliminary to the inve^tii^atmn ot l^priii^ah Phonoloixv. Mv nroixramme
and ray thesis were approvtMl hy the aiijiulicator^, the late Principal
Ram^ndra Suudara Tri\r'dT and Mahiimah('>p!idh\ aya Pautjit Haraprasada
^^astri, M.A., CLE. For tlv* Tniver^ity Juhil^e Research Prize for the
followinix year the suhjt'Ct wa< annoiuK-ed a-^ ' Comparative Philoloiry
with special reference to the Berii^Mh Dialects/ and thi- allowed me an
opportunity to put into *hape mv note^ on the dialects of Benixali, while
winnincr me the pri/e. The thret* years* work as Pre m eh and Roychanil
?,tudent cotisi"*ted of a monoiicr.iph on the Persian elemeiit in Hens^ali, a
study of the Bonijali verh and verb-root <, and a study of the lanjj^uau^e
of the Ohl Heni^ali Carya poem<, combined with further note< on Hen^rali
Phonetics.
In 1910 I was selected for a (Tovernraent of India iint^uistic
scholarship for the scientific -^tudy of Sanskrit in Euro[)e. Mv
three years' j-tay in Eurojie, durinu: ini9-'922, at the Universities of
London and Paris, has naturally enough been of the orreatest value for
me in my work. It enabled me to eome in touch in London with scholars
like Dr. L. I). Barrett, with whom I read Prakrit, and who snpervispd my
work in Lon<lon ; Dr. F. W. Thomas, who as lecturer in Comparative
Philology at University Colleire -^ruided me in my stndv of Indo-European
PhiloloGfy; Professor Daniel Jones, under whom I studied Phonetics,
who was not only rny « siksa-u'uru » but also a warm friend and helper;
besides Sir E. Denison Hoss, Director of the School of Oriental Studies,
and most sympathetic of men, and Professor R. W. Chambers (of l-niversitv
Collejye), and Messrs. E. IL Gr. Grattan and Robin Flower (also of
University Colleijfe), whose classes respectively in Persian, Old EnirHsh,
Gothic and Old Irish I attended ; and in Paris, I had the privilei^e of
sitting at the feet of a master like Professor Antoine Meillet for different
branches of Indo-Euronean lin^niistics, and of studyin*? Sanskrit and other
Indo-Aryan philoho;y under Professor Jules Bloeh, besides meeting other
eminent scholars like Professors Sylvain Levi, Paul Pelliot and Jean
PREFACE xiii
Przylaski. While I was in E^ngland Sir George Grierson took a personal
interest in my work, an interest which manifested itself in many ways
and which he in his kindness and his love of science still retains. This
has benefited me to th»^ <rreatest deirree ima<>inable ; and the fellowship of
colli mon stuilies with thi'^ iluf/cu of Indo-Aryan Linguistics which it ha^ been
my very irreat fortune to enjoy, has ])een, along with my coming in similar
personal touch with Profes-^ior Julo Bloeh^ an inspiration in my studies and
my laboiirs ; ami I may -ay the same of mv coming to know Professor Meillet,
the s'firtjfff and the teaehrr. To all these gentlemen I have to couvev my
mo^r rrniteful thanks fur all their kindnesses and for all that I have received
from them as their pupil.
The work, wlule it was being prepared in London in 19-20-1^21, had
the atlvantage of beinur looked over in its first draft (except in some sections
relating to the vrrb) by Dr. Harnett ; and 1 am very grateful to him for
much helpful advice in <u^gestinLC improvements in arran<»:ement and in the
irenera! treatment, as well as for ^on\e references. After it was approved bv
the University of Li>ndon, Sir George Grierson, in spite of his very heavy
and urgent st ientitle work, honoured my book, in MS., by n careful perusal,
an'l his criticisms and sui^irestions he embodied in several pa^^es of notes.
Professor Jules Bloch also did the same thins:. These notes I constantly
kept beside me in re-writing my thesis. Everywhere I have profited
by their criMcisnis, and in most cases I have accepted their suggestions.
I have also received some references and one or two suggestions from my
friends i:i Calcutta while lin\lly preparing; the work for the press, and these
have been acknowledged in their [)ro}K^r i)laces. I have to mention here
specially the names of Professor Hem Chandra Uaychaudhuri, my old oollege
friend and colleague in the Tniversity, and of Professor Satyendranath Basu
nf tiic Univeisity of Dacca, for some suggestions in the earlier part of
tiie v'iork.
In preparing the present work, the plan adopted by Professor Bloch
in his * Formation de la Langue marathe' has given me the clearest
notions about what a book on the origin and development of a modern
Indo-Aryan language should contain : and Professor Bloeh's work^ which
xiv
PREFACE
Sir George Grierson has fleseribod a? 'without any tl^ubt tho mo^t
iriiportaiit book dealinir with the Moflern In-lian Iantruanr»»s that has
appeared si rice the publieation of IloernlpV fj/'iihi'^mr ^h^' (jainliai}
Laiifjvage^ in ISSO/ ha^, in thr clarity of \x< exposition and in tht» width of
its erudition \\.< well a< in the s'uvn"*^< of it? ju(];^mpnt, ofTen»d me the bfst
model that I could have. Hut in my own hook, as I find, I ha'l to di^^cus^
many j^oints, somt^ of them -iiIo-ih^up^, psppciaily in tlir Inh'od ncfinn ,
which shoulfl be but nif^rely touched upon \\\ a Wf^rk o[ a prufp^^^t-dlv
lin2:uistic chnracfer, not bein^r inimediately /^/-v;"? for history of lani^ua:^'' i
and perhaps, I hnd to be fuller in dt'tail ; and at time-, repetition became,
unavoidable. That wa> due partly to the fae> that an ap[)reciat:on of fhc
racial, histonoil and cultural backiT:round was thoni^ht to f)e ludpFiil \\\
followinic the {in;?uistie development ; and the reason of the repetition is
that the work of re-writini? and priutinc^ my book went hand-in-hand i^o
that I had n^ opportunity of ^urveyin^j the present work a^ a whole before
the printing; '>f it was finished), and that the same phenoj^i^nion had t'> be
viewed from different aspects, and a repetition of a fact an ar'^niment
was felt to be necessary where a mere reference was not enourrii. t hope,
however, tbat the s^eneral unity of the work ha*^ not suffered therebv.
I have tried my best not to be doixmatic, and althouL^H) I had to specul.U'^
and hypothesize at times to explain facts, I hope I have not let l<)ose my
fancy to roam freely, unchecked bv the restraints of science. In my book
no fi^reat points have been raided, no remarkable theojies advanced : and
fortunately there is haraly any scope for that. T have siruply tried to
apply the methods of Comparative Philology, as aceej)ted by the present-
day masters of the science, in workin^j: out the history of Bengali. A
number of things have come into my notice as one of the first workers in
the field along what may be called scientific lines, at Irast among Bengali
speakers : and these would strike any other observer. ^Vfany of the views
expressed may ultimately prove to be wrong, with tfie accession of new
facts — as, for instance, from the systematic study of the dialects of Bengali
and of the cognate speeches. The work here submitted, however, is the
outcome of sincere labour in a subject for which I have the greatest love,
PREFACE
XV
and it is here presented as an Essay towards an Historical and Comparative
Grammar of Bensjali, and as a contribution towards the scientific study
of the Modern Aryan languasfes of India.
Linjxui>ties as a modern science is still in its infancy in India, and
the measure dose of ^ Comparative Philolosjy ' or ^ Historical Grammar ^
which our collesje students readin*^ advanced courses in Sanskiit or English,
not supplementing; it by any acquaintance with another cosjnate langua2:e
of equal importance, most unwillingly izulp down, is hopelessly inadequate
to create an intelliijent intere^^t in the snbjfct. Added to this initial
difficulty, Indo-Aiyan linsjuistics both of the classical and modern periods
has formed the favourite haunt of mere amateurs who seek to compensate for
their want of knowledi^e of the principles of historical i^rammar and of
the modern science of lani];uaje by professing utter contempt of it ; and the
professed btudent of literature who knows the language but not its liistory
shares in this contempt. To make confusion worse confounded, the
spirit of scholasticism is not yet dead ; we have elaborate s^rammars of
Sanskrit masqneradincr as Bengali grammar, in which the genuine Beng^ali
forms have been branded as vulgar (asadhu) beside the so-called
* polite" (sadhu) forms borrowed from Sanskrit. The first professedly
historical grammar and etymoloi^^ical dictionary of Bengali (by that
erudite and versatile scholar Rai Bahadur Yogesh Chandra RSy
Vidyanidhi, published by the Vaggiya Saliitya Parisad, Bengali year
1319-13*2-2), for instance, has not been able to i?hake off the "Sanskrit
idea by appreciating the true line of linguistic development. A historical
grammar of Bengali in the true sense of the term there has never
been in Bengali; and there ha^ not been a work exelasively on Bengali
by any European scholar, on the lines of Trumpp's Sindhl Grammar,
or Kellogg's Hindi Grammar, or C. J. Lyall'"« Sketch of Hindustani,
to guide the Bengali scholar in acquiring]: a true perspective which the too
near presence of Sanskrit and the fact of the language being his mother-
tongue generally blur for him. But there have at times been refreshing
manifestations of common sense in writing grammars of Bengali. The
first Bengali to v^rite a grammar of his mother-tongue was the Father
XVI
PREFACE
of Modern India, ^h** i^reat Raja Ham Xfohun Rox'. who^^e work was
published in Ensli*^!! in 182r>, and in B*^ntrnli in l"^.).') ; an<l he
knew what we shoul<] mean by ' HentT^^b.' ChinTaniarii fTur]!2rnli*'^
bdok (pnblislied in the early eiirhtie^) a irreat jidvanop "ii tlip <o-f»alh'd
Beni^fab' 2:rammarf= of tho period, and in reeerit ttnio- wo have Xakulrsvara
VidyabhusanaV httle hook (first edition BrnLrah' yrar '-^iCi, fourth edition
1315), and mention may bt» made of fffsTki'sa f5iT*.trTV bofd% (Heni,^ali yt^ar
1:^1)7 = 1000). But the fir<t Ben^-ab with a hfii^ntitln in^i<rht to nttaek the
problems of the lan^rnairt^ was the ])0f*t. Hnbinchannth TaijfoM' : and il i<
Hatterinix for the votarie-^ of Philohii^v to find in nne who i^ the irreate^^t
writer in the lan<;uat]:e, and a t^-rrat poet and seer for all time, a k»M»n
philoloGjist as well, distintjnishtM] alike f)y an a^iilnoiw t'nijinry int'> tlie faet<
of the lanixnai^e aiid bv a seholarlv ap[>n'eiati<ni of the method^ and fin<lini;<
of the modern western philoloixist. The work of Habindranath is in tht*
shape of a few essays (now eollected in one volume) on Brnirali phoneties,
Benorali onomatopoeties, and on the BenLjali noun, ar d on other topics,
the earliest of which aftpeared in the earl v nineties. an<l som*' fre«:h ]iapers
appeared onlv several years a^ro, The^e papers may be said to have shown
to the Bensrali enquirini^ into the problems of his lanfrn^iire the proper lines
of approachins: them.
Two works, however, thouf^h not on historical srrammar, have been
specially useful in writing this book, and I cannot be too irratefnl to the
scholars responsible for them. These are the Bengali Dictionary of
JnanSndra Mohan Das, and the edition of the ' i^rT-Kfsna-Kirttana,' our
most important Middle Benfjali text, by Basanta Ranjan Ray Vidvad-
vallabha. The former work presents the richest collection of material
for phonolo2:y and for the study of the formative affixes of both New
Bengali and Middle Bengali ; and the latter with its excellent commentary
and word index, especially the latter, has been an invaluable help for
both phonology and morphology. For the rest, stray papers and monographs
on points of vocabulary and grammar, in the Journal of the
Vagglya Sahitya Parisad and in periodicals like the ' Prabasi,* have at
times been requisitioned. These latter of ours- are not always
PREFACE
xvii
up-to-date in their methods, but have nevertheless been very useful,
^ly obligations in each case are indicated at the proper place. In
connexion with the chapter on the Phonoloory of the Persian Element
in Bengali, I have to acknowled<>e gratefully the assistance I received
from my friend Khan Bahadur Shamsu-l-^UIama Maulavi Muhammad
Hidayat Husain, Ph.D., of the Presidency College, Calcutta, with
whom I went through my list of Perso- Arabic loan-words in Bengali in
relation to their original forms.
^ I have not given a bibliography separately, as all the books consulted
or referred to have been suflSciently described in the text.
To indicate the pronunciation I have given phonetic transcriptions
[within square brackets] in the alphabet of the International Phonetic
Association slightly modified for Bengali. This has been noted in a
special section immediately before the list of Contents.
The book is now placed before the public, and while I do so I recall
with the greatest sorrow that Sir Asutosh Mookerjee is no longer in
our midst to see it completed. Sir Asutosh's services to his University and
to his people and his towering personality are well known in our country,
and I need not dilate upon them here. For the foreign scholar interested in
Indian Philology and in the spread of modern science in India to form some
idea of the work of Sir Asutosh in the University of Calcutta^ I would refer
to the obituary note on him from Professor Sylvain Levi, who had occasion
to know the man as well as his ideals and achievements, in the * Journal
Asiatique' for 1924. In his sudden and untimely death in May 1924,
I mourn the loss not only of a great national figure but also of a personal
friend, and especially of one who was keenly interested in this work.
Those of us who were privileged to come in intimate touch with his
personality and followed his lead in university matters can say whole-
heartedly that his indeed was a « svadu sakhyam » as well as a « svadvl
pranltih After my return from Europe late in 192;i, I was at a loss
how to print my book, and naturally I turned to Sir Asutosh, my patron,
my friend, philosopher and guide. Sir Asutosh had watched my career
abroad, and he at once offered to publish my book through my Alma
c
xviii
PREFACE
Mater, For over a decade before that time, Sir Asutosh had been
actively engaged in establishing and furthering the study of Bengali
and other Indian Modern Languages in the University of Calcutta. He
was responsible for the foundation of the first post of research-lecturer
for an Indian language in an Indian University — the Bengali research
fellowship established in 191:5. After creating the University Departments
of Post-graduate Teaching and Research in Arts and Science in 1916, which
formally transformed Taleutta University from an examining body (teaching
but indirectly through affiliated eolleG:es) into a teaching and investigating
one, he instituted the study of Indian Vernaculars as a subject for
the M. A. examination in 1919. He made provision for the teaching
of all the important vernaculars of India, Aryan and Dravidian ; and
at his instance important volumes of typical selections from the different
North Indian languages were undertaken and published. In 1 92*2, he founded
the Khaira chair of Indian Linguistics and Phonetics with the endowments
furnished by the late Kumar Guruprasad Singh of Khaira, and selected
me as its incumbent. Sir Asutosh's idea was to establish in Calcutta
a school of Indian philology, in the widest sense of the term. He had
a number of well thought-out plans, but death has put a stop to all
of them. When my book was taken up by the University Press, Sir
Asutosh showed a personal interest in it, and after the initial difficulties
in preparing the necessary types with diacritical marks were
overcome, thanks to his solicitude, he watched the progress of the
work, and was at times impatient at the delay. It was a most
cherished hope of mine that he would see the completion of the
work, and it is my greatest regret that this hope remains
unfulfilled.
While carrying the book through the press, I have received uniform
kindness and encouragement from everybody concerned^ and I cannot
be too grateful to them. I have to express ray thanks especially to
the Assistant Registrar of the University, Babu Yogesh Chandra
Chakravartti, M.A., whose unfailing courtesy and prompt action have
been of great help ; to Babu Atul Chandra Ghatak, M.A., Superintendent
PREFACE
XIX
of the University Press, who took a keen interest in my book^ and
granted me every facility that the University Press could offer, and
allowed me many special privileges ; his kindness has been constant durina;
the three years that the book took to print — the first forme was printed early
in 1923, and the last ones in 1926 ; to Babu Kalipada Das, B.A., Chief
Assistant in the University Press, whose expert proof-reading and whose
most intelligent interest have saved me from many a typographical error
and many a lapsus calami, I have also to record that the compositors
in the University Press, Bengali young men all of them, appreciated
my labours and gave their most cheerful cooperation. A number of
typographical errors nevertheless will appear. For these I am to a larije
extent responsible, as all the proofs from first to last (there were some-
times five or six proofs to read before one forme could be printed) were
corrected by me. In the Additions and Correcfio/is at the end of the
book I have pointed out such typographical and other errors as have
come to my notice, but I fear some more, thousch I hope they are
of a trivial sort, have escaped my scrutiny, and for this I crave the
indulgence of the reader.
For the Lule.r, I am indebted to Babu Sukumar Sen, M,A., Lecturer
in Comparative Philology, formerly pupil and now colleague in the
University. He very kindly volunteered to prepare an index of all the
Bengali words, and thus relieved me of a orreat burden. As he has been
one of the very few serious students of Comparative Philology in our
midst, whose enthusiasm for the subject is as great and as sound as his
conscientious industry and his scholarly outlook, and who is himself engaged
in philological researches, I could not wish this part of the work to
be entrusted into better hands. He has the best thanks of his whilom
teacher and friend.
I have indicated the scope of my work in a detailed list of CoafentSy
and a further index of the topics discussed, as well as of the names,
would have increased the bulk of the work and delayed the publication
for a still longer period. The Confenis I hope will be found to be
enough.
XX
PREFACE
« Mega biblion, mega kakon » : the great evil however has been
done — the text of my book, barring the Contents and the Inrfex, runs up to
nearly 1100 pages ; but this could not be helped — as the subject, it must
be admitted, is a very wide one. I have not stinted any labour, and I have
tried to do my best : but
« a paritosad vidusam na sadhu manye prayoga-vijfianam ».
The University,
Calcutta :
15 June, 1926.
SUNITI Kl MAR ChaTTJEKJI.
ABBREVIATIONS
A. C. = After Christ.
Ap. = Apabhransa.
Arab. = Arabic.
AS 15.= \siatie Society of Bengal, Calcutta
B. C. = Before Christ.
B., Beng. = Bengali.
Bib. Ind. = Bibliotheea Incliea Series, ASB.
Bib. Nat. = Bibliotbeque Nationalc; Paris,
BSOS. = Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, Loudon.
Coll. = Colloquial.
DMG. = Deutsche Morgenrandische Gesellschaft, Berlin.
Drav. = Dra vidian.
E.=:East, Eastern.
EB. = East Bengal, East Bengali.
eMB. = Early Middle Bengali.
eMIA. = Early Middle Indo- Aryan.
Ep. Ind. =Epigraphia Tndiea.
Hind. = Hindostanl.
IA. = Indo-Aryan.
IAnt. = Indian Antiquary. Bombay.
IE. = Indo-European.
IF. = Indogermanische Forsehungen, Berlin.
I.-Ir. = Indo-Iranian .
JA. = Journal Asiatique, Paris.
JAOS. = Journal of the American Oriental Society, New Haven.
JASB. = Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta.
xxii
ABBREVIATIONS
JBBRAS. = Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society.
J BORS,= Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, Patna.
JRAS. = Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, London.
KKC. = ' Kavi-kagkana Candl/ Vag^a-vasl edition.
Langue Marathe = ' La formation de la Langue marathe' by Jules Bloch,
Bibliotheque de I'Ecole des Hautes El:udes, Paris, 1919.
LSI. = Linguistic Survey of India.
1MB. = Late Middle Bengali.
lMIA. = Late Middle Indo- Aryan.
Mag. = MagadhI.
MB. = Middle Ben^i-
MIA. = Middle Indo- Aryan.
MSL. = Memoires de la Soeiete de Linguistique, Paris,
N. = North, Northern.
NB. = New Bengali.
N.E. = North.East, North-Eastern.
NIA. = New Indo- Aryan.
N, W. = North- West, North- Western .
0B. = 01d Bengali.
0IA. = 01d Indo- Aryan.
0WR. = 01d Western Rajasthani.
Pers.= Persian.
Pers.-Arab. = Perso- Arabic.
Pkt.=: Prakrit.
S. = South, Southern,
Saur. =Sauraseni.
SBE. = Sacred Books of the East Series, Oxford.
S.E. = South-East, South-Eastern.
l§KK. = 'Sri-Kfsna-Kirttana,' edited by Basanta-Ranjana Raya, VSPd.,
Bengali year 1323.
Skt. = Sanskrit.
SPd. = Sahitya Parisad.
Stand. Standard.
ABBREVIATIONS
xxiii
sts,y 5^«c*. = semi-tatsama, semi-tatsamas.
S.W. = South-West, South. Western.
fbi,, ^M5. = tadbhava, tadbhavas,
^5., ^55. = tatsaraa, tatsamas.
U.P.=: United Province? of Agra and Oudh.
VSP. = *Vago;a Sahitya Paricaya ' or Typical Selections from Karly
Bengali Literature, Two Volumes, Calcutta University, 1914.
VSPd. = Yai)gl}a Sahitya Parisad, Calcutta.
VSPdP. = ' VaggTya Sahitya Parisad Patrika.'
W. = West, Western.
ZDMG. = Zeitsehrift der Deutsche Morojenlandische Gesellsehaft, Leipzig.
SIGNS
> means gites, leads to, remlU ia^ is ehangefl to, gi^'ing^ leading to, etc. :
e,g,, « hasta > hattha > hatha > hat^ ».
< means comeE from, is derived from, coming from ^ being derived from, etc. :
e.g,^ « hat^ < hatha < hattha < hasta ».
= indicates a cognate form, or a source type.
* before a word or affix indicates a hypothetical form not preserved in
literature, but reconstructed : e.g., « dipa-raksa- -h-uka- > *dlva-rakkh-
ua- > dia-rakhua > der^kho ». This is found with forms in Indo-
European, Indo-Iranian and other hypothetical stages of the speech,
as well as in intermediate forms in Indo- Aryan.
? before a word or form indicates doubt as to the form proposed, or the form
being the source of the word or connected with the word under discussion.
-y/ means root.
X before a word means it is dialectal, and not universally recognised,
t before a word indicates that it is obsolete.
+ joins up the component parts which are at the basis of a Modern Indo-
Aryan or other word,
the hyphen, has been used to analyse words into their roots and affixes.
When a word (Sanskrit or Pali or otherwise) is given with a hyphen
at the end, it indicates merely the base form, to which other additions
of suffixes or inflexions were made. Prefixes similarly have a hyphen
after them, and suffixes and inflexions before them.
' ' : names of books are given within inverted commas.
« » have been used in all transliterated forms, except when they occur
by themselves within ordinary brackets ( ).
[ ] square brackets enclose words in phonetic transcription (and in some
cases also ordinary English words, and transliterated forms, occurring
within ordinary brackets).
( ) in a transliterated or phonetically transcribed word shows that the
letter or sound occurs optionally, and can be omitted either in writing
or in pronunciation.
TRANSLITERATION
Traxsi.iteratiox of Bengali.
^ has been transcribed as « & »^ when the original sound oF [d] (see be^ow,
under P/io/iefic Trayiscripfion) is retained ; as « » or « o » indifferently,
when as a result of Umlaut and loss of following < i » or « u » the
sound is altered to [o] : when the spellins: is kept in view, « ^' » has been
used, and when the pronunciation, « o ». The letter « a » represents a
long ^ « & » sound which seems to have resulted in OB. and MB.
from an earlier group « aa, awa, aha ». A quiescent not indicated
in the Bengali spelling by ^ (= the « virama » or « hasauta »), is trans-
cribed i.e. a deleted «a»: e.g.^ = « &nal?i but
« c&'ll& (collo) In a final ^ « y& », where it represents an earlier
« -e», the « & » has not been noted : ^ = « -y >. In personcd names and
names of books, simple « a » has been used for % and noc « 4 », and
the symbol « ^ » also has not been employed.
^, ^, ^, ^ have been transcribed respectively as < a, i, I, u, u ». As
results of « sandhi », « a, i, u » also have been employed, t ^
forming separate syllables, in writing at least, are denoted by « i, u ».
^ J* have been transcribed as « f , 1 », with a vertical bar below, the
commoner « r, 1 » being retained respectively for the so-called * cere-
bral r ' [% i) and for the ' cerebral T ( = 3, not found in Bengali).
1^ ^ = « e, &i, o, &u » ; « Sandhi » t£3, 9 = « e, o
t = «n»ortm»; : = «h = on the top of the vow^l {ejj,, ^
= a, ^ = a, ^ = 1, I ; ^ = ii, = fi; = 5)-
'^3 ^, ^, ^, vg = * kh, g, gh, g >.
^, ^> ^ = * c, ch, 3, jh, il
^, F, «1 = « t, th, d, rjh, n » ; \5, ^ = « r, rh ».
^, ^, ^f, ^, ^ = * t, th, d, dh, n ».
% ^, ^, ^ = * Pf ph> blij
XXVI
TRANSLITERATION
?f = « j > in tadhhavns mainly ; and in some cases in iatsamas, 5^ = « y »
See below, under ^.
^, ^ = * r, U.
^ = « b » when initial, intervocal and final, « w » when post-consonantal,
jif J = respectively « s, s, s ».
^ = « h ».
^ = « y ». ^ or ^, subscript or post-consonantal (= j) is transcribed « y ».
^ has in some cases been ignored, where it stands for the « w » glide.
Glide ^ has been occasionally transcribed as « y » and also as « w » (see
text, pp. 338-342). The group has generally been transcribed as
« w », (or « w » to indicate its character as a glide sound).
^ = « ks » ; ® = « jn ».
Transliteration of Sanskrit.
On the lines for Bengali as above. Practically the Geneva System has
been followed.
«g, o» have invariably been used for q,^, to emphasise upon their long quan-
tity ; and the long diphthongs % ^ are written « ai, au ». Accent in Vedic
has been denoted by « ' » on the vowel bearing it : e-p., « a, i, f', 5, Q ».
The « anusvara » has been indicated by ^ n * or by « m » following
the etymology.
^=«f:^;^ = «f» (i.e., * f ^) j ^ = « 1 » ; 3 = • U ; 35 = « Ih ».
^ has been denoted by « v » as usual, but in some cases, « w » has been
employed, to emphasise upon the bilabial pronunciation.
For « 8 », see under Phonetic Transcription below.
Transliteration of Prakeit.
« a, g, o » have been used to emphasise on their short quantity before double
consonants. Disyllabic groups — « aY, aii ».
The « anusvara » = « n, rh
The « ya*sruti » has been denoted by « y », and « w » has been used for
a similar « w » glide.
In some cases, spirant pronunciation has been indicated by « 9,, j, ft »,
For « 9 », see under Phonetic Transcription below.
TRANSLITERATION
xxvii
Other Indian Languages,
Quiescent « a » has not as a rule been indicated in languages other than
Bengali by « ^ » as it has been done in Bengali, except to make clear
the derivation of a form or word in a particular case.
Oriya and Assamese « & », as in Bengali.
Biharl « a », a rounded vowel sound as in Middle Bengali.
Small « u »j at the top of the line, indicate the attenuated final vowels
of Maithill, Sindhi, etc.
The diphthongs are written « &i, k\i » for Oriva and Assamese, and « ai,
&u » for the rest. The nasalised diphthongs are * ai, aii ».
The stops with simultaneous glottal closure, as for instance in East Bengali
and in Sindhi, have « ^ > after them : e.ff,, « ii^', b' ».
Generally « r, rh » have been used for intervocal ^{l), « d, fjh » where
these letters are pronounced as the * cerebral r, rh.*
For the letter ^, « v, w » have indifferently been used : 2:enerally
« w » for Hind5stani. Assamese and Oriya fellow the Bengali way —
« b-, -b », « -b- > (intervocal), « -w- » (post-consonantal).
Tamil palatals have been indicated by the italic « «, r, t », and the Tamil
voiced cerebral spirant b}' « i ».
• i > is the voiced form of the sibilant « s » = v of Skt,, which occurred
in Indo-Iranian.
« 9 » has been used for the palatal fricative sound, unvoiced^ of Indo-
Iranian.
Persian' and Arabic.
For the transliteration and phonetic transcription from these speeches, see
under * Phonology of the Foreign Element : Persian/ forming
Chapter VT. of Phonology, pp. 559 ff., esp. p, 573.
« X » has generally been employed to indicate the letter ^ : the usual
transcription is « kh » or « kh ».
« § » = sli of English ; « ^ » — J, or as in English pleamre =
French j.
PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION
The symbols are those employed by the International Phonetic
Association. An introduction to this system is to be found in
^ The Principles of the International Phonetic Association ' London,
1912, and ^ L'E'criture phonetique international,' London, 1921
publications of the Association. See also G. Noel-Armfield's ' General
Phonetics,' 3rd ed., Cambridge, 1924. The symbols occurring in
the present book are given below,
[ : ] after a symbol denotes length o£ the sound indicated by it, whether
a vowel or a consonant ; ["'j on the top of a vowel indicates
nasalised pronunciation ; and ['] before a syllable indicates stress
upon it and ['"'J indicates strong stress. The little vertical bar [i]
beside a stop sound shows that it is unexploded, e.g,y [pi, ti, k|].
[a] : ^ front a,' as in North English vian, cat, heard in dialectal West
Bengali pronunciation of a word like ^T'^ [ka:l] t/esterday, tomorrow^
as opposed to [ka:l] time. Nasalised form = [a].
[t?J : a central vowel occurring in Modern Portuguese: see pp. 621-622.
[a] : ^back' or 'central' a — as in Standard Bengali "^t^l [koka] uncle ^
^fi? [ami] /. Nasalised form = [d].
[a?] : the sound of a as in Southern English man^ cat West Bengali sound
as in [kseno] wky, ^Jt^f [tserg] abandonment. Nasalised £orm= [S],
[d] : the sound of o as in Southern English hot, lot : it occurred in Old
Bengali for the later ^ = [o] (see below) : see Text, p, 258. It is
a kind of [a] without lip-rounding,
[b] : as in English = the Bengali
[b'J : made with simultaneous glottal closure, as in Sindhi, or in dialectal
East Bengali, [b'a:t] boiled nee = Standard ^ [bBa:t].
PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION
XXIX
[b6] : the vr of Sanskrit and Hindi etc. : the voiced labial stop aspirated,
[b] : bilabial fricative, the same as [u] for which see below,
[e] : palatal stop, unvoiced — the old sound of Skt. =^ — resembling in
acoustic effect a fronted or palatalised « k », i.e., a sort of « ky »
Teh] : the same aspirated = the old sound of Skt. w.
[cf] : palatal affricate, unvoiced = the West Bengali 5.
[cfh] ; unvoiced palatal affricate, aspirated =s West Bengali 5.
[9I : unvoiced palatal fricative, the sound of c/i in German ick : the old
value of the Skt. ^,
[d] : interdental stop, voiced = W of Bengali. (In 01 A., this sound wa^
alveolar).
[d'] : the same, with accompanying glottal closure, as in dialectal East
Bengali [d^a:n] joarf(/^ = Standard Bengali <ft5{ [dfiain].
[dB] : voiced interdental stop, aspirated = 5^ of Standard Bengali,
: voiced alveolar stop, as in English and Assamese,
[dj : voiced cerebral or retroflex stop made with curled-up tongue-tip = ^
of Sanskrit. The Bengali is of the same class, but it is pronounced
at a lower position, approaching the alveolar region,
[d'] : the above, with accompanying glottal closure : found in Sindhi, and
in dialectal East Bengali, e.^,, [tPa:k] driua^ tom-tom to cover =
Standard Bengali Ft^ [(■fiQ:k].
[(Jfi] : voiced cerebral stop aspirated = Sanskrit ^, West Bengali U.
: 3] : voiced interdental spirant = th in English this [Sis], then [8sn],
same as 0 of Arabic as in [?a:tj,j^ [ua3r] etc.
[d] : voiced dental or alveolar stop, velarised, i.e. made with simultaneous
raising of the back of the tongue : occurring in Arabic (see Text,
pp. 567ff).
[di] : voiced alveolar unilateral, velarised: occurring in Arabic (see p. 568).
[dz] : voiced dental or alveolar affricate = dialectal East Bengali ^.
[dg] : voiced supra-alveolar or palatal affricate, as in English y?^^^*? =
[dgAds].
||e] : high-mid front vowel, as in West Bengali C*r*t [de:J] laiid, connirK
Nasalised form = [e].
XXX
PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION
[e] : *semi-vowel e/ the Bengali ^ as in ^rilTl [maea] (Skt. ^Tf^yr = ,nia:ia:]).
[e] : a sound intermediate between [e] and [s] (see below),
[a] : the ' neutral vowel ' or ' sheva ' — a central vowel as in English again
[9gein], HindostanI ^Jct [mu:rat] imagCy [rAtan] getn^ etc,
[s] : low-mid front vowel, as in dialectal East Bengali [ksbol] only,
or in English get [gSi^]. Nasalised form = [s],
[s] : a central vowel, as in English bird, her \hs\d^ hs:(.i)].
[f] : unvoiced denti-labial spirant, as in English. Often heard in Bengali
for ^ = [ph] .
[f] : unvoiced bilabial spirant, the puffing sound made in blowing^ out a
candle : commonly heard in Bengali for ^ — [ph] (in dialectal East
Bengali also for ^ = [p]).
[g] : velar stop, voiced = English g in go, Bengali ^i. (The symbol
generally used for this sound in the IPA. alphabet is
[g'] : the above, with glottal closure : found iu Sindhi, and in dialectal
East Bengali, as in [g'orr] = Standard Bengali ^ [gSo:r] home.
""gR] : voiced velar stop, aspirated = Skt. "g, West Benij^ali ^.
[g.] : voiced velar fricative = j of Persian : found in dialectal East Bengali
in an intervocal position.
[g] : voiced uvular stop (the IPA. symbol commonly used is [g]).
[y] : voiced uvular fricative =s Arabic f.
[h] : unvoiced glottal fricative^ 'unvoiced h,' the h sound of English, as in
hat^ happy. This is the Skt. and Bengali «visarga», and the «piana»
or aspiration in the « aghosa maha-prana » or unvoiced aspirated
sounds — [kh, eh (cjh), th, th, ph].
[fil : voiced glottal fricative, or 'voiced h' = Eni^lish h as in behind
[bafiain^Z], perhaps [pafigeps] ; = Sanskrit ^f, Bengali ^, Arabic *.
[t] : a whispered h, = ^, the so-called ' emphatic h ' of Arabic.
[i] : high front vowel, unrounded, as in BengaU ft^I [di:n] poor, [dim]
day^ English seen [si:n, siinj. Nasalised form = [i].
[i] : high front vowel, retracted and brought down very near high-miil
position = English / as in pit [p^i^].
[i] : * semi-vowel or consonantal i ' : the old value of Skt. 5r.
PHONETK^ TRANSCRIPTION
XXXI
j] : voiced palatal fricative, like English y ia jies [jss].
[j] : a stronger form of the preceding, with greater audible friction,
approaching [5], for which see below, after [z].
[}] * voiced palatal stop = Skt. ^ (the old pronunciation of which was
like that of a fronted or palatalised ii = « ojy »).
[JS3 * palatal affricate, voiced = West Bengali
[JS'j ' Palatal affricate, voiced, with i>lottal closure, found in dialectal
East Benorali for tiie next sound, [j^R], of Standard Bensjali.
[J^R] : palatal affricate, voiced = West Bengali ^.
[k] : unvoiced velar stop = Bengali English k as in hnher [belke],
[kli] : the same, aspirated slightly = the English sound in cap [k^sep],
king [k^iij] .
[kh] : the same, aspirated strongly = Skt. ^, Bengali ^.
[1] : 'clear 1,' as in South English long [bg], = BengaU ^.
[i] : *dark 1/ or velarised 1, pronounced with simultaneous raising oi the
back of the tongue towards the soft palate, as in South English well
[wsi]. Bill [bii].
[j] : ^cerebral 1,' made with the curled-up tip of the tongue ao^ainst the
dome of the palate = Vedie 3. The same aspirated, 3^ = [Ifi]. '
[1] : 'vocalic P — forming a syllable with another consonant = Skt. tg: ;
like the I in English hoUle [bn/l, bort].
[li] : slightly palatalised 1 as in dialectal West Bengali (see p. 539).
■[^^1 : ' palatal 1,' pronounced with simultaneous raising of the front of
the tongue towards the hard palate : a sound found in dialectal French,
Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.
[m] : bilabial nasal = the Bengali t[.
[mj : Wocalic m,' as in English hotiom [bo^Jm],
[ra] : high back unrounded vowel = an [u] made with spread lips : found
in Tamil, in Japanese, and in other languages,
[n] : alveolar nasal == the Bengali ^T.
[n] : retroflex or cerebral nasal = the Sanskrit ^.
[rt] ; 'vocalic n,' as in English hution [bA^n],
PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION
[g] : velar nasal : the Skt. ^, Bengali \§, % Enfylish ng as in sing [sig].
[ji] : palatal nasal : the Skt, 3{, Bengali French and Italian gyi^ Spanish '/i.
[o]: high-mid back vowel, rounded, = Bengali ^ in person,
tcorld. Nasalised form = [5J.
[8] : 'semi-vowel 0/ e.g,, Bengali in Tf^^ [kbaoa].
[6] : is a sound intermediate between [o] and [d] (see below),
[oe] : low-mid front vowel, rounied^ = the French sound as in ccenr [kceE].
[0] : low-mid back vowel, rounded : the sound as in English law [lo:], =
Bengali ^. Nasalised form » [5],
: high-mid front vowel, rounded, = the German 0 as in schon [JV^in],
French eu as in 2)cu [p<^] .
[p] : bilabial stop, unvoiced : Bengali ^.
[p^] : the same, slightly aspirated : English in paty pick [p^£e^, p^ik].
[ph] : the same, strongly aspirated : Skt. tf, proper sound of Bengali
[q] : uvular stop, unvoiced, ~ Arabic ^3.
[r] : alveolar trilled, voiced : Bengali % Scots English r.
[r : flapped r, or so-called ' cerebral r ' = Bengali Hindi ^.
[f] : ^ vocalic r * : = Skt. ^.
[j] : ^ fricative r,' alveolar, as in South English.
[4] : retroflex fricative r, = the Tamil sound often transliterated « i ».
[ri] : slightly palatalised r, as in dialectal West Bengali (see p. 539).
[r] : trilled ' uvular r,' as in Northern French,
[s] : dental or alveolar sibilant, = Skt. ^, East Bengali 5, English
[s] : unvoiced dental or alveolar sibilant, velarised, = Arabic yj>,
rj*] * palatal sibilant made with the blade of the tongue, with slight lip-
rounding, = English sh^ Arabic and Persian (in transcriptions
written « S »).
[/] • palatal sibilant made with the front of the tongue = Bengali H, >i.
: cerebral or retroflex sibilant made with the tip of the tongue curled-up
against the dome of the palate = Sanskrit ^.
[t] : unvoiced inter-dental stop = Bengali \5. (The Skt. cT was originally
« danta-muliya » or alveolar, like the English t,)
[th] : the same, aspirated strongly = Sanskrit Bengali %
PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION
xxxiii
[0 : alveolar t as in English better [bs^s] ,
t\_^'\ : the same slightly aspirated = English t in tap, tip [^^*»p, ^*ip].
[t] : retroflex or cerebral stop, unvoiced, =3 of Skt. The Bengali ^ is of
the same class, but it is pronounced at a lower position, approaching
the alveolar region,
[th] : the same aspirated = Sanskrit Bengali
[4] : unvoiced dental or alveolar stop, with velarisation, = Arabic
[ts] : unvoiced dental or alveolar affricate = East Bengali 5.
[tj] :supra-alveolar and palatal affricate, unvoiced = English ch as in
church 5= [tj9:tj].
[u] : high back rounded vowel = Bengali ^, ^. Nasalised form = [ii].
[xj] : high back rounded, slightly advanced and approaching the mid
position, = English short u as in put^ book [p^C^, buk].
[v] : voiced denti-Iabial fricative, = English v ; frequently heard in Bengali
for ^ = [bfi].
[u] : voiccil bilabial fricative : it is the common Indian value of the
« anta^tha va» = ^ : very commonly heard in Bengali for ^ = [bfi],
[a] : a central vowel (or rather, a low-mid back vowel), considerably
advanced, found in English, as in smij enough [sAn, inAf] = the Hindi
stressed ^ as in TtH [rAtan], and very probably also the Sanskrit
« samvf ta » ^.
[w] : bilabial semi-vowel, or ^consonantal u' (= [u]), as in English
wet^ win, the old value of the Skt. « antastha va » ~
[^] : bilabial semi-vowel, or fricative (==[t5]), nasalised, occurring in
Apabhransa, in Hindi, in Middle Bengali,
[x] : velar spirant, unvoiced = German ch .in ach^ Persian ^ : found in
dialectal East Bengali. Occurs also in Slav, in Germanic: cf. pp. 243,
246, 387 : see also p. 558. Ordinarily transcribed « kh »
[xl • uvular spirant, unvoiced, = the spirant form of [q].
[y] • Iiigt front vowel, rounded — an [i] pronounced with rounded lips
= French German H.
[z] : alveolar voiced spirant = English 2, Persian j.
[«] : the same sound, velarised, occurring in Arabic ( = ■*^)
E
xxxiv PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION
[5] : voiced palatal fricative = French j, Persian J, (in trandiferatiom from
the Persian written « 5 »).
[61 : inter-dental fricative, unvoiced = English tk in fhin, ilim\k [^in,
^ffigk] , Arabic
[9] : the * glottal stop/ = Arabic ^ hamzah ' (t, *).
[*^] : the ^ laryngal fricative * = Arabic ' ^ayn ' (^).
(In tramliieration^ the above two are denoted respectively by « and « * »).
[n, ?7, n, n, m] are respectively the nasals [n, ji, n,m] pronounced very brief :
see pp. 360 fP.
[a, i, u] are the vowels [a] or [a], [i] and [u] respectively, pronounced very
brief.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Sir George A. Grierson, K.C.I. E,
Benedictory
Author's Preface
Abbreviations
Signs
Transliteration
Phonetic Transcription
Contents
Introduction
Appendix A to Introduction
Appendix B „
Appendix C „
Appendix D ^,
Appendix E „
Phonology
Morphology
Appendix to Morphology
Additions and Corrections
Index of Bengali Words
V — vu
ix — X
xi — XX
xxi — xxiii
xxiv
XXV — xxvii
xxviii — xxxiv
XXXV — xei
1—149
150-169
170—178
179—188
189—223
237—648
649—1052
1053—1056
1057—1078
1079—1179
DETAILED CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION, pp. 1-235.
§ 1 : Position of Bengali, its age as a characterised language, p. 1 ;
§ 2 : Number of Bengali Speakers, p. 1 ; Linguistic Boundaries — Aryan,
languages on the frontiers of Bengali, p. 1 ; non- Aryan neighbours of
Bengali, pp. 2-3 ; ' Kol ' and ' Muntja,' p. 2. § 3 : The Indo-European
speeches : the Indo-Iranian or Aryan branch : Indie, Dardic and Iranian
xxxvi
CONTENTS
groups, pp. 3-4 ; other Indo-European branches^ p. 5 ; ^ 4 : the extinct
Indo-European speeches : Kuchean or Tokharian, ' Hittite,' etc., pp. 5-6.
§ 5 ' Tabular Representation of the Indo-Aryan speeches, p. 6 ;
§ 6 : the Modern Indo-Aryan speeches, p. 6 ; § 7 : the Dardie Kasmlri
etc., pp. 6-7 ; § 8 : Western Panjabi, p. 7 ; § 9 : Eastern Panjabi, p. 8 ;
§ 10 : Sindhi, p. 8 ; § 11 : Rajasthani dialects and Gujarat! : 'Piggala'
and ' Diggala,' pp. 8-9; § 12 : Paharl or Khasa dialects : Khas-kura
(Nepal! or Parbatiya) : Dramas^ in Bengali and Maithill from Nepal :
Kumaunl and Garhwall, etc., pp. 9-10 j § 13 : Western Hindi dialectsi.;
Braj-bhakha ; HindostanT, Hindi, Urdu ; Importance of HindostanI :
pp. 11-13 J § 14 : Eastern Hindi dialects : Awadhi : Malik Muhammad
Jaisi and Tulasl-dasa, p. 13 ; § 15 : Marathi : the ' JiianeSvari,' p. 14 ;
§ 16 : the Magadhan speeches : Bhojpuriyaj Maithill, Magahl, Oriya,
Bengali-Assamese, p. 14 ; § 17 : Halabletc, pp. 14-15; § 18 : Sinhalese:
its source : Elu : Maldivan, pp. 15-16 ; § 19 : the Gipsy dialects outside
India, p. 16.
§ 20 : Periods in the History of the Indo-Aryan speech : [1] Old
Indo-Aryan, [2] Middle Indo-Aryan in (a) Early, (b) Transitional,
(c) Second and (d) Third stages, and [3] New Indo-Aryan ; Vedie or
Sanskrit, * Prakrit/ and * Bhasa ' : approximate Dates for these periods ;
pp. 16-17. Characteristics of Old Indo-Aryan, pp. 17-18 ; characteristics
of Middle Indo-Aryan in its various stages, pp. 18-19 ; characteristics of
New Indo-Aryan, pp. 19-20. § 21 : Old Indo-Aryan Linguistics : the
problem of the Prakrits, pp. 20-21. §22: ' Magadhi Apabhransa,'
the source of Bengali and its sister-speeches, p. 31 ; the ' Praeya' speech,
pp. 21-22. § 23 : Genealogical Classification of the New Indo-Aryan
speeches on the basis of the Linguistic Survey of India, p. 22 ; some
hypotheses in working out the history of New Indo-Aryan : the ' Koine '
dialects of ancient and modern times, p. 22.
§ 24 : the Indo-European people, their problematic area of characterisa-
tion, and primitive home, p. 23 ; Dialects in Indo-European, « satam »
and « centum », p. 24. § 25 : Advent of the Indo-Europeans in Western
Asia and Iran : the Aryans— the Mitanni— the Kassites— the Manda
CONTENTS
xxxvii
or Mada people, p. 25 ; Aryan overllow into the Panjab : threefold
division o£ the Aryans : Indo-Aryans, Iranians, Dards, pp, 25-^6.
§ 26 : Aryan and Dra vidian in India : * Hindu' culture, pp. 26-27.
Pre-Aryan elements from the West, in culture and in religion : Western
affinities of the Dravidians, pp. 27-28. >^ 27 : Other Non-Aryans in
India : the Kols and other Austric peoples, the extent ot* the traet
occupied by them, and their absorption in the Hindu population, pp. 28-29.
§ 28 : The Tibeto-Cbinese Mongolians in the Himalayan regions and
in North-Eastern India, pp. 29-30.
§ 29 : Ho9rnle and Grierson*s theory of the ^ Inner ' and * Outer '
Aryans, and * Inner ' and * Outer ' Aryan languages, pp. 30-81 ; § 30,
Ramaprasad Chanda's * Inner' and ^ Outer ' Aryan Races, pp. 31-32.
§ 31 : Criticism of this theory, pp, 32-5*5 (see also Appeudir A, pp.
150-169). § 32 : Old Indo-Aryan Dialects : forms of Old Indo-Aryan
dialectal origin in Yedic, in Sanskrit, in Pali etc., pp. 31-36 ; Vedic or
Sanskrit as the typical or representative form of Old Indo-Aryan,
p. 36.
§ 33 Vedic — a « satam » language, pp. 36-37 : its phonetics :
probable Dravidian influence in both sounds and inflexions, pp. S7-38.
§ 34 : Aryan advent into India : Gandhara, Panjab, BrahmS.varta,
Madhya-desa : foundations of Indo-Aryan culture in the Panjab and
the Midland, p. 39 ; non- Vedic Aryans, p. 10 ; Non- Aryans and the
Aryan invaders — their mutual contact leading to a synthesis of the two
cultures, pp. 40-4)1. § 35 : Non- Aryan (Dravidian) cults and ideas in
the Vedic world, pp. 41-42 ; non-Aryan (Dravidian and Kol) words in
the Old Indo-Aryan speech, p. 42. § 36 : Spread of^Ary^^Q3 peech ani l ^
culture in Northern India from the Panjab eastwards : the Midland, the
Eastern tracts, pp. 42-44 ; purity of the Aryan speech in the North- West
(Udlcya), p. 44 ; advance and phonetic decay of the Aryan speech in the
East : probable Eastern forms in Vedic, pp. 44-45.
§ 37 : the Aryan Speech in the East, in Bihar : the Pracyas,
the Vratyas, pp. 45-46 ; Vratya speech : preference for « 1 », p. 47 ;
the Middle Indo-Aryan stage attained in the East earlier than in the
xxxviii
CONTENTS
West, p. 48 ; Greek names of Eastern Indian peoples and places borrowed
from Western Indo-Aryan dialects, p. 48.
§ 38 : Development of Indo-Aryan : change in sound, and loss of
old roots and words which are replaced by new ones, pp. 48-49 ; conservative
tendencies : gradual establishment of Sanskrit as a literary language
on the basis of the dialects of the Midland and the West, pp. 49-50 ;
Fanini : his date : « chandasa » and < laukika » : dialects and schools
of grammar in Panini's time, pp. 50-51; spread and general adoption
of Paninean Sanskrit by Brahmanical Aryan speakers : Sanskritisation of
popular literature — the ' Mahabharata,' the * Puranas,^ and the ^ Ramayana :
« arsa » forms, pp. 51-52. Later History of Sanskrit : gradual approach
to Prakrit or Middle Indo-Aryan in syntax and in general spirit : mutual
influence in vocabulary, pp. 52-53 ; Sanskrit gradually accepted by the
Jainas and the Buddhists ; approaches to Sanskrit : ^^^atha ' or Mixed
Sanskrit, or Buddhist Sanskrit : Final Triumph of SanskritT^'.' 53-54 ;
.Sanskrit as the feeder of the Vernaculars, p. 54.
^ "^ 4 39^ ' Pracya ' characteristics in phonetics and mori^hology ;
* Eastern Pracya ^ or Magadhi, p. 54 ; * Western Praeya ' or Ardha-magadhi,
the speech of Kosala, the speech of Buddha, pp. 55-56 ; the linguistic
situation in Northern India at the time of Buddha, pp. 55-56 ; Pali,
a Western or rather a Midland Speech, not based on the Eastern dialect (of
Kosala and Magadha), p. 57; influences of the various dialects on Pali,
pp. 57-58 ; Sanskrit influence on Pali, p. 58 ; Ardha-mSgadhi of the Jainas,
p. 58 ; The ' Eastern Praeya ' or Magadhi speech : the « s » pronunciation :
oldest specimens of the Magadhi dialect, pp. 58-59.
§ 40 : The Sutanuka inscription, and the Brahmi seals from Magadha
with « -s- » tor « -s- », p. 59, Dialects in the Inscriptions of Asoka : the
Midland Speech (' Old l§aurasen! ') and the Magadhi Speech (with
the « -s- » characteristic) not represented, p. 60 ; temporary supremacy of
Pracya over Madhya-desa during Maurya times, p. 60 ; Sanskrit influence
on Transitional Middle Indo-Aryan, p. 61 ; Middle Indo-Aryan dialects
and the evidence of usage in the Sanskrit drama, pp. 61-63 ; the position
of Magadhi, p. 61 ; artificial character of later Middle Indo-Aryan, p. 62.
CONTENTS
xxxix
§ 41 : Overflow of Magadhan speech into Bengal, p, 62 ; the
Vaggas^ the Vagadhag, the Cerapadas, the Pundr^ in the Brahmana
literature, pp. 62-68 ; the Radhas and Suhmas in early Jain a tradition,
p. 63 ; Bengal probably linked to Aryan India by the Maurya conquest,
p. 63 ; spread of the Aryan speech through religious and cultural
influence, pp. 63-64.
§ 42 • The Pre- Aryan Peoples of Bengal and their Language :
Bengali Toponomy : Place-names from Ancient Inscriptions, pp. 64-65 ;
words like « jota-, viti (hitti), ga<]^a, pula, handa, -va(Ja etc., pp.
65-67 ; § 43 : Names of tracts in Bengal from Pre-Aryan times
— Pundra, Vagga, Radha, Suhma — originally names of peoples • Dravidian
and Kol tribes, pp. 67-69. § 44 : The Tibeto-Burmans : the ' Kambojas '
( = KSeas) and other tribes of North-Eastern and Noi-thern Bengal :
suggested Tibeto-Burman (Bodo) influence on Bengali, pp. 69-70.
§ 45 : Existence of a Pre-Aryan culture in Bengal, p. 70, but certain
tribes were apparently rude and barbarous, p. 71 ; gradual Aryani-
sation of the Bengal tribes : introduction of Brahmanism, Buddhism
and Jainism : how the Aryan language S2:>read in Bengal, pp. 71-74 ;
progress of the Aryan speech and culture in Radha, in Varendra, and
in Vagga : Samatata : Bagarl : pp, 73-74, (The legend of Vijaya-
sinha the Aryan coloniser of Ceylon : Vijaya-sinha and the first
Aryan colonists in Ceylon went from Gujarat and not from Bengal : later
connexions between Magadha-Bengal and Ceylon, through Buddhism
and through trade, pp. 72-73.) Spread of Aryan speech in Odra, p. 74.
§ 46 : Aryanisation of Bengal in post-Mauryan times : the Susunia
rock-inscription of Candra-varman : the Gupta conquest of Northern
India and of Bengal : Kalidasa's mention of Bengal ; ^ Bhasa ' and Bengal :
Jaina tradition and Bengal, pp. 74-76 : spread of Brahmanical religion and
culture under Imperial Gupta auspices, as evidenced from inscriptions, pp.
76- 77. §47 : Fa Hien in Bengal (Tamralipti), p. 77 ; Hiuen Thsang's
evidence about linguistic and cultural conditions in Bengal and the Assam
and Orissa tracts in the early part of the 7 th century after Christ, pp.
77- 78 ; Assamese and the Kama-rupa speech of the 7th century, p. 79.
CONTENTS
§ 48 : Substantial if not complete Aryanisation of Bengal proper by the
7th century, p. 79 ; political troubles in the 7th century and first half
of the 8th century, pp. 79-80 ; foundation of the Psla dynasty, welding
into a political unity the Aryanised people of Bengal, p. 80 ; the
importance of the Pala period in the history of the Bengali people
and old Bengali culture : formation of a Gau(Ja-Vagga or Bengali nation,
pp. 80-81 ; the rise of the Senas, p. 81 ; dissociation of Bengal from
Magadha and from Mithila in political and cultural matters, p. 81 ;
formation of the Bengali speech, p. 81.
§49 : Materials for the study of the Pracya (and Old Magadhi) speech
as the source of Bengali, p. 82. Fricative Pronunciation of Intervocal Stops
and Aspirates lead to their elisign and weakening, and this marks the
progress of the Early Middle Indo- Aryan dialects into New Indo- Aryan,
pp. 83-85 ; contrast between Mahariatri on the one hand, and Saurasenl-
Magadhl on the other, pp. 85-86. § 50 : Transitional Middle Indo-Aryan,
and the Prakrits of the Grammarians, pp. 86-87 ; grammars treating only
of the archaic forms of speech, p. 87 ; advance of the Second Middle
Indo-Aryan into the Third Middle Indo-Aryan or Apabhransa stage,
p. 87 ; Sauraseni Apabhransa, and other hypothetical Apabhransas, p,
87. §51: Probable date when the ^ApabhranSa^ stage for Middle
Indo-Aryan came in, pp. 87-88 ; the ' Dhakkl ' dialect, p. 88 ; the
« -ta- > -da- » affix in Apabhransa, pp. 88-89 ; late names in « -ta,
-ia », p. 89 ; where the * Apabhransa ' stage was first developed or
noticed, p. 89 ; the term ^ Apabhrania,' and analogous words, pp. 89-90 ;
recent special technical use of the term ^ Apabhrafisa in Indo-Aryan lin-
guistics, p. 90 ; Apabhransa literature, p. 90 ; Importance of Saurasenl
Apabhransa in Aryan India during the period of transition from
Middle Indo-Aryan to New Indo-Aryan, pp. 90-91 ; the 'Avahattha^
speech, p. 91,
§ 52 ' The modern representatives of a ' Magadhi Apabhrafisa ' —
the present-day MSgadhi or Magadhan speeches, their mutual agreements
and inter-relation, pp. 91-92 ; Grouping of the modern Magadhan
speeches : Eastern, Central and Western Groups, p. 92 ; Common
CONTENTS
xli
Magadhan Characteristics, pp. 92-93 ; Characteristics noticeable in
Eastern Magadhan only, pp. 93-94 ; in Central Magadhan, p. 94 ;
in Western Magadhan, pp, 94-95 ; Characteristics common to East
Magadhan and Central Magadhan, p. 95 ; to East Magadhan and
West Magadhan, pp. 95 ; to Central Magadhan and West Magadhan,
p. 96. § 53 : Probable date of separation of the various Magadhan
groups from each other by each following its own line of
development, pp. 96-97 ; ^ Proto-Bengali,' ' Proto-Maithill/ ' Proto-
Oriya' stages, when special characteristics manifested themselves in
these speeches as forms of a Magadhi Apabhransa, p. 97 ; the
establishment of different affixes for the plural of the noun in the
various groups, pp, 97-98 ; division of Eastern Magadhan into (a)
Bengali-Assamese, and (b) Oriya, p. 98 ; shifting of stress in Old West
Bengali, p. 98 ; early establishment of a Literary Speech uniting the
various local dialects of Bengali, p, 98 ; separation of Assamese from the
common Beng ah- Assamese group, pp. 98-99,
§ 54 : Bhojpuriya, a little-cultivated speech, p. 99 ; oldest specimens
in some poems of Kabir, pp. 99-110. § 55 : Magahi : absence of literary
culture of this dialect ; political and other reasons for the subsidiary position
of Magahi in its own home, pp. 100-102. § 56 : Maithill : Sanskrit
culture in Mithila, p. 102 ; Early Maithill literature : the 'Vaina-
ratnftkara ' of Jyotirlsvara fhakura, and the lyrics of Vidyapati,
pp. 102-103 ; influence of Maithill on Bengali : the ^ Braja-buli '
dialect of Vaisnava poetry in Bengal, pp. 103-104 ; the ' Avahattha '
speech in Mithila : Vidyapati's ' Kirtti-lata,' p. 104 ; Early Maithill
contrasted with later Maithill, p, 104 ; probable Kol influence in the
formation of the verb in Magahi and Maithill, p. 104; pre-Moslem
place-names in the Maithili area, p. 104. § 57 : The Oriya people of the
time of Hiuen Thsang, p. 105 ; Oriya speech spread from South- West
Bengal, pp. 105-106 ; spread of Brahmanioal culture, and settlement
of Brahmans in Orissa, p. 105 ; the names ' Odra,' * Orissa ^ (< « Odivisa *
< « Audri-visaya »), and ^ Utkala,^ p. 105 ; conservative character of
the Oriya speech : old references to it, p, 106 ; oldest specimens of
F
xlii
CONTENTS
Oriya in the inscriptions, pp. 106-107 ; value of the orthography in
the 15th and 16th century (and earlier) Oriya inscriptions in determining
the phonetics of Early Oriya, p. 107 ; Early Oriya of literature, p. 107.
§ 58 : Assamese — its close connexion with the Bengali dialects : the earliest
specimens of Assamese : 15th century writers, p. 108 ; place-names
in old Assam inscriptions, p. 109,
§ 59 : Oldest Specimens of Bengali : (1) Place-names from old in-
scriptions, p. 109 ; (2) Words in Sarvananda^s ^ Tika-sarvasva ' commentary
on the ' Amara-kosa,'p. 109 ; Connected Specimens : § 60 : (3) the ' CaryS-
padas,' p. 110 ; their subject-matter, p. 110 ; the ^ Bauddha Gan 0 Doha*
of Mahamahopadhyaya Haraprasada J^astri : probable date of the MS.
of the * Carya-padas,' p. 110; the ' Ddha-kosas ' of Saraha and Kanha
in Western Apabhransa, p. Ill ; the *DakS,rnava' and the speech in
which it is written, p. Ill ; the Sanskrit commentary to the Caryas,
pp. 111-11-2 to the two ' Doha-kosas,' p. 112 ; the subject-matter of the
' Caryas,' p. 112 ; the speech of the ' Caryas ' is Old Bengali, p. 1 12, and
that of the two ' Doha-kosas ' Western or SaurasenI Apabhransa, p. 112 ;
other similar literature in Western Apabhran^ : the * Subhaaita-saggraha,'
and the works or poems rendered into Tibetan in the ' Bstan-Hgyur,'
pp. 112-113. §61: Importance of SaurasenI Apabhransa as the lingua
franca or accepted literary language of Northern India in the formative
period of NIA., p. 113; 'Avahattha' and * Piggala/ pp. 113-114;
Bengali (or East Magadhan) idioms and forms in Western Apabhransa as
written in Bengal (or Eastern India), p. 114 ; the tradition of employing
a western dialect in later Maithill and Bengali literatures, pp, 114-115.
§ 62 : Archaic character of the Old Bengali of the Caryas, p. 1 15 ; ^auraseni
or Western Apabhransa forms in the language of the Caryas, p. 115 ; forms
from the literary Prakrit, pp. 114-115 ; reasons for this Western influence,
p. 116 ; the occurrence of a few Maithill forms in the language of the
Caryas explained, p. 117; the Basis of the Speech of the Caryas probably
West Bengali, p. 117; the Metres of the Carya poems : ' Padakulaka '
and * Payar/ p. 117; proper New Indo- Aryan and Bengali character
of the language of the Caryas, pp. 117-118; Importance of the Caryas
CONTENTS
xliii
as a linguistic document in the history of New Indo-Aryan, p. 118.
§ 63 : Date of the Caryas : the Carya Poets — their identity with the
Siddbas of late Mahayana Buddhism^ p. 119 ; Translations of works
by these Siddhas in the Tibetan ' Bstan Hgyur/ p. 119; the date of
Luyl-pada, one of the Siddhas and Carya poets, pp, 119-120 ; Kanha
the Siddha, poet of the Caryas, and Panditdcarya Srl-Kahna the author
of the ^ Hevajra-panjika Yoga-ratna-mala ' (preserved in a dated MS.),
probably identical, and the same person is in all likelihood the
Kanu-pa of the Gopl-canda legend, pp. 120-122 ; evidence from Old
Marabhi sources about the date of Goraksa-natha and the Kanu-pa of the
Gopi-eanda legend, p. 122 ; evidence from Tibetan tradition for settling
the question of date without much value, pp, 122-123 : the period 950-1200
after Christ the probable date of the Caryas, p. 123.
§ 64 : The ^ Prakf ta-Paiggala ' : alleged Bengali character of some
of the verses considered, pp. 123-124 ; Two Poems attributed to
Jaya-deva from the * Adi-Granth,' pp. 124-125; §65: the Songs in
the * Gita-govinda ' probably originally composed in Old Bengali, or
Western Apabhransa, and then Sanskritised, pp. 125-127.
§ 66 : Typical Middle Bengali of literature — its limitations as
illustrative documents of the history of Bengali due to lateness of MSS.
not preserving the original language intact, p. 127 ; Standard Literary
Language in Early Bengal, and dialectal mix-up in Middle Bengali
literature, pp. 127-128; the ^ ^ri-Kfsna-Klrttani,' : unique character
of the work : the antiquity and genuineness of the MS., p. 128 ; its
importance in the history of the Bengali language, pp. 128-12*^.
§ 67 : Periods^in the History of Bengali : [I] Old Bengali Period,
its characteristics, p^^-l^-T^O ; possible lost literature in it, p. 130.
§ 68 : [2] Middle Bengali Period : (a) Transitional Middle Bengali,
not represented by authentic specimens : probable characteristics of it,
p. 130 ; the works ascribed to this period, and to the earlier one, are
really very late, pp. 131-132; (b) Early Middle Bengali, as represented
by the ' Srl-Kf sna-Kirttana ' and other works : its character — changes
in phonetics, inflexions and vocabulary, pp. 132-133 ; (e) Late Middle
xliv
CONTENTS
Bengali : the Vaisnava literature : Hindi and Maithill influence : ^ Braja-
buli ' : full development of Epenthesis and Umlaut and other Phonetic
changes ; Persian influence on Vocabulary : Stressed Metre, pp. 133-134 ;
§ 69 : [3] New or Modern Bengali : Development of Prose : the
« sadhu-bhasa » : the rise of the Colloquial of Calcutta : ' Hutom Peear
Naksa ' : Rabindranath Tagore : Future of this form of Bengali, pp. 134-
185; Phonetic Advanse in New Bengali, p. 135; Influence of English,
and renewed influence of Sanskrit, p. 136.
§ 70 : Classification of the Dialects of Bengali : Dialectal Forms
in Middle Bengali MSS., p. 136; the ' Crepar Xaxtrer Orthbhed,'
p. 136 ; probable lines of spread of the MSgadhi speech in Benoral, and
its local crystallisation, pp. 136-137 ; OriyS and the old speech of
Radha, p. 137; divisions of West Bengali, p. 137. §71: Four main
Groups of Dialects in Bengal and Assam, and their mutual agreements,
p. 138; Intermingling of Dialects, p. 138 ; Rise of Class or Caste Dialects
which still are current, pp. 138-139 ; mutual influencing of contiguous
dialects, p. 139 ; the Dialects in the Delta, p. 1 39 ; Movement of the
Brahmans within Bengal, p. 139 ; the Standard Colloquial Speech, p. 139.
§ 72 : No single Primitive Bengali as the unique souree of all Bengali
dialects of the present day : special independent developments in the different
localities, pp. 140-141 ; the exact position of the Standard Literary Bengali,
the «sadhu-bhasa • as a composite speech, p. 141 ; Tabular Representation of
the Dialects of Bengali, their areas and mutual relationship, p. 140. § 73 :
Differences among the various dialects or dialect groups : Phonetic, pp.
141-144; Morphological, pp. H4-U6. §74: Factors helping to bring
about Linguistic Unity in Bengal : Political Unity under the Palas —
the Gauda-Vagga land as one country, p, 146; Brahman dispersion all
over Bengal giving a common intellectual aristocracy, pp. 146-147 :
the importance of the latter factor, p. 147 ; connexions between Bengal
and the contiguous tracts — Magadha, Mithila and Orissa, p. 147 ; closer
connexion with Orissa through the temple of Jagannatha as a centre
of Vaisnavism, and through the personality of Caitanya, pp. 147-148;
isolation and separate cultural development of Assam, p. 148.
CONTENTS
xlv
§ 75 : Names for the Bengali Language : the common name Bengal
(Bangalah) for the whole country given by the Turkl and other Mohamme-
dan conquerors, p. 14*8; « zaban-i-Bangalah », the Persian name, and
« Idioma Bengalla », the Portuguese name, p. 148 ; « bhasa » and
« prakrta », p. 14?8 ; « G&u(la, Gaucja-bhasa, G^udiya bha>a », p. 149 :
« Bai|(g)^la-bhasa, Baijg^la, Bangla, Bengal Language^ B&gga-bhasa »,
p. 149.
Appendix A : pp. 150-169.
§ 76 : Retention of Final Vowels in New Indo-Aryan speeches, pp,
150*151 ; Transitional stage of very short vowels in dropping these, pp. 151-
15*2; Epenthesis in New Indo-Aryan, p. 152 ; Derivation of some Bengali
words, p. 152 ; Interchange of « i, u » and « e, o »^ pp. loiJ-153 ; Change
of « u » to « i », p. 153 ; Change of « ai, au » to open « e, 6 », and Hindi
pronunciation of « ai, au », pp. 153-154 ; « ai, au » in Bengali, and final « 5 »
in Bengali, p. 154 ; Pronunciation of « c, j » as palatal and as dental affricates
in New Indo-Aryan, pp. ; 54-156- New Indo-Aryan « g, xi,y^,j>^
p. 155; Derivation of some New Indo-Aryan words, pp. 155-156;
Interchange of « r, 1, r p. 156 ; Interchange of « d, dl », pp. 156-157 ;
Change of « d » to « j », of « mb » to « m », p. 157 ; Elision of intervocal
« -r- », p. 157; the Bengali form ♦ m&ilam », p. 157; Change of inter-
vocal « -s- » to « -h- », p. 158 ; Use of « s » for the other sibilants,
p. 158; Disaspiration in New Indo-Aryan, p. 159; Derivation of some
words, pp. 159-160; Compensatory lengthening of vowels, p. 160;
Absence of compensatory lengthening in Western Hindi, p. 160. § 77 :
The « -i, -i » affix for the feminine, p. 161 ; The ablative post-positions
« h&Yte, sando, hando », p. 161; Synthetic and Analytical Methods in the
Declension of the Noun, pp. 161-162, — in Western Hindi, p. 162 ; in
Bengali, pp. 162-,^ 63; in Marathl, p. 168; in Lahndl, p. 163; help-
words reduced to affixes also in Western Hindi, p. 164; Affixed Pronouns
with Nouns — in Assamese, pp. 164-165; the formation of the Past Tense
of the Transitive Verb, p. 165 ; the Passive and the Active Constructions
in New Indo-Aryan languages, p. 166; the Adjectival Affix « -1- », p.
xlvi
CONTENTS
167. §78: General Agreement in Vocabulary between the 'Outer'
and the 'Inner ' languages : the root « ach », p. 167. § 79 : Conclusion :
Division into two groups * Western ' and * Eastern ' more likely, rather
than into * Inner ' and * Outer ^ groups, pp. 168-169.
Appendix B: pp. 170-171.
§ 80 : Paucity of Diphthongs in both Indo-Aryan and
Dravidian, p. 170; dislike of spirant sounds in both, p. 170; The
question of the Cerebrals, pp. 170-171; Anaptyxis in Dravidian: did
Primitive or Old Dravidian have initial surds only, or sonants as well ? p. 171 ;
other possible Dravidian influence in Phonetics^ pp. 171-172. § 81 : Disuse
of Prepositions in Indo-Aryan, p. 172; New Indo-Aryan Declension,
with Post-positions of nominal or verbal origin, p. 172; Absence of a
Dative- Accusative Affix for Neuter Nouns, p. 172 ; Nature of Dravidian
Influence on Indo-Aryan : not borrowing of affixes or forms, but imposition
into Indo-Aryan of the Dravidian principles of formation, p. 173 ; the Adjec-
tive Genitive in New Indo-Aryan, p, 173 ; Indication of Comparison in Old
Indo-Aryan, and in New Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, as well as in Indo-
European speeches outside India, pp. 173-174; Compound Verbs, p. 174;
Participial Tenses in Indo-Aryan and Dravidian : the importance of the
Conjunctive Indeclinable, pp. 174-175 ; Passives of Compound Verb
Construction, p. 175; Onoraatopoetie Formations in Indo-Aryan, in
Dravidian (and also in Kol), p. 175 ; * Echo Words ' in Indo-Aryan and
Dravidian, p. 176. §82: Syntactical Agreement between New Indo-
Aryan and Dravidian, pp. 176-177 ; Omission of the Copula, p. 177;
Common Idioms occurring in both — e.g,, use of a form meaning having
said, p. 177. §83: Dravidian words borrowed in I ndo- \ryan — probably
begun from outside India, from possible Dravidian speakers in Iran, p. 178.
Appendix C : pp. 179-188.
§§84-110: A List of Place-names from old Inscriptions
(copper-plate grants, inscriptions on stone etc.) from Bengal and Assam,
dating from 432-43:^ A.C. to 1248 A.C., pp. 179-188.
CONTENTS
xlvii
Appendix D : pp. 189-223.
§ 111 : The terms takama, iadlkavay de^l (and videsl) as
used with reference to New Indo- Aryan, and the old employ of these
terms with reference to Prakrit, p. 189 ; the term semi-tatsama explained :
examples of semi-tat samas in Beno^ali, pp. 190-191. § 112: The tadbham
element — its importance, p. 191; the desz element: true dekl words,
p. 192. § 113: The rtrfes^ or Foreign Element: Foreign words (Persian,
Greek) in Middle Indo-Aryan, p. 193; later Persian (New Persian)
words in New Indo-Aryan, p. 193 ; Greek words in Ancient India, pp,
193-ly4 ; Old Persian and Greek words inherited by Bengali from Middle
Indo-Aryan, pp. 194-195. § 114: Classification of New Indo-Aryan
words: some principles to observe, with illustrations, pp. 195-197. § 115:
The tadbJiava and dekl element : cognate forms from other languages in
the Modern Indo-i\ryan speeches driving out of use native forms have
obscured the story of the development of a New Indo-Aryan speech, pp.
197-198; Phonetic Alteration in tadbhava words: typical Bengali
tadbhavas^ pp. 198-199. The study of the desJ words : words of Dravidian
origin; words of Kol origin — the work of J. Przyluski, p. 199; ddsi words
conveniently considered under tadbhavay pp. 199-200; Onomatopoetic
words, p. 200. 5 116: The tatsama words: Prakrit traditions in pronuncia-
tion, pp. 200-201 ; Solecisms in ths use of tatsama words in Bengali, p.
201. § 117: The Foreign Element: Persian words in Bengali, pp. 201-
202 ; Introduction of Persian into Bengal: Turks and ^ Pathans ' in Bengal,
p. 202; Turks and Tajiks in India : spread of Persian in North India, p. 202 ;
Development of Urdu, p. 202 ; Persian in pre-Moghal Bengal, pp. 202-
208 ; Channels through which Persian words could come into Bens^ali
in pre-Moghal times, p. 203 ; Examples of such Early Borrowings, p.
203 ; the Study of Persian in Bengal, as an administrative as well as
a cultural language, pp. 204-205 ; Rate of Adn)ission of Persian Words into
Bengali as evidenced from Middle Bengali literature before 1800, p. 204 ;
Post-Moghal times in Bengal and further influence of Persian, p. 205 ;
Establishment of HindostanI, p. 205 ; Hindostani becomes the vehicle of a
xlviii
CONTENTS
synthetic Indo- Moslem culture, and formed a new channel for the introduc-
tion of Persian words into Bengali etc., p. 206. the Present Extent of
the Persian Element in Bengali, p. 206 ; § 118 : Nature of the Persian
Element : Classification of Persian Words, with examples, pp. 206-308.
§ 119 : the Mohammadans and Bengali : percentage of Mohammadans in
Bengal and in other parts of North India, p. 208 ; Causes of the Spread of
Islam in East Bengal, pp. 208-209 ; slow progress of * Islamic' i.e. foreign
or non-Bengali culture among Mohammadans of Bengal, pp. 209-210;
the poet Alaol, pp. 209-210; Present-day Tendencies among Bengali
Mohammadans, p. 210; 'MusalmanI Bengali,^ — its character and the
literature in it, pp. 210-211 ; Percentage of Persian words in it,
p. 211 ; Hindostanl forms in ^ Musalmani Bengali,' p. 211 ; poor quality
of the literary output in this dialect, as compared with genuine folk
poetry of Bengali Moslemdom, pp, 211-212; * Jagga-namah,' p. 212.
§ 120 : Arabic and Turki words also conveniently included under ^ Persian *
Element in Bengali, pp. 212-213 : List of Turki words in Bengali, p. 213 ;
no direct Arabic influence, p. 214 j Phonetics of the Persian words
in Bengali modified by Turk! pronunciation : Archaic Character of Persian
as used in India, p. 214. § 121 : Portuguese words in Bengali :
how to differentiate them from similar borrowings from English, pp.
214-215. French and Dutch words in Bengali, p. 215. §122: English
words in Bengali : popular borrowings from English, and learned Sanskrit
equivalents for these loan-words, 215-216; Polk Etymology in popular
words, p. 216 ; Nature of the English Element TlWeign Names coming
through English, pp. 216-217 ; Naturalised English Words in Bengali,
p. 217. § 123 : Proportion of the Various Elements of Bengali : in the New
Bengali Dictionary, p. 218; in Old Bengali, pp. 2i8-219 ; in Early Middle
Bengali, p. 219; ousting of tadbhavas by corresponding tatsamas in Middle
Bengali, pp. 219-2->0; Proportion of the V'arious Elements in later Middle
Bengali, p. 220 ; the Early 19th century and the Sanskritising tendency, pp.
220-221 ; Proportion of the Various Elements in Modem Bengali writers
in the different styles, pp. 221-222 ; the Percentage of the Persian
Element in Bengali, pp. 222-223.
CONTENTS
xlix
Appendix E : pp. 224-235.
§ 124 : Origin of the Bengali Alphabet, pp. 224-225 ;
the Maithill, Deva-nagari, Kaithi, and Oriya Alphabets, pp. 225-22G ;
Phonetic History and Orthography, p. 226 ; the « w » glide in the Eastern
languages, and the new letters to denote it, p, 226 ; spelling in the
epigtaphieal records, p. 226 ; Sanskrit influence on Bengali orthography
dislocating the native tadbhava tradition, pp. ^26-227 ; the 50 « aksaras » :
§ and flp, p. 227 ; the old pronunciation of p. 228 ; the
« aksara » principle and Bengali versification, p. 228. § 125 : The. Perso-
Arabic Script and Bengali : some Chittagong MSS. ; Specimens, pp 228-
233. § 126 : The Roman Alphabet and Bengali : Manoel da Assumpgam's
work ; Augustin Aussant ; Halhed ; Gilchrist j pp. 233-234, § 127 : The
'Silet Nagarl' Alphabet, pp. 234-235 ; Other Alphabets used for writing
Bengali, p, 235 ; the question of the Roman Script for Bengali, p. 235.
PHONOLOGY, pp. 237-649.
Chapteb. I : Phonetic History of Indo-Aryax, pp. 239-274.
§ 128: The Old Indo- Aryan Sound-system, pp. 239-24-0 ; Reeonsttue-
tion of Old Indo-Aryan Pronunciation, p. 240 § 129 : the Sounds of OIA.
described : Vowels, pp. 240-242 ; § 130 : Consonants, pp. 242-244 ; the
Semi-vowels, p. 244 : Nasalisation in OIA., p. 244 ; the « anusvara »,
p. 244.
§ 131 : OIA. Changes into Middle Indo-Aryan, pp. '244-245. § 132 :
Palatal Stops > Palatal (and Dental) Affricates in MIA. and NJa.,
pp. 245-249: Evidence from Greek Transcriptions, p, 245, from Epigraphy,
pp. 245-247, from the Prakrit Grammarians, pp. 246-248. § 133 : * Cerebral
« r » ' Pronunciation of intervocal « -d- », p. 249 ; the Pronunciation of
« y » in MIA., as evidenced from inscriptions and from the orthography
of Old Khotanese (?r^ « ys » = « z »), pp. 249-250 ; how OIA. « y« »
altered to « j- » in Second MIA., p. 250 ; the Pronunciation of « v »
in OIA. and MIA, as evidenced from Greek transcriptions, p. £50 ; § 134 ;
Unexploded Stops in Consonant Groups in OIA. leading to Assimilation,
1
CONTENTS
p. 251 ; the Redistribution of Sounds into « aksara » groups, p.
§ 135 : Spirant Pronunciation of OIA. Intervocal Stops in MIA., pp. £5*2-
£54 ; Consonant-system of Typical Second MIA., p, 254; Elision of MIA.
Double Consonants in Ardha-magadhi (« -tr-, -tv- > -tt- > zero »)
inexplicable, pp. -154-255. § 136 : Phonetics of Late MIA. : « -m- » >
« \^ », etc., pp. 255-256 ; Sanskrit borrowings in MIA., p. 256, § 137 :
The Sound-system of Magadhl Apabhransa p. 257 Notes on Magadhi
Apabhransa Sounds, pp. 258-259.
§ 138 : Development of Old Bengali — alteration in Phonetics, p. 259 ;
« a, a»'in Old Bengali : Combinative Changes of « &, a », p. 260 ; other
sounds in Old and in Early Middle Bengali, p. 261. § 139 : Reconstruction
of Old Bengali Pronunciation : Phonetic Transcriptions of passages in Old
Bengali, pp. 261-263 ; in Early Middle Bengali, pp. 263-260. § 140 : The
Sounds of Late Middle Bengali and New Bengali, pp. 267-269 ; New
Bengali Dialectal Sounds, pp. 269-270. § 141: Standard New Bengali
Sounds, and Percentage of their Frequency, as compared with Sanskrit,
pp. 270-272 ; Reasons for the Divergences between OIA. (Sanskrit) and
Bengali, pp. 272-274.
CHAPTJiR II : Phonology of the Native Element : Vowels :
Accent System and its Influence ox Vowels, pp. 275-300.
§ 142 : Loss of Interior Long Vowels of OIA., noticed in NIA., due to
reasons of Stress, p. 275 ; Stress Accent and Pitch Accent, pp. 275-276 ;
Pitch and Stress in OIA. and MIA., pp. 276-277, in NIA., pp. 277-278 ;
Loss of OIA. syllables though Absence of Stress, pp. 278-279.
§ 143 : Accent in Old Bengali : Bengali Stress-system contrasted with
that of Common or Typical NIA., p. 280 ; Non-initial Stress in Bengali
dialects : probable occurrence in Old Bengali of Non-initial Stress, of
Prakrit origin, side by side with Initial Stress which was probably Non-
Aryan, pp. 280-284* ; Evidence of the presence of these two systems from
early orthography, pp. 280-282, and from the development of Middle and
Modern Bengali, pp. 282-288 ; probable non-Aryan influence, pp. 283-284*.
CONTENTS
li
§ 144 : Old Bengali Phrase-stress determined from the Bengrali System
of Versification, p. 284 ; « Matrai-vrtta » Metreis, pp ; the
« Payar » Metre : Vowels m Beiigali distinguished by Quality alone, rather
than by Quantity, p. -285 ; the nature of the « Payar », pp. 2S5-2S6 ; the
« Payar » in Oriya and Assamese : the origin of « Payar » = « Padakulaka »
of MIA., p, -287 ; Metre in Jaya-deva's ' Gita-ijovinda,' p. 288 ; the word
« Payar », p. £88. § 145 : Initial Stress in Jaya-deva's metre, p. 289 ;
the Theory of « aksaras », p. 289 ; Versification in Bengali : (1) « matra-
vftta» and (2) « ak^ara-vftta », pp, 289-291 ; (o) «svara-vrtta » or Stressed
Metre, pp. 292-293 ; Sense-groups of Four Syllables with Head-stress in
NB. and MB., pp. 293-294 ; Stressed Metre in late MB. and NB.,
p. 294 ; Conclusion, p. 295.
§ 146: Dropping of Final and Medial Vowels in MB. : Evidence of
Metre, pp. 295-298 ; Diphthongs in « -i » in MB., p. 299. § 147 : Evidence
from Transcription of Bengal Names by Early European Writers, pp. 299-
300 ; Stress and Contracted Forms of Bengali, p. 300.
Chapter III : Phoxology ov the Native Element : Vowels : pp. 301-378.
[A] OIA. AND MIA. Vowels in Bengali.
^ 148 : Loss of OIA. Final Vowels in Bengali, p. 301. § 149 : OIA.
final « -a » — its Loss, pp. 301-303 ; its Assimilation with preceding vowels,
pp. 30:1-303 ; Pronunciation of the final « -a » in fs. and other words in
NB., pp. 303-305. § 150 : OIA. * -a », lost in Bengali, pp. 305-306 ;
Assimilation with preceding vowels, p. 307. § 151 : OIA. final « -i, -I »
— their loss in NB. after a consonant, pp. 307-308 ; Diphthongisation with
a preceding vowel, pp. 308-309 ; loss of final « -i » in stss., p. 308 ; Final
« -I » in eMB,, p. 309, § 152 : OIA. final « -u, -u »— loss in Bengali,
p. 310 ; Diphthongisation after a vowel, p. 310 ; some apparent exceptions,
pp. 310-311 ; Final « -u » of Western Apabhransa origin, p. 31L § 153 :
OIA., MIA. final « -e » gave « -i », and then this « -i » was lost in NB,,
pp. 311-312 ; the final « -o » extremely rare in pre-Bengali, p. Sl'2. § 154 :
Tatsama influence restores final vowels in many cases, p. 312.
lil
CONTENTS
Vowels in Initial Syllables : § 155: Loss by Aphaeresis in the MIA.
as well as in the NIA. period^ p. 313. § 156: Initial « a- » in OB. and eMB,,
changed to « a- p. 314. § 157 : Post-consonantal « -a- » before sinofle
consonant^ p. 315. § 158: OIA. and MIA. in initial syllables
followed by two consonants, p. 316 ; eases of absence of compensatory
lengthening, in OB., MB., and NB., pp. 316-318; explanation of this
irregularity, p. 319 ; change of « a » in initial syllables to « o pp. 319-
320. Initial « a- and « a » in initial syllables : § 159 : before a single
consonant, pp. 320-321 ; cases of weakening of this « a » in OB. and MB.,
p. 321. § 160: OIA, «a» before two consonants, p. 321, occurring as « & » in
some OB. words, p. 321. § 161 : Fronting: of nasalised « a» to [ae] when
followed by another < a » in NB., p. 322. § 162 : Vowel Quantity in spelling
and pronunciation in Bengali — influence of Sanskrit spelling on Bengali
orthography, pp. 822-«i23. § 163 : Initial « i-, i », and « -i-, -I- » in initial
syllables : before single consonant, pp. 323-324 ; before two consonants,
pp. 324-325. § 164 : Initial « u-, u- », and « -u-, -u- » in initial syllables :
followed by one consonant, pp. 325-326 ; by two consonants, pp. 326-327.
Change of « i, !, u u » to « e, o » in MIA., p. 3^7. § 165 : MIA. « e, e, o,
0 » in initial syllables : Bengali pronunciation of « e » in initial syllables as
[ae], p. 327 ; OIA. *e> before one consonant, pp. 327-328; OIA. and MIA.
« e » before two consonants, p. 328 ; OIA. « ai », p. 328 ; « e » in deal words,
p. 328 ; § 166 : OIA. « 6 » before single consonant, p. 329 ; OIA., MIA.
« o » before two consonants, p. 329 ; OIA. « au, av, av, uv », pp. 329-330.
Vowels in the Interior of Words : § 16?": Vowels Not in Contact in
MIA.— their loss in NB. through absence of stress, pp. 330-334 ; Loss of
« -a- », pp. 830-831 ; Loss of * pp. 331-332 ; Loss of « -i-, -i- »,
pp. 332-333 ; Loss of « -u-, -u- », p. 333 ; Loss of • -e- », p. 384 ; Loss ot
M -0-, -o- *, p. 334. § 168 : Preservation of Interior Vowels, p. 334 : of
« -a », p. 335 ; change of interior « -a- » to « -i-, -e-, -a- », pp. 335-336 ;
preservation of « -a- », p. 336 ; of « -i-, -i- », pp. 336-337 ; of « -u-, -u-
p. 337 ; of « -e-, -6- », p. 337.
§ 169 : Threefold treatment of Vowels in Contact^ p. 338 ; § 170 :
[a] Insertion of Euphonic Glides in MIA. and in NIA., pp. 338-340 ; the
CONTENTS
liii
Euphonic Glides « y, w » in Bengali, pp. 340-341 ; Bengali Orthography and
the Euphonic Glides, p. 341 ; Instances of the Euphonic Glide in Bengali,
p. 342. § 171 : [b] Diphthongisation of Vowels in Contact : in MIA,, and
in Bengali, pp. 342-344 ■ Instances from Bengali, pp. 344-345 ;
Diphthongs in MB. and NB. resulting from « samprasarana », from contrac-
tion, from Epeuthesis : Diphthongs with high vowels and low ones, in MB.
andNB., p, 345. § 172 : [c] Contraction of Vowels in Contact in MIA. and
in Bengali, pp. 345-346 ; the group « aa », pp. 346-349 : New Bengali final
« - & » and final « -a », pp. 348-349 ; the groups « aa, aa, Sa », pp. 349-350 ;
various other groups of MIA. — « ai, aii, ae, ao, ae, u, ii, ia, la,
(uu, uu), ua. ua, ea, ei, oa, oi » etc., pp. 350-353.
[B] TuEAraEKT OK CIA. « f ».
§ 173 : « f * in tadbhava words : OIA. «f » in MIA., pp. 353-354 :
« f » in the different dialects of Early MIA., p. 354 ; « r » > « a, i, u, e,
6 » in tbh. words in Bengali, with examples, pp. 354-356.
§ 174 : « r » in tatsama^t and semi-tatsamas : Medieval Bengali
Pronunciation of « f », as « ri, ir ; re, er ; ra, &r; ro, or », p. 356 ;
semi-tats am as based on the medieval pronunciation, p. 357 ; the use of «f »
to write «ri» in foreign words, p. 358.
[C] Nasalisation of Vowels in MIA. and NIA.
§ 175 : [I] Treatment of final « anusvara » of MIA. in NIA., pp. 358-
359. § 176 : [II] (1) Class Nasals and interior « anusvara > in NIA, :
'Reduced Nasals' and Nasalisation in NIA., pp. 860-361 ; evidence from Early
MB. spelling and Bengali dialects, p. 361. § 177: Nasalisation through Class
Nasals, pp. 3r>2-363 ; assimilation of* gg » to p. 363 ; other groups of
nasal and class consonant, or other consonant, pp. 364-367,
§ 178 : (2) ^ Spontaneous Nasalisation ' in MIA. represented in NIA,,
pp. 368-369 : Examples of Spontaneous Nasalisation in Bengali, pp. 370-
371. § 179 : Nasalisation in Ononiatopoetics, p. 371. § 180 Absence of
Nasalisation, pp. 371-37*2. § 181 : [III] Nasalisation through intervocaN -m- »
and « -n- », pp. 372-373 ; post-consonantal « -m-, -ii- » in tatsamaSj p, 373»
liv
CONTENTS
Chapter : Phoxology of the Native Element : Vowels, pp. 374-43-3,
[D] Intensive Vowel*^.
§ 182 : Glide vowels in NIA. consonant groups, p. 374 : sts, forms in
MIA., pp. 374-375 ; Anaptvxis in NIA., p. 375 ; Intrusive Vowels :
u, e, o » : examples from Bengali, pp. 375-377.
[E] Pbothesis of Vowels.
§ 183 : Prothesis in MIA., p. 377 : in NIA.,esp. Bengali, pp. 377-378.
[FJ Epexthesis.
§ 184 : Epenthesis in MIA., p. 378 ; Epenthesis in the Magadhan
speeches, pp. 378-379 ; Beginnings of Epenthesis in Bengali, p. 379 ;
Character of MB. Epenthesis, pp. :^7 9-381 ; Examples of « i » and « u »
Epenthesis in Bengali, pp. 380-381 ; § 185 : Epenthesis of post-consonantal
« y » in ts, words, pp. 382-383 ; Diphthongs as a result of Epenthesis,
p. 382 ; Bengali Orthography and Epenthesis, pp. 382-384 ; the diphthongal
stage as developed out of Epenthesis retained in many Bengali dialects,
p. 384; § 186 ; Contraction of such diphthongs in the Standard Colloquial,
pp. 384-385 ; Conflict of the Literary Speech and the Standard Colloquial
in the matter of contraction of epenthetic diphthongs, pp. 886-387 ; New
Diphthongs in MB,, p. 387.
[G] Vowel-Mutatiox ok 'Umlaut': Vowel Hakmony,
§ 187 : ' Umlaut ' in Germanic, and in Bengali, pp. 387-388 ; in
Assamese, p. 388. § 188 : ' Umlaut ' as the successive step after
Epenthesis, pp. 388-389 ; line of development, pp. 389-390. § 189 :
Orthography and Umlaut, pp. 390-392. § 190 : (i) Types of Mutation in
Bengali, pp. 392-395. § 191 : (ii) Mutation without Epenthesis : Vowel
Harmony in OB., p. 395, in MB. and in NB., pp. 395-396 ; Cases of
Vowel Harmony through influence of following vowels in Bengali, pp.
396-400 ; § 192 : Cases of Vowel Harmony through influence of preceding
vowels, pp. 400-401 ; Vowel Harmony in semi-tatmnasy pp. 401-402.
CONTENTS
Iv
[H] Origin of the New RExaALi Vowels.
§ 193 : The NB. Standard Colloquial vowels, p. 402. § 194 : Sources o£
NB* [0], pp. 402-404, §195: Sources of NB. [a], p. 404; § 196:
Cases of interchange between [a] and other vowels, pp. 404-405. § 197 :
Sources of NB. [i], pp. 405-407. § 198 : Sources of NB. [u], pp. 407-408;
§ 199 : Interchange between [i] and [u], p. 408. § 200 : Sources of
NB .[e], pp. 408-410. § 201 : The [se] sound in Standard Bengali, and
[s] in dialectal Bengali, p. 410 ; Sources of [ae], pp. 411-413. § 202:
Sources of NB. [0], p. 418. § 203 : Interchange between [i] and [e] and
between [u] aud [o] in Bengali, pp. 414-415, due largely to OIA. Ablaut
and to Bengali Vowel Harmony.
§ 204 : Bengali Diphthongs— in the literary and colloquial speeches,
pp. 415-416. § 205: Bengali [ie], pp. 416-417. § 206: Bengali [ia]'
pp. 417-418. § 207 : Bengali [io], pp. 418-419. § 208 : Bengali [iu],
p. 419. § 209 : Bengali [ei], pp. 419-420, § 210 : Bengali [ea], p. 420.
§ 211 : Bengali [eo], p. 420. § 212 : Bengali [eu], pp. 420-421. § 213 :
Bengali [see], p. 421. § 214 : Bengali [aeo], p. 421. § 215 : Bengali [ai],
pp. 421-42-2. §216: Bengali [ae], pp. 422-423. §217: Bengali [ao],
p. 42:3. § 218 : Beugali [au], pp. 42:3-424. § 219 : Bengali [oe], p. 424.
§ 220: Bengali [oa , p. 425. §221: Bengali [00], p. 425. § 222:
Bengali [oi], pp. 425-426. § 223 : Bengali [oe], p. 426. § 224 : Bengali
[oa], pp. 426-427. § 225 : Bengali [ou], p. 427. § 226 : Bengali [ui],
p. 428. § 227 : Bengali [ue], p. m ; § 228 : Bengali [ua], pp. 428-429.
§ 229 : Bengali [uo] , p. 429.
§ 230 : Bengali double vowels [ii, ee, aa, 00, uu], p. 429.
§ 281 : Triphthong and Tefcraphthongs in Bengali, p. 429.
[I] Vowels in Sanskrit Words
§ 282 : Bengali pronunciation of Sanskrit Vowels, pp. 429-430 ;
Bengali pronunciation of Sanskrit given in phonetic transcription, pp.
430-431 ; § 233 : Examples of Bengali semi-tatsamas widely removed
from the originals, pp. 4S1-432.
Ivi
CONTENTS
§ 234 : Limitations to our Phonetic Studies of Beno^ali due to the
absence of properly observed and recorded data, p. 432.
Chapter V : Phonology of the Native Element :
Consonants : pp. 433-558.
[A] OlA. Consonants : General Lines of Change to Bengali.
§ 235 : [1] General History of OIA Single Consonants — initial and
inter voeal, pp. 433-434 ; [II] Histojy of the Compound Consonants, or
Consonantal Groups, pp, 434-437.
[B] Aspiration and Deaspiration.
§ 236: Aspiration, and absence of it, in OIA., p, 437 ; Initial Aspiration
through presence of « s- » in the earliest OIA., pp. 437.438 ; through
presence of « -r- », p. 438 ; through Dravidian influence, p, 438 ; Cases of
Aspiration beside unaspirated forms in Bengali, pp. 438-439. § 237 :
Unexplained Aspiration in the interior of words in MIA. and in NIA., pp,
439-440. § 238 : Aspiration and Deaspiration through Metathesis of « h »,
pp. 440-441. § 239 : Loss of intervocal and final Aspiration in MB. and
NB., pp. 441-44*2, § 240 : ('onditions regarding aspiration in NB., pp.
442- 443 ; § 241 : Orthography of NB. and deaspirated consonants, pp,
443- 444. 4 242 : Deaspiration in other NIA., p. 444 • § 243 : Loss of
Aspiration in MIA. : Assimilation of « visarga » without aspiration of a
connected consonant, pp. 444-445.
[C] Intmchange of Consonants.
§ 244 : Cases of Voicing and Unvoicing, between [k, g],
[t,f' > r], [t, d], [p, b], pp, 415-446 ; § 245 : Change in point of articula-
tion, between [ /, ^(h)], [L n], [m, w], [jg, z], pp. 446-447.
[D] Doubling of Consonants.
§ 246 : Doubling before the semi-vowels and liquids in Bengali,
p. 447 ; by assimilation of « r », p. 447 ; through emphasis, pp. 447-448.
CONTENTS
Ivii
[E] Changes of Consoxants in Contact : Assimilation.
§ 247 : The Assimilation of « r pp. 448-449 ; Full Explosion of
Stops in Consonant Groups, p. 449 ; Assimilatory Deaspiration, p. 449 ;
Regressive Assimilation in Consonants of the Same Class, p. 450 ; Absence
of it in Consonants of Different Classes, pp. 450-451, and also Presence
of it in such eases, p. 451 ; Assimilation in the Chittagong Dialect,
pp. 451-452 ; Progressive Assimilation, p. 452.
[F] Metathesis.
§ 2& : Instances from Bengali, pp. 452-453.
[G] Haplology.
§ 249 : Instances from Bengali, p. 453.
[H] History of the Bestgau Consonants.
[I] The Stops and the Affricates, with the Aspirates.
(1) The Gutturals or Velars : § 250 : TJnder-articulation and Voicing,
pp. 453-454 ; Elision, p. 454 ; Spirant Pronunciation in Dialects^ — intervoeal,
p. 454, initial, pp. 454-455 ; [k] in the 'Crepar Xaxtrer Orthbhed', p. 455.
§ 251 : The Sources of NB. « k » in MIA. and OIA., pp. 455-457 ; * k »
as an Affix, p. 457 ; final pleonastic « k », pp. 457-458 ; Cases of resultant
* k » in NB., p. 458. § 252 : « kh » > [x, B] in Dialects, p. 458 ; in the
*Crepar Xaxtrer Orthbhed,' p. 458 ; Sources of NB. < kh pp. 460-461.
§ 253 : Elision of « g » in Dialects, p. 461 ; Sources of NB. « g », pp-
461-463 ; Resultant « g » in Dialects, pp. 462-483. § 25.4 : NB. « gh —
its Sources, p. 463 ; « gh » in some obscure words, p. 464.
(2) The Palatals : § 255 : Dental Affricate Pronunciation of the Palatals,
pp. 464-465 ; § 256 : Evidence from Tibetan, p. 465 ; Alternation of
« c, eh » with « s », p, 465 ; § 257 : Alternation of « c, ch » and the
Sibilants in OIA. and MIA., pp. 466-467 § 258 : Intervoeal Palatal
Stops in Magadhi Prakrit, in Bengali and in other NIA., p. 468. § 259 :
H
Iviii
CONTENTS
OIA.« ks » > « (k)kh, (e ch » in MIA. : dialectal differentiation, p. 469.
§ 260 : The MIA. changes of « ty, dy » to « tiy, yy ; cc, 33 etc., p. 470.
§ 261 : The Sources of NB. * c », pp. 470-472. § 262 : The Sources
of NB, « eh >, pp. 472-473 ; Interchange of « ch » and Sibilant, pp. 473-
474 ; Dialectal Dropping of intervocal « eh », p. 474. § 263 : Sources
of NB. « 3 » : Sanskrit « y » pronounced as « 3 », pp. 474-477 ; The « dz »
Pronunciation of « j », and « s » Pronunciation of « ch p. 477. § 26i :
The « jh » sound in NIA., pp. 477-478 ; Typical Groups of Words in
Bengali with initial « jh- », with suggested derivations, pp. 478-481 ;
Sources of NB. « jh », pp. 481-482.
§ 265 *. Interchange of Palatals with other consonants — Gutturals,
Cerebrals and Dentals : examples, pp. 482-483.
(3) The Cerebrals : § 266 : Cerebralisation in OIA. in the Eastern
Dialect : Kesultant Cerebralisation^ pp. 483-487 : Fortanatov's Law,
p. 484 ; Eastern Cerebralisation practically a continuation of Eortunatov's
Law, p. 485 ; forms with cerebralisation, and without, in MIA. dialects,
pp. 486-487. § 267 : Spontaneous Cerebralisation, pp. 487-488 ; Cerebral-
isation in deH words, p. 489. § 268 : Sources of NB. « pp. 489-492.
§ 269 : Sources of NB. « th », pp. 492-494. § 270 : « r(h) » pronun-
ciation of intervocal « -d(h)- », p. 494. § 271 : Sources of NB. «d-^ -r- »,
pp. 494-497 ; « d-, -f- » in some obscure words, pp. 497-498 ; § 272 :
Sources of Bengali « ^h~, -rh- », pp. 498-500.
(4) The Dentals : § 273 : Changes undergone by the OIA. Dentals
through Contact with other Consonants, pp. 500-501 ; the Sources of NB.
« t », pp. 501-503. § 274 : Sources of NB. « th », pp. 508-505. § 273 :
Sources of NB. « d », pp. 505-506. § 276 : Sources of NB. « dh », pp.
506-507 ; Interchange between « dh » and « dh p. 507 ; « dh » in
some obscure words, pp. 507-508.
(5) The Labials : § 277 : LabiaHsation through influence of « v, m » in
MIA., p. 508 ; * -V- » > c -p. » in MIA., pp. 508-509 ; MIA. Dialects and
Labialisation, p. 609. § 278 : The « p » sound in Bengali : change to
the spirant, p. 509 ; Sources of NB. « p », pp. 509-511. § 279 : Sources
of NB. « ph », pp. 511-513 ; « ph » in some obscure words, p. 512,
CONTENTS
lix
§ 280 : Sources of NB. « b pp. 513-514. § 281 : Sources of NB. « bh »,
pp. 515-516; « bh » in some obscure words, p. 516,
§ 282 : Elision of OIA. intervoeal consonants, p. 517 ; of intervocal
« r » in Bengali, p. 517.
[II] The Nasals in New Bengali and in Old and Middle Bengali.
§ 283: The Pronunciation of « anusvara » in Bengali, pp. 517-518.
§ 284 : v§ [g] in OB., MB. and NB., p. 518 ; the ^] and [y] sounds in
OB. and MB., pp. 518-519 ; OIA. intervoeal « m » reduced to a mere
nasalisation in Bengali : examples, pp. 519-5-21; Loss of Nasalisation in
« w < m », pp. 520-521 ; Nasalisation of « v, w », p. 521 ; Nasalisation of
NB. resultant « -m- », p. 521 ; Interchange between [g] and [m] in NB.,
pp. 521-522. § 285 : The ^ * n » (or [p]) in Benorali, pp. 522-533. § 286 :
The «l «n» sound in Bengali, pp. 523-5^4; likelihood of the occurrence
of « n » in Early Bengali, pp. 524-526 ; « n » in dialectal NB., p. 526 ;
« n » > « nt » > « --t pp. 526-527, § 287 : Sources of NB. Dental « n »,
pp. 527-529 ; Elision of « -n- », p. 529 ; « n » in some unexplained words,
p. 530 ; Interchange of « n » with « m, g >, p. 530. § 288 : Sources of
NB. « m », pp. 530-532 ; Change of intervocal « -b- » to « m p. 531 ;
Intrusive or Euphonic « -m- », p. 532.
[Ill] The Se:mi-vowbls.
§ 289 *• The circumstances of their occurrence in MB. and NB., p.
533; the [e] glide in NB., pp. 533-534 ; Pronunciation of post-consonantal
« .y » in MIA,, p. 534. § 290 : The [o] glide in MB., p. 534 ; the * v »
subscript in is, words, p. 534 ; its revival in orthography, pp. 534-535 ;
[o] in New Bengalij p. 535.
[IV] The Liquids ' r ' and ' l ' in Bengali.
§ 291 : The * Pracya ' speech and « r^ 1 », p. 535 ; MIA. dialectal cross-
influences in the matter of «r,U, pp. 535-537; the « r, 1 » question in NIA.,
pp. 537-538; the History of the Magadhi « 1 » in the Modern Magadhan
speeches, pp. 537-538. § 292: The Question of the Cerebral « j » in MIA.
k CONTENTS
and NIA., pp. 538-539 ; Palatalised « ly » in MIA. and in dialectal
Bengali; p, 539 ; Cerebralised « 1 » in Oriya, p. 539. § 293 : The Sources
of NB. « r »j pp. 539-540 ; Interchange of < r, r p, 541 ; § 294 :
Dropping of pre-consonantal « r » in NB., pp. 541 ; wrong Intrusion of
« r », pp. 541-542; the intervocal « r » in Bengali, dropped or intruded, p.
542 ; Initial « r » in dialectal Bengali, pp. 542-543. § 295 : The Sources
of NB. « 1 »j pp. 543-544 ; « 1 » in words of dest origin, p. 544 ; Elision
of « 1 », p. 544 ; Intrusion of « 1 p. 545. § 296 : Interchange of
« 1 » and « n pp. 545-46,
[V] The Sibilants in Bengali.
§ 297 • The Question of Palatal and Dental in the Magadhan speeches,
pp. 546-547 ; Orthography and the Sibilant Sound of Bengali, p. 547,
§ 298 : Sources of the NB. [J] sound, pp. 54S-549. § 299 : The Problem
of the Change of intervocal Sibilant (single or double) to « h » in MIA. and
in NIA., pp. 549-550 ; Preservation of the Sibilant the Rule in Bengali,
p. 550 ; Change of the Sibilant to [h^ x] in East Bengal and in Assam,
pp. 550-551. § 300 : Interchange of the Bengali Sibilant with « e, ch
p. 551. § 301 : Intrusive Sibilant before Consonants in NB., and
the ancient MIA. (Magadhi Pi-akrit) characteristic in pronunciation,
pp. 551-552,
[VI] The 'h' Sounds in Bengali.
§ 302 : Initial, and intervocal, and final « h » in Bengali, p. 552 ;
Sources of NB. « h », pp. 552-556 ; « h » from the Sibilants, pp. 555-556.
§ 303 : Prothetic « h- » in Bengali, p. 556 ; Euphonic intervocal « h »,
p. 556 ; « h » in some obscure words, pp. 556-557. § 304 : Final « -h »
in Bengali, p. 557; Intervocal « -h- » in Interjections, p. 557 ; Metathesis
of « h » in Consonant Groups, p. 557, § SOS : Unvoiced « h » : « visarga »
in Bengali, in Interjections, p. 558 : the Pronunciation of the « visarga » in
Bengali, and in Sanskrit, and in Foreign words, p. 558.
CONTENTS
Ixi
Chapter VI : Phonology of ihe Foreign Element :
Peesun, pp. 539-619.
§ 306 : Arabic and Turk! words introduced into Bengali through
Persian, p. 559 ; Arabic words in Spanish etc. and in Indian languages,
p. 559, foot-note ; Early Persian and Modern Persian Sound-systems, pp.
559«560 ; Turki influence in the Indian pronunciation (and grammar of)
Persian, p. 560 ; Persianised Indian words, p. 560 ; the HindostanI speech
as the medium of Persian influence in India from the 1 8th century
downwards, p. 561,
§ 307 : The Sound-system of Early Persian : the Sounds tabulated and
described, pp. 561-564 ; modern aspirate pronunciation of the unvoiced
stops, p. 662 ; « ma'ruf I, u » and « majhul e. o » in Persian, p. 563.
§ 308 : Phonetics of Classical Arabic— its Sound- system, and the
reconstruction of it, pp. 564-565 ; the Sounds of Arabic tabulated and
described, pp. 566-569 ; the ' emphatic ' consonants of Arabic, pp. 567-568 ;
the letter u^, p. 568.
§ 309 : The Sounds of TurkT, pp. 569-571 ; Persian modification of
Turki sounds, p. 571.
§ 310 : The Sounds of HindostanI, p. 571 ; Imposition of Persian
sounds upon HindostanI, pp. 571-572.
§ 311 : Wide deviation from the original Persian sounds in some
Bengali words, p. 572 ; Transliteration and Phonetic Transcription of
Persian, p. 573.
§ 312 : Treatment of the Persian Vowels in Bengali, p. 573.
[I] Short Vowels : § 313 : (1) Persian short « & » in Bengali, pp. 573-
579 ; Initial « » and « -a- » in initial and interior syllables, pp. 574-578;
Final * -a- p. 579.
§ 314 : (2) Short * i, 5 » of Persian in Bengali, pp. 579-580, § 315 :
(3) Short * u, o » of Persian in Bengali, pp. 581-582.
[II] Long Vowels : § 316 : (1) Long * a » in Bengali, pp. 582-584,
§ 317 : (2) Long « I, e », pp. 584-586, § 318 : (8) Long * u, o »
pp. 585-586.
Ixii
CONTENTS
[III] The Diphthongs : § 319 : (1) Persian <.ai », pp. 586-587 ; § 320 :
(2) Persian « au », pp. 587-588.
[IV] Changes of a General Character : § 321 : (1) Combination of
two Separate Vowels, pp. 588-589; (2) Dropping of Vowels : §322:
(i) Aphseresis, p. 589; § 323 : (ii) Syncope, pp. 589-591 ; § 324 : (iii) Loss
of Pinal Vowels, p. 591. (3) Addition of Syllables : § 325 : (i) Anaptyxis,
pp. 591-592 ; (ii) Addition of vowels at the'end of words, p. 593.
The Consonants : [I] The Glottal « h » and « ^ayn » of Arabic.
§ 326 : ifbe « h » sound of Persian — initial, intervoeal and pre-consonantal,
as well as final, pp. 593-596. § 327 : The « ^ayn » in Bengali,
p. 596.
[II] The Uvular Stop [q], and the Velars : § 328 : the Uvular [q] in
Bengali, pp. 596-597 ; § 329 : Persian « k », pp. 597-59S. § 330 : Persian
« g », p. 598. § 331 : Persian [x], p. 599 ; § 332 : Persian [xw], pp.
599-600. § 333 : Persian [9] , p. 600.
[III] The Palato-alveolar Affricates : § 334 : Persian « e », pp. 600-
601 ; § 335 : Persian : « j », p. 601.
[IV] The Persian Dentals: §336: Persian * t », pp. 601-G02. § 337 :
Persian « d », pp. 602-603 ; § 338 : Persian « ?J pp. 603-604.
[VJ The Persian Labials : § 339 : Persian « p », pp. 604. § 340 :
Persian « b », pp. 604-605. § 341 : Persian f », pp. 605-606.
[VI] The Persian Nasals : § 342 : Persian [g], pp. 606-607. § 343 :
Persian « n p. 607. § 344 : Nasalisation of Vowels from contiguous
« n », pp. 607-608 ; Spontaneous Nasalisation, p. 608. § 345 ; Persian
« m », pp. 608-609 ; Nasalisation through « m », p. 609.
[VII] The Persian Liquids : § 346 : Persian <« r », pp. 609-610. Loss
of « r » in Bengali, and intrusive « r p. 610, § 347 : Persian « 1 », pp.
610- 611 ; Interchange of « 1 » and « n », p. 611.
[VIII] The Sibilants of Persian : § 348 : Persian « s » and « § pp.
611- 618 ; Bengali « ch, c for Persian « s, § pp. 612-613. § 349 :
Persian « z », pp. 613-614. § 350 : Persian « 5 », p. 614.
[IX] The Semi-vowels : § 351 : Persian « y » in Bengali, pp. 614-615 ;
§ 352 : Persian € w, v » in Bengali, pp. 615-617.
CONTENTS
Ixiii
[X] Consonant Changes of a General Character : § 353 : Metathesis,
pp. 617-618 ; Elision, p. 618 ; Insertion of Consonants, pp. 618-619.
Chapter VII : Phonology of the Foreign Elemext :
Portuguese, pp. 620-632,
§ 354 : The Portuguese and their Language in Bengal, pp, 620-621 ;
the Pronunciation o£ Portuguese, early and recent, p. 6'U ; Foreign
(non -Latin) words through the Portuguese, p. 621.
The Vowels : § 356 : Portuguese « a, a », pp. 622-625 ; § 366 : the
nasal diphthong « ao », pp. 628-624 ; § 357 : Portuguese « e, e », pp.
624- 625 ; the diphthong « ei », p. 625 ; § 358 : Portuguese « i, i ^ pp.
625- 626 ; § 359 : Portuguese * o, 6 ^ pp. 626-627 ; the diphthongs « oi,
ou », p. 627 ; § 360 : Portuguese « u, u ^ p. 627 ; § 361 : Intrusive
Vowels in Portuguese Consonant Groups, p. 627 ; intrusive final « a »,
p. 627.
The Consonants : § 362 : Portuguese « b », p. 627 ; § 363 : Portuguese
« e », p . 628 ; § 364 : Portuguese « eh p. 628 ; § 365 : Portuguese
* d » p. 628 ; §§ 366-369 : Portuguese « f, g, h, j p. 629 ; § 370 :
Portuguese « 1 » and « Ih », pp. 629-630 ; § 371 : Portuguese « m
p. 630 : § 372 : Portuguese « n » and « nh », p. 630 ; §§ 373-375 :
Portuguese « p, q, r », p. 630 ; § 376 : Portuguese « s », pp. 630-631 ;
§ 377 : Portuguese « t p, 631 ; § 378: Portuguese *v»: absence
of the spirant pronunciation of ^ = « bh » in Early Modern Bengali,
p. 631 ; § 379 : Portuguese « x », p. 631 ; § 380 : Portuguese • z »,
p. 632.
Chapter VIII : Phonology op the Foreign Element :
* English, pp. 633-648.
§ 381 : The English in Bengal : the European rivals of the English, p.
633 ; Early Borrowings in Bengali from English, p. 633 ; ever-increasing
stream of English words, p. 683 ; naturalisation of English Loan-words in
Bengali, pp. 633-634.
Ixiv
CONTENTS
Bengali Pronunciation of English — its Character — with Specimen of
Bengali-English Pronunciation in Transcription, pp. 634-635.
The Vowels : § 382 : Quantity of English Vowels ignored, pp. 635-636 ;
the Vowels of Standard Southern English, p. 636 ; § 383 : English,
[i, i:, s, a:], p. 636 ; § 385 : English [d, O:]— the early pronunciation
of these English sounds from the evidence of Bengali and other Indian
borrowings, and from transcriptions into English of Indian names and
words, pp. 636-638. § 385 : English [u, u:] ; English [a] : the early
19th century pronunciation of the English [a], p. 638; § 386 : English
[9], p. 638-639 ; English [3:], p. 639 ; § 387 : the English Diphthongs :
[ei], [ai], p. 639 ; [au], and its early pronunciation in English, pp.
639- 640 ; [ou], [01], [01], [iaj, [u9], [oa], [sa],p. 640 ; § 388 : Loss of
Vowels, p. 640 ; Anaptyxis of Vowels, pp. 640-641 ; Prothesis, pp.
640- 641 ; Addition of final Vowels, p. 641 ; 'Italian' values in foreign
names, p. 641.
The Consonants ; | 389 : the Stops and Nasals, and Affricates :
the Alveolar Sounds of English, pp. 641-642 ; the Nasals, p. 642 ; the
Affricates [tj, dg], p. 642 ; § 390 : the Liquids : ' clear ' [1], and ' dark '
[i], and [r], p. 642 ; § 391 : the Fricatives : [h], [s], [JJ, [z], [5],
[*]> P], M> W» PP- 642-643 ; the English [v] and the spirant
pronunciation of ^ « bh » in Bengali, pp. 643-644 ; § 392 : the Semi-vowels
« y, w » [j, w] of English, p. 645.
§ 393 : A List of Typical Naturalised Loan-words from English in
Bengali, pp. 645-648.
MORPHOLOGY, pp. 649-1056.
Chapter I : Formative Affixes, pp. 651-714.
§ 394 : OIA. Affixes in NIA. : living and dead m affixes, pp. 651-652.
[AI Suffixes— [I] Tadbhava Suffixes : § 395 : (1) the Suffix « -i, 4 »
p. 652 ; § 396 : (2) the Suffix ^ -o », pp. 652-653 ; MB. personal
names in « -o », p. 653 ; § 397 : (3) Affixes derived from the OIA.
Active Present Participle « -&nt. » : « &nt& », « &t », « -&t& », « -at »
CONTENTS
Ixv
pp. 653-655 ; § 398 : (4) * -atl, -iti », pp. 655-656 ; § 399 : (5) : * -an^
-on^, -en^ », p. 656 ; (5a) « -ana, -na », p. 657 ; (ob) « -&n!, -unl, -ni
(-D1) * etc., pp. 657-658 ; § 400 : (6) * -a » (i), Definitive, Pejorative,
Connective, A*^cntive and Pleonastic, pp. 658-659 ; ^ 401 : (7) « -a »
(ii ). Passive Participle and Verbal Noun Affix, pp. 660-661 ; § 402 :
(8) «-ai»(i), Verbal and Abstract Noun Affix, pp. 661-662 ; § 403:
(9) * -ai » (ii). Diminutive, p. 662 ; § 404 : (10) * -ait^, -at^ p. 663 ;
§ 405 : (11) • au > -ao pp. 663-664 ; § 406 : (11a) < -aua > -oai
p. 664 i § 407 : (12) • -at?t, -ati (-ati) », p. 664 ; § 408 : (13) « -an^,
-an& (-ano) » (i), pp. G64-665 ; (13a) « -ani, -unT, -ni » etc., pp. 665-666 ;
§ 409: (14) « -ao^ (-ano) » (ii), p. 666 ; § 410: (15) « -ani (-ani) »,
p. 666 ; §411: (16) « -am^, -am&, -ami, -ma, -mi » etc., pp. 666-667 ;
§ 412 : (17) « ar?l, -arl, -ra, -ri » etc. (i), p. 668 ; § 413 : (IS) * -ar?t,-ari »
(ii), pp. 668-669 ; §414: (19) • ar?i, arl » (iii), p. 669 ; § 415: (20)
« -aru », p. 669 ; § 416 : {^^) * -al& » (i), with extensions « -ala,
-all pp. 670-671 ; § 417 : (2^) « -a]& » (ii)j also with extensions « -ala,
-all*, pp. 670-671 ; § 418: ('23) « -I, -i * (i), pp. 671-672 ; the form
* -ui », p. 672 ; § 419 : (24) * -I, -i » (ii), Feminine, Diminutive and
Abstract Affix, pp. 67-2-674 ; § 420 : (25) * -i », Verbal Noun Affix,
p. 674 ; § 421 : (26) « -iya, -ia > -e », pp. 674-675 ; § 422 : (27) « -iye,
-ie pp. 675-676 ; § 423 : (28) * -it- », p. 676 ; § 424 : (29) * -ib- »,
p. 676 ; § 425 : (30) « -il^ » (i), Adjectival, pp. 676-677 ; § 426 : (31)
« -il4 » (ii), Past Base, p. 677 ; § 427 : (32) * -u, -u » (i), pp. 677-67S ;
§ 428 : (33) « -u, -u > -0 > -a » (ii), p. 678; § 429 : (34) ^ -ua, -uo, -o »,
p. 679.
§ 430 : (35) « » and its extensions : « -ka » (i), Nominal (=abstraet,
concrete, onomatapoetic), pp. 679-682; the MIA. ^ -kka » : its Source in
OIA., with possible Dravidian influence, pp. 680-681 ; Extensions of this
« -ka » in Benc^ali, pp. 681-682 ; § 431 : (36) * -ka > (ii), with extensions,
pp. 682-683 ; § 432: (37) * -k&r^ », p. 683 ; § 433: (38) * -goeher^,
-goc(h)4», pp. 683-684 ; § 434: (39) « -c^, -ac^ », p. fi84 ; § 435:
(40) « -ja », p. 684 ; § 436 : (41) * -ta » (i) and its extensions * -ta, -ti,
-tiya > -te », pp. 684-686 ; § 437 : (42) • -^t^ » (ii), p. 687 ; § 438 :
1
Ixvi
CONTENTS
(43) « -ta » (iii), with oxtensions, p. 687 ; § 439 ; (44) « » (i with
extensions, pp. 687-688 ; § 440 : (45) « -ra » (ii), with extensions, pp.
688-689 ; § 441 : (46) « -ra » (iii), with extensions, pp. 689-691 ; the
Apabhransa « -''n, -'jl » Affix, p. 689 ; Source of this « -(Ja, -fjl » — NIA.
-rl, -ri » etc., pp. 689-690 ; Exaniples of this Affix from Bengali, pp.
690-691 ; § 442 : (47) * -t^, -ti . (i), pp. 691-692 ; § 443 : (48) < -t^,
-tfk, -ti » (ii), p. 692 ; § 444 : (49) * -t^, -ta, -ti, -uti » (iii), p. 692 ;
§ 445 : (50) the Feminine Affix « -ni, -n, -ini, -uni » etc., pp. 692-696 ; its
Sources in OIA., pp. 692-69^^ ; its oncroaehini^ij upon the domain of « -i »,
pp. 694-695 ; § 446 : (51) « -p^na p. 696 ; § 447 : (5->) « -m&nt& >
« -m^ta, -mat^, -m^n^ », pp. G90-697 ; § 448 : (5*3) « -rii > -rii, -ur »,
p. 697 ; § 449 : (54) « -la » and its extensions, pp. 697-698 ; § 450 ;
(55) « -s^, -sa, -c4ia, -ca », with extensions, pp. 699-700 ; ^ 451 : (56)
« .sa(h)i p. 700 ; § 452 : (57) « -s^i^, -s&ra >, pp. 700-701 ; § 453 :
(58) « -sDa », p. 701 ; § 454 : (59) « -har^, -hara » p. 701.
^ 455 : Other fadbhara Affixes, pp. 701-702.
[II] TnU.\mu Suffixes ; § 456 : their adoption through the occurrence
of a large /-v. element in the speech, p. 702 : Doubling of Consonants
in the ?.IIA. U. forms, pp. 702-703. § 457 : (1) * -ima », p. 703; § 458:
(:2) c -lya p. 703 ; § 459 : (3) « -ka pp. 703-704 ; § 460 : (4) « -t(a),
-it(a)», pp. 704-705 ; §461: (5) * ^t&by& », p. [705 ; § 462 : (6) « -ta »,
p. 705 ; § 463 : (7) * -twa p. 705 ; § 464 ; (8) « -para p. 706 ;
§ 465 : (9) * -m&y^ », p. 706 ; § 466 : (10) * -s&hii ^, p. 706; § 467 : (11,)
« -suddha, -snddha >, p. 706.
§ 468: [III]: Foreign Suffixes of Persian Ori^^nn, pp. 707-709.
[B] Prefixes: [I] Prefixes of Native [thh. and U,) Origin: § 469: (i)
« a-, a-, &na- », Privatives, pp. 709-710 ; § 470: ('3) * a-, a- », Pleonastic,
pp. 710-711; § 471 : (3) « ku- », p. 711; § 472: (4) * d4r^. », p. 713 ;
§ 473 : (5) * ni-, nir- », p. 711 ; § 474 : (6) * bi-, be- », p. 712 ; § 475 : (7)
«s&. ^ p. 712; § 476: (8) « su- », p. 712; § 477: (9) * ha- », pp. 712-713.
Some other Words used as Prefixes, p. 713.
[II] Prefixes of Foreign Origin: § 478: Persian Prefixes, pp. 713-
714; § 470 : English Prefixes, p. 714,
CONTENTS
Ixvii
Chapter II : Declension of the Nolx, tp. 715-7S1.
[A] Stems.
§ 580 : OIA. Noun Stems reduced in their number by phonetic decay
in ]\IIA. and in NIA., p. 715; the Sterna in the Apabhransa period
tending to be reduced to a single « -a » stem, pp. 715-716; Long Vowel
Stems in NIA. due to contraction, p. 716 ; the predominance of the « a »
stem in Early Benoali, p. 716.
§481: Nominative and oblique in NIA., pp. 716-717; Levellins^ of
special forms for the feminine to those for the masculine, p. 7 J 7 ; § 482 :
One Declension in Bengali : Consonantal and Vowel Stems, and the
phonetic modification in the inllexions consequent to these Stems : « -nit,
-er^ » ; insertion of « -t- » : pp. 717-719.
[B] Gendbk.
§ 483 : The Feminine Affixes in the Adjective — « -a, -i », p. 7*20 ;
Grammatical Gender in NIA,, p. 720; Grammatical Gender in OB., pp.
720- 721, m MB., p. 721; Non-x\ryan influence in doing away with
grammatical gender in the Eastern speech and in Bengali not hkely, pp.
721- 722 ; Differentiation between Animate and Inanimate Nouns, p. 722.
[C] Number.
§484. Loss of the Dual, p. 722; OIA. Plural (Nominative) Inllexiout
— how far preserved or lost in NIA., p. 723 ; Extension of the Instrumental
and Genitive Plural Affixes to the Nominative, p. 723. § 485 : Nominative
and Oblique Plural kept distinct in most of the NIA, speeches, pj). 723-
724; the Instrumental Affix used for the Nominative in NIA.— evidence
from Western Hindi, from Awadhi, from Oriya, from Bengah', pp. 721-
725; § 486: the old Genitive Plural in * -na » as a Plural Affix in Bengali,
p. 725 ; this encroaches into the verb, and drives away « -anti, -enta »
etc., pp. 725-726 ; the Genitive > Nominative Plural * -na » in OB.
ixviii
CONTENTS
and NB., p. 7*^6. § 487 : Two sporadic cases of oid Plural forms in
Bengali, p. 726.
§ 488 • New methods to indicate the plural with the loss of the old
affixes, pp. 726-727 ; the numerals qualifying the simple base were enough,
p. 727 ; Compoundiuyf with Nouns of Multitude, pp. 727-728: « kula- >
gula- pp. 727-728 ; § 489 : « -digli-, -diger^, -di, -der^l » : use of this affix
in Bengali, pp. 728-729 ; the form « -dig&t^ » and the question of Persian
inHuenee, pp. 729-7^30; Theories about the origin of this affix, p. 730 ^
the source is « -adi-ka, -adi », p. 730; « -adi, -adik& » in MB., pp. 730-
731 ; the shorter form « -di, -der^ » — in MB. and NB. — with phonetic
modifications involved, pp. 731-732 ; the Genitive « -diger^ » from
« -adi-ka + -er^ », p. 732, § 490 : Other Words of Multitude figuring in
Bengali, pp. 732-733; Affixation of Case Terminations at the end of the
compounded word, p. 733 ; employment of some of the nouns of multitude
at the head of the compounded word in OB., MB., NB. p. 733; use
of the Pronominal Adjective « j^ta » for the Plural, p. 733 ; use of
Demonstrative Pronouns with the Plural, p. 734.
§491: The Bengali Plural Affix « -la, -era », p. 734; Affinities in
Maithili : use of a Noun of Multitude after the « -ra » forms, p. 734;
Genitival Origin of « -ra », p. 734 ; first employ of the « -ra * with the
Pronouns, pp. 734-755 ; the «-ra» forms in the SKK., p. 735, and in
other eMB. and 1MB. literature, pp. 735-736, as well as in the NB. dialects,
p, 736 ; the use of the Genitive Affix « -ka > -ga » for the Plural in
dialectal Bengali, p. 736 ; the Genitive > Plural forms in other NI A.. —
Bhojpuriya, Baghel-kban(ji, Khas-kura, Malavl and Early Kanauji, pp.
736-737 ; no connexion of Bengali « -ra » with any Dravidian affix,
p. 737.
§ 492 : The word « manava » as a Plural Affix in Oriya, in S.-W.
Bengali, in Bhojpuriya (ISagrpuriya), and in Chattisgarhl, pp. 737-738.
§ 493 : Some Assamese plural-indicating words — « -bilak^ », « -bor^ »,
p. 7 38, and « hat^ », p. 739.
§ 494 : Distributive Plural by Repeating the Adjective in Bengali,
p. 739.
COiSTENTS
Ixix
[D] CAbE Inflexions : Inherited jbROii MIA., and Nlwly Ckkated.
§ 495 : NB. Affixed Intlexions as distinguished from Separate Pott-
positions, p. 739. § 496 : Inherited Intlexions and New Creations in the
above, pp. 739-740.
Nominative.
§ 497 : The Nominative Affix « -e » : MagaJbi Prakrit « -e » >
Mngadhi Apabhransa ^'^.i », p. 7-^0; survival of this « -i » in Bengali
in a few sporadic eases, p. 741 ; Origin of the Bengali « -e » from
Magadhi Apabhrausa « ^ -ai » < Magadhi Prakrit « -ae », p. 741 ; the
« -e » affix for the Nominative in Oriya, pp, 741-742, and in Maithill,
p. 742; disappearance of the « ^ -i » in New Magadhan, p. 742;
influence of the Instrumental « -8 » in the Nominative < -e », pp. 742-
743; possible influence from Tibeto-Burman in confusing the Instrumental
and the Nominative in Bengali, p. 743 ; use of the Locative in « -t- »
for the Nominative, in NB., through extension of the Locative to the
Instrumental, pp. 743-744.
LVbTRUMENTAL.
§ 498 : The Instrumental Affix * -e » in OB., MB., NB., p. 744 ;
Source of this Affix, pp. 744-745 ; the Affix in other NIA., p. 745 ;
Locative Affix for the Instrumental, p. 745 ; OB. base-forms for the
Instrumental, p. 745.
Locative and Oblique.
§ 499: The OIA. and IE. Sources of the MIA. and NIA. Locative
Affix « -e », pp. 745-746 ; the MIA. Locative Affixes, p. 746 ; OB. Locative
Affixes, p. 746; the Accusative or Dative (Oblique) in « -e, » in OB.,
MB.,NB.,p. 747; the corresponding Oblique form in Early A wadhi, p. 747 ;
in W. Hindi, pp. 747-748 ; in Oriya and in Maithill, p. 748 : the Oblique in
« -e » is the same as the Locative, pp. 748-749; the Locative Affix in the
Ixx
CONTENTS
Bengali Dative forms « -er-e, -k-e », p. 74-9. § 500 : Loss of the old inherited
aflSx « -i » for the Locative ia NIA., p. 749 ; absence of the OIA.
Locative Plural Affix « -su, -su » in NIA., p. 750. § 501: The Bengali
Locative form « -t&, -te » and its Origin and Affinities, p. 750 ; use of
the « -t- » form in the Ablative sense, p. 751; dialectal Locative Affix
from « madhya», p. 751.
Genitive.
§ 602: The OIA. Genitive Affix « -sya », and the MIA, (Magadhi)
and Sauraseni Apabhransa form « -aha, -aho » etc., p. 751 ; the OB.
forms, pp. 751-752 ; Origin of the ♦ aha, -aho » form, p, 752; « -asya »
> « -assa » > * -as, -as » in MIA,, p. 752 ; instances of the « -a. -aha »
Genitive in OB., and in MB. and NB., p. 752, § 503 : Help-words for
the Genitive in MIA,, p. 753 ; their nature, and their transformation
in NIA., p. 753 ; « karya » and its derivatives, p. 753; Synthetic
Affixation or Compounding of these help-words, as opposed to their
Separate (Jse, in different forms of MIA. and NIA., p, 754; « karya >
kera, kela » and «kara», «kara», « kf ta > kaa » as Genitive Affixes,
p. 755 ; the form « kara » in Bengali, pp. 755-756; the form « krta >
kaa » and pleonastic « -ka > -kka > in NIA., pp. 756-757 ; the various
Post-positional Affixes for the Genitive in OB., p. 757; « -kera, -kara »
in MB. pp. 757-758 ; the * -ka » for the Genitive in MB. and NB., p. 758,
§50$: The Medieval Sanskrit form « -sat-ka », and a possible NIA.
equivalent of it in Assamese, pp. 758-759-
Dativb.
§ 505 : The Affix « -ka » for the Dative in OB. and MB., oeeurinir
as • -k^ » in dialectal Bengali and Assamese, pp. 759-760 ; the Dative
in « -k-e » : theories about its Origin, p, 760 ; « kaksa > kahu, kahl »,
pp. 760-761; analogous forms in other NIA,, p, 761 ; a modification
either of « krta », or of « kak^a », pp. 761-762 ; the « -ke » form in other
NIA., p. 762. § 506 : The Dative Affix * -r-e, -er-e p. 762.
CONTENTS
Ixxi
Ablative.
§ 507 : The « -lui » AflBx in OB., and « -hfl, -u » in Oriya, pp. 762-768 ;
Source of this Affix, p. 763 ; the Ablative in « -ta, -te », p. 768.
§ 508 : The Declension of the Noun in Maoradhi Apabhransa, and
the forms which have survived in Bengali — si Comparative Statement,
pp. 703-765.
Post-positions.
§ 509 : Pre-positions and Post-positions in OIA., p. 766, later stereo-
typed as Pre-verbials, p. 766 ; Inflected Forms of Nouns as Post-positions in
MIA. and in Classical Sanskrit, p. 766 ; Verbal Forms as Post-positions,
p. 766; Probable Dravidian Influence, p. 766. Post-positional Words in
Bengali — a List (with Etymological Notes) of 39 Native Forms, pp. 767-
777 : (1) « apeksa », ( 2) c age », (3) « k§rite », p. 767 : (4) « k&riya, Wve »,
pp. 767-768: (5) * karttrk^ », (6) * kaehe », (7) * kar&n^ », (8) « gh^r^t,
<2:hare », p. 768 ; (9) « cahite », pp. 768-769; (10) « eahiya, eeye (11)
« ch^ra », (12) « j&nye », (18) « thai » etc., p. 769; (14) « t^re »,
pp. 769-770; (15) « thakiya », (16) * thane » etc., (17) * diya » etc., (IS)
« dwara », (19) « nimitte (20) « nice », p. 770 ; (2 I) « par^ pp. 770,
771 ; (22) «pakhe », (-^3) « paehe, plehe », (24) « pane*, p. 771 ; (25) « pase »
pp. 771-772; (26) « b&i », (27) * bahir^ » etc., (-28) * binS », p. 772;
(29) *bih§ne», pp. 772-773 ; (30) * bhitgt » etc., (31) ^ bhit^r^
(^32) « majhe », and « mi », p. 773 ; (33) « lagiya » etc., (3i) « s&gge »,
(25) « s&ne » etc., p. 774; (36) * sath(e) », pp. 774-775; (37) « sudd ha,
suddha p. 775; (88) « h&ite » : derivation of « haite » : its connexion
with MIA. forms like « hinto », and with various NIA. forms, pp. 775-777;
(39) * haile, h&'le », p. 777.
Sanskrit Words used as Post-positions, p. 777 ; Perso- Arabic Words
similarly employed, p. 777.
[E] Enclitic DEriNiTivES or NraiERATivES.
§ 510 : The Bengali Definitives and their Formal Use in Bengali,
pp. 777-778; Indefinite Use. of the Definitives, p, 778; Definitives in
Ixxii
CONTENTS
other speeches, p. 778. The Definitives of Bengali, and their Derivations:
(1) « khau^ » etc., p. 779 ; (£) « gaeh?t » etc., p. 779 ; (3) « grdta » and its
Source, pp. 779-780 ; (4) • j&n^ », p. 780; (5) « -ta » etc. : the ' Definite
Article' of Ben^^ab', pp. 780-781; (6) * than^ », p. 781.
Other words of a definitive nature, p, 781.
Chapter III : The Nvmerals, pp. 78-2-806.
§ 511 : The words for the Numerals on a pan-Indian rather than local
dialectal basis, p. 78*2 ; local dialectal forms as a substratum, p. 782 ;
Late MIA. or NIA. developments shared in most NIA., but not uniformly,
p. 783.
§ 512; The forms for Qyw, pp. 783-785 ; §513: the forms for Two, .
pp. 785-786; §514: for T//;r^, pp. 786-757; §515: Four, pp. 787-788;
§516; Fh-e, pp. 78S-7S9; §517: Six, pp. 789-791; the problem of
i\lIA. and NIA. « eha- » = OIA. (Sanskrit) « sas », pp. 790-791 ; MIA.
equivalents, p. 791 ; § 518 : the fotms for Seven, pp. 791-79^ ; § 519 : Fi'f/At,
792 ; § 520 ; Mne, p. 792 ; § 521 : Ten, pp. 792-793. § 522 : The Ten-^ : the
irregularities from MIA., pp. 793-794; § 523: the Twenties, 794-795;
the question of vigesimal computation in lA., p, 795; § 524: the Thirtiesi^
pp. 795-796; § 525: the Fort {e,% p. 796 ; § 526: the Fifties, pp. 796-797;
the question of the chancre of « -s- » to « -h- » in this decade, p. 797 ; § 527 :
the Sixties, pp. 797-798; § 528 : the S^^renfies, with the ehan^e of « -s- »
to « -h- », p. 798; § 529 : the Eighties, p. 799, with preservation of « -s- *,
and intrusion of « -r- *, p. 799 ; § 530 : the Nineties, pp. 799-800 ; § 531 ;
the forms for Hit nd red, pp. 800-801 ; § 532: Thousand i the use of
the Persian word in NIA . and the reason for it, p. 801 ; § 533 : Numbers
above Thonmnd, p. 801; §634: the Fractionate for \, \, \, U, 2^,
p. 802 ; for 3i, Tins ?lm \, Less by \, p. 803.
§ 635 : Declension of Adjective Numerals in OB., pp. 803-804.
§ 536: The Ordinals : absence of a res^ular Ordinal AflSx in NB., and
the make-shifts employed, p. 804; the form for First, p. 804; forms for
Second, Third, Fourth, p. 805 ; forms for the hi<?her numbers, pp. 805-806.
CONTENTS
Ixxiii
Chapter IV: The Pronoun, pp. 807-860.
§ 537 : The Pronouns take the same ajExes and post-positions as the
Noun, but have Oblique Forms, p. 807.
[A] The Pronoun for the First Person.
§ 538: The OIA. « aham » in MIA. and in OB.: OB, « hia
pp. 807-808 ; § 539 : the Nominative « hau = hau » and the Instrumental
« mai » in OB., pp. 808-809 ; confusion of the Oblique Base « mo » with
Instrumental, p. 809 ; the Instrumental = Nominative in NB., in Oriya
etc., p. 809. § 540 : The form « ami » — its source, and its occurrence in
OB. and MB. : « amhi » and « amhe *, pp. 809-810; « amhe, amhi, ami »
transferred to the singular, p. 810 ; MB. plural use of « ami », p, 810,
§ 541 : The Oblique Forms « mo-, ama- » — their origin, and their use in
OB. and MB., pp. 811-812. § 542 : New Plural Formations by adding
nouns of multitude or the « -ra- » aflSx, p. S12 ; the position in Bengali :
singular and plural forms, p. 81 'Z ; in other Magadhan speeches, p. 813 ;
Hindi « ham, ham-log », p. 813. § 543 : The oblique form « majhu »
in MB. and in Braja-bull — its source and affinities in other NIA., p. 813 ;
the NIx\. genitive of the personal pronouns in « -ra », pp. 813-814; the
literary form « mama », p. 814. § 544 : The Early NB. form < ^sm^dadi »,
p. 814. § 545 : Typical Dialectal Forms for the First Person, pp. 814-815 ;
notes on some of these, pp. 815-816.
[B] The Pronoun for the Second Person.
§ 546 : The forms in NB., singular and plural, p. 816. § 547 : The
OIA. « tvam, *tu » in the NIA. speeches — in OB., pp. 816-817. § 548:
The OB. and NB. form « tai', tui », p. 817. § 549 : The Oblique « to- » in
OB., pp. 817-818; the eMB. Oblique « tS- », and equivalent forms in
Maithill, p. 818. § 550 : The form « tumi » and its origin, pp. 818-819 ;
the Oblique Form « toma- », p. 819; § 551 : the Braja-bull forms « tuhu,
tujha » etc., p. 819. § 652 : Old Singular, Old Plural and New Plural
J
Ixxiv
CONTENTS
forms in the Magadhan speeches, pp. 819-8^0: § 5S3 : Typical Dialectal
Forms of Bengali, p. 820.
[C] The Proxoun for the Third Person.
§ 554: The Nominative and Oblique Forms in the NB. Standard
Colloquial, p. 821. § 655 : The OIA. « sa, sah and the NB. « se »,
p. 821; the Neuter « ta(ha) pp. 821-822. § 556 : the Oblique « ta-,
taha- », p. 822. § 557 : The Old Plural Nominative form, p. 8£2 ; use of
the Instrumental and Genitive Plural for the Nominative in Mag. Ap.,
pp. 822-823 ; § 558 : the Honorific Forms, Nominative and Oblique, in MB.
and NB., pp. 823-824 ; § 559 : New Plurals from the Genitive Base, p. 824;
§ 560 : the Instrumental form « tena > tS », pp. 824-825 ; the Locative
form « tab! p. 825 ; the form « tathi », p. 825. § 561 : Special forms for
the Feminine in Dialectal Bengali, p. 825 ; the artificial forms « tasyar^ »
etc., p. 826. § 562 i Western Forms in OB. and in Braja-buli : « so, tasu, tasu,
t&chu », p. 826. § 563 : Typical Dialectal For^as, p. 827 ; notes on
the dialectal forms, 828. § 564 : The emphatic form, pp. 828-829.
[D] The Proximate or Neau Demonstrative.
§ 565 : Typical Standard Bengali Forms, p. 829. § 566 : Forms for
the Near Demonstrative in OIA. analysed, pp. 829-830 ; the Bengali
Demonstrative Pronoun Base, p. 830 ; its Source in MIA._, OIA., pp. 830-
831 ; the « eha » form of Apabhransa, and the plural form of it, p. 831 ;
the form « iha » of Bengali, p. 831; the Bihar! forms, p. 831, § 567:
OIA. « eta- » in the various NIA. speeches, p. 832 ; notes on the
development of the NIA. forms, pp. 852-833 ; forms in Sinhalese, p. 834.
I 568 : Various other forms of this Pronoun : dialectal « ise and archaic
* ithe », p. 834 ; § 569 : Dialectal Forms, pp. 834-835. § 57o : The
emphatic form, p. 835.
[E] The Remote or Far Demonstrative.
§ 571 : Standard NB. Forms, p. 835 ; § 572 : Demonstrative Bases
in Indo-lranian and in Indo-Aryan, pp. 835-836 ; Base of this Pronoun
CONTENTS
Ixxv
in Bengali : « 6-, u- » forms ; Interchange with the Pronoun of the Third
Person, pp. 836-837 ; the « o- » form in Apabhransa and in Avahattha,
p. S37 ; the Source of the Bengali « o-, u- p. 837 ; the forms in the
Bihari dialects, p. 837 ; § 573 : the Remote Demonstrative in the
various NIA. speeches, p. 838 ; notes on some of the forms in these, p.
838. § 575 : Other Forms : « oi » etc., pp. 838-889 ; § 575 : Dialectal
Forms, p. 839 ; § 576 ; the emphatic form, p. 839.
§ 577 : The Question of the Non- Aryan Affinity of the lA. Demonstra-
cive Pronouns, p. 839.
[P] The Relative Pronoun.
§ 578 : The Forms in Standard Bengali, p. 839 ; § 579 : the Source
of the Pronoun is its various forms, p. 840 ; Forms for the Relative in
other NIA. speeches, p. 840 ; § 580 : OB, Forms for the Relative, pp.
SiO.841 ; MB. « jahi, j&thi », p. 841 ; § 581 : Dialectal Forms : the
emphatic form, p. 341.
[G] The Interrogative Pronoun.
§ 582 : Standard Bengali Forms, pp. S41-84'2 : § 583 : the Nomina-
tive « ke », the Neuter « ki », p. 843 ; the form « kongl » and its origin
and affinities, pp. 842-843 ; MB. confusion between « kon^ » and
« k&man& », p. 843; § 585: the Oblique « ka(ha). », p. 843; the Honorific,
p. 843 ; the Neuter Base « kis- » — its origin, its occurrence in OB. and
MB., and in other NIA. speeches, pp. 843-844 ; § 585 : the Honorific
Form, p. 844 ; § 586 : the forms « k&hi > k&i, k&thi, k&y », p. 844 ;
§ 587 : the Interrogative in OB. : Native MSgadhl and Western
Forms, p. 844,
[H] The Indefinite Pronoun.
§ 588 : The Indefinite in Bengali and in other NIA., and its Source,
p. 845 ; Forms other than the Nominative, p. 845 ; § 589 : the Neuter
form « kiehu » — its origin and affinities, pp. 845-846.
Ixxvi
CONTENTS
§ 890 : Compound Pronominal Forms, in NB, and MB., p. 846.
[I] The Reflexive and Honorific Pronoun.
§ 591 : OIA. « atman » and MIA. « atta-, appa- », p. 846 ; the
Reflexive in OB., pp. 846-847 ; the form «ap^ » in NB. and in other NIA.,
p. 84)7 ; § 592 : the Extension of the Reflexive to the Honorific — a new
thing in Bengali, pp. 847-848 ; the Honorific in other NIA. speeches,
p. 848 ; Honorific use of the Reflexive probably a Midland Idiom adapted
in Bengali and in other NIA., pp, 848-849 ; § 593 : the Pronoun « apan^ »
in OB., MB., NB., p. 849 : § 594 : the Reflexive form « apas^t », p. 849 ;
§ 895 : the form « apt& », p. 850 ; § 696 : Dialectal Forms, p. 850 :
§ 597 : the ts. form « nijii », p. 850.
§ 598 : The Bihari Honorifies « raur, raur ; rauwa ; ais, ais ; 5ha-,
W \f %/ \J
aha- » and their Sources, pp. 850-851.
[J] Pronominal Derivatives, Adjectival and Adverbial.
[I] Adjectives of Quality or Manner in « -mat^, -m&n^ ».
§ 599 : The Forms in ISB., p. 851 ; the Source of the AflSx in OIA.,
p. 851 ; Irregularity as to its Phonetics, pp. 851-852 ; the form
« m&t&(n^) », p. 852 ; the form in Assamese, p. 852 ; Extension of the
Affix, and Dialectal Forms, pp. 852-853.
[II] Adjectives and Adverbs of Quality in « -h&na > -hena > -hn&
> n& ».
§ 600 : The Forms in NB. and in MB,, as well as in Maithill, p,
853 ; in M^adhi Apabhransa, — and its OIA. Source, pp. 853-854 .
Corresponding Forms in other NIA., p. 854 ; Forms in Braja-bull, p. 854 ;
Analogous Forms in MB., and in Early Assamese^ p. 854.
[III] Nouns and Adjectives of Quantity in « -t&, -to »,
§ 601 : The NB. Forms, pp. 854-855 j Equivalents in o!;her NIA.,
p. 855 J Origin of this form in MIA. and OIA., p. 855 ; use of « -kar^ »
CONTENTS
Ixxvii
for the genitive of the « -t&, -to » form in Bengali, p. 855 ; the form
c kmk^ p. 855.
[IV] Adverbs of Time in « -be » :
§ 602 : Forms in Bengali and in other NIA., p. 856 ; Sources in
Apabhransa, p. 856 ; Origin, pp. 856-857 ; some Western Apabhransa
and other AflSnities, p. 357.
[V] Adverbs of Time in « -kh&n^ » :
§ 603 : The Form and its Use, p. 867 j its Origin, p. 857.
[VI] Adverbs of Place in « -tha » •
§ 604 : The Form in NB., p. 858 ; Origin, p. 858 ; the Locative
forms as Oblique Pronouns, p. 858 ; the form in an extended shape in
Bengali : Oriya and other dialectal Equivalents, p. 858 • Adverbs of
Place in « -t » in Assamese and other Magadhan, and their Origin and
Affinities, pp. 858-859.
[VII] Other Adverbs of Place in « -khSne », etc. :
§ 605 : The « -khane » Forms, p. 859. § 606 : The « -dhar^, -dhare »
Forms, p. 859. § 607 : Some Dialectal Forms in « -ndh- » etc., p. 859.
§ 608 : Other Dialectal Forms in « -thi », pp. 859-860.
§ 609 : The Correlatives « j^i » and « tai », p. 860.
§ 610 : Some Western Adverbs of Manner in OB., and their Origin
and Affinities, p. 860.
Chapter V : The Verb, pp. 861-1052.
[A] Conjugation of the Verb in IE,, in OIA., and in NIA.
§ 611 : Themes, Aspects and Tense of the Verb in IE., p. 861 ;
the Augment, pp. 861-862 ; the Themes of Primitive IE., and the Growth
of Tenses lii the IE. languages, pp. 862-863. § 612 : A Conspectus of the
OIA. (Vedic) Verb Forms, pp. 863-868 ; the Present System, p. 864 ;
the Aorist System, pp. 865-866 ; the Future System, pp. 866 ; the
Perfect System, pp. 866-867 j Participles, p. 867 ; Verbal Nouns, p. 867 ;
Periphrastic Forms, p. 868 : Secondary Conjugations, p. 868. § 613 :
The OIA. Forms as surviving in Bengali as a NIA. speech, pp, 868-870,
Ixxviii
CONTENTS
[B] Bengali Vekb-Roots.
[I] Historical Classification.
§ 615 : Number of Roots in Sanskrit, p. 870 j Roots in the Vedic
Speech, in the Brahmanic, in Classical Sanskrit, pp. 870-872 . Nature
of a great many Skt. Roots as in the ' Dhatu-kosas ' : TacMava Roots, pp.
871-872.
§ 615 : Verb Roots in Bengali : their Number and Classification^
p. 872.
§ 616 : Primary Roots, p. 873 ; § 617 : Unprefixed Primary
Roots, pp. 873-874 ; Prefixed PrimaTy Roots, p. 874 ; § 618 : Relics of
the OIA. Thomes in the NB. Primary Roots, pp. 874-875 ; § 619 : Passive
and Future Bases used for the Present in MIA. and NIA., pp. 876-877 ;
§ 620 : Original Causatives as Primary Roots in Bengali : pp. 876-877 ;
§ 621 : Some Obscure Roots, Primary in Form, with Dravidian Affinities
in some cases, pp. 877-879 ; § 622 : Tatsama and Semi-tatsama Roots
in Bengali, pp. 879-880.
§ 623 : Derivative Roots : Causatives, p. 880 ; § 624 : Denominatives,
and their wide development in NIA., pp. 880-881 ; § 625 : Earlier and
Later Formation of Denominatives in Bengali — those without
« -a- » and those with it, pp. 881-883; § 626: Sanskrit {ts., sts,)
Denominatives, pp. 883-884 ; § 627 : Foreign Denominatives — Perso-
Arabic, English, p. 884 ; § 628 : Compounded and Suffixed Boots, pp.
884-889 ; Two Roots Compounded, p. 885 ; § 629 : Root and Suffix
Combined, p. 885 ; § 630 : the Affix « -ka », pp. 885-886 ; Roots T^ith
« -k- » not of suffixed origin, p. 886 ; § 631 : the Affix « -ta- », pp.
886-887 ; § 632 : the Affix « -ra », pp. 887-888 ; § 633 : the Affixes
« -ra, -la », pp. 888-889 ; § 635 : the Affix « -sa, -ca », p. 889 ; § 635 :
Onomatopoetic Roots, pp. 889-891 ; Onomatopoeties in OIA., in MIA.,
pp. 889-890 ; the Nature of Bengali Onomatopoeties, p. 890 ; Types
"f Onomatopoetic Roots in Bengali ; (A) Onomatopoeties Proper, Simply
and Duplicated ; and (B) Roots Repeated, with Complete Repetition and
CONTENTS
Ixxix
Partial or Modified Repetition, pp. 890-891 ; § 636 : Some Obscure Roots,
p, 89% ; Phonetic Modifications in Bengali Root Forms, p. 892.
[II] Formal Classification.
§ 637 : Phonetic Changes in the NB. Conjugation, pp. 892-893 ;
Arrangement of the Bengali Root into Classes, pp. 898-895.
[Ill] Roots and Vemal Noins in Bengali.
§ 638 : Nominal Forms in OIA. identical with the Root as conceived
by grammarians^ p. 895 ; Verbal Nouns reduced to the monosyllabic form
of Roots through loss of final vowels in NR., pp. 895-896.
[C] Kinds of Verbs, Intransitive and Transitive.
§ 639 : Transitive and Intransitive Verbs in Bengali^ p. 896 ; § 640
No distinction between Intransitive and Transitive Roots by vowel
length of root observable as a principle in Bengali, pp. 896-897. § 641 :
The Accusative and the Dative : differentiation between names of Inanimate
and Animate Objects with the Transitive Verb in Bengali, p. 897 ; the Dative-
accusative in « -ke » a definite form, p. 897 ; the Dative-aceusativt
Construction is the « bhave-prayoga » in Bengali, pp. 897-898; Absence
of the Dative-accusative in the Apabhransa and Avahatfcha^ and in OE.^
and its establishment in MB., p 898. § 642 : The verb «bas» originally
an impersonal form in MB., pp. 898-899 : the phrasal verbs « bhalo-basa »
etc., p. 899,
[D] Moods : Optative, Subjunctive, Imperative.
§643: Occurrence of only the Indicative and Imperative Moods in
Bengali, and loss of the other Moods of OIA., p. 899. § 644 : The MIA.
« -ijja- » Optative in NIA. : the form « lijje», pp. 900-901. § 645 : Bengali
Optative with the Conjunction « jeuh », p. 901 ; Optative with the Con-
junctive in « -ile », p* 901. § 646 : The Subjunctive in OIA. and MIA. :
the Past Conditional in « -it- » in Bengali, and corresponding forms in
other NIA., pp. 901-902; the MB. and NB. Subjunctive with « y&di »,
p. 90^ ; use of « yadi > jai » in Apabhransa and Avahattha, p. 902.
Ixxx
CONTENTS
§ 647 : The Affixes of the Imperative Mood in NB., in Early ME
and in OB., pp. 902-904 ; OB. Passive Imperative, -p. 904. § 648 :
Derivation of these Affixes: those for the 2nd person : the 2nd pers. sg.
Affix, in MB. « -& », and in NB. * 4 p. 904 ; the OB. Affix « -hi », MB.
« -hi, -I », pp. 904-905 ; the OB. agglutinated form with the 2nd pers. sg.
pronoun « tu », p. 905 ; the MIA, Affix « su » for 2 sg. atmanepada (< OIA,
-sva), and probable connexion of the OB. « -hu, -u » with it, p. 905 : the OB.
« -hu » may be plural in origin, from OIA. « -atha, -ata > -ahu », pp.
905-906 ; the « -u » affix in the Oriya past and future, and in Western
Apabhran§a, p. 906 ; the MB, Imperative Affix « -ih&, -a », NB. « -ft,
-0 », and its Origin, p. 906 ; the MB. form « -ha», p. 907. § 649: The
Affixes for the 3rd person : the form « -u, -aii », and forms with pleonastic
« -ka », p. 907 ; the plural form « -ntu, -n^ », p. 907. § 650 : Forms for
the Imperative in the other Magadhan speeches, p. 907.
§ 651 : The Future Imperative Precative or Prohibitive in « -ihft, -iyo,
-io », — its Origin, and its Affinities in other NIA. speeches, p. 908. § 652 :
The forms « ga, ge » with the Imperative in Bengali, and in Western
Hindi, pp. 908-909.
[E] Voice : the Passive in Bengali.
[I] The Inplected Passive in Bengali.
(1) Passive Indicative: § 653: Passive Forms in OIA., pp. 909-910;
the OIA. Passive Affix « -ya- > and its Survival in the NIA. speeches,
pp. 9 10-911. § 654: NIA. « -ij-, -i- » Forms: Survival of the Passive
specially in the speeches of the West, p. 911. § 655 : The Inflected Passive
in OB. and MB. : the « -ijja-, -ija- » forms in the Western Apabhransa
of the ' Doha-kosas/ pp. 911-91^; the « -ia-, -i- » forms in the Cary as,
p. 91%; the Analytical Passive with « v'ja » in OB., p. 912; « -ia-,
-ijja-» in MSgadhi ApabhrafiSa, p. 913; Eelies of the inflected « -ia- »
Passive in Early MB.— examples from the l§KK., pp. 913-915 ; gradual
merging of the 3 sg. (or pi.) passive into the 1 sg. active in MB.,
p. 915 ; other MB. examples of the Inflected Passive, pp. 915-916. § 656 :
CONTENTS
Ixxxi
The Inflected Passive in Maithili, pp. 916-917 ; in Orija, p. 9 17. § 6S7 :
Survivals of the Inflected Passive in NB. : Prohibitives and Optatives
in dialectal Bengali, pp. 917-918 ; the Passive in Proverbial Expressions,
p. 918; the Passive in respectful Imperative (dialectal), p. 918.
(l) Impersonal Constructions in Bengali: § 658: the Impersonal
Verbs of Passive Origin in Bengali, p. 919.
(3) Passive Imperative in OB. and MB: § 659: the Early MB.
* -iu » and OB. « -iu » form, pp. 919-920 ; its origin from the Passive
Imperative of OIA. and MIA., p. 920.
[II] Analytical Formation of the Passive in Bengali.
§ 660 : The different methods of analytically forming the Passive
in Bengali, pp. 920-921. § 661 : (I) The form with * v^ja with the Object
in the Nominative : its use, and idioms with this form in Bengali, pp. 921-922.
§ 662 : (2) The form with « y^ja > with the Object in the Dative, — an
Impersonal Construction, p. 922 ; the Origin of this construction, pp.
922- 923. § 663 : The Origin of the « -v/ja » passive in NIA. : a Connexion
with the Inflected « -ijja- » Passive of MIA, exceedingly probable, pp,
923- 924, § 6Qi : (3) The Passive with the Verbal Noun in « -ana» + « ^ja »,
with the Object in the Dative, pp, 924 ; Origin of this form, probably
from the MIA. Passive Adjective in « -anijja(y)a », pp. 924-925 ;
use of the « -ana » + « y^ja » form in Bengali, p. 925 ; some eases
of Haplology, p. 925. § 665 : (4) The Passive with « -x/par », a ' Compound
Verb' Construction : a Dravidian resemblance, pp. 925-926. § 666: (5) The
Construction with Passive Participle Adjective in « -a » + « \/h& », p. 926.
§ 667: (6) The Construction with the Skt. Passive Participle + « v^ha »,
p. 926. § 668 : The Construction with * v^aeh », p. 926. § 669 : The
Constructions with « c&l » and « kba », pp. 926-927. § 670:
The Impersonal and Indefinite Use of the Passive in NB., p, 927.
[Ill] The Passive in « -a- »,
§ 671 : Instances of the Passive in « -a- » from M B,, p. 927 ; from
NB,, p, 928 j from Oriya, p. 928; from Eastern Hindi and Western Hindi,
K
Ixxxii
CONTENTS
p. 928. Source of this form : not the old Causative (in « -apaya- »), but
rather the old Denominative in « -aya- », pp. 928-929 ; Evidence from the
Biharl dialects establishing this derivation, p 929, and from Bengali, as
well as from Western Hindi, p. 929.
§ 672 : The Passive Construction with the Transitive Verb Past Tense
in Bengali (karraani-prayoga), p. 929.
[P] Tense : The Simple Tenses.
§ 673 : Enumeration and Classification of the Tenses in Bengali :
Three Types— Radical, Participial, and Periphrastic, and their nature,
p. 930.
[I] Thh: Radical Tense.
§ 674: The Forms for the Radical Tense in NB., pp. 930-931;
Number of the Verb in the Radical Tense, p. 931, § 675 : The Radical
Tense in OB. — Typical Forms in the Three Persons, p. 931. § 676 : Forms
from MB., as well as from Oriya and Maithill, pp. 932-983. §§ 677-679 :
Origin of the Forms for the Radical Tense in the Three Persons, pp. 933-937.
§ 677 : Levelling of the OIA. « gana» affixes to the « -a- » Class in MIA,,
and Fusion of the Causative Affix « -aya- > -e- » with the Indicative,
pp. 933-^34. The Origin of the Various Forms for the First Person — the
forms « -hu, -u, -u, -S, -o, -I, -i » : Derivation of Forms in other Magadhan,
pp. 934-935. § 678 : The Forms for the Second Person, in Bengali and
other Magadhan, pp. 935-936, § 679 : The Forms for the Third Person,
pp. 936-937 : the Plural > Honorific : the verbal « -anti » and the nominal
« -na », pp, 936-937 : the Honorific in « -thi » in Maithili and Magahl,
p. 937 ; the « -s- » forms from Awadhl, in Bhojpuriya and iii
Magahl, p. 937.
[II] The Tenses originating from OIA. Participles.
(1) The Past Base.
§ 680 : The Inflected Past Forms of OIA. curtailed in MIA. : the
Past Forms in Pali and in Ardha-mSgadhl, pp. 937-938 \ the use of
CONTENTS
Ixzxiii
the Passive Participle in « -ta, -i-ta » in the Past Tense in OIA. and MIA,,
pp. 938-989; Final Disappearance of the OIA. Inflected Past Forms in
Apabhransa, pp. 939-940. § 681 : The Pleonastic Affix « -1- » to strengthen
the Passive Participle form in lA.^ employed in different tracts, p. 940 ;
the « -ilia-, -ella-, -uUa-, -alia- » Affix in the Adjective and Verb Forms of
MIA., p. 941. § 682: The NIA. Affix for the Past Form of the
Verb is derived from the above, p. 941 ; Lyall's, Bhandarkar's, Sten
Konow's formulation of this theory, and general acceptance of it, p. 941.
§ 683 : The view that « OIA. -t- > MIA, -d- » gave the « NIA. -I- » consi-
dered, p. 942 ; the doubling of the « -1- » of OlA. in MIA. : treatment of
Intervocal « -1- » and * -11- » of MIA. in NIA., pp. 943-943. § 684 : The
question of this « -1- » affix being identical with the Slav « -1- », pp. 943-944.
§ 685 : The occurrence of the « -1- » Affix in NIA. : « -1- » forms and non-1
forms, pp. 944-945. § 686 : The Non-1 Past {Tense Bases and Passive
Participle Adjectives in MIA. and in the NiA. speeches, p, 945 ; the
« 4- » forms in MIA. and in the NIA. languages, p. 946. § 687 : Non-l-
and «-l- » forms in OB., pp. 946-947. § 688: Non-1 forms in MB., pp.
947-949. § 689 : The Present Tense, used for the Past Tense in MB. and
NB., is probably the Non-1 Past Form, pp. 949-950 ; Examples from MB.,
of the use of this ^Present-Past' side by side with the « -1- » Past, pp.
950-953; the real non-1 past origin of this form discussed, p. 953. The
* Prakrta-Paiggala ' Past Form in « -e », pp. 953-954. § 690 : Examples
of the non-1 past form in Onya and in Maithill, pp. 954-955. § 691 : The
non-1 Passive Participle in Bengali, p. 955; Examples from MB,, pp. 955-
956. § 692 : Instances of the Adjective in « -1- » from OB. and MB., pp.
956-958; Feminine « -1- » Adjectives in OB., and MB., p. 958 ; Instances
of the « J- » form (in the Adjective) from Oriya, from Maithill, and
from Western Hindi, pp. 958-959.
(2) The Past Conditional or Habitual.
§ 693 : The Source of this form : OIA. Present Participle in « -ant- » :
the syntactical development in MIA., p. 959 ; the form in OB. and MB.,
Ixxxiy
CONTENTS
p. ^60. § 699 : The Past Conditional in the other Magadhan speeches^ pp.
960-961 ; the New Assamese Conditional in « -hitea », p. 961, § 695 : The
« -it-, -at- » Future in the Modern Magadhan Speeches : in Maithill and
Magahl, p. 961, and its development, pp. 961-962 ; the « -it- » Future in
Dialectal Bengali, pp. 962-963 ; probable independent development of
this use of the original -ant- » form in the Central Magadhan speeches and
in Dialectal Bengali, p. 963 ; the use of the « -ant- * participle for all tenses
noted by the Prakrit Grammarians, p. 963.
(3) The Future Tense.
§ 696 : The OIA. Sigmatie or Inflected Future in NIA., pp. 903.965 :
its occurrence as a living form, pp. 963-964 ; cases of this old form in
MB. (for the 3rd person, in addition to the 2nd person forming the
Future Precative), pp. 964-965.
§ 697 : The « -itavya > -ib-, -ab- > Future in NIA. : the Affix in
OIA., MIA. and NIA. : a Verbal Noun Base as well, pp. 965-966 : the late
and foreign character of the change « -itavya > -ib, -ab- » in the Magadhan
speeches^ p. 966 ; the adjectival nature of the affix retained, p. 967*. Cases
of the « -ib- » form in OB., p. 967 ; the form « -ib- » in Bengali etc., as
opposed to the form « -ab- », p. 967 ; the change of the « -b- » in this
form to « -m- » in Dialectal Bengali, p. 967.
[6] Personal Affixes,
[I] The Various Constructions (Prayogas) in NIA.
§ 698 : Affixation of Personal Terminations — a NIA. Development,
pp. 967-968 ; the « Kartari, Karmaui, Bhave Prayogas » in MIA., p.
968 ; the development of the « BhSve Prayoga » with the transitive verb
in NIA., p. 968 j the « Prayogas » in the different NIA. speech groups :
Western Hindi, p. 968 ; Rajasthani-Gujaratl, p. 969 ; Marathi, p. 969 ;
Pahari, pp. 969-970 ; Western Paujabi and SindhI, p. 970 ; Affixation in
the North- Western languages, — its resemblance with Iranian, footnote
pp. 970-971. § 699 : The « Prayogas » in the Eastern NIA. Groups :
CONTENTS
Ixxxv
in Mag, Ap., 971 i followed by affixation in OB and MB., pp. 971-972.
Pronominal Affixation in the other Magadhan speeches : probable Kol
influence on Central Magadhan in this matter, pp. 97^-973. § 700 : Affixa-
tion and the question of * Inner ' and * Outer ' Aryan, p. 973.
[II] The Affixes for thjb Past Tense.
§ 701 : Affixes added to the « -il- » base in MB. and in the NB. Stan-
dard Speech, pp. 973-974.
(1) The Affixes for the First Person : § 702 : the base form, without
personal affix, p. 974 ; § 703 : the affix « -i », p. 975 ; § 704 : the « a-h8.
-8, -m » group, pp. 975-976 ; § 705 t the « -am » group, pp. 976-977 ;
§ 706 : the question of the 01 A, verb form « asmi », and of the OlA. first
personal affix « -ami » having anything to do with the Bengali 1st person
affixes, p. 977.
(2) The Affixes for the Second Person : § 707 : the base form,
p» 978 ; the form « -i » — its affinities and source, pp. 978-979 j § 708:
the group « -asi, -is « etc., p. 979 j § 709 : suggested pronominal origin
of « -i, -asi * etc. considered, p, 980 ; § 710 : the affix « -u », p. 980 ;
§ 711 : the group « -a, -aha » etc., — origin and affinities, pp. 980-981 ;
§ 712 : the group « -eh§, -ehe, -e » : affinities and probable source,
pp. 981-982.
(3) The Affixes for the Third Person : § 713 : OB., MB. and
NB. forms without any affix, pp. 982-983 ; § 715 : the affix « -e » for
transitive verbs, pj-. v)83-986 ; its use in the dialects of NB., p. 983 ;
its origin, pp. 983-9 h4 ; its occurrence in the SKK., side by side with
« -a », p. 984 ; MB. feminme forms for the intransitive past indicate the
coniinuance of their original adjectival nature iu eMB., p. ^84; the exten-
sion of the 3rd person present affixes (singular « -e », and plural « -anti »
etc. for the honorific) accomplished during eMB. period, pp. 984-985 ; the
«-thi » and « -&h » affixes for the verb honorific in Mail hill, p. 985 ; the affix
« -6 » for the past intransitive verb 3rd person in the Standard Colloquial,
p. 985 ; use of « » for the 3rd person past transitive verbs in the Stand.
Ixixvi
CONTENTS
Coll. due to EB. influence, p. 985 ; Grierson's explanations of the divergence
in affixation between the transitive and intransitive past forms for the 3rd
person, pp. 985-986. § 715 : The « -k- » affix in the past form, p. 986.
§ 716 : The honorific « -anti, -ani, -ani, -en » etc., p. 986; the « -en » form,
and the « -afii » form, pp. 986-987 ; the equivalents of the Bengali « -en »
in the other Magadhan speeches, p. 987 ; the plural affix « -e » for the 3rd
person past honorific in Oriya, p. 987.
[Ill] The Affixes for the Future Tense.
§ 717 : The 1st personal forms « -ib&, -ibo-h8 (> -ibo, -ibu, -mu, -m),
-ibam » etc. pp. 987-98S. § 718 : The 2nd personal forms — « ibi, -ibu,
•ibe, oibSha, -iba, -ibehi » etc., p. 988. § 719 : The 3rd personal forms
« -ib&, -ibe »^ and the honorific forms, p. 989.
[IV] The Affixes for the Conditional or Habitual Past.
§ 720 : The forms « -is ; -i, -u », p. 989.
[H] Pleonastic Affixes.
[I] The Pleonastic Affix « -ka ».
§ 721 : The tense forms which can take this affix, pp. 98y-990 :
some forms in eMB., and NB., p. 990. § 722 : The « -ka » in the other
Magadhan speeches, especially in Central Magadhan, pp. 990-992.
§ 723 : The « -ka » affix with other parts of speech, p. 992 ; its extension
first to the transitive verb, p. 992. § 724: The « -ka » form not an
affixed pronoun, as suggested by Grierson, p. 993. § 725 : The pleonastic
« -ka », its importance in lA. : its occurrence in 01 A., noted by Pacini,
pp. 993-994.
[II] The Pleonastic Affix « -ra ».
§ 726 : Examples of its occurrence and use in the NB, dialects, p. 994,
and in the SKK., p. 995 ; § 727 : it was probably a much more common
form in Bengali, p. 995 ; the occurrence of a « -ra » affix in other NIA.,
pp. 995-996 ; the Etymology of this Affix, p. 996.
CONTENTS
Ixxxvii
[111] The MB, Pleonastic Affix « -li ».
§ 728 : Cases of its occurrence in eMB., and in other NIA., p. 997 ;
probable Source, p. 997.
[IV] The Pleonastic Affix « -khan, -khun ».
§ 729 : Its use, in the Standard Colloquial, and its Origin, pp.
997-998 ; its dialectal form * -ne p. 998.
[V] The Pleonasic Affix « -tI ».
§ 730 : Its occurrence in the Mayang Dialect and in Oriya, p. 998 ;
probably the same as the Enclitic Definitive, p. 998^
[VI] The Pleonastic Affix « -va »
§ 731 : Its occurrence in OB., and in other NIA., p, 999.
[I] The Participles.
[I] The Present Participle,
§ 732 : The « -ite » and « -anta », forms, p. 999 ; Locative
of the Present Participle, pp. 999-1000 ; § 733 : ibid., in Dialectal and
Standard Bengali, and in other NIA., pp. 1000-1001 ; the Locative
Participle in OB. and MB., pp. 1001-100^; in OIA., p. 1002.
[II] The Past Participle.
§ 734 : The « -a » type and the * -ila » type, p. 1002 ; the Past
Participle in « -iyS », p. 1002: use of the Past Participle as a present
or static form, p. lOOS.
[J] The Conjunctives.
§ 735 : The « -iya » form, and the « -il€ » form — their special forces,
pp. 1003-1004 :
Ixxxviii
CONTENTS
[I] The Conjunctive or Absolutive in « -ilk »
§ 736 : Its use as an Adjective, and as a Verbal Noun, p. 1004 ; it is
not repeated, pp. 1004-1005; its use in NB. and MB., p. 1005;
analogous forms in other Magadhan and in HindostanI and Marathi,
pp. 1005.1006; the Past Participle with the Locative in MIA. and OIA.,
p. 1006,
[II] The Conjunctive in « -lyl, -lyf, -i »
§ 737 : The Various Forms of this Conjunctive in OB., pp, 1006-1007 ;
Dialectal Bengali Conjunctive in « -ne,-(i)nai », Oriya Conjunctive in « -ina »,
compared with the Bengali forms in « -iiia^ -iyS », p, 1007 ; the « -i » form
in other Magadhan, p. 1007 ; the Mai- Paharia form in « -hen&k^ »,p. 1008.
§ 738: Conjunctive Affixes in OIA. and in MIA., pp. 1008-1009 ;
their connexion with the forms in the various NIA. speeches, pp. 1009-
1010, and in Bengali, p. 1010; § 739: the GujaratI Conjunctive in
m -l-ne », pp. 1010-1011. § 740 : The Conjunctive in the syntax of NIA.
(Bengali) and of MIA. (Pali, Classical Skt.), p. 1011. § 741 : Adverbial
Gerundive use of the Conjunctive in Bengali, p. 101 § 742: Cases of
loss of the « -i » affix in MB., p. 1012.
[K] VeEBAL NOITNS, AND THE INFINITIVE IN « -ITK »
§ 743 : Various types of Verbal Nouns in Bengali, p. 1012. § 744 :
J) The Verbal Noun in * -&n^ . etc., p. 1013. § 745 : (2) The Verbal Noun
in « -& », etc., p. 1013. § 746 : (3) The Verbal Noun in « -i »,pp. 1013-1014;
§ 747 : The connexion of the Infinitive in « -ite » with this form, p. 1014;
the MIA. affix « -ittae » not the source of Bengali « -ite », pp. 1014-1015 •
loss of the OIA. Infinitive in « -(i)tn. », p. 1015; confusion of the
«.ite» Infinitive with the « -ite » Pres. Part, pp. 1015-1016. § 748 : (4)
The Verbal Noun in m .§ »_its Passive Participle origin, and its being
independent of the « -iba » form, pp. 1016-1017. § 749: (5) The Verbal
Noun in « -ila », p. 1017. § 750: (6) The Verbal Noun in • -ib» », pp.
CONTENTS
Ixxxix
1017-1018. § 751 : Relative Participle Adjectival Use of the Past and Future
Passive participles, in Bihar! and in Oriya, and in Bengali, pp. 1018-1019.
[L] The Compound or Periphrastic Tenses.
§ 752: (1) The * -ite-che, -ite-ehil& » type, pp. 1019-1020; {%) the
m -i-che, -i-chil& » type, p, 1020; (3) the * -(i)l^-ehe, -(i)l^-chi]& » type,
pp. 1020-1021 ; (4) the « -iya-ehe (-iyi-che), -iya-chil& (.iyi-ehil&) »
type, p. 1021. § 753: The Progressive Form in MB., pp. 1021-1022.
§ 754: The history of the « -ite-che, -ite-ehilli » form, pp. 1022-1023;
its affinities in other NIA., p. 1023. § 755 : The history of the « -i-che,
-i-ehil& » form, pp. 1023-1026; analogous forms in other NIA., pp.
1024-1025 ; its use for both the Progressive and the Perfect, pp. 1025-1026.
§ 756: The Perfect form in * -il^ », pp. 1026-1027. § 757: The « -ina,
-iya » form : its history, pp. 1027-1028. § 758 : Two dialectal periphrastic
tenses — (5) S.-W. Bengali forms with « ^ytha, » auxiliary, and (6) North
Central Bengali forms in « -(i)t-H--it- » + root « 5eh », p. 1029.
[M] Causativbs.
§ 759 : The « -a- » Affix of the Causative, p. 1029, and its Source
in MIA. and OIA., p. 1030. § 760 : The Source of the Causative Verbal
Noun Affix « -an&», p. 1030. § 761 : Participles of the Causative : • -(a)it- »
for the Present Participle, p. 1030; the Affix «-an&» for the Passive
Participle: its Affinities in other NIA,, and its Source, pp. 1031-
1032. § 762 : The Causative Passive Participle in « -il- p. 1032. § 763 :
Double Causatives, and other Causative forms of Common NIA. absent in
Bengali, pp. 1032-1033. § 764: Periphrastic CausBtives with « >yk&ra » in
Bengali, p. 1033.
[N] Denominatives.
§ 765 : Denominatives in OB., MB., p. 1033 ; Denominatives without
any affix, and with the « -a- » affix, pp. 1033-1034; Source of this « -a- »
L
xc
CONTENTS
affix, p. 1034 ; the « -an& » and « -(i)l^ » affix with the Denominative,
p, 1035.
[O] Verb Substaniive, and Defective Verbs*
§ 766 : Substantive Roots in Bengali, p. 1035. The Source of
Root « ach », pp. 1035-1036; the < * -ske-, * -sko- > -ccha- » Verbs in
Sanskrit, p. 1036 : wider extent of the employ of -y/ « 5ch » in NiA.,
pp, 1036-1037 ; Conjugation of the verb « aeh » in MB. and in NB., p.
1037 ; Root « tha < stha » in Oriya, and in Assamese, and « tha, th& * in
dialectal Bengali, pp. 1037-1038.
§ 767 : Root ♦ h&, ho » : Affinities in other NIA. : the two forms
merged into one, p. 1038 ; phonological reasons for considering a form
« *as-a-ti > h&y » beside « bhav-a-ti > hoe » etc., pp. 1039-1040.
§ 768: Root « rah > : its current derivations, p. 1040; the Skt.
root « arh », pp, 1040-1041 ; an Indo-European root found in German
and Latin, p. 1041 ; *rah» in MIA., pp. 1041-1042.
§ 769 : Root « thak » : its Source, p. 1042.
§ 770 : Root « b&t », pp. 1042-1043.
§|771 : Irregular Forms : « k&il&, k&r-il-& », * gela, jail& » etc., pp.
1043-1044.
§ 772 : The Roots meaning to give and to take : « l&h, li, le, ne »,
pp. 1044-1046 ; Root * ghgn », p. 1046.
§ 773 : Roots « a » and « a-is » beside a form from « i-gam », = to
come, pp. 1046-1047.
[P] Duplicated Verbs.
§ 774: Duplicated Verb-forms in OB., MB. and NB., p. 1047. § 775 :
Roots which go in pairs, pp. 1047-1048 ; Roots repeated by an artificial
or ' Echo ' form, p. 1048. § 776 : Verbal Nouns of Reciprocity
from Reduplicated Forms, pp, 1048-1049 : their occurrence in 01 A.,
p. 1049.
CONTENTS
xci
[Q] C03IP0UND Verbs.
§ 777: The Compound Verb — its character as a Feature in NIA.,
pp. 1049-1050: Dravidian Analogies, p. 1050. § 778: The Compound
Verb in OB. and MB., p. 1050. § 779 : Types of the Compound Verb in
Bengali, pp. 1050-1052: I: Nominals, pp. 1050-1051; II: Verbals,
pp. 1051-1052.
Appendix to Morphologt: : pp, 1053-1056,
§ 780 : Development of New Bengali from the Primitive Indo-
European speech illustrated by a number of NB. sentences with
equivalents (attested as well as hypothetical) in the various stages,
pp. 1053-1056.
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
1. Bengali is a member of the Indie group of the Indo-Iranian or
Aryan branch of the Indo-European family of languages. With its sister-
speech Assamese, Bengali forms the easternmost language in the IE.
linguistic area, just as the Celtic Irish and the Germanic Icelandic are the
westernmost. It has been in existence as an independent and characterised
language, or, rather, as a distinct dialect group, for nearly ten centuries.
2. Among the languages and dialects of India, Bengali is the speech
of the largest number of people/ 48,367,915 persons having returned it as
their mother-tongue during the census of 1911. Bengali is spoken by
92 per cent, of the population of the province of Bengal ; and portions of
Assam and of Bihar and Orissa linguistically form parts of Bengal.
Bengali shades off into its sister-languages Oriya, Magahi and Maithill
in the west, and into Assamese in the north-east. Apart from other Indo-
Aryan speeches, notably Hindostani (which is spoken with varying degrees
^ Of course J a modified form of Western Hindi (Hindostani, Hindi or Urdu) is the
lingua franca of all Aryan-speaking India, and is the established languag'e of literature, of
education, of the law-court and of public life in the BiharT, Eastern Hindi, PanjabI and
Lahndi, Central and Western Pahafi, and Rajastham tracts. From this, Hindi or Hindd-
stanT is often loosely regarded as the language of the people of all Aryan India excluding
Sindh, Gujarat, the Mahratfca country, Orissa, Bengal and Assam, Xepal, Kashmir, and to
some extent the Pan jab, — of a tract with a population of over 112 (including the Pan jab,
over 133) millions. Hindi or HiudostilnT is unquestionably the most important language
of India, and the only speech which can be said to be truly national for all India ; but it,
together with other forms of Western Hindi, like Braj-bhakha, Kanauji, Bundeli, etc., is the
nwther-tongueythehome-language of a little over 4H millions only (according to the census of
1911). Taking into consideration the number of people speaking it as their mother- tongue,
Bengali is the seventh language of the world, coming after Northern Chinese, English,
Russian, German, Spanish, and Japanese ; although as a great world-speech, HindoatSni
alone of Indian languages can rank with English, French, Spanish and Arabic.
INTRODUCTION
of purity), which are brought into the province by immigrants from the
north-west and the west, Bengali has, within recent years, come in
contact with Khas-kura or Parbatiya (the so-called Nepali) at Darjeeling
in the north.
On its borders, it meets with several aboriginal languages and
dialects. Within the western boundary of Bengali is found Santali
(Saotali), a dialect of the KoP (Munda) group (of the Austro-Asiatic
branch of the Austric family of speeches) ; and Ho and Munrlarl, also Kol
speeches closely related to Santali, are found to the west of Bengali.
Besides, two Dravidian dialects, intimately connected with each other, are
found to the wesfc of Bengali : Malto^ which is spoken in the Raj-mahal
Hills, and Kurukh (Kflrukh) or Oraon (Orao), which just touches Bengali
at its extreme western fringe. In the north and the east, Bengali comes in
touch with a number of speeches which are members of some six different
groups of the Tibeto-Burman branch of the Tibeto-Chinese family. To
the north, we have Lepca or Rong, a dialect of the Tibeto-Himalayan
group ; Dhimal, Limbu and Khambu, which are ^ pronominalised ' speeches
^ T have a preference for the old, familiar and accurate * Kol,' nsed by the Aryan-
speaking neighbours of the Kol peoples, as an ethnic and linguistic term, to * Munda.' 'Kol'
comes from a Middle Indo-Aryan * Kolla/ which is found in Sanskrit (also as 'Kola') ; and
obviously in Sanskrit it referred to the aboriginal people of Central India. (Cf. New Indo-
Aryan * Bh!l ' from earlier ' Bhilia,' found in Sanskrit and Prakrit.) The word *K6Ua, KoV itself
seems to be of Kol origin, and in all probability it is an early Aryan transcription of the
source-form, in what may be called * Old Kol,' of the modern Kol words for man — Santali
[ha:r], Mundari [horo], Ho [ho:], Korwa [hor], Kurkii [ko:roi]. There is no contempt
implied in the use of the word among those who employ it, whatever the Sanskrit * kola/
never a popular word, might mean. A tract in Singbhum District in Chota Kagpur is
known as Kolhan (<* K611anSm) = (f7ic kn^?) of the Kdls: cf. Bhotan = (^;ie land) of the
Bhots or Tibetans. The term 'Kol' has an extensive employ, whereas *Murida' is the designa-
tion of only one section of the Kol people. Besides, it was used by Hodgson to denote this
particular group of speeches, which, however, he classed as * Tamulian,' i.e., Dravidian.
(A. Nottrott and P. Wagner, ' A Grammar of the Kol Language,' Hanchi, 1905, pp. 2, iii ;
LSI., IV, pp. 7, 8.) * Munda * has not been able to drive out * Kolarian ' entirely ; ' Kol *
seems to be least objectionable, and it is near enough the unmeaning but popular
' Kolarian.'
TIBETO-BURMAN, KHASI, INDO-ARYAN 3
belonging to the same group, and are spoken by small numbers in the
extreme north ; Danjong-ka or Sikkimese, and Lho-ke or Bhotanese, which
are closely related forms of Tibetan, To the north-east and east, Bengali
meets dialects of the Borjo group : Bodo (Biir&) or Kacarl (also known as
Koc, Mee and Kabha), Garo, and Dima-sa, as well as Mrung or Tipura ;
it touches the area of the dialects of the Naga group ; and dialects of the
Kuki-Cin and Burma groups, like Meithei (or Manipuri) and LuSai, and
Araeanese. Another aboriginal language, not related to the Tibeto-Burman
dialects mentioned above, is spoken on the eastern frontier of Bengali,
namely, Khasi, belonging to the Mon-Khmer group of the Austro- Asiatic
languages, and thus connected with the Kol speeches of West Bengal.
Bengali, like other Aryan languages of India, has spread, and is still
spreading, at the expense of the aboriginal tongues,
3. The living Indo-European languages can be arranged and classified
under eight branches, which are as follows :
(I) The Indo-Iranian, or Aryan, falling into three ^ groups :
(i) The Indie, Indian or Indo-Aryan group, under which come Yedic,
classical Sanskrit, the old Prakrits of the early inscriptions, Pali, and the
various Prakrits and Apabhransas of old documentary remains and of extant
literature ; the modern Aryan languages (^ vernaculars of India ; Elu, or
Old Sinhalese, and modern Sinhalese ; and the Gipsy speeches of Armenia,
Syria and Turkey, and of Europe.
The inter-relation of the various Aryan languages, so far as it seems
likely, is given in the Table under § 5.
* I accept Grierson's division of Indo-Iranian into three groups, although this is not
admitted by all. (Sten Konow, 'Notes on the Classification of Bashgali,' JRAS., 1911, p. 1,
ff., where Dardic is relegated to the Iranian group ; Jules Bloch thinks it possible that the
source -dialects of present day Dardic, together with the Indian Prakritic speeches of the
north-west [and the source-forms of the Gipsy dialects of Armenia and Europe?], formed a
distinct Indian dialect-group ; JA., 1912, i, p. 336. Another view is that the Dardic
speeches are * ancient Aryan (Vedic) dialects which have been overlaid with Iranian as the
result of later invasion ' iu the time of the Achaemenids, or earlier: E. J. Rapson in the
Cambridge History of India, 1922, p. 52.) See below, § 25,
4
INTRODUCTION
(li) Dardie^ or Fis§ca : embracing the languages of the extreme
north-western frontier of India^ and falling into these subgroups : (a) Kafir
' — BaSgall; Wai-ala; Wasi-veri or Presun ; and Kala§a, Gawar-bati and
PaSai ; (b) Kho-war, or Citrali ; and (c) Sina — Sina proper (7 dialects) ;
Kohistam (3 dialects) ; and KaSmirl.
(iii) The Iranian group, which is represented by a number of speeches^
ancient and modern, beginning with Avestic (from c. GOO B. C, the
generally accepted period for Zara^uStra, to whom are attributed the oldest
portions of the Avesta, the Ga^as), and Old Persian of the Aclvtemenian
cuneiform inscriptions (about B.C. 520 — 350) and spreading from the Black
Sea region to Central Asia. The relationship among the various Iranian
speeches seems to be as in the Table below (A. Meillet, ' Grammaire du
Vieux Perse/ Paris, 1914, § 5 ; Sten Konow in A. W. R. Hoernle's 'MS.
Remains of Buddhist Literature found in Eastern Turkestan,' Oxford, 1910,
pp. 237-238; LSI., X).
Indo -Iranian
(Aryan)
Iranian
I
Dardic
Indie
Persic
Group
Avestic ( = Old Bactrian ?
Old Medic ? )
1
> Old
Persian
1
1 1
Middle Chaldeo-
Persian Pahlavi
(Pahlavi)
1
Kurd
Dialects
New
Persian
with
Tajik!
Persian Ormurl
Dialects or
of the Bargista
North
and
Centre
Scythic
Group
East Iranian
so-called
* North Aryan *
Old Khotanese
(P^Kiisana or
Baka speech)
So";dian
Ghalca (Pamir)
Dialects (WakhT,
Sighnl, SaiTqolj,
Ossetic Yaghnobi IskasamT, MunianT,
Yfidgha) "
Paito
?
Baloci
The subgroups other than Persic arejsometimes classed together as * Medic,' in the
sense of * non-Persic'
EXTINCT INDO-EUROPEAN SPEECHES
5
(II) The Armenic Branch ; (III) The Baltic-Slavic Branch ; (IV) The
Albanian Branch ; (V) The Hellenic Branch ; (VI) The Italic Branch ; (YII)
The Celtic Branch, and (VIII) The Germanic or Teutonic Branch.
4. Besides the above eight branches, members of which are living
languages at the present day, there were a number of speeches both in
Europe and in Asia, now extinct, which were members of the Indo-European
family; e.y.^ the languages of the Ligurians, the lapygiansand Wessapians,
and the Veneti of Italy ; the languages of the Illyrians and Daeians, and of
the Thracians ; Phrygian, spoken in Ancient Asia Minor, a speech related
to Thracian, and connected by some with the Armenian j the remains in the
above are extremely scanty, and it is impossible to tind out their proper
relationship within the family. "^A^ithin recent years have been discovered,
from Chinese Turkistan, Buddhist and other documents, in Indian Brahmi
characters, of an Indo-European speech, spoken up to the end of the first
millennium A.C. in the Tarim Valley, in the cities of Kucha (Dialect B)
and Qara-shahr and Turf an (? Dialect A) ; and this speech, to which the
names Kuchean and Tokharian have been given, and which has some unique
points of interest, agreeing more with the Indo-European languages of the
west (Celtic, Italic, and Slav and Armenian) than of the east (its neighbour
speeches of the Aryan group), has been relegated to a branch by itself. (A.
Meillet, ' Le Tokharien,' Indogermanisehes Jahrbuch for 1918; Sylvain
Levi, ^Le Tokharien B,'* Langue de Koutcha,' JA., 1913, ii, pp. 311-380).
The language of the Hittites of Asia Minor has been declared to be Indo-
European by Fried rich Hrozny' (' Die Spraeheder Hethiter/ Leipzig, 1917)
and J. S. Marstrander Caractere indo-europeen de la Langue hittite,^
Christiana, 1919) ; but although this has been disputed or regarded as not
established with certitude by some, there can be no question about the Indo-
European character of the language. (Cf. also ZDMG. for 19:^:2 : Johannes
Friedrieh^ 'Die hethitische Sprache,' pp. 153-173; E. Forrer, ^ Die Inschrif-
ten und Sprachen des Hatti-Reiches,' pp. 174-269 ; both these writers
agree as to the Indo-European character of the speech, which is named
' Hethitiseh,' or * Kanisisch ' by Forrer, as the language of an
0
INTRODUCTION
' Indo-European ' ruling class^ in eontrfldistinction to the non-IE. speech of
the people of the Hittite kingdom, called ^ Chattiseh ' or ' Proto-hattisch/)
Also &ee below, § 25.
5. The inter-relation between the various languages and dialects of
the Indo-Aryan group may be indicated by a Table as in the opposite page,
following mainly Grierson in the ' Linguistic Survey of India.'
This Table seeks to indicate merely the general lines of development of
Aryan in India. There has been a very large amount of mutual influence
among the various local speeches, and above all, the dominant influence of
the literary languages, or Jioi}?es, which has frequently overlaid the normal
line of development of a local dialect, and in this way has obscured to a
considerable extent its original character.
6. Of the various modern Indo-Aryan languages or groups of dialects,
some have been quite important and dominant as literary languages or as
languages of inter-provincial intercourse from very early times, while others
have been nothing but forms of XocdX patois. Short notes on their respective
extent, importance and antiquity are given below. For maps, exact figures,
and details, Grierson 's ^ Linguistic Survey of India ' is our great authority.
7. Beginning from the extreme north-west, we have the Dardic
languages, which, although they do not belong to the Indo-Aryan group,
may be noticed in tbis connection. These languages are spoken in the
Kashmir valley, and in the region to the north and north-west of Kashmir,
namely, Dardistan (Gilgit etc.), Chitral and Kafiristan, with the Hindu
Kush as its north-western boundary. The Dardic languages, or, rather,
ancient dialects of the same group, influenced Indo-Aryan dialects of the
north-west and the west, of which Western Panjabi (Lahndi) and Sindhi
are typical examples. (See 11, li, 25.) Excepting Kasmiri, the
Dardic languages, although philologieally important, have no exalted
position. The number of people speaking them does not exceed 2
millions, of which Kasmlri alone takes up over 1 million. The Dardic
speeches of the present day, barring Kasmiri, were never cultivated,
and were written down only in the 19th century, so that no specimens of
an earlier period are available. From the earliest times Kashmir was a
To face 'page 6]
Table illustrating the Development of the Aryan Speech in Indi^.
IndO'Iranian
(Aryan)
Dardic
Group
Iranian Group
Indie or Indo- Aryan Group
Oldest Indo-Aryan ;
Vedic Dialects, c. 1500 B.C. ? 1200 B.<-\ -
E. Afghanistan; ? Kasmir; Panjab; ? N. <t.!iiu::s Doab
Spoken Dialects, c. 1200-700 B. C.
GandhSra, Panjab, Upper Ganges Valley
Udicya (Gandhara, Panjab)
> (North-West)
? PaisSci
Prakrits
xn
o
a
o
I
Kharogthi
and other
N.-W.
inscrip-
tions from
Asoka
down-
wards
and
(North =
Himalayan)
[Original Khasa —
Dardic ? Later
overlaid and
absorbed by Indie
from RajputanS in
the MIA. period]
? Praticya (Gujarat etc.) Dialects
(South-West)
Asokan
Speech of
Girnar
Madhya-desTya (Kuru-Paucala etc.)
(Midland or W. Doab Speech)
Pr • 1 (Kosala etc.)
(Easterr^ Spjech of Buddha)
Kekaya, Madra,
Takka etc.
(Vracada
Apabhransa)
Kbiasa [Pali and _Lati, Saura§tri, Abhiri,
Magadhi AvantI [with Sanrasenl^ —
influence] (and Gnrjara = Dardic ?)
|_ induence]
? Early North-
Indian Koine
Literary Pali
[with Eastern,
North- and South-
western, and Sans-
krit influence]
Eas .~'in
Asc < m
Sp 'h,
Star ( ird
(? K.me)
Ardha-mSgc Ihl
[Sauraseni
infiuencel
oauraseni •
{'Khasa
Apabhransa ')
op
5*
B3
I
PahafI S|)eeches
^ O fel
^2 3?
u (Nagara Apabhrausa)
Jain
Ardh.'
mSgac'hT
RSjasthSni ^ — " •
I \ i i
- (Sauraseni Apabhransa) ^ (Ardha-magadfc
(Araha^tha) Apabhransa)
I I
I Eastern Hindi
Western Hindi — ^ (Purabiya)
Magadhi
(Magadhi Apabhransa)
I
I
D P 08 t-J
2- ^ £J
p
i I
C 3 g W >
— a a x
I
DakeinStya
? RS§trika
(Southern)
Literary Dialect (Brahmanas)
Based on the Speeches
of the North -West, and
West Midland
Sanskrit
(Panini, from Udicya,
c. 5th Century B. C.)
Mabftra^tri
Gathft
(Mixed Sanskrit and
Prakrit)
(MahSrastri
Apabhransa)
KA^iMlRl, LAHNDI
7
part of the Indo-Aryan world in culture and religion as well as in politics,
whereas the other Dardic tracts, because of their inaccessibility, were never
completely brought under Indian influence and organisation, so that the
people retained more or less their primitive ways. Kasmlri consequently
has always been exposed to the inflaenee of the Indo-Aryan speeches,
Sanskrit and the Prakrit vernaculars, from which the other Dardic
speeches are free. There was literary cultivation of Old Kasmiri, and
probably the lost ' Bfhat-katha ' of Gunddhya, written in the ' Paisaci *
language, was in Old Kasmiri, if it was in any Dardic speech at all. We
may be quite certain that Kasmiri was cultivated before 1000 A.C.
There is some Middle Kasmiri literature. The earliest specimens of
Kasmiri that have been made accessible to us are the poems of Lalla,
a mystic poetess of the Saiva Tantrika cult, of tLe 14th century Lallii-
vakyani,' ed. by Grierson and Barnett, RAS., London, 1920). Kasmiri
used to be written formerly in the SSrada character, allied to the
Deva-nagarl, but at the present daj^, since over 90% of its speakers
are Moslems, the Perso-Arabic character is used, although a modified
Deva-nagari has been devised and employed, for philological purposes
mainly. Kasmiri was at first regarded as a Sanskritie or Indo-Aryan
language, owing to the large Indo-Aryan element in it, but its Dardic
affinities have been fully established (Grierson, * Linguistic Classification
of Kashmir!,' lAnt., 1015, p. 270).
8. Western Panjabi or Lahndi, also known under various other names
(Hindko, Jatki, MultanI, CibhFili, Pofchwari etc.), is a grouj) of dialects
current among nearly 5 millions of people in Western Panjab, who employ
for literary purposes Urdu and to a slight extent Hindi and Eastern
Panjabi. Western Panjabi does not possess much literature, except some
Sikh prose narratives like the ^ Janam-sakhl,' and some popular ballads
and songs, of which the language is often mixed with eastern forms of
speech. The native system of writing for Western Panjabi, with the * Lant^a '
characters, a variety of Sarada, is in comparatively little use now, Per-
sian characters being commonly employed when the language is put in
writing.
8
INTRODUCTION
9. Eastern Panjabi, or Panjabi^ is the language of nearly 16 millions
(according to the census of 1911). This speech is only one form of a
Common Panjabi, extending from the west of the Western Hindi to the
region of Pasto ; only it has from early times come under the influence of
the Midland speech of the west Gangetic region. There are various dialects
of Eastern Pan jab!, a noteworthy form of it being Dogrf, which is spoken
in the state of Jammu and in the district of Kangra. There is a slight
literary culture in it, the oldest extant specimens being a few Sikh hymns
dating from the 16th century. Sikhs at the present day use E, Panjabi to
some extent for literary purposes^ employing the Gur-mukhl character,
which is a reformed kind of LandS ; but Hindostani (Urdu or Hindi) has
always been the dominant language among E. Panjabi speakers. The
Persian character is also sometimes used to write E. Panjabi.
10. Sindhi is the language of the lower Indus valley and of Kachh,
and is spoken by a little over 3i millions. It has 5 dialects — VicolT, SiraikT,
Larl, Thareli and Kacchi. Sindhi is written in an elaborated form of the
Perso-Arabic alphabet, but the Landa character, proper to it, is in common
use among merchants, and Gur-mukhl is occasionally employed. In its
grammatical forms, Sindhi retains many archaic features, and in its
phonetics it is remarkable in possessing four peculiar sounds not found in
any other Indian language, Aryan, Dravldian, Kol, or Tibeto-Chinese, vi:.y
[}' or }5']j H'] and [b'], which are only [g, J5, d, b] pronounced
with simultaneous closure of the glottis. In phonetics and morphology
there are points of agreement between Sindhi and Panjabi (W, and E.),
Sindhi has a little literature of ballads and prose tales, and of compositions
in the Persian style.
11. The dialects of the Rajasthanl group (Marwan, Jaipur!, MewatT,
Malav! and others) are spoken by over 14 millions, and they seem to form,
with GujaratI, a separate branch of the Indo- Aryan family, which has as its
basis the early lA. dialect (or dialects) current in Malwa and Gujarat,
strongly modified by the neighbouring SaurasenI speech of the Midland
(§ 13), and in times pod 500 A.C., also to some extent influenced by the
language of the Gurjara tribes (possibly Dardic in origin), who came from
rAjasthAnT, gujarAtI
9
the north-west and settled in Rajputana and Gujarat and became the
rulers there. The Western or Marwarl form of Rajasthanl is in reality
the immediate sister of Gujarat!, the eastern dialects agreeing more with
Western Hindi. The exact affiliation of the Eastern Rajasthanl dialects
(MSwatI, Jaipurl and HSrauti etc., Malavl and Nimarl), whether they
are more intimately connected, in their origin^ with Western Hindi or
with W. Rajasthanl-GujaratT, cannot be determined, in the absence of
genuine ancient remains in them ; but it has been found out that W.
RajasthSnT and GujarSti are derived from the one and same source-dialect,
to which the name * Old Western Rajasthan! ' has been given (L.P. Tessitori,
•Notes on the Grammar of Old Western Rajasthanl/ lAnt., 1914-1916:
Introduction). This OWR. is represented by a respectable literature, mostly
by Jain authors, and this literature dates from the 14th century and earlier to
the end of the 15th century. Gujarat! must have differentiated from OWR.
in the 16th century into a separate language, which is now spoken by over
10 millions. The first great poet of Gujarat, Narasinh Mehta, belongs to
the 15th century, but the language of his poems, which are very popular,
has been modernised in the course of centuries. The dialects of Rajasthani
are not much used for literary purposes now. The language of the Midland
has always been dominant in Rajputana. In the earlier days, the Sauraseoi
Prakrit and SaurasenI ApabhranSa had spread their influence over the
original Indo-Aryan dialects spoken in Rajputana and Gujarat ; and the
litei-ary dialect of the Old Western Hindi period, Avahattha or ' Piggala,'
was as much cultivated by the bards of Rajputana as ' Piggala ' or the local
Rajasthani dialects, especially Marwarl ; and at the present day, Hindi is
almost the sole literary language. There is, however, a rich literature in
Rajasthani, mostly in Marwarl, and to some extent in Jaipurl, consisting
mainly o£ bardic poems and chronicles. This literature has been explored,
and its nature made known, by Tessitori, who edited, before his lamented
and untimely death, some fine Marwarl poems (Journal and Proceedings of
the ASB., 1914, 1916.17-19.20; Bib. Ind., Rajasthani Series).
12. The Pabarl or Khasa dialects present a linguistic complication.
According to Grierson, the original speech of the Khafia tribes, who spread
8
/
10 INTRODUCTION
from Western Himalayas into the eastern montane tracts, was of Dardic
origin, and like the Dards, the Khasas were Aryans outside the pale of Hindu
society. Indo-Aryan speaisers from the plains, mostly from Rajputana,
migrated north into the Himalayas among the Kha§as,and Hinduised them,
from the early centuries of the Christian era ; and the Indo-Aryan dialects
they brought completely killed off the original speech of the Khasas, and
became transformed into the present-day Pahari dialects ; which are thus
forms of south-western (RajasthanI) lA., carried to the Himalayas at a late
period, and modified more or less by Dardic whose place they took, the traces
of Dardic being stronger in the west. A nearly analogous case is that of
Kasmirl, which is Dardic profoundly modified by Indo-Aryan (from the
Pan jab), only it did not give up its native character and become absorbed
bylA.
Khas-kura (called also Parbatiya, Gorkhall or Nepali) is the most
important Pahari speech. The other Pahari dialects are interesting
philologically, but otherwise they have not much importance. Excluding
Khas-kura, for which exact figures are wanting, the Pahari dialects
are spoken by less than 2 millions. Khas-kura seems to be ousting rapidly
the Tibeto-Burman speeches of Nepal. It originally spread from Western
Nepal, and its oldest remains do not go beyond the latter part of the 18th
century. Maithili seems to have been current in South-eastern Nepal before
the advent of Khas-kura ; in any case, Awadhl, Maithili and Bengali were
used as languages of culture in the court of the (Tibeto-Burman speaking)
Newarl kings, who ruled before the Gurkhas, as is evidenced by a number of
dramas written in the above languages in Nepal, right down to the middle
of the 18th century (<?.^., A. Conrady, ^ Hariscandra-nrtyam,' Leipzig, 1891 ;
Nonl-Gopal Banerjee, ' Nepale Baggala Natak,' VSPd., 1324 San,
Introduction ; C. Bendall, ' Cat. of Buddhist Skt. MSS. in the Univ. Libr.
of Cambridge,* 1883, pp. 83-84, 183; * Kat. der Bib. der DMG.', referred
to by Bendall and Conrady). Kumauni and Garhwall, and other forms of
Central Pahari, and the various dialects grouped together as Western
Pahari, have no literature worth mentioning. Hindi is the established
language of literature in the Central Pahari region.
WESTERN HINDI
11
13. The Central Indo-Aryan language, Western Hindi, is spoken by
over 414 millions. Its chief forms are (i) Braj-bhakhft, the dialect spoken
round about Bareilly, Aligarh, Agra, Mathura, Dholpur and Kerauli ; (ii)
Kanauji, in the upper Doab, east of the Braj-bhakha area^ (iii) Bundeli, in
Bundelkhand and part of Central India ; (iv) Baggaru or Hariani in South-
eastern Pan jab ; and (v) the dialects to the north of Braj-bhakha, from
Ambala to Rampur, to which the name * Vernacular Hindostanl' has been
given, as they approach nearest HindostanI as now written (Hindi or High
Hindi and Urdu). The oldest remains of W, Hindi extant are in the
' Prithlraja-Rasau ^ of Cauda Bardai (12th-13th centuries). The language
there is much under the influence of literary Prakrit and Apabhransa of the
earlier periods. The ' Prakrta-Paiggala,' which is a treatise on Apabhransa
versification, compiled, in its present form, towards the end of the 14th
century, gives in illustration of the metrical rules, a number of poems and
couplets, most of which are in a dialect which is essentially Old W^estern
Hindi. The Apabhransa verses quoted in the Prakrit Grammar of
Hema-candra (1088-1 1 7;i A.C.) are in a iSauraseni speech which is archaic
for the time of Hema-candra, and which represents the pre-modern stage
of V/'estern Hindi.
The dialect of Braj is the most important and in a sense the most
faithful representative of the old SaurasenI speech, the source of the
W. Hindi dialects, which was current in the Midland (Madhya-desa) of
Aryan India, corresponding roughly to South-eastern Panjab, the western
districts of the United Provinces (Rohilkhaod, Agra and Meerut Divisions),
and the tract immediately to the south. Braj-bhakha has a rich literature,
mainly in verse and partly in prose ; and it and Awadhi, an Eastern Hindi
dialect, formed the common literary vehicles for poetical composition in the
Upper Ganges Valley (Hindostan proper), until recent times, when
standard Hindostani came into being. HindostanI is in its origin
based on the Western Hindi dialects spoken in and around Delhi,
dialects which were strongly influenced by the contiguous Panjabi and
Rajasthanl ; and as the speech of the capital, it gradually came to be
adopted by the Turki, Persian and Pasto speaking nobility of the
l2
INtRObUCTlOlsr
Moslem court. Originally a mixed patois of the bazaar and the camp
(«urdu» <Turki «ordu» camp), it came to have a prestige as the language
of the capital city and of the Moslem conquerors who settled down
in India; and under the successive Moslem dynasties^ officials and others
from Delhi helped its spread into the provinces, east and west and south, as
a convenient lingua franca, a natural successor to the iSaurasenI Avahattha
of the* Rajput courts of Northern India immediately before the Musalraan
conquest. For some time, when it was in a fluid state, with its grammar not
yet fixed, and its vocabulary mainly native Indian, it was only a spoken
language, the Moslems of foreign origin who spoke it at home using Persian
for literary and epistolary purposes, and the Hindus and converted Moslems
employing the vernaculars, Braj-bhakha and A wad hi. It was first used
seriously for literary composition only towards the end of the 17th century,
by North Indian Musalmans sojourning in the Deccan ; although, it is said,
it was taken up ' earlier for poetical composition in Delhi itself by Amir
Khusrau in the l^{h century (Bal-mukund Gupta^ ^ Hindi-bhasa,' Calcutta,
Saihvat 1964, pp. 9 fE). Froi» the 18th century onwards, HindostanI
became a serious rival of Braj-bhakha and Awadhi as a literary languao^e.
Persian words were being adopted by all Indian dialects from after the
Musalman conquest, and poems of Kabir (15th century) and others in the
dialects, with a large Persian vocabulary,- have been found long before the
establishment of HindostSniJ ^ Hrndostani was already the home Iaa«'uao'e
of an influentiai^Moslfem nobility and geatry in Northern India, and as
such, it had gradually taken up a large number of Persian words; it was
already the accepted standard speech, « khari-boli », for all Northern India;
and by the beginning of- the 19th century;^, it was well established as a
literary language ; and as most of its writers were Musalmans, it was
written in the Persian character, and a large Persian element became its
great characteristic. Hindu writers (beginning with Lallu-Ial and Sadal
Mi§ra) then took it up, at first at the suggestion of some English scholars
in Calcutta^ and used HindostSnl with as few Persian words as possible^
and wrote it in the national script, the Deva-nagari, The resultant style
of Hindostani, known as Hindi or High Hindi, has become established
WlSSTERN HINDI, EASTERN HINDI
13
in all Upper Gangetic India, in the Panjab (among many Hindus), in
Bajputana, in Central India, in the Central Provinces, as it admirably
met the necessity for a convenient dialect for prose. It has been
experimented for poetry in the old Hindu style as well^ although
Braj-bhakha still holds its own. The Musalman style o£ Hindostani,
known as Urdu, has developed greatly, and in versification and other
matters has completely shaken off the Indian tradition and adopted
those of Persian and Arabic.
Hindi and Urdu have their common form in the colloquial Hinddstani :
and this form of Western Hindi, as the dominant language of modern
Aryan India, has exerted a tremendous influence on all the Aryan
languages of the country; the Kol languages have been touched and
influenced by it, and the Dravidian languages of the south have not
been free from the influence of this great northern tongue. The Upper
Gangetic A^alley has been the centre of culture and political life in
India since the dawn of history, and it is in the nature of things that
its language, successively as Sanskrit, as Pali, as l^aurasenl Prakrit and
Apabhransa, as Avahattha, as Sraj-bhakha and as Hindostan?, should be
a force throughout the history of India.
14. Eastern Hindi (called * Purabiya ' by the speakers of W. Hindi)
is the name given to a group of three dialects, Awadhl (called also Kosall
and Baiswari), Baghell and Chattis-garhi, spoken by over millions in the
United Provinces, Central India and the Central Provinces, to the east of
the W. Hindi area. Bagheli is almost identical with Awadhl, but Chattis-
garhi is different in some respects. Awadhl has a rich literature. The
earliest great work in it is the ' Padumawati * of Malik Muhammad Jaisi
(middle of the I6th century), but its literary cultivation undoubtedly goes
back several centuries earlier. Tulasl-dasa wrote mostly in Awadhl*
Bagheli and Chattis-garhi have a little literature, some of which
has been printed. Hindi and Urdu, however, as successors to Braj-
bhakhS, which was formerly much cultivated in the Eastern Hindi area,
have been adopted by the speakers of Eastern Hindi as their literary
language.
14
INTRODUCTION
15. JMarathl is the language of nearly 20 millions in the Deecan,
along the Bombay coast and in Berar, Haidarabad and the Central Provin-
ces. Marat hi has 3 dialects — Desasth or DesT, th^ central and standard
dialect spoken in the Deccan tract; KogkanI or coast dialect ; and Yarhaji-
Nagpuri or eastern dialect. The language round about Goa, called also
Koijkanl^ is a sister-dialect of Marathl, and has some peculiarities of
its own. The oldest specimens of MarathI are epigraphical, consisting
of a number of short inscriptions, the earliest of which dates from 1118
A.C. (J. Bloch, ' Langue Marathe,' pp. 279 £E ; Yinayak Laksman Bhave,
' Maharastra-Sai-asvat^/ Poona 1919, pp. 9 fE.). The earliest writers of
Marathi whose works are extant are Mukunda-raja (end of the 12th century :
cf. Bhave, op^ cit,, pp. 25-26) ; Jnana-deva, whose ' Jnanesvarl,' a translation
with commentary of the Bhagavad-gita, was written c. 1290 ; and
Nama-deva^ a contemporary of Jnana-deva, a few of whose poems are
preserved in the Sikh ^ Adi-Granth/
16. We now come to the Eastern or Magadhan group of speeches,
of which Bengali is a member. The westernmost is Bhojpuriya, spoken by
nearly 20^ millions. It is spread, roughly, from the east of the towns of
Mirzapur, Jaunpur and Faizabad to the Son and the Gandak rivers, and
makes a sort of a wedge in the south-east, south of the Magahl area.
Magahl is the dialect of over 6i millions, in Gaya, Patna, Hunger and
Hazaribagh districts, as well as of some settled communities of South Bihar
people in the west of the Maldah district of Bengal. Maithili is spoken by
over 10 millions in Bihar to the north of the Ganges, and in the districts of
Hunger, Bhagalpur and Santal Parganas to the south of the river. In the
north, it shades off into Bengali in Eastern Purnia. Opiya, the language of
over 10 millions, is current in a corner of South-western Bengal, in Orissa,
and in part of Chota Nagpur, the Central Provinces and Madras Presidency.
Assamese is spread in the Assam valley, among a population of l i millions.
The oldest specimens of these languages, and their relationship with
each other, are discussed later.
17. There are some curious dialects current in Bastar and the Central
Provinces, which are a mixture of Chattis-garhi, Oriya and Marathi, These
SINHALESE
15
are spoken by tribes who originally had Gondl and other non-Aryan
languages, and came simultaneously under the influence of three slightly
different forms of Indo-Aryan. The most important of these dialects is
Halaba or Halabi (LSI., VII, pp. 330 fE).
18. Siohalese is another Indo-Aryan language which was cut off
from its sisters and cousins from c. 5th century B. C, when, according to
tradition^ Indian emigrants under Prince Vijaya went to the island and
settled there. Vijaya 's homeland was Lala : it is mentioned in connection
with Vagga (East Bengal) and Magadha; and Supparata and Bharukaccha
(Sopara and Bharoeh or Broach on the Bombay coast) are said to have
been visited by Vijaya in course of his wanderings. Lala is identified by
some with Rarjha or West Bengal, by others with Lata or the Gujarat (and
Sindh) coast country. The latter identification seems more likely : the
first immigrants who carried the Indo-Aryan speech to Ceylon seem to have
been from the Western India coast (W. Geiger, ^ Litteratur und Sprache der
Sinhalesen/ in the Grundriss der Indo-Arischen Philologie und Altertums-
kunde, pp. 90, 91). Later, from the 3rd century B.C. downwards, Ceylon
seems to have come in touch with Magadha, through Bengal^ and traditions
of intimate relations between Bengal and Ceylon are preserved in medieval
Bengali literature. The Middle Indo-Aryan (* Prakrit ') period is re-
presented in Ceylon by numerous inscriptions, and there is evidence
regarding the existence of a literature in what may be called a * Sinhala
Prakrit ' going as far back as the 3rd century B. C. But this literature
is entirely lost. The oldest specimens of Sinhalese extant go back to
the middle of the 10th century. The older form of Sinhalese is known
as EIu ( = Helu,<Hialu<Sihalu = Sinhala), which is a sort of 'Apabhran^a '
for Sinhalese, Sinhalese, by virtue of its position, has developed along its
own lines, unlike the Indo-Aryan speeches of the mainland, which
have always influenced each other very strongly, and have not allowed
entirely independent progress of any one of these. After its development
as a modern Indo-Aryan speech, however, it has been influenced by Pali
and Sanskrit. Closely connected with Sinhalese is the language of the
Maldive Islands, which is derived from Old Sinhalese of the 9th- 10th
16
INTRODUCTION
centuries (W. Geiger, * Maldivisehe Studien, III/ Sitzungsberichte
der philos.-philol. und der histor. Classe der kgl, bayer. Akademie der
Wissenschaften, 1902, Heft I, p. 114).
19. The Gipsy dialects of Western Asia (Armenia, Turkey, Syria)
and of Europe fall into two classes, one European, and the other Armenian,
The Gipsy speeches are derived from Prakrit dialects spoken in the north-
west of India, and these dialects had some connection with the Dardic
speeches. The ancestors of the Gipsies seem to have dispersed from India
for the first time as early as the 5th century A.C. ; and the earlier bands
went to Europe by way of Persia, Armenia and the Byzantine empire,
arriving in Eastern Europe in the 13th century, and thence spreading to
Western and South-western Europe. A later band stopped in Armenia,
where their language is more faithful to the Middle Indo-Aryan forms, but
seems to be more impregnated with Armenian. (F. Miklosich, ' Uber die
Mandarten und die Wanderungen der Zigeuner Europa^s,* I-XII, Vienna,
1872-1880; P. N. Finck, ' Lehrbuch des Dialects der deutschen Zigeuner,'
Marburg, 1908 ; ibich, ' Die Sprache der armenischen Zigeuner,' Memoires
de PAcademie imperiale des Sciences, VIII, Petrograd, 1907 j Eneyclopsedia
Britannica^ ^). The connection between the modern Indo- Aryan languages
and the Gipsy dialects is, from point of view of origin, very close ; but as
these have developed entirely on their own lines, they are not usually
considered in discussing the history of Modern Indo-Aryan ; they throw
valuable light on some points of Middle and New Indian phonology and
morphology, however.
20. Taking into consideration the main phonetic and morphological
trend of the Indo-Aryan speech as a whole, its history has been conveniently
divided into 3 broad periods : (1) Old Indo-Aryan (OIA.), when the lan-
guage was most copious in both its sounds and forms ; (2) Middle hido-
Art/an (MIA.)i when there was a movement towards simplification of older
consonant groups, and a genera] curtailment of grammatical forms. The
MIA. period may further be subdivided into an Early y a Second and a Late
stage, with a Transitional stage between the Early and the Second ; (3) New
Indo-Aryan (NIA.), when the old simplifying tendencies inaugurating the
PERIODS OF INDO-ARYAN
17
second period had worked themselves out ; the old inflectional system having
been worn down to a few meagre forms, gramniar had to be eked out with
a number of new help-words, so that the whole character of the language
became altered, and the modern lA. ^ vernaculars ' came into being. Vedie
and Sanskrit form the typical or representative languages of the first period.
For the second period, we have the various Prakrits of the earlier inscrip-
tions beginning with those of Asoka, Pali, and the Prakrits of literature-
At the confluence of the second and the third periods we have the literary
Apabhransas ; and these Apabhransas of literature are mainly based on
hypothetical spoken Apabhransas, in which the earlier Prakrits die and the
Bhasas or modern Indo-Aryan languages have their birth. The terms
'Vedic' or 'Sanskrit,' 'Prakrit' and ' Bhasa ^ may be used as short and
convenient, though rather loose, terms for the three periods of Indo-Aryan ;
and the transitional stage between ' Prakrit ' and * Bhasa,^ properly forming
a part of the ' Prakrit ' or MIA. period, can be conveniently called
' ApabhraiiSa.'
Definite dates cannot be laid down in language history, but the
period from the time of the composition of the Vedic hymns (? 1500
? 1200 B.C.) to the times immediately preceding Gautama Buddha (557-477
B.C.) may be regarded as the 01 A. period. The MIA. period may
be said to have extended from 600 B.C. to about 1000 A. C. ; of
which 600 B.C. to 200 B.C. would be the Early or First MIA. stage,
200 B.C. to 200 A.C. the Transitional MIA. stage, 200 A.C. to 500 or
600 A.c! the Second MIA, stage, and 600 A.C. to 1000 A.C. the Third or
Late MIA. stagje. The first few centuries after 1000 A.C. would be an
Old NIA. period, during which the NIA. languages enter into life.
The main characteristics of lA. during the three periods, affecting most of the dialects,
may be briefly noted.
[I] 01 A, Period : 1500 B.C.— 600 B C. (Vedic as type). Phonetic : r, J, ai, au ; conso-
nants retained in full ; final consonants (aurd stops, visarga, some nasals) ; consonant groups
like kr, kl, kt, gd, tr, sm, hm, rt, rk, etc. in full force ; ' root -sense ' fully present, at least in
the early stages; variable pitch accent. Morphological : Declension — complicated systems:
root-nouns, and derived nouns ending in vowels and consonants ; 3 genders, 3 numbers, 8
cases ; special suffixes for masculine and neuter, and feminine, and a special pronominal
3
18
INTRODUCTION
declension. Conjugation— elaborate systems of tenses (present and imperfect, aorist, perfect
and 'pluperfect.' future and conditional); moods (indicative, subjunctive, optative,
imperative); participles (present, perfect and future); athematic and tuematic roots,
classified by Indian grammarians into 10 gana^ ; 2 vo-ees — active and reflexive and some
special forms for the passive (presert tense 3 pers. singular aorist) ; causative, desiderative
and intensive forms; passive partiriple3 ; verbal rouns (infinitives) and perunds, and
iudecliriab'e participles. Synfactictd : wide use of finite verbal forms in the various past
tenses, of the hubjunctive mood, in the earlier period ; position of particles not fixed ;
word-f>rder free.
[2] iHA. Peiiod : 600 B C— -1000 A.C.
(i) Karly j-tage : 600 B.C.— 2tX) A.C, (Asokau Prakiit and Pali as types).
Phonetic: r, 1, lo&t ; ili, au, also aya. ava>e, Oj simplification of consonant groups, by
assimilation, etc. (kk, dd, tt, mh, ore.) ; final consonants and visarj^a dropped; tenJency
towards corebralisation of dent il stops and aspirates in connection with r , h s s reduced
generally to one sibilant, s or s; intervocal single ^to^s, retained. (In the Koith-west and
the "West, and possibly also in the MidHml, the cerebralisino: tendency was resisted, in the
early period, but it shou-ed it-;L^lf as a characteristic of the eastern dialects very early, even
as early as the OiA. ; the dialects of the Norfch-west preserved a ^rreat deal of the
phonetics of OIA.j — e,'j, i^ecurrepce of r in consonant groups, retention of Z sibilants s s s
— right down to the end of the transitional MIA. ])eriod, but trrndually througli the influence
of other dialect^, yielded to the pan-Indian tendencies.) The old * root-sense' grew
obscured A fixed stress accent, in the place of the earlier free pitch, peenis geneiallv to
liave been establi^Iied. MorpiKtloyirdl • considerable sinjpiification of the declen.sional system ;
move towards standaixli.-^ing the -a declenijion ; the dual lost; the dative mer_'ed iato the
genitive ; thn forms of th^ pronominal declension were extended to the noun. Conjugation :
imperative aiui optativ.- remain, but the subjunctive, found in a few rare cases, is lust ;
perfect system becomes less and les^ used, and is confined to a few verbs only; aoi ist
and imperfect f.ill toi^erhei, and aie Ihss and le^is u^ed ; middle voice, pieseivtd as n lelie
in the earlier period, tlisa^jpeared . tjf tiie derived forms, causative alone a living form ;
verbal nouns anil iferunds become fewer, hut more used ; wi<ler n.«e of the passive paititiple
for tlio pa^r ren^f ; fewer prepositional particles.
(ii) Transitional stai^e : l^OO B C,— 200 A.C. ('i lie Prakrits of the eailier insoiip-
tions, — KharostUT and B rah ml — as types). Chancres mainly i>honetic : single intei vocal
unvoiced stops and asjiirates became voiced, and fell togetlier \\ ith original \oiced stops
and aspirates ; these, except -£j(h)-. became open consonants, and came to be lost entirel}'
in the next period.
(iii) Second MIA. stage: A.C. 200— GOO A.C. (Diamatic Prakrits— San rastmi,
Maharastri and MagadhT, and Jaina Arclha-magadhT ag types). PJwnetic . the process of
turniniT original single stops to zero completed during this period ; original intervocal
aspirates (except -th-, .dh->-dh-) became spirants aspirated, probably, and then weakened
CHARACTERISTICS OF LATE MIA. 19
to -h- : (the above processes were earned on in all the dialects, but seem to have been
completed first in the southern speeches, e g.^ SEaharastri — while in some of the northern
dialects — SanrasenI and Mdgadhi — the voiced [and spirant] stage was maintained longer ;
Ardha-magadhi in tliis seems to have agreed with its neighbours) : -p-, however, commonly
found a 3 -v- ; intervocal -s- becomes -h- in some cases ; sandhi between udvrtta vowels.
2Iorpholoyical ■ Declension — further advance towards siniplitication, but masculine and
feminitie declersions preserved ; beginning of tlie use of help- words in forming cases of
nouns and pvocouns— kera< karya, kaa<krta ; (in the transitional sta^'c, -santaka and
one or two others can be noted). Conjuga^^^ion : reduced to indicative present and future,
in perative, opi^ative present, perfect for a few stray verbs, and passive present ; use of
the passive participle to indicate the past becomes the rule ; a number of verbal nouns
and part'cip'al forms. Syntactical : Word -order becomes stereotyped ; prt-ferenco for the
nominal lather than the verbal phrase.
(iv) Third MIA. stage (Apabbransa) : c. 600 A.C.— 1000 A.C. (Type— West( rn
or oaui'aseoT Apabhr.insa). Phondic : lu the main, the state of thiuLTS as in seconil MIA.,
bub there was further decay : weakening of final vowels — -a>-a, -e, -o>-i, -u ; in mj.ny
dialects, -s- -ss- of earlier periods becamo -h- inter vocal sincfle -m- > nasalised -v- or -w- ;
nasalisation of vowels commences. Morphological : all declentsions practically reduced to
one ; survivals or relics of the feminine and neuter declensions in some places ; typical
case forms— nominative, singular -u, •i(?), and plural -a ; instrumental — -em, -hirn ;
ablative — -ahu ; genitive, singular — -aha, -5ha, -assu, -i5, pluial -na, -ham ; hicative — -i.
-ahim, -ahn, -asu ; establishment of inflected help-words to emphasise case relations — kaia,
kaniia, kicca, niaha, kaccha or ktikkha, thama, sama, anta, antara, etc , generally added to
the genitive or some other form; also of verb forms like (a)hanta, bauda, thakkia, dia,
etc.; these help-words became the inflections ard post-positions of the next period.
Conjugation: indicative present and future, passive pi esent : optiitive lend{n,i>: to )»c Ipi>s
and less used; imperative ; the other moods and tciiseh entirely lo^r , the ubo of the
passive participle for .he past tense establiijhes the passive and neuter L-onstrnctions ;
employ of fortifying affixes, pleonastic, like -ill- or - ill-, -d- ; componnd-vei b constructions
coming into use more proniinentiy.
Ufee of rime in versification comes into being, wider use of jin</h^s and onomatopoetic
forms in ordinary language, noted already in the preceding staue. Loan-words (new
tat-samas and semi-tdt-sainas) from S.inskrit ; influence of boLij San.-akrit and the literary
Prakrits of the earlier stage.
[3] NI A. Period : v^\cr 1000 A. C. Common characteristics in the oldest period:
Phonetic : reduction of earlier double consonants to single ones, with compensatory
lengthening of preceding vowel, except in the North-west and West ; existence of inter-
vocal euphonic -y- -w- between uncombincd udvrtta vowels, exce]>ting -ai -.ni in certain
cases. Morpholoyind : Declension — distinction of feminine ; nominative and oblirpie
bases — the latter an earlier oblique case -form ; formation of plural by new methods
INTRODUCTION
(agglufcination, use of the genitive, etc.) ; inherited inflections very few ; no accusative-
dative for inanimate names ; use of post-positions ; Apabhia65a (inherited) forms far
the nouns of number (no neTV combinations). Conjugation : use of the present participle
as a tense-form commences ; beginning of compound tenses by combination ; passive
construction, with the passive participle qualifying the object, for the past tense of the
transitive verb ; adjectival (and neuter) construction for the intransitive verb past j use of
inflected passive, present tense, in -i- or «ij- ; establishment cf analytical passive form with
roots ja, pad, etc. ; causatives in -a(v)- ; some verbal nouns ; wide use of the conjunctive
participle (indeclinable) in adverbial and other senses. Syntactical : compound verb con-
structions are established.
21. Each of the three stages of I A. forms a subject by itself. The
first stage especially, as represented by Vedic and Sanskrit, has been studied
with conspicuous success in Europe and in America, thanks to the ancient
and medieval Indian grammarians on the one hand and to the historical and
comparative methods of modern times on the other. With the help of
Avestic, Greek, Latin, Old Irish, Gothic, Old Slavic, and other IE. languages,
a great deal of the obscure points in the history of the origin and develop-
ment of Vedic and Sanskrit has gradually been cleared up. The Aryan
came to India, assuredly not as a single, uniform or standardised speech,
but rather as a group, or groups, of dialects spoken by the various * Aryan ^
tribes who entered into the land and settled down there. Only one of these
dialects, or dialecfc groups, has mainly been represented in the language of
the Yedas. But there were undoubtedly other dialects, not very different
from Vedic, which might be expected to have continued and to have been
ultimately transformed into one or the other of the various NIA. languages
and dialects. The mutual relationship of these OIA. dialects, their
individual traits and number as well as location, will perhaps never be
settled ; NIA. forms, remote as they are, do not help us here much, and
from a study of the MIA. records, and of OIA. (Vedic and Sanskrit)
itself, we can only suspect that there were marked dialectal differences in
Indo-Aryan of 3000 years ago. (See § -I*!.) The true significance of the
various Prakrits as preserved in literary and other records, their origin and
inter-relation, and their true connection with the modern languages, forms
one of the most baffling problems of Indo-Aryan linguistics, owing to a
PRACYA AND MAGADHI
21
three-fold reason, that the Prakrits (and Apabhransas) are literary and to
a great extent artificial languages, standing to some extent off from the
general current of development of MIA. as spoken ; that our other authori-
^ties, the Prakrit grammarians^ are not reliable guides, themselves influencing
as much as being influenced by the texts and theories ; and that there has
been intermixture among the various dialects to an extent which has com-
pletely changed their original appearance, and which makes their aflSliation
to forms of MIA. as in our records at times rather problematical.
22. Common forms and inflections, as well as common habits of
phonetics and syntax show that the dialects of Bengali, as well as Assamese
and Oriya on the one hand, and the dialects of the Biharl group on the
other, must have originated from some early form of I A. current in the
eastern part of Northern India. To this mother-dialect, the name * Magadhi^
has been given ; and Magadhi, with its immediate neighbour * Ardha-
magadhi,' the source of E. Hindi, formed the * Praeya ' or eastern group of
dialects in the late 01 A., and MIA. periods. Some of the phonetic
characteristics of Magadhi, €,g., -« s » for <c s s s », 1 » for « r », noticed from
a very early period, are preserved or can be traced in its descendants ; and
some time before its break-up into Bhojpuriya, Maithili and Magahl,
and Oriya and Assamese-Bengali, which continued along their own lines
since then, it developed certain morphological features and syntactical
tendencies {e.g,^ use of « kaa » and « kera » or « kara » with the genitive,
of «-ill-», «-elI-» or «-all-» with the passive participle, of the verbal noun in
«-ebba-» or «-abba-» for the future, of an active construction for the past
tense), which were new in its history, and which have been inherited by its
descendants. This late form of Magadhi, when these peculiarities originated,
can be described as ' Magadhi Apabhrausa.' We have no remains in this
immediate source-form of the modern Magadhi languages preserved for
us, but we can form some idea of it from a comparison of the oldest
specimens of Bengali, Oriya and Maithili, and their sister-languages, as
well as of Sauraseni and other Western ApabhrauSa dialects of the
same period, of which we have records. The Praeya speech, including
Magadhi, originally differed remarkably in its phonetics, and to some
INTRODUCTION
extent in its morphology, from the other forms of lA, which prevailed
to its west (§ 39).
23. The history of the Aryan language in India, especially with
reference to the developnient o£ the modern ^ vernaculars/ has been^
narrated by Grierson (in the volumes of the LSI. ; in the ' Languages of
India/ Calcutta, 3903 ; in the ' Bulletin of the School of Orienta] Studies/
Loudon, Vol. I, Nos. 2 and 3 ; also K. G. Bhan('arkar, ' TVilson Philological
Lectures/ 1877, reprinted Bombay, 1914 ; P. D. Gune, ^ An Introduction
to Comparative Philology/ Poona, 1918), The life-long labours Grieison
in the field of New and Middle Indo-Aryan have finally established the
grouping of the NIA, languages in their origin and their history; and it
seems ^he monumental LSI, will remain the final authority on the broad
lines of classification of the modern Aryan languages of India, although
many dt^tails will necessarily be modified with increasing knowledge. An
account of the origin of the NIA. languages must necessarily be based on
the facts and hypotheses established by Grierson and others.
Some of the almost universally accepted hypotheses are — the existence
of various kinds of 'spoken Prakrits and A pabhransas/ as the ^ missing
links ' between the NIA. languages and OIA. dialects ; the derivation from
one kind of ' spoken Prakrit ' of a number of current NIA. languages and
dialects grouping themselves together by virtue of common traits ; the lite-
rarv and artificial character of Sanskrit when compared with the early MIA.
spoken vernaculars, in the eastern part of Northern India at least as early as
the time of Buddha and even of the B rah m anas, and in the North -Western,
Western and West- Mid land tracts probably from slightly later times ; and
the domination of one form of ML\. over the rest as a, Koine or a literary or
official speech (it was the language of Buddha, and of the Jain teachers, and
Asoka's court-dialect, forms of an eastern [Ardha-magadhi] speech, in the
earlier centuries cf the MIA. period; and a Western Midland [and perhaps
for a period, under the Ku-anas, a North-western] sf^eeeh, subsequently).
A sketch of the early history of lA., with reference to the origin of
Bengali, is attempted below, as a preliminary to a study of the Phonology
and Morphology of the language.
THE INDO-EUROPEAN PEOPLE
23
24. Aryan speakers are admitted by most scholars to have come to
India at some period not very much anterior to 1500 B.C., which is
the date usually given to the commencement of the age when the
Vedic hymns w^ere composed. The Aryanisation of North-western
India (Pan jab) was a gradual process, aijd started as an overflow from
what is now Afghanistan, where Aryan speakers were sojourning for
some time before they turned to India, along the rivers KubhS (Kabul),
Krumu (Kuram) and Gomat! (Gomal) and the passes of the western
frontier. The original people among whom the primitive Indo-European
speech, the ultimate source of Vedic and Avestic, of Greek, of Italic and
Celtic, of Slavic and of Germanic, was characterised, were, according to
testimony of language, pastoral, and perhaps nomadic, with some know-
ledge of agriculture, but their home and race- type are matters of dispute.
Panjab and Kashmir, Central Asia^ South Russia, Poland and Lithuania,
Hungary, North Germany, and Scandinavia, among other places, have been
proposed by different writers as the original Indo-Euro{)ean home. But it
seems that there cannot be much objection in regarding the wide tract of
land extending from the wTst and south of Russia (possibly also from east
Germany and Poland) to the Altai and Thien Shan mountains of Central
Asia, as the ' area of characterisation ' of i)rimitive Indo-European language
and culture. In the central and eastern j)arts of this tract now^ live various
Tatar peoples^ speaking dialects of the Turk I and Mongol groups (of the
I ral-Altaie family), side by side with the Russians. North of this traet
w^as the original home of the Finno-Lgiian peoples, remnants of whom
are still found there. It is probable that the wide grass lands of Eurasia
were shared by primitive tribes, both 1 1 id o- European and I 'ral-Altaie
(Altaic and Finno-Ugrian) in sj)eech, and that there w^as some amount of
intermingling among them. The connection between the Indo-European
and Finno-Ugrian languages, as advocated by Henry Sweet (' History of
Language,' London, 1900, Chapter VII) might be a genetic one, and it may
yet be proved that the Indo-European and Finno-Ugrian (and consequently
also the Altaic) speeches have a common origin in the language of the
prehistoric dwellers of the Eurasian plains. There is again, no proof
24
INTRODUCTION
that the primitive Indo-Europeans, the Wtros, as P. Giles proposes to
call them ( ' Cambridge History of India/ Vol, I, p. 66), were a
puie and unmixed race. Many scholars, mostly German, assumed the
original Indo-European type as being tall, long-headed, straight-nosed, with
fair complexion and golden wavy hair, the Nordic type of Europe ; others,
like Sergi, regarded them as having been a medium round-headed race, fair,
with black hair, the Alpine type; while a third view suggests with greater
plausibility that the Indo-European speakers were ^a conglomerate of peoples
of different origins who in prehistoric times were welded together into an
ethnic unity ' (A. H. Keane, * Man Past and Present,' revised and re-written
by A. H. Quigginand A. C. Haddon, Cambridge, 19:Z0, p. 505). Marked
dialectal differences were present among the primitive Indo-Europeans, as
can be seen from the derived languages. Primitive IE. dialects have been
classed into two broad groups from point of view of phonetics and vocabulary,
a Western and an Eastern. In the former group, original IE. gutturals,
stops and aspirates, were preserved as stops and aspirates, and in some cases
they seem to have been pronounced with rounded lips, and so developed a
« w » quality ; and in the latter, eome of the original gutturals were palata-
lised, and then turned into fricatives; the former dialect group developing
into the ' centum * languages — Celtic and Italic, Germanic, Greek, and the
latter into the ^ ?atam ' languages — Indo-lranian, Armenie, Albanian and
Baltic-Slavic- (See § 33.) The presence of Tokharian (Old Kuchean),
which is a non-palatalising speech, akin to the ' centum ' languages of the
west, within the eastern area is an ethnic and linguistic problem, a likely
explanation of which is that it is due to the migration of a western lE.-
speaking tribe into the east in some unknown epoch.
25. Some of the IE. tribes speaking a dialect of the palatalising and
spirantising class had ecme down south-east, into the eastern part of the
plateau of Iran, and became established there by 2000 B.C. The ronte by
which they came from ihe problematic IE. homeland, which so far as India
is concerned was certainly in the north-west, is unknown. It was generally
thought that they came through Transoxiana, before they passed down
south into Bactria and Arachosia. But the finding of the Boghaz-koi
ARYAN MIGRATION INTO INDIA
25
records, with the names of the Vedic deities Indra (in-da-ra), Varuna
(a-ru-na or u-ru-w-na), Mitra (mi-it-ra) and the Nasatyas or the Asvins
(na-§a-at-ti-ia) worshipped by the chiefs of the Mitanni, who ruled in the
north-western part of Mesopotamia, in the 15th century B.C., and who
bore Aryan names like Artatama, Artamanya, SaiiSSatar^ Sutarna, Subandu,
DuSratta, Suwardata and YaSdata, has inclined some scholars to regard
Mesopotamia and the lands north and west of it as lying in the track of
the Aryans in their progress from their home m Eastern Europe, through
the Caucasus or the Balkans and Asia Minor, east to India. The presence
of §uria§ { — Sun, Skt. «Surya») and MaruttaS (=Skt. « Marut*?) among
the gods— « buga§ (compare Skt. «bhaga», Avestic «ba^», Slav
«bogu»//w/) worshipped by the Kassites, who conquered Babylon in the
18th century B.C., and who also had names which have an Aryan look, e.g,
IndabugaS, has also been similarly explained. The Manda or Mada people,
mentioned in the early Babylonian and Hittite records, who spoke an Aryan
language, and were probably the ancestors of the later Medes of Iran, were
similarly an Aryan tribe stopping in Mesopotamia and Kurdistan and
Western Iran during the migration of the Aryans to the east towards
India (P. Giles in the ' Cambridge History of India,' Vol. I, Chap. Ill ;
H. R Hall, ' Ancient History of the Near East/ M913, p. 201 ; E. Forrer,
ZDMG., 1922, pp. 247 ff. ; Sten Konow, JRAS., 1911, pp. 42-47).
Be it as it may, these IE. speakers were settled for some time in
Eastern Iran before they came into India ; and long before that event,
their language had entered into a stage of development which has-
b en called Indo-Iranian or Aryan. This Indo-Iranian form of IE. is the
immediate source of the dialects brought by the ^ Aryans ' into India. In
Eastern Iran, it is likely that the Aryan speakers absorbed the original
peoples, who must have differed from them in race, speech and. culture.
The influx of the Aryans into the Panjab from what is now Afghanistan
seems to ha\e been brought about by gradually extending the Aryan pale
in the east ; parts of Eastern Afghanistan- — the Gandhara (Kabul Valley)
region — always formed an integral part of Aryan India down to Moslem
tinies. It was not a national movement, a folk-wandering, on a large scale,
4
26
INTRODUCTION
to a distant land in search of new homes ; in any ca^e, it did not leave such
an impression in the mind of the Vedic people. The reasons for Aryan
migration into India are not known^ but probably it was the land-hunger of
a primitive half-nomadic people, accentuated possibly by divergences in cults
and dialects which were manifesting themselves in Eastern Iran. The tribes
that moved into India, with their special cults, became the founders of the
Hinda civilisation, gradually taking up elements from the culture of the
peoples already in the land. Of those who were left in Iran, some remained
in their primitive state^ and became the Iranian-speaking Scythians, of
Central Asia and the Black Sea regions ; while others, also Iranian speakers,
developed the Magian religion and culture, and coming in touch with the
Sumero-Semitic people of Babylon and of Assyria and with the filamites,
founded the great and powerful civilisation of Persia ; and others again, not
developing any great culture of their own, became in course of time the Balo-
ches, Afghans and other Iranian peoples. A third group sought homes in the
bleak and inhospitable mountain regions east-south of the Hindu Kush : it
is thought they parted company with the rest before the split had occurred
among the Indo-Iranians, leading to their bifurcalion into Indo-Aryans
and Iranians. The speech of this third group, now represented by the
Dardic or Pi&aca dialects (§ 3), holds an intermediate position between
Iranian and Indian. Dardic speakers peopled Kashmir; and it would seem
numbers of them settled in the plains of India as well, where they have
been absorbed among their Indo-Aryan kinsmen, and their character istic
dialects have naturally died out, but these have left their marks on the
Indo-Aryan speeches which came in touch with them and ousted them from
the plains. (LSI., VIII, Part II, Introduction.)
26. Two peoples,* speaking languages belonging to two different and
unconnected families of speech, and having originally different types of
^ P, Srinivas Iyengar would have it that the Aryan speech came to India with out
an Aryan people ; he would explain the introduction of the Aryan speech into a densely
popnlated aud civilised non-Aryan (Dravidian) Panjab and Northern India as a culture
drift, in the wake of a religious cult ('Life in Ancient India in the Age of the Mantras,'
Madras, 1912, pp. 3, 4, 10, 11, 14-16). But the theory of an Aiyan invasion is borne out
MESOPOTAMIA AND INDIA 27
culture, have built up the ancient civilisation of India. These two peoples
are the Aryan and the Dravidian, and the complex and composite civilisation
which is the result of a synthesis of these two cultures is known as 'Hindu
civilisation.'
It seems that there were Chaldsean (Sumerian as well as Semitic)
and Western Asiatic, and possibly also Aegean elements in the oldest
stratum of Indian Aryo-Dravidian culture. These Western elements
might have been pre-Aryan, having been already present in Proto-Dravi-
dian, before the advent of the Aryans into India ; or what is equally litely,
these elements might have been absorbed by the Aryans into their own
culture as a result of their contact with Western peoples in the course of
their migration into India from their primitive home in Eastern Europe.
Some cults, as that of a great Mother-Goddess, and probably of some of the
Vedic deities, and some old myths (like that of the deluge), as well as some
astronomical knowledge, and a few objects and ideas of material culture,
seem thus to have been introduced into India at a very early period.'
by the general outlook upon life as presented by the Vedic poems, which is that of a war-
like and conquering people establishing themselves in a country previously inhabited by
another people, by the character of the Vedic speech, which in its habits differentiates
itself from later forms of Indo- Aryan, and associates itself with Greek and others in pre-
serving a pure Indo-European structure ; and by the totally different form of culture
and ideas presented by the Rig- Veda on the one hand and the oldest Tamil poems on the
other — poems which, according to competent authority, represent the Dravidian spirit at its
purest and most ancient form. The wide difference in racial type between the South
Indian Dravidians and the North-west Indians is note-worthy ; and we have also to take
into consideration the parallel cases of Persian, Greek and Italic Indo-European cultures,
* Cf. • Hinduism,' by W. Crooke, in Easting's Cyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. VI,
p. 688 ; E. Forrer, * Die Inschriften und Sprachen des Hatti-Reiches,' ZDMG , 1922, i, p. 252 ;
B. G. Tilak, * Chaldsean and Indian Vedas/ in Comm. Essays presented to K. G. Bhandarkar,
Poona, 1917, pp. 29-42 ; A. Weber, * Indian Literature*,' London, 1904, pp. 2, 247-248. The
' ^ suras ' as the enemies of the Gods in old Sanskrit literature may be a reminiscence of
hostile contact between Assyrians and Aryans outside India : F. \V. Thomas, in the JRAS.,
1916, p. 364. The latest theory about the origin of the Dravidians is that they belong to
the Mediterranean race, that they lived for some time in Mesopotamia, and by the pressure
of the Akkadians or Semites, they pushed into India, by way of Balochistan (where the
Brahui language marks their presence), and spread along the Indus and Ganges valleys.
28 INTRODUCTION
The stronghold of Dravidian culture was in the South, probably in
the basin of the Kaveri ; and among the Dravidians there were tribes in
various stages of civilisation, from the civilised ancestors of the Kannarja,
Telugu and Tamil-Malayalam peoples to the wild forefathers of the
Brahuis and the Gonds, Khonds and Oraons. These latter may represent
earlier pre-Dravidian stocks, like the Kols, who adopted Dravidian speech,
and who might originally have been (as they are now) quite distinct from
the civilised Dravidians. It is regarded as certain that Dravidian speakers
were at one time spread over the whole of Northern India as well^ from
Baloehistan to Bengal.
27. The other elements in the Aryan-speaking peoples of Northern
and North-eastern India may be briefly noted.
Beside the Dravidians there were the Kols, whose speech is a member
of a linguistic family extending through Indo-China and Malay Peninsula
to Indonesia, Melanesia and Polynesia — the Austric family (P. W.
Schmidt, ' Die Mon-Khmer Volker, etc.,' Brunswick, 1906). Kol speakers
are now confined roughly within the region between the Ganges, the
Tapti and the Godavari (West Bengal, Chota Nagpur, North-east Madras
before passing into theSonth and absorbing there the pri mi Live Ne^to and proto-Polynesian
population : James Hornell, ' The Origins and Ethnological Significance of Indian Boat-
designs,' Memoires of the ASB., 1920, Vol. VII, No. 3, pp. 225-226. The Yedic word ' mana '
a iveightj is regarded as being of Babylonian origin ( = *minH'), and ' parasu '( ^ Greek
* pelekua ') a^e and M5ha* <* *r6dha' jVo7i have been connected with Sumerian * balag*
(Akkadian *pilakku*) and 'urudu' copper respectively: of. A. B. Keith, * The Early
History of the Indo- Aryans ' in the Bhandarkar Comm. Volume, p. 87. The tinding of
a Babvlonian cylinder of c. 2000 B.C. in Central India (Rakhal-Das Banerji, ' Bdhgalar
ItihSs,' Part I, Calcutta, 1321 San, pp. 20-22), and of the Harappa seals from the Panjab,
with the unmistakable Cretan bull and Cretan-looking symbols (Annual Progress
Report of the Supdt. Archaeological Survey, Hindu and Buddhist Monuments, Northern
Circle, for the year ending 31st March, Lahore, 1923, Plate IX; Cambridge History of
India, I, Plate XI, 22, 23), are probably among direct evidences of early contact between
the Indo-Aryans or Dravidians and the people of the West. Cf. also 'Some Ancient
Elements in Indian Decorative Art ' by A nanda Krishna Coomaraswaniy, in the Ostasia-
tische Zeitschrift, quoted in the Modern Review (Calcutta) for August 19U, where the
infiux of decorative 7noiifs from the Aegean region into pre-Aryan India is established.
KOL, MON-KHMER, TIBETO-CHINESE
29
Presidency, the Central Provinces), but on linguistic and ethnic grounds it
has been surmised that at one time they lived in the Gangetic plains, up to
the foot of the Himalayas.*
The presence of the Khasis in Assam, as well as the early history of
the Mons and the Khmers (who were spread all over Burma and ludo-China
before they were subdued and assimilated by the Tibeto-Chinese tribes,
like the Burmans and the Tai), may warrant the assumption that in very
ancient times, the Kol-Mon-Khmer race was spread from Central India and
the Ganges valley to Cambodia. The Kol race undoubtedly forms an im-
portant element in the present-day Aryan-speaking masses in Northern
and Central India. The Kols never evolved any great culture, and they
apparently had nothing to contribute in the formation of the Indian
civilisation; they were simply absorbed within the Hindu (Brahmanical
and Buddhistic) fold when they adopted Aryan speech.
28. The speakers of the Tibeto-Chinese languages, the Tibeto- Burmans
and others, who settled in Tibet and in the southern slopes of the Himalayas
as well as in Assam aud North and East; Bengal in comparatively recent
times, seem not to have moved much further to the east of their primitive
home round about the sources of the Yang-tsze-Kiang at the time of
Aryan penetration into India (1500 B. C). When the Tibeto-Burmans,
forming one branch of the Tibeto-Chinese race, came to the Indian side of
the Himalayas, to Nepal and North Bihar, Bengal and Assam, they
* Census Report (India,) for 1911, p. 327, § 412. Sarat Chandra Roy, * The Mundas and
their Country,' Ranchi, 1912, Chap. II, pp, 80-32, 43, 44, 47 ff., 61, 70 ff. Mr. Roy's attempts
to identify names of non- Aryan chiefs in the Rig-Yeda with Mundarl names, pp. 47-4P, are
rather fanciful. All that we can be fairly certain of is that the Kols lived in the
Upper Gangetic Valley, and were considerably influenced by their more civilised
neighbours the Dra vidians, among whom they might have been absorbed, at least in
the plains ; and when the Aryans came, they, in common with the Dravidians, took up
the Aryan speech and were brought within the fold of the Brahmanical social order.
Those Kols, who, living in the remoter parts of Central India, did not come in contact with
the Gangetic Aryans or Aryanised people in ancient times, are now represented by the
Santals, the Mundas, the Hos, the Kurkii, the Savaras, the Gadabas, etc, and possibly also
by the Bhils (now Aryan in speech).
30
INTRODUCTION
possibly mingled with the Kol and Dravidian peoples already estabh'shed
there; aud this amalgam rapidly became Aryanised in contact with Gangetic
culture. The other branch of the Tibeto-Chinese peoples, the Tai or Shan,
carried on its incursions in North-eastern India in successive waves, o£ which
we know in detail one only, the Ahom invasion of Assam in the 13th century.
The Tibeto-ChineiC peoples who came to India were rude tribes without any
high culture, and their contribution to Indian civilisation seems to have been
nil ; although one branch of this race, the Chinese, built up one of the
greatest material civilisations of the world, the foundations of which go back
to the beginning of the second millennium B. C.
29. Hoernle had postulated the incoming of the Aryans into India in
two groups or bands, one earlier, and the other later. According to this
theory, a group of Aryans first came into India and settled in the Western
Gangetic Doab or the Midland country. They were followed by another
group, and these new-comers dispossessed their kinsmen, who had come
earlier, from their original settlements, and forced them into tracts west,
north, east and south of this Midland region. The new-comers thus became
the ^ Inner ' Aryans ; and their predecessors, who had to retreat into the out*
lying tracts, became the * Outer ' Aryans. It was among these * Inner *
Aryans that Vedic culture and Brahmanical ideas grew up. This view of a
two-fold Aryan immigration, or rather, of the advent into India of two
separate and antagonistic groups of Aryan-speakers, both equally important,
has been endorsed by Grierson, and the theory has been further elaborated
by him. According to Grierson, the ' Outer ' Band of Aryan invaders, who
were closely connected with the J)ardic speakers, and were probably but a
branch of them, settled in the Panjab, in Sindh, in Gujarat and Rajputana,
in the Maratha country, in the Eastern Hindi area, and in Bihar (whence
their language was taken to Bengal, Assam and Orissa), and in the north,
along the slopes of the Himalayas. Thus, the ^ Inner ' Aryan speech is now
represented by Western Hindi ; whereas the other current forms of Aryan
speech developed from the dialects used by the * Outer ' Aryans ( ^ History
of India' by A. R. Hoernle and H. A. Stark, Calcutta, 190i, pp. 12, 13 ;
Grierson, BSCS., Vol. I, No. 3, p, 52).
aNNER' AND 'OUTER' ARYAN
31
The reasons adduced by Grierson are mainly linguistic. He notices
that there are certain points of disagreement between the Midland Aryan
language, Western Hindi, on the one hand, and the other Aryan languages,
viz,, Lahndl, Sindhi, Gujarati, Marathl, Bengali, Bihar! and the Pahari
dialects, on the other. These disagreements in points in which the outer
languages agree are inherited, as Grierson is inclined to think, from the
two ancient groups of Aryan languages spoken by the ' Inner ' and the
* Outer ' Aryans respectively. Not only do the ' Outer ' languages agree
with each other in those very points in which they differ from the
Midland language, but what is more, the Dardie languages share with the
* Outer ^ speeches most of these ver}^ characteristics. Consequently, the
NIA. languages fall into two main classes : (i) * Inner,** or Midland,
or SaurasenI class : classical Sanskrit is believed to be specially connected
with this group, being based on the early Midland dialects ; Western
Hindi is its modern representative ; and (ii) 'Outer,' or non-Vedic, or non-
Sanskritic, the so-called * Magadhi ' of Hoernle, to which fall practically
all the other NIA. speeches; as also Sinhalese, and the Gipsy speeches
outside India. The ' Outer ' group is closely connected with Dardic,
according to this classification. Grierson has brought together (in the
BSOS., Vol. I, No. i], pp. 78-85) those points of Hnmiistie similarity
among the * Outer ' speeches on which he has basetFthis connection
among the various ' Outer ' languages, and their differentiation from the
' Inner ' or Midland language.
30. What Grierson has suggested from linguistic reasons has been
sought to be established on anthropological and ethnological grounds by
Rama-Prasad Chanda ( ' Indo-Aryan Races,' Parti, Rajshahi, 1910).
Chanda, however, differs from Grierson in some of the details of the
theory. According to Chanda, the ' Outer ' Aryans were a brachy cephalic
race, derived from a stock totally different from the ^ Inner ' Aryans,
who were dolichocephalic. This difference in race went hand in hand
with a difference in dialect. The dolichocephalic * Inner' Aryans were
the ancestors of the people of the Panjab, of the Rajputs, and of the
Brahmans of the Upper Ganges Valley (Hindostan) : among them
INTRODUCTION
grew up the Vedic institutions and culture and the system of the four castes.
The braehycephalic ' Outer ' Aryans, who originally knew nothing of the
Vedie cults, and from whose religious notions ultimately developed Yaisna-
vism and Saktism, were, in later times, profoundly influenced by the
religion and ideas of the * Inner ' Aryans, but only after they had been
settled for centuries around the latter in Western Panjab, in Sindh, in
Gujarat and Maharastra, and in Bihar and Orissa and Bengal, where they
crossed over from Western India through the forest country of Central
India. The Gujaratls, Marathas as well as the Bengalis, Biharls and
Oriyas have a preponderance of braehy- and mesaticephals : they are
the result of a mixture of the round-headed ^ Outer ' Aryans with the long-
headed Dravidians and Kols, as well as with the long-headed ^ Inner ' Aryans
who migrated from the Midland into the outer tracts. Such, in brief, is
Chanda^s view; and this also takes cognisance of the linguistic arguments
put forward by Grierson.
31. The problem presented by the above theory is a most important
one, and impossible withal to solve. The linguistic data brought forward
by Grierson is admittedly late ; and they might very well be the result of
independent development in the various ' Outer ^ languages, not of inherited
tendencies. A consideration of the points raised by Grierson is made in
Appendix A to the Introduction, The anthropometric data of Chanda need
not be questioned, and what he says about the influence of Magadhan and
East Midland Outer ' Aryan) peoples upon the ^ Inner ' Aryans of the
West Gangetic Doab Indo-Aryan Races/ p. 54 fE.), is note-worthy. It
may be that the Gujaratis and the Bengalis, with most Biharls, present a
type which is the result of the mixture of Dravidian, Kol and ' Inner ' Aryan
long-heads with a race of broad-heads, akin to the Homo Aipinv.s, from
Central Asia, who came to India in some prehistoric period : but what
evidence is there that these broad-heads were Aryan or Indo-European
speakers ? The linguistic basis for Chanda's theory is weakened a great
deal when the Lahndl-speaking Western Panjabis, who by their dialect
are ^ Outer ' Aryans, according to this ' Inner ' and * Outer ' theory, and
whose ancestors at least in certain tracts used to be regarded by the
VARIOUS OIA. DIALECTS
^ Ituier ' Aryans ol: the Midland as beinj:^ equally degraded aud out of the
Brahmauical pale as the Magadhau and other eastern peoples 37), are
proved racially to be of the same stock as the Kanaujiya Brahmans of the
Midland. Besides, the evidence of anthropometry based on cephalic index
alone is not regarded as conclusive. For aught we know, and it is not neces-
sary to digress into questions of anthropology, which as a science is still in
its infancy, the hypothetical b»'achy cephalic hordes from Central Asia^ who
are regarded by Cbauda, with the concurrence of A, C Haddon, a^^ forming
one of the elements in the Gujarat!, ^laratha, Kodagu, Kanna^Ja, Telugn,
Oriya, Bengali and Bihari peoples, might never have been Aryan speakers.
It is to be noted that the Telugu. Kanna'ja and Kofjagu peoples, who are
supposed to be the result of exactly the same ethnic mixture as the GujarAtis
and the Bengalis, never spoke Aryan, Again, there is not the slightest
tradition in Bengal favouring the assumption of the migration of (brachy-
cephalic ' Outer') Aryans from Western India or Gujarat into Bengal and
Bihar. On the other hand, the traditions of Aryandom everywhere refer to
the Midland as the nidus. The attempt to establish on anthropometrical
and ethnological grounds a ring of 'Outer ' Aryandom round an * Inner ^
Aryan core is as unconvincing as that on linguistic grounds
32. Instead of regarding the Aryan dialects of Ancient India as
falling int") two great classes or branches, as Hoernle and Grierson have
postulated, we may, with Weber and others, think of them as forming
more than two groups, some of these agreeing with each other more than
with the rest, by virtue either of a ijenetie connection, or of development
along similar linos, or again of mutual intluence. This sort of classillcation
may be thus illustrated :
»
Indo-lranian
Iranic
Dialects
Dardic
Dialects
Indo-Aryan Dialects
A B C D
North-west Midland West East
r i
E t
E etc.
INTRODUCTION
The existence of intermediate dialects, between I rank and Indian
as well as Dardie and Indian, is exceedint^ly probable.
Ihe speech uf the Rig- Veda, which is our sole re[>reseatative for all
these dialects, A, B, C, D, E, F etc, is a kind of literary language, a
^ bardic speech, based primarily on one of these dialects only, but admitting
forms from other dialects as well, specially when towards the end of the
Rig-Yedic period the mass of Vedic hymns became the common property
of mobt Aryan tribes. The basic dialect upon which thi^ composite Vedic
bardic speech was gradually built up, and i£uite unconsciously too, as is the
case with all t^imilar birdie Unu^uages, was probably of Lhe extreme West,
when the Aryans were as yet contined to the Pan jab ; and we can trace
some of its salient phonetic characteristics which marked it oft* from the
other dialects. Thus, for example, it was a dialect which had only « r »,
and no « 1 it spirantised internal voiced aspirates like « ^h jh dh bh »,
ultimately to change them to « h » ; and turned intei vocal « d dh » to
the liquids « 1 Ih » (cf. A. Meillet, ' Les Consounes inter voealiques en
Vedique,' IF., XXXI, pp. HO ff.). In its preference for « r this basic
dialect of the Rig-\ eda speech agreed with Iranian, possibly its immediate
neighbour to the west. From forms preserved in classical Sanskrit (which,
again, is a later literary dialect, also of com{X)site origin, based on the
spoken forms ot* 01 A. current from Gandhara or Peshawar frontier
to the Midland, uptil the middle ot* the first millennium B. C, but
approximating to the dialects of Western Pan jab in its rather archaic
phonetic chai-acter), and also from forms preserved in the jMIA. dialects
(or Prakrits), we can conclude that there were other OIA. dialectte
of the Vedic age which did not agree with this basic dialect. Thus,
certain Aryan dialects, probably of the central region, preserved both
« r » and <l * ; and others, undoubtedly of the east, had only « 1 » : e.g.,
genuine Vedic « -srl-ra- » (cF. Avestie « sri-ra- ») prosperous ^ beside « sri-la- »
and « sli-la- », both preserved in Sanskrit ( = Indo-Iranian « * €ri-la- », IE.
« * krai-lo- »). The later, younger portions of the Rig-Veda show forms in
« 1 » also ; which indicates t le influence of an « 1 » dialect. The other dialects,
which are represented by Sanskrit and forms of MIA., did not favour the
OIA. DIALFCTAL FORMS 85
change of the voiced aspirates to « h » ; and it was through the influence of
these, that the habit of the basic dialect of the Rig-Vedie speech was not
allowed to have full play ; so that we find in the poems of the Rig- Veda (as
much as in Sanskrit) very many instances where the old aspirates were retained,
or restored. While some of the OIA. dialects, including the basic dialect
of the Rig- Veda, changed intervoeal « -di- » to « -j- », other dialects, a? shown by
Sanskrit, retained the « -d- ». In other points too, the presence of a varied
dialect group in the oldest Indo-Aryan stage is very well attested. A form
« guru » heavy y important is found in Vedie and Sanskrit, but that another
form « garu corresponding to the (jreek « barus », existed dialeetally, is
attested by the Pali and later Prakrit « garu » ; ef . also Skt. « gar-iyas, gar-
is tha » . The Vedic and Sanskrit ^ purusa, purasa » oian was only dialectal
Indo-Aryan; the common Indo-Aryan form seems to have been « * pursa*
from «*pu-vrsa» (J. Wackernagel, ^ Altindische Grammaiik,^ I, Gottingen,
1896, p. xix ; C. C. Uhlenbeck, ^ Etym. Worterbueh der altind, Spraehe,'
Amsterdam, 1899), which is found as « posa, purisa, porisa » in Pali.
Inflected forms, roots and words not preserved in Vedie and classical
Sanskrit are o3casionally found in MIA. dialects, and these often
indicate their presence in OIA. dialects other than the Vedic or
classical Sanskrit literary speeches. Vedic and Sanskrit have a form
x^syat» (=«^ as », 3 sg. optative), corresponding to the Latin form
< siet >sit » ; but the Pali « assa » represents an OIA. dialectal form
< * asj at », in which the vowel of the original root is strengthened
and preserved, and which corre<?ponds to Gre-dc < ele » (for « eh Jet »
=:IE. « ^ fsiet »). TA. « da ^ oecnrre<l in the present tense both in
the reduplicated and simple forms ; the former, « dadati » ffif'^'^,
« datta» giren, were more current in the dialect or groups of dialects on
which Vedie and Sanskrit were based; but the latter, dati », « dita*
had apparently an equally wide or even wider currency in the other
dialects, and in the NIA. languages it is these l-^tter forms which
have held on (<c dati >> « deti » in a Bharhut inserii)tion, through analogy
of < nayati » > « net! » takes ; < deti » > NIA. « dei, dey »; « dita»>
NiA. base « dia », as in Hindi «dl-a»j Bengali f^«T * di-Ia » etc.).
:3G
INTRODl^CTION
The common NIA. root « aeh, aeb, ch » he. present in Bengali etc., in
Gujaratl, in Paharl, comes from an 01 A. «*acch » ; this « ^ acch » is
not found in Vedic and Sanskrit, and must have been quite common in
other OIA. dialects, being only a thematic form of « as » : IE.
« es-sko-ti » would ^iv^e « acchati » in OIA.; « ^ es + sko-» is found,
beside the athematic « \/ es in Greek, in Latin and in Kuchean. The
MIA. word « adhigi(Jhya » cnmtnnicuig, in the Rhabra edict of Asoka,
lons^ wrongly read as « adhigicya is explained as preserving^ an OIA.
root « ^ gfdh » fifep, ir'^lk, agreeing with Avestic « gar ad », Latin « gradior
Lithuanian « giridiu Old Church Slav « gredo » etc., and different
apparently from the Vedie « grdh » he (freed y (Truman ^lichelson in
the IF., XXVIL p. 197).
These and similar divergences between Vedic and Sanskrit and the
* Prakrii ' dialects, and divergences within one single form of speech like
Vedic itself, sufficiently demonstrate the existence of dialects in OIA. other
than the basic speech of the Rig-Veda. But after all, these differences are not
great, and the position of Vedie and Sanskrit as representatives of all or
most OIA. dialects is not assailed. The remarkable agreement of Vedie
with Avestic and Homeric Greek shows its right to be regarded as the
typical OIA. language, with which comparison can be made of MIA. and
NIA. as with the original standard or norm ; and although MIA. and
NIA. languages are not, strictly speaking, derived from the language of the
Rig- Veda, or from classical Sanskrit, they can very well be referred to the
latter, for iype^ of their xonrce-forms, in phonetics and in such old inflections
as are not the result of later, independent development.
33. The Vedic language, then, as typical of OIA., may be taken to
represent the arehe-type from which later lA. speeches spring. This
language belongs to what has been called by the philologists the « sat9m »
class of Indo-European tongues, namely, those which have changed the ori-
ginal IE. front gutturals (the so-called ' palatals') k kh, g gh » into palatal
fricatives and sibilants « 5, z * (later <c s, j >^ or ^ s, z »). This palatalisation
occurs in Baltic-Slavie and Albanian only among the IE. languages of
Europe : the other European speeches of the IE. family, Greek, Italic„Ce]tie
OIA. PHONETICS
:i7
and Germanic, did not change these original front gutturals into palatal
f^pirants or sibilants (although that change has resulted in most o£ the
modern forms of the above speeches^ /^\//., dialectal Greek, Italian, French,
English, during the last thousand or fifteen hundred years). The Primitive
IE. word for luniilred^ «''^ivi]it6m », became «satam » in Sanskrit, <csat8m » in
Avestie, «^iiiitas^ in Lithuanian, and «siito» in Old Church Slavic ; while
the guttural was retained in Greek « (he)-katon Latin « centum » (pron.
kentum), Primitive Celtic « kanton » whence Old Irish « ert » (pron. ked)
and Welsh «eant», Primitive Germanic ^'^xunclam » whence Old Ens^lish
<chund». Two typical words, Avestie « satam » and Latin « centum
representing two varieties of transformation of the IE. « ^ kmtom are
employed as convenient labels to mark off the two kinds of IE. from each
other. The consonant system of I A., as represented by Vedic. is remarkably
full, and is most faithful to the Primitive IE., espe<.'ially as to its charac-
teristic aspirate sounds, which are preserved nowhere else. But it is parti-
cularly poor in its vowels — IE. «:a e o, a e o * haviuQ; already in the Indo-
Iraniau stage fallen together into « a, a ». The languages with which
Aryan came into contact in India, of which we have belated specimens
only, namely Kdl and Dravidian, iniiuenced it a great deal in its
phonetics, and determined the character of the subsequent phonetic history
of TA. on some note- worthy points. The simple and primitive vowel system
such as characterises Vedic was continued in Common I A. down to recent
times, and it has been modified but slightly. It is to be noted that Kol and
Dravidian possess an equally simple vowel system. The aspirates of I A.,
however, have succeeded in imprinting themselves on all non- Aryan
languages with which it came in direct toifeh, f\g, Kaunarja, Telugu,
Santali. The Vedic literary speech is lacking in spirants, except in the
ease of the rare guttural and labial breathincr, the * jihva-mullya ' [x| and
the ' upadhmaniya ' [f], as variants of the ' visarga.' The palatal spirant
[k>c] was changed to the palatal sibilant s » [s] in India, and \ g>zj
to the palatal stop « j » = Q], This is remarkable, when we find that the
sister and probably the nearest neighbour of lA., namely Iranian as in the
A vesta, is particularly rich in spirants. This lack of spirant sounds in lA.
38
INTRODUCTION
might have been due to the very earlj^ inHuence of Dravidian (and perhaps
also Kol). "Besides, ihe cerebral sounds « t d 1 T)y>, which are preeminently
Dravidian/ have already been imposed upon the earliest lA.
The morphology of Vedic is as luxuriant as it can be, and it retains
most faithfully the inflections of Primitive IE. Much of the vigour and
grace of the Vedic speech is due no doubt to its highly inflectional character.
But the modifications its roots undergo, and the very elaborate nature of
its declinational and conjugational forms have made it one of the most com-
plicated of languages, although all that was easily understandable in Primi-
tive IE. with its agglutinative character. Compared with OIA. (Vedic),
Old Dravidian must have been simplicity itself. The conjugational system
of Old Dravidian, with the nominal nature of the verb, with its two tenses,
a past with a definite sense and an * aorist ^ or * future ' with an almost
universal applicability, its want of modal and derived forms like the
causative (cf. J u lien Vinson, ^ Le Verbe dans les Langues dravidiennes,'
Paris, 1878, pp. 56, 57), was nowhere befoie lA.; but undoubtedly it
sufficed, by periphrasis no doubt, to express all simple ideas. The Kol
scheme of declension and conjugation, with its regular array of suflSxes and
infixes added to the root, is an extremely simple thing^ even in modern Kolj
although it looks formidable in its poly synthesis. (J, Hoffmann, * Mundari
Grammar,' Calcutta, 1903, Introduction ; LSI., Vol. IV, Introduction to
the Man. "a languages and to Santali.) The result of the contact between the
speakers of the highly inflectional and complicated Aryan, and those of the
comparatively regular, agglutinative Kol and Dravidian, when the latter
took to speaking the language of the former, we see in the later history of
the Aryan speech in India, in the process of its transformation to the NIA.
languages. The whole system of Vedic has been simplified to that of the
^ The following is the reconstruction of the Sound-system of Primitive Dravidian by
K. V. Subbayya (' Dravidian Phonology,' lAnt., .Iiine, .Inly, August 1909)' Vou-els : a, a,
i, i, u, u, e, e, o, 6: and long iv (simple and nasalised) ; Consonants • p., -b- ; t-, -d- : .tu, -d- •
-g'- (-front gutturals of IE., k, g) ■ k- -g- (-velars of IE., q, g) : m, n, n. ii,*n;
r, 1, r (trilled), 1, 1 ( = spirant cerebral 1, or r, or z), and probably aUo a bilabial spirant, w,
both voiced and unvoiced, and the palatal semi- vowel y : and there was no sibilant.
ARYANS OF THE MIDLAND
modern vernaculars^ and tins simplification lias been carried out to a great
extent along the lines of Dra vidian (cf. Aj)2)endix B),
34. The first coming ofc* the Aryans into India was, we may prefeume,
as the extension into North-western India of the Aryan pale from what is
now Eastern Afghanistan. There was progiess towards the east, along
Northern Panjab; and in the Rig-Vedic period, commencing from about the
middle of the 2nd millennium B. C, Aryandom in India, at least Ihe
Aryandom of which the Rig- Veda is the religious and literary expression,
extended from the Kabul and the Swat rivers to the Ganges. Probably at
this time there were two cesitres of Aryan life : at least it wis so during the
earlier part of the next pL^riod : Grandhara (Peshawar and Rawalpindi), an<l
the tract wliich came to be known as ' Brahm&varta, by the river Sarasvatl
(Patiala, Ambala, Karnal). The distinctly Indian character of the Vedie
religion seems to have taken shape in the eastern part of the area. Here
one section of the Aryans developed the Vedic cult of fire, of Indra and of
the great Gods of the Rig- Veda ; here probably the later, Brahmanie ideas of
sacrifice first took shape, and the beginnings of the old Aryan monarchical
institutions were made. The hymns of the Rig-\ eda, the bulk of them,
were composed in the Panjab, but it is quite imaginable that a number of
them were brought into India from outside by the Aryans : witness, for
instance, the common metres and strophes found in both the Rig- Veda
and the Avesta. The particular group of Aryans who created the Vedic
religion, and systematised it« literature and its* ritual, seem to have made
the Midland (the Upper Ganges Doab) their home, where they developed
the system of the four castes, and in general laid the foundations of
Brahmanistic culture and religion of later times (1000 — 600 B. C). From
their position in one of the richest parts of India, from their high culture
and their organisation, these Midland Aryans became the most dominant
people in Northern India, and their intellectual people, the Rrahnians, and
their aristocracy, the bLsatriyas or Rajauyas, were able to infiuence all
surrounding peoples by their superior mentality ; and they extended the
Midland institutions right up to Benares and Mithila in the east, and also
into the south and the west.
40
INTRODUCTION
All Aryaa speakert^^ however^ were not ' Veclie ' in their relii^ion and
general outlook. There is evidence in the Rig- Veda that the A'edie Aryauj?
fought not only ^\ith the non-Aryans, but also with other Aryans, whose
ideas and ways of life were probably dissimilar. Some of these non-A'edic
Aryans seem to have preceded the Aryans of the Yedie cults in the ea^t^
along the Ganges, where the latter followed them from their Midland
head-quarters. Other bodies of Aryans, keeping themiselves equally aloof
from the Yedie iVryans of the Eastern Pan jab, were settled in Western
and South-western Pan jab. These Aryans of the eastern tracts seem to
have differe-l from the Midland or Yedie Aryans in many respects — in
religious observances, in many practices, in dialect.
The non-Aryans, Dravidians and Kol, fought with the Aryans, both
Yedie and non-Yedic, and made peace with them. iVIany of the non-
Aryans remained unalfected by Aryan <ailture and language for quite a
long time: the presence of Dravidian (or Kol)-speaking peoples in Northern
India, including the Pan jab and Upper Ganges A'alley, down to late
MIA. times, is not an unlikely thing, considering that the Brahuis are
nourishing in Balochistan at the present day. The evidence from literature
seems to show this also : and toponomy in Northern India would probably
support it. The Goads, a Dravidiau-speakiug tribe of Central India, ior
instance, j?eem to give their name to GoiL'la district in the United Pro-
vinces. But from the advent and settlument of the Aryans, large numbers
of non- Aryans were tinding a plasd in Aryan society, either as sej;fs and
slaves, or as fre.^ cultivators and labourers and artisans, although they
were looked down upon as « Sudras » by the Aryan settlers, the « ^'ifeas ». The
Dravidians were possessed of a material culture not much inferior to that
brought by the Aryans (cf. R. Caldwell^ * Comp. Gmmni. of the Drav.
Langs.^,' London, 11)13, pp. 11 3-114: ; P. T. Srinivas Iyengar, * Life in
Ancient India in the Age of the Mantras,^ ^Madras, llHrZ, p. l.j). They
seem to have been clever agriculturists and artiiicers, and they had their
own deep-seated ideas on world and man, which also affected the Aryans,
The contact between the two peoples which began possibly as a shock of
strife at tirst in the Panjab, and became friendly and intimate in the
DRAVIDIAN INFLUENCE ON ARYAN
41
Ganges Valley, resulted iu a compromise in which outwardly the Aryan
triumphed, for his language superseded Dravidian in Northern India^ and
in later times even became the vehicle of thought and culture among the
Dravidians of the South. Through this victory of his language, the Aryan
gave a distinct colour to the culture with which it became associated. This
synthesis took nearly a millennium to complete in the plains of Northern
India.
35. Even as early as the Vedic period, when the thoughts and notions,
the social institutions and mental outlook of the Aryans in India, in fact, their
culture as a whole, had many more things in common with the primitive
Hellenes, Italians, Celts, Germans and Slavs than with their descendants
the later Hindus of Northern India, — at a time when characteristic Hindu
ideas did not develop among them, Dravidian cults and Dravidian language
had begun to intiuence their religion and speech. No trace of the doctrine
of transmigration, for instance, is found in the Rig- Veda, and yet no other
doctrine is so peculiarly Indian ; it may have had its origin in non-Aryan
animism, but it became established among the Aryans quite early. Some of
the cosmic notions seem to be Dravidian ; Dravidian gods ^ were being added
to the Aryan pantheon ; or rather, their attributes and natures, and sometimes
^ E g.f a. Dravidian god of tiie mountains and wastes, a Red Go(/, probably had his name
translated into Aryan as ' ''Rudhra,' and then identic ed with the x^ryan god ' Kudra % the
Roarer^ and later on, his Dravidian iiames (cf. Tamil 'siva/t' led, 'Bembu' copije)-) seem to
have been adopted as 'Siva' and 'Sambhu and this synthesis, sublimated by Hindu
thought, in later times gave rise to the Piiranic Rudra-Siva or Mabadeva, one of the
grandest conceptions of mythology. The Dra vidians probably had a monkey-god, whom
they called the Male Monkey ; he seems to have been introduced into the Aryan pantheon
as ' Vrsa-kapi not without opposition from some Aryans ; and later, his Dravidian name
seems to hare been adopted into the language of the Aryans, and Arvanised as ' Hanii-
mant ' (of. Tamil 'an-mandi' male monkey). The Aryan Visnu seems to have been identified
with a Dravidian Sky -god (Dravidian ' vin ' ^A-?/). But other Dravidian cults, like the
worship of serpentp, or of the linga.did not make any impression on the Aryan** at this time.
(Cf. ' Dravidian Kt^ligion in Hnstintc's (\vch>priedi.i of Religion and Ktliics : F. E. Pargiter,
' Vrsakapi and Hanumant,' J RAS , 1913. p. 4U0 : P. T. Srinivas Iyengar, c>i>. r//.. pjj. 12.").
126; M Collins' Remarks on S. A. Pillai's 'Sanskrit Klement in tlie Vocabularies of the
Drav. Langs.' Madras University Dravidic Studies, HI, 1919, pp. 61-62.)
42
INTRODUCTION
even their names, were transferred to the Aryan gods, and a new and
composite creation resulted gradually from this sort of union.
The language of the Rig-Veda is as yet purely Aryan or Indo-European
in its forms, structure, and spirit, but its phonetics is already affected by
Dravidian ; and it has already begun to borrow words from Dravidian (and
from Kol) : not only names of objects previously unknown to the Aryans,
but also a few words of ideas ; among words of probable Dravidian origin in
the Rig-Veda being, to give a few examples, «ann» particle^ « arani »,
riilbing wood for Jire^ < katu-ka » sharps « kapi » monkey^ « karmara »
smith, « kala » small art, « kala » time, « kitava » gamester, « kuta »
hut, «kunaru» irifhered-armed , <ckunf;a» IioJe, «gana» handj«v\^u^>> -several,
«nila» live, « nihara » doifd, snoic, <cpnska-ra» lofus, «puspa » Jtower^ « puj-
ana » vsorshij)^ « phala ^ fruit ^ « bila » liole^ « bija » -seed, « mayia'a » pen/owl^
« ratri » aiglit, (?) « rupa » /b//>i, « sayam » evening, ^vsi\crii» //aiidsome.
As we proceed, the uon-iVryan words are on the increase : in the Brahraanas,
for instance, we come across words like « atavi » /'orrst, « alarka » a kind of
foirer, « adambara » drum, «kambala» blanket, (?) « kulala » potter,
«khafjga» rhinoceros, « tan^jula » rice, « tila » sesamnm, « phana » fi'oth,
scum, <= mataci » ( ? ) locust, « marka-ta » ape, monkey, « valaksa, balaksa »
ivhite, « valli » creeper, ( ? ) <« vrihi » rice, <c sava » corpse, mostly names of
objects; and as the Aryan speech gets in strength, words of ideas seem to
be borrowed no longer, but a respectable number of concrete terms are
adopted into the old vernaculars and in Sanskrit, (For References, see
under Appendix B.)
36. Among the various OIA. dialects, those of the tribes of the
West, contiguous to Iranian, might show points of agreement with the
latter ; and those of the East might reasonably be expected to have come more
and more under the intluence of the non-Aryan languages, as they penetrat-
ed deeper and deeper into the heart of India. As an increasingly large
non-Aryan pojMilation adopted the Aryan speech, we may expect changes to
creep into it, and its words anci forms to be modified, to suit the ways of the
people that adopted it. By 1000 B.C., the Aryan tongue seems to have
become well established or dominant in Northern India up to Bihar, which
ARYAN ADVAKCE— 'BRAHMANA" SPEECH
43
becomes ' Arvdvarta' or Aryan land. Certain Aryan tribes seem, from the
evidence of the Brahmaiias, to have been nomadic at this time. The
Vedie Aryans from Eastern Pan jab and Western Doab advanced eastwards,
in the wake of their eastern kinsmen. Rich and powerful states, like those
of the Kurus (Bharatas) and the Panealas, the Yasas and the Usinaras, the
Matsyas and the Salvas, the Siirasenas, the Kosalas and the Kasis, and the
Videhas, were established in the Midland and in the Ganges Valley, the last
three states beinor the easternmost. These are among the states mentioned
in the pre-Buddhistie Brahmanas (1000—600 B.C.), with which the
early traditions of India in history and romance, poetry and philosophy,
religion and social institutions are connected. The population of these
states consisted of Aryans, Yedic and nou-Vedic, of a mixed population of
Aryans and non-Aryan s, and of non-Aryans more or less Aryanised in
language and culture.
The Aryan dialects of the preceding generations, which were
contemporaneous with the speech of the Rig- Veda, changed, so that the
latter became slightly archaic, and, although studied in the poems
of the Rig- Veda, forming the corpva of a national literature, it could
no longer remain a current, every-day speech ; and a new literary speech,
a slightly simplified Vedie, grew up, among the descendants of Vedic
speakers and among those who adopted the Vedic cults. This Sanslcrii
of the Brahmanas is the literary form of the dialects spoken by those
Aryans and Aryanised people who originally followed the A'edie cults, and
were now spread from Western Pan jab to oihar. The Aryan tribes of the
Panjab, like the Gaudharas, the Kekayas, the Madras, and the Kurus and
Panealas of the Midland were the peoj)le among whom the Vedie culture had
its proper home. By the time that the Aryan speech had penetrated into
what is now Bihar, /.<?., after 1000 B.C., s>ome distinct tendencies in pronun-
ciation were manifesting themselves in the eastern Aryan dialects, spoken by
the non-Vedic Aryans. But it may be j»resumed that in spite of the differ-
ence between the dialects of the extreme West and those of the extreme
East becoming greater and greater, through the * Prakritic ' tendencies deve-
loping in the latter, there was a general intelligibility among them, through
44.
INTRODUCTION
the medium of the language of the Brahmanas ; although it represented
in its phonetics and its general spirit the dialects of the extreme West and of
the Kuru-Pancala tract. Despite the presence of at least two antagonistic
or differing sets of Aryans, the Vedic Aryans and those who did not
follow Vedic customs and religion, Northern India of the first four
centuries before Buddha, presented one cultural whole. In the ' Satapatha
Brahraana' (700 B. C. ?), the colonisation of North Bihar by Panjab (Vedic)
Aryans is described ; of. the story of Mathava Videgha (SB., I, 4, 1). But
the Western Panjab or Udicya peoples, according to the testimony
of one of the Brahmanas, spoke the Aryan tongue with greater purity
than the people of the Midland : this statement is corroborated by the
north-western inscriptions of Asoka (Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra) several
centuries later, where the language agrees with Sanskrit ( = 01 A.) in its
phonetics very closely, whereas the language of the eastern inscriptions
of the same monarch shows the greatest possible deviation from the Sanskrit
norm. Sagkhyayana * or ' Kausltaki Brahmana/ VII. 6 : « tasmad
udleyam disi pra-jnata-tara vag udyata, udanea u eva yanti vacam siksitum,
yo va tata.agacchati, tasya va susrusantf. iti » in the nor titer n quarters
is speech littered with more discernment^ and northtrard go men to learn
speech ; he who comes thence^ to him men hearken : A. B. Keith's translation,
Harvard, 19 20, p. 387). With this opinion of the Midland scholars
about the purity of the speech of the North-west, their view about the
debased speech of the ' Vratyas ' or non-Vedic Aryans of the East (p. 47)
may be contrasted. There cannot be any question that the dialects of the
Arvan language were losing their purity in the East, at a time when the West
had preserved it better. The influence of the East is seen in some of the
words of Yajur and Atharva Vedas, and in the Brahmanas ; nay, even in the
Rif^-Veda. Instances are « vikata » deformed < « vikrta « mleccha » larbarian
< « * mlaiksa « dandia » stick <« * dandra ef , Gk, « dendron », « kuru » do
(imperative) for « kfnu », « \/path » read <« prath « tata » depth beside
«karta » pit^ « a(]hya» v^ealthij = <5c"^ardhya» < « v^rdh « napita »
harher<<^\/^W2» cf. Pali « nahapita* ; in addition to these eases of cerebra-
lisation in connection with « r » and assimilation of consonant groups,
THE ARYANS OF THE EAST
4.5
prevalence of « 1 » forms is possibly to be referred to the influence of
this eastern dialect, as also those cases where earlier « s » is changed to
«s». (Cf. A. A. Macdonell, ' Vedic Grammar' in the Grundriss der Indo-
arisehen Philologie u Altertumskunde, under Phonology ; J. Wackernagel,
' Altindisehe Grammatik,' I, liii, and under cerebrals ; also ef. Vidhu-sekhara
^astri, ' Samskrte Prakrta-prabhava/ in the Bengali journal PravasI,
Calcutta, for Phalguna, 1817 Bengali Year.)
37. A few centuries before Buddha, Vedie cults and literary tradition
were introduced into North-eastern India, as far as Benares and North
Bihar. "When Buddha flourished, Magadha or South Bihar, hardly known
in pre-Budclhic times to the Aryans of the West, was already a member of
the Aryan group, and a strong member too. The Rig-Veda mentions only
once (III, o3, 14) a country called « Kikata», which Y'aska (VI, 32) describes
as a country which is the home of non-Aryans, « dOso' narya-niv5sah Kikafca
is identified by later Sanskrit writers with Magadha. (Cf. Hem-Chandi*a
Ray-Chaudhurl, ' Political History of Northern India from the Accession of
Parikshit to the Coronation of Bimbisara,' Journal of the Department of
Letters, Calcutta University, Vol. IX, 1D:^3, p. 56.) In the Atharva-Veda^
the Aggas and the Magadhas are mentioned as far-off or strange peoples
among whom the Midland Aryan would gladly spirit away the malarial
fever which troubled him (V, 22, 14). The ' Satapatha Brahmana '
describes the easterners as being «asurya» or demoniac (hostile ?) in nature
(XIII, 8, I, 5). The orthodox Brahman spirit found something antagon-
istic in the eastern peoples, «Pracyah», among whom the Magadhas are
to be numbered. Magadha was ([uifce outside the Aryan, or rather Vedic,
pale in the Brahmar^a period ; so, too, according to Y^'aska; yet whenBuddha
flourished, during the age immediately following that of the Brahmanas,
Magadha is a powerful Aryan state. Magadha, then, must have received
the Aryan language and settlements of Aryans long before Buddha. What
is very likely is that these Aryans were distinct from those other Aryans
of the West among whom the Vedie culture grew up, distinct in dialect,
in religion, and in practices, at least in the Brahmanic period. We do not
know how far, or whether at all, they differed from each other in race, but
+6
INTRODUCTION
they certainly differed in dialect and in relii?ious practices. Possibly these
eastern Aryans, or Aryan speakers, were a mixed people, with an Aryan
element w4iich had fallen under the spell of n on -Aryan ideas, but had not
given up its Aryan tongue : just as at the present day Russian colonists in
the remoter parts of Siberia are being considerably influenced by Mongol
(Buriat) and Turki (Yakut) peoples (ef. E. J. Dillon, ' Siberia in our own
Time,' in Harms worth's History of the AYorld, p. 700).
The Aryans of the Vedic cults called these non-Vedic Aryans ' Yratyas/
outcasts^ or rlieless people. The Vratyas could obtain admission into the
Vedic community by the performance of a ceremony or sacrifice, « vratya-
stoma». (Cf. Rama- Prasad Chanda, op^ ci(., p. 39 ; Weber^ ^ Indian Literature/
pp. 67j 68, 79.) The tract where these Vratyas were most numerous seems
to have been Manfadha. Theirpriests were probably bards as well, so that after
the absorption of the Vratya communities, or of sections of them, into the
Brahmanic fold, the word « magadha » was retained in Sanskrit to mean a
harcL The rise and progress of the anti- Brahman and the anti-sacrificial ideas
of the Buddhists and the Jains among the eastern peoples — and these heterodox
schools also called their teachings ^ Aryan truths,' — perhaps shows that other
traditions were established beFore the Brahmans oame, and the Vedic
institutions or ideas brought by the Brahmans from the ^Midland and the
North-west (Madhyadesa and Udieya) sat lightly on the masses. (Cf.
Weber, op, cif., p. 79.) The Vratya hymns of the Atharva-Veda (XV), in
which there is a deification of a wandering \'ratya [)riest, with his strange
paraphernalia and his cortege, are a puzzle : they suggest the presence
of a 6aiva cult among the Vratyas, and certainly a cult quite different
from that presented by the Vedic world. The extravagant respect paid
to the Vratya in these poems either shows the hand of the followers of
Vratya cults themselves ; or they are the w^ork of \'edie Aryans who felt
fascinated by the Vratyas with their non-Midland practices, and perhaps
by their wild mysticism, for the Atharva-Veda hymns are highly mystic
in this connection. There are, however, similar passages of mystic and
supernatural treatment of the idealised priest or mendicant elsewhere in
Vedic literature (P. T. Srinivas Iyengar, op, cit,, pp. 77-78).
VKATYA SPEECH OF THE EAST
i7
The general Brahman attitude towards the Vratyas was anything
but sympathetic. But they admitted that the Vratyas were Aryan in speech.
The * Tancjya^ or ^ Pancavinsa Brahmana/ in speaking of the Vratyas, says
(XVII, 4) that i lie If call an expression ichieli is not uttered icith difficulty
leitifj 'Uttered with difficulty, and also they speak the huit/uage of
the iiiiiiated {i.e. into Brahmanism), although they are not initiated :
« a-dur-ukta-vakyam dur-uktam ahur a-diksita diksita-vacam vadanti ».
Weber's explanation of the first statement is tliat it ' probably refers to
prakritic, dialectic differences, to the assimilation of groups of consonants,
and similar changes peculiar to the PrSkrit vernaculars ' (Weber, ojj. cit.,
pp. 67, 6S) ; and Weber is undoubtedly right : here we have the oldest
contemporary notice of a Prakritic habit of speech in India. The
^Satapatha Brahmana ' (111, 2, 1, 23) makes the Asuras^ auti-Vedic
people, presumably of the East (cf. the expression «5sury3h pracyah»
in the ^B., referred to at p, 45), cry out « helavo, helava» when they were
deprived of speech (atta-vacasah) and vainj^uisluid ; and this word is given
by Pataiijali (1, i, 1) as «helayah», and it is the Asura pronunciation,
according to traditional explanation, of the words « he arayah » 0, the foe-
men / A form like « alayo » or « alayah » for « arayah with « 1 y> for « r », is
characteristic of the Praeya or eastern speech, of which that ob' Magadha is
a variation. (Weber, op, cit., p. ISO; Raml-Prasrid Chauda, op.ei,t., p. •^22.)
Taking into consideration the linguistic state of the country during the
time of Asoka (middle of the ord century B.C.), it is evident that the
Prakritic or ' Magadhl ' forms developed quite early, and in the East.
The Sohgaura copper plaquette inscription is perhaps the oldest Brahmi
record, and may date from the ^th century B.C.; it belongs to the
Gorakhpur district in the United Provinces, within the Praeya area, and we
find here forms like « bharkjagalani5> = «bhanfjagara- », <« bhala » = « bhara»,
<scmathula»=:« Mathura», with «1» instead of « r» (J. F. Fleet, ' The In-
scription on the Sohgaura Plate/ JIIAS., 1907, pp. 500 ff.). And the state-
ment in the * Tarilya Brahmana' may be reasonably eonstrned to mean that
the simplification of the consonant t^roup-^ in the East was noticed by the
people of the Midland or the North-west as early as, say the 8th century B.C.
48
INTRODUCTION
It would thus seem that the real Prakrit stage was first attained by I A.
in the East^ among the Praeyas, in Kusala and in Magadha^ and specially
among the Vratya Aryans who were established there. Prakritic habits of
speech gradually spread themselves from the East to the West; but as it is
shown by the inscriptions of the North-west and the West {e.g,^ the Shah-
bazgarhi and Mansehra inscriptions, the Besnagar inscription, the Mathura
lion capital inscription, etc.)j in the earliest homes of Aryan speech in India,
the habits of the easterners^ although ultimately victorious, were resisted long.
By the time of Asoka, the popular dialects of the West Midland probably
had succumbed, and abandoned OIA. traits ; but these traits {e.g,^ retention
of«r»with consonants, of the three sibilants « ^ s s ») continued in the
North-west till Kusana times, and later. Greek forms like « Prasioi »
= «Pracyah», « Amitrokhates » = « Amifcra-ghatah », or « -khadah », « San-
drokuptos » = « Candra-guptah », « Palibothra » — « * Pa^J^h-butra, Patali-
putra, ^Patall-pui-ta* (ef. Jarl Charpentier, ZDMG., LXX, pp. 216-250),
« Erennesis s> = «VaranasI» and « Erannoboas » = « Hiranya-vahah are really
western, although they are names of persons, peoples, and places of the East ;
and the Greeks first heard these names, from the 4rth century B.C., from
speakers of the western and north-western dialects which retained the « r ».
38. The Aryan language entered the second stage of its development
some time before Buddha, for by the time that Buddha flourished (c. 500
B.C.), the spoken language of Kosala and Magadha had progressed from
the OIA. stage sufficiently far to become a distinct language from the
earlier literary forms, « ehandas », which obtained, namely, Vedic and
Brahmanie Sanskrit. In addition to fundamental changes in phonetics and
modifications in morphology, old words were being replaced by new or
foreign ones, or were being modified in their meaning. This was more
noticeable in the second MIA, stage, when old and almost universally used
IE. words, like « asva» //ow, « asman » done^ «svan» dog^ « vrsa » hidl^
«avi» i^Ueep, ^ana jvan, uksan oXy « nlhita, arusa » m/, ^vaha, ratha*
wagon y chariot, « rais, radhas* «sahas, tavisi » Hlrength, «udan»
loatery ^/bA^ eat^ <^ y/ grbh » seize, take^ « y/ drs » isee, « g}'dh » he greedy,
«Y/han» drike, kill, <t y/w^k^^ grow^ ^ worship, sacrijice, <i
THE BEGINNINGS OF SANSKRIT
49
v^vej » tremhle^ « ^pr-n- » //Y/, « ut-y/pat ^ fiy^ « v/su » give birth to^ « damaj
veaa» /ionae, « Jru » /m^, « puskara » lotns, etc., etc. iijave place^ respectively,
to words like « ghota-ka^^ «prastai'a »^ «kukkura», « santja, gona»^ « mesa,
e Ja-ka « ballvarda « rakta », « sakata, *ga<. d-ika « d liana », « bala »,
« paulya, jala «y/khad, y/jam*, «pra-^ap», ^pra-^/iks, -^/drk-s-*,
<e y/lubh », « mar-ay a- », « vfdh », « \/ puj-aya- « y/kamp », « ^ pur-
aya-», « ud-y/cll-ya- », « jan*aya- « vat-ika < ^ vrt » beside the old
« i^rha « vrksa, gacelia, pinda « kamala, padma etc., which are the
sources of the words actually in use in NIA.
When all Aryan India became or tended to become Prakritic in speech,
even in the Midland and in the Brahm&varfca of the Yedic Risbis, there was
an attempt on the part of the Brahmans — possibly they were not conscious
of it — to establish for use in their schools, a form of speech as near the older
dialects of the Vedas and the Brahmarias as possible. It may be expected
that when Prakritic habits were becoming the rule among the masses in
Central Aryavarta, the upper classes, the Brahman priests and scholars
and the Ksatriya aristocracy, who were of Midland Aryan blood, tried to
preserve purity of speech, at least in all formal affairs, if not in their private
life ; and they were probably the last to be affected by Prakritic habits,
since they, more than auy other section of the people, were born Aryan
speakers ; and they kept themselves aloof from the vast majority, w^hieh
was a mixed group of Vedic « Visa« », or Yrat3as, and Dravidians and other
full-blooded non- Aryans. As it has been pointed out before, the speech of
the North-west was nearest the Yedic in phonetics ; and the North-west
was, from its geographical position, the stronghold of Aryan speakers
in India. The pronunciation of the North-west was the acknowledged
standard in Biahmanie schools in the Midland, and further east, duiing the
period of the Brahmanas (p. 44). The north-western tracts (Gandhara
etc*) were famous for their learning, and bot\i Brahman and Buddhist
tradition aj'ree in makinsj Taksasila in Gandhara a srreat cultural and
educational centre for all Aryan India, where pupils from the farthest east
of Aryandom used to resort. Towards the close of the Brahmana peri jd,
then, another literary speech, practically a younger development of the speech
7
50
INTRODUCTION
of the Brahmanas, was growing up in the Brahman schools, and possibly
also in the courts of the Ksatriya chiefs who followed the Vedic religion.
It was a polite form of speech based on the language of the aristocracy
and the priesthood of the ^lidhnd, pe/ feci 1 or improred, « samskrta in
the sense that in its phonetics and in a great deal of its grammar it was
made to adhere to the OIA. (Vedic and Brahmana speeches) ; and as
such^ it very closely agreed with the speech of the North-west as well.
It seems the speech of the upper classes in the Midland was substantially
the same as that of Gandhara during the period 7th — 6th centuries B.C.
This new literary speech must have arisen about this time ; and much
as HindostanI or « kharl-boli » (§ 12) of the present day, it was used and
studied by the followers of the Vedic faith from Gandhara to Benares and
Pataliputra. Patanjali in the 2nd century B. C. describes it as the language
of the « sista » or culfitred people, chiefly Brahmans, of Aryftvarta. After
the language of the Vedas, this speech became an object of serious study
with Brahmans : and differences of opinion naturally arose as regards correct
usage in this language. In the oth century B.C., the great grammarian
Panini wrote his * Astadhyayl,' the oldest systematic grammar of this new
language that we possess. (For the date of Panini, I accept the views of
Hem- Chandra Ray- Chaud hurl in his ^ Materials for the Study of the Early
History of the Vaishnava Sect/ Calcutta University, 19 20, pp. Ii-i8.) Panini
was an inhabitant of the North-west, of Gandhara ; and this literary speech,
(in contradistinction to the speech of the earlier literature, « chandasa », which
he also treated of in his book), was, in his time, sufficiently close to his own
Udicya dialect to be described by him as « laukika » or current s/jpech. In
later times, this very speech, Sanskrit, attained a sanctity and came to
be called « deva-bhasS » or the Speech of the Gods. Before Panini, several
schools of grammarians had arisen. In addition to the views of individual
scholars, two important regional schools are noted by Panini : the Northern,
i,€.j Northern and Western (Udicya), and Eastern (Pi-acya), — in the western
and eastern tracts of Aryan India, daring the closing centuries of the OIA.
period. These tracts were separated from each other, according to tradition,
by a river Saravati, which was somewhere in the Midland, and it has been
ESTABLISHMENT OF SANSKRIT
51
sought to identify it with the Satadru or the Satlaj (Haran-Chandra
Chakravarti, ^ Praeya O Udlcya Mn the VSPdP., 1319, No. 1). In the
* Kasika' Commentary on Panini (middle of the 7th century A.C.), the
Videhas, Aggas, Vaggas, and Magadhas, as well as the Paiiealas of the
Midland, which is curious, are included under the Pracyas. The SaravatI
river is perhaps the Sarayu ({§aravati = a medieval Sanskritisation of a
Prakrit «Saravu» for « Sarayu >; ef. the Greek transcription « Sarabos
and « Sarwa » in the work of Al-Beruni), which is within the tract dividing
the West and the Midland from the East.
Panini gave this new literary language a fixity for all time. But
during his age, it was a living language, current as a sort of HindostanT
of the upper classes, and as such it had local variations, and approximations
to local vocabularies and idioms, which it was impossible to bring under rule.
During the earlier centuries of the MIA. period, the masses throughout
Aryan India certainly understood it, even in the East, where Prakrit was
already fully developed. Ancient Indian drama (the earliest fragments of
which that we possess date from 1st cent, A.C., the period of the Kusaiias),
in making the aristocracy and the Brahmans speak Sanskrit, and the lower
classes and the women the Prakrits, surely in this respect adheres to a
tradition which has its origin in an actual state of things at the transition
of the OIA. to MIA. in the Midland. The historical traditions as well as
the ballads and songs which were current among the Aryan settlers (the
Ksatriyas and others) of the Vedic faith, in the Panjab and the Midland,
and possibly also in the East, in the various dialects, were collected and
arranged, and their language was t^mended into Sanskrit. These collections
formed the nuclei of the Sanskrit Mahabharata and the Puranas, and
possibly, also of the Ramayana ; though the last named work looks more
like a Kvnstf^pos than real popular ballad poetry such as the Mahabharata
unquestionably preserves. In many cases, old dialectal forms were
retained in these ballads, and these did not agree with the standard as
laid down in Panini's grammar; and later Sanskrit grammarians accepted
these dialectal forms, as preserved in the Sanskrit of the Mahabharata
and the older Ptuaiias, and }»olitely called them « ars\ » torm^— f'um-
52
INTRODUCTION
employed by the Rishis. The SaDskritising process for these specimens
of OIA. sa^a and legend seems to have continued down to the Gupta
period. (Cf. F. E. Pargiter, ' The Dynasties of the Kali Age,' Oxford,
1913, Appendix, on metric evidence to show that a great many passages
in the Puranas were originally written in early MIA.) A mass of ritual
literature began to be written in Sanskrit, and in all these ways, the
foundations of classical Sanskrit literature were laid towards the end of
the OIA. period.
As the distance between the vernaculars (of the North-west, Midland,
East and South) and this newly risen Sanskrit; grew greater and greater,
the latter became an artificial language. It could be held np to show
what OIA. was lik^, in its sound-system and in most of its forms. Its
grammar grew hide-bound, and prevented any change or growth that is
characterstic of a living language. But throughout the long course of
artificial existence it entered upon, almost immediately after its birth, we
can see that it was not entirely unaffected by change in its spirit. Sanskrit
literature, like Latin literature of medieval Europe, was the creation of
scholars, who used in daily life various vernaculars, MI A., NIA., Dardic, and
Dra vidian. The Sanskrit language as employed by them took its colouring
from the vernacular speeches of the writers oP the successive periods,
from 500 B. C. down to the present day, — in vocabulary, in syntax, in
idiom. At the hands of certain writers, it developed some cumbrous
qualities, like the use of lonir compounds, which came to be regarded as a
stylistic embellishment. But the induence of the vernaculars it never
escaped. Prakrit roots and forms were ever on the increase in Sanskrit,
and occasionally words from the Dravidian and Kol, (and from foreign
languages like Greek, and Old, Middle and New Persian), which were first
adopted in the vernaculars. Its syntax was gradually based on the Prakrit
vernaculars, and, like the latter, it came to discard gradually the OIA.
inflected past forms of the verb, ultimately relying almost entirely on
participles. (Cf. J. Bloch, ' La Phrase nominale en Sanskrit/ M'^L., XIV,
Paris, 190n.) In this way, from vocibulary, from syntax and from style, it
is possible to trace a development in this great literary language of India.
SANSKRIT AND THE PliAKRlTS— GATHA
Sanskrit as written at the present day also suffers from importation o£
vernacular (and even foreign) words and vernacular constructions in the
hands of indifferent writers.
When the MIA. stage was fully on its wa3% Sanskrit became almost
identical with Prakrit, remaining true to OIA. only in phonetics and
inflection. It would seem that at first Sanskrit was confined to the
Brahman schools, and courts ot: Aryan chiefs in the Panjab and the
Midland ^ and with the spread of Brahman influence, Sanskrit came to
have an exalted position in the East as well. But Buddhism and Jainism,
two religions which had their origin in the East, at first employed languages
based on eastern v^ernaculars, or on a koine that grew up on the basis of
the Prakritic dialects of the Midland, and was used iu the early MIA.
period (B. C. 500 downwards) as a language of intercourse among the
masses who did not care for the Sanskrit of the Brahman and the Rajanva ;
and these languages for some time checked a wide employ of Sanskrit.
There was a certain amount of success in setting up rival literary languages
like Pali and Ardha-magadhi. But the spint of conservatism, which is
never absent from literary effort, saw that Sanskrit did represent a standard
which transcended the apparently erratic course of the vernaculars; and
quite early, Sanskrit became triumphant, and obtained the homasje of the
Buddhists and the Jains as well. The Buddhists for a time (*2nd cen. B, C.
— 3rd cen. A. C) almost side by side with their h'terary work in Pali,
sought to approximate the Prakrits they were familiar with to Sanskrit as
used by the Brahmans ; and this resulted in the curious dialect called
« Gatha » or Mixed Samkrit, or BiMAijuf San-^krit, from its very nature a
most artificial raix-up, often with false Sanskritisation of Prakrit forms ;
and this is the language which is found in works like the ' Lalita-vistara,'
the ' Maha-vastu ' and the ' DivyAvadana.' The same thing was done in
the chanceries of kings and in the pub'ic re(3ording oF events, as is evidenced
from in«!Cription«; of the period. But Sanskrit g radii ally came to its own
entirely, and the oldest Sanskrit inscription, the Rudra-daman inscription
at Girnar, dates from the middle of the :ind century A. C, when, in parts
of India at least, Sanskrit began to oust the vernaculars from formal
51
INTRODUCTION
documents. It thus came to have a position which it did not have before :
it became both the ofReial as well as the cultural and sacred lansruase of
almost all sections of people in India. Although it admitted vernacular and
foreign words by the back-door, once its prestige being established Sanskrit
became the reservoir from which the vernacular streams were frequently
fed. OIA. words had their natural change in MIA., and in that case they
represented the original, basic stratum of the language. But with the
general recognition of Sanskrit as the undisputed representative of an earlier
stage of lA., borrowing from it freely began in MIA, (especially in the
Second and Third stages) ; and thus fresh elements were added to the
vernaculars, which became naturalised, and were subjected to the subsequent
phonetic modification of the dialect into which they were introduced. This
process of borrowing from Sanskrit was repeated at various times in the
later history of lA. ; and this fact of Sanskrit interfering with the natural
development of the language by being always ready to supply new words by
the hundred, and occasionally a new form here and there, is a note-worthy
thing in the development of Middle and New Indo-Aryan.
39. The people known to the Kurus, Panealas and other tribes of the
Midland and the West as Pra(?yas or Easferfiers consisted of the Kosalas (in
Oudh), the Kasis (round about Benares), the Videhas (North Bihar) and
later, the Magadhas and the Aij^as ("^outh Bihar). The term « Pracya » has
its modern counterpart in the word « Purabiya », by which the speakers of the
Western and Midland speeches, Panjabl and Western Hindi, desit^-nate their
eastern neii^hbours in HinJostan, the Eastern Hindi and Bihari speakers.
The Pracya dialect seems to have developed two forms, a Western and an
Eastern, The following were among the salient characteristics of the Piacya
speech : in phonetics, «l » alone was used, and there was no « r»; and there
was a tendency towards serebralisation of « t , d » in connection with « r » ;
OIA. « -vy- , -ty- » etc, became « -viy- , -tiy - » , but « -ly- » became « -yy- » ;
and there was one dental « s » for « s s s » ; in morphology, OIA. singular
nominatives of « -a » nouns, « -ah, -am », took the form « -e » (in the West it
became « -o- ; the accusative plural of masculine « -a >•> nouns had the affix
« -ani » , *nd the locative singular « -assi » (or « -assim * ?). In the eastern
OLD ARDHA-iVlAGADllL AND OTHER DIALECTS
55
form of Pracya, a patoiH which advanced further from the western norm,
the sibilants «sss» were represented by the ])alatal «s» and not by
the dental « s ».
Folio win£^ the nomenclature of the Prakrit (grammarians describing'
MIA. of the second period, Western Pracya can be called Ardha-magadhi
and Eastern Pracya, Magadhi ; and these dialects as they were during the
first MIA . period can be described as Old iVrdha-magadhi and Old
Magadhi, Old Ardha-magadhi as spoken in Kosala was uadoubiedly the
speech of Buddha* ; oq it was based a current speech of Eastern Aryan
India, iu which Buddha and MahavTra gave their discourses, and which
' The languages and dialect^ current in N^orthern India during the first MIA. period
(600-200 B.C.) were probably the following (see Table. oi)po»itP p. 6 ; and T. \V. Rhys
Davids, ' Buddhist India,' London. 1903, pp. 1.53.154) —
[i] Spoken dialects of I A , current from Oandhara to Bengal in the east and the
Deccan in the south, which probab y formed the following .5 groups .( 1) North-western
— Gaudhara, Paujab, possibly Sicdh ; (2) South-western— (rujarat, \V Rajpatana ;
(3) Midland; [ilalwa the meet i a ground of {2) and (3).] (4) Eastern— (a) Old Ardna-
masfadhi, or Kosala, and {h) Old Mftgadh? : and (5) Southern— Vidarbha, Maharilstra.
Probably there were other dialects as well. (1) resembled 01 A most : (4) had
deviated from 01 A. more than any other. (3) and (4) were both current in the Ganges
Valley, and during this period, (4a) had greater prestige, as the language of the leaders
of anti*Br5hm*iDie thouught, and of the courts of the powerful monarchies or republics
of the East : but seems to ha^e been an lerstood as a lingna franca everywhere in
Aryandom, being between the two extreme^ of (I) and (4)
[ii] Two literary languages : (a) the ancient bardic dialect — chindasa — preserved in
the Vedic hymns ; this was based on the CIA. dialects current in the Pan jab before 1000
B.C. ; a younger form of this dialect is found intho Brahmanas, which is intermediate in age
between (a) and (b) ; (6) a 'reformed' literary speech —saraskrta —which was crystallising
in the Brahman schools and in the courts of princes in the Midland and the North-west.
This latter was based on archaic forms of (O and (3) above, agreeing more with (I) in
preserving the 01 A. phonetic character when it was S3^stematised in the beginning of the
MIA. period by the grammarian Panini of the North-west.
Towards the end the first illA. period, when it had already lost all OIA. character-
istics in phonetics etc , (3) began to take shape as a literary language, and became Pali.
[iii] Dardic dialects, spoken in the Western Himalayas, and also probably by settled
com Ml unities of Dardic people in the plains of Northern India, who were rapidly coming
under Indo-Aryan influence.
INTHODIK^TION
became the lan<^uai^e of tlie eodrt and adrninistration in Eastern ln(lin.
Asoka's eourfc languai^e, as in the Midland and eastern inscriptions,
present varieties ©f this speech. (CJf. T. W. Rhys Davids, ' Pali Text
Society's Pali Dictionary,' 1921, Foreword, pp. 1, '2; of. also S. Levi,
^Sur line Langae preeanonique du Bouddhisme,' JA., 191*3 ; H. LUders,
* Brnchstiicke Buddhistischer Dramen,' Berlin, 19 1 1, pp. 40, 41.) Ample
testimony is borne to the political power o£ the Pracyas Prasioi ' ) in
the 4th century B.C. by Greek writers. There is no wonder that their
dialect would have some prestige, and east into shade for a time the Midland
and other western speeches. During the time of the Mauryas, and specially
of ASoka, this ' standard East Indian ' was dominant as the official language
practically all over India ; and, as is evident from the presence of eastern
forms — the so-called ' Magadhisms ' — in the language of the Giruar, Shah-
bazgarhi and Mansehra inscriptions, it exerted a great intluenee on other
forms of MIA. (Truman Michelson, American Journal of Philology,
1909, pp. :iS4 fE. ; JAOS., 1909, i, pp. 77 ff.). The oldest records in this
dialect are the Hrahmi inscriptions down to Asoka (the Piprahwa vase
inscription, the Sohgaura inscription, and the eastern inscriptions of Asoka),
and the fragments from the Buddhist Sanskrit drama found in Central
Asia (early Kusana period).
The discourses ot Buddha and of Mahavira were originally in this
Pracya speech. Those of Buddha later {i.e, after Asoka) were rendered
[iv] Foreign ton^nes — e.g., Persian and other Iranian (from c. 500 B.C.), and Greek
(from end of the -Ith cen. B.C.), spoken b^^ small communities in the North-west,
[v] Non-AryaTi dialects : Dravidian and Kol, spoken by many among the masses
in the Panjab, in Central India, in the Uansfeq Valley, who were in the process of being
Aryaniaed. These seem to have been the lant^aage of the ^»eople in general in Bengal,
Orissa, and other parts. Dra v idian bid its stfong^-hold in the South> and literary culti-
vation of Dravidian must have cotnmenceil already, to blossom into the Old Tamil litera-
ture of the early centuries after Christ. The Tibeto-Chinese speeches, if they had at all
come within Indian frontiers by this time, were confined to the Assam side, and had not
descended on the Indian side of the Himalayas as yet.
Possibly there were in the wilder parts of India the pre-Dravidian and pre-Kol speeches
of remnants of primitive Negroid and other tribes, which have since entirely disappeared.
ORIGIN OF LITERARY PALI
57
info a Western dialect, undoubtedly that of the Midland (an old form of
SauraseuT) ; but as it happens in such cases, when a text is rendered from
one dialect into another, a o:reat many forms of the original dialect re-
mained, and showed themselv^es as a substratum. (Cf. AV. Geiger, * Pali
Grammatik ' ui the Grundriss, § 80; H. Liiders, ' Epigraphisehe Beitrage,
III,' in the Sitzunsfsberichte der Konig. preuss. Akad. der Wiss., 1913,
LIII, pp. 1003 ff.). This western dialect into which Buddha's
teaehin^^s were translated came to be known as ' Pali,' which simply
means f. and its lyrammar amply shows that at its basis it is a Midland
speech. Pali became a sort of a sacred language for some Buddhists ;
and because Budilha was couneeted with Magadha and obtained his en-
lightenment there, Pali, as the speech in which the sayings of Buddha were
enshrined, came to be known as ' Magadhl,' probably first among the
Buddhists of Ceylon. The connection with Magadha suggested by this
name has considerably confused our notions regarding the home of the
dialect on which Pali was based. The essentials of Pali phonology and
morphology agree with SaurasenT of the second MIA. period more than
with any other form of MIA. A koine akin to Pali of the Buddhist
documents was established as early as the beginning of the 2nd century
B.C., as can be seen from the languag^e of the Kharavela inscription
(cf. Kashi- Prasad Jayaswal's edition of the in'^cription in the JBORS.,
1917, Part IV, 11)18, Part IV). Pali as a literary language seems to have
been established during the transitional ML\. period (-200 B.C. — -^00 A.C.),
retaining, howev^er, a generally archaic (Z.^*., early MIA.) type. Based on a
Midland speech, which as a current language was a sort of a junior rival
of Sanskrit during the transitional and second MIA. stages, it became
powerful with the prestige of a literature when the folklore of Northern
India was emboiiied in it in the ' Jatakas,' and when the philosophy
of Bad! ha wa< rendered in it. It was studied in Buddhist monasteries
in North-western and Western India, as well as in the Midland; wit i
the fall of the Mauryas, the preslige of its eastern ri^^al, Ardha-magadhT,
was at an end, and it became probably the only important vernacular
speech of Northern India, like its modern counterpart HindostanT. During
S
5S
INTRODUCTION
the Kusana period (1st ceii. — 4tli een. A.C.), the dialects of the extreme
North«west, Gandhara, seem to have had some prestige, both as the
languaore of the tracts where the ruling family had its stronghold as
well as the language of the culture and university centre of Taksasila.
Pali was used also by the speakers of the north-western dialect ; and
thus it came to have a number of north-western words and forms,
showing characteristic Dard or Pisaca influence (cf. O. Frankfurter,
'Handbook of Pali/ London, 1883, p. 9; G. A. Grierson, 'The Home
of Literary Pali' in the Bhandarkar Commemoration Volume, Poona,
1917, pp. lis ff.). There were also words and forms from other
Aryan dialects, from the Gujarat and Malwa side, as well : e.^,, the
forms in * b- » for « dv- », « -pp- » instead of « -tt- » for « -tm- », etc.
Pall was for some time cultivated in Ceylon, and it is quite possible
there was some ' Sihala ' influence in its formative period: the «b-»
and « -pp- » forms may be from Ceylon : the Aryan language of Ceylon
was a form of the old Gujarat dialect of the first MIA. Period.
(§§ 18, 45). When Pali was established as a literary language, it came
under the influence of Sanskrit, which to some extent became its model ;
and Pali after the 5th century entered into a career of artificial literary
existence in India, in Ceylon, and later, in Burma (among the Mons
and the Burmese) and in Siam, which can be compared only with
that of Sanskrit.
The ' Western ' Pracya speech of Buddha has thus been completely
ousted from Buddhistic literature by its rival, the Midland speech which
became Pali. The Jains preserved the original Western Pracya language
of the teachings of their master Mahavlra to a greater extent than the
Buddhists. The oldest Jain texts are in the dialect called Ardha-magadhi :
it represents the lA. speech in the second MIA. stage, and thus it is
younger than Pali ; it is already strongly influenced by western dialects (in
its « r » forms, for instance), but, on the whole, it may be said to represent
the old speech of Kosala fairly well, at least in some of its characteristics.
The Eastern Pracya speech, or Magadhi properly so called, seems to
have developed out of the Pracya dialect. Its specis^l characteristic, « i§ » for
OLD MAGADHI SPEECH o9
all the sibilants of OIA., might have developed as a dialectal variation of
Praeya as early as the late OIA. period, but it is recorded first in
the ^utauuka inscription, coatemporaneaus with the Asokan docainents :
although the language of the xAsoka inscriptioas, even within Magadba
itself, ignores this peculiarity. Probably the « s » pronunciation was
regarded as vulgar, and hence the court dialect of the Asokan in-
scriptions does not notice it. This seems to be borne out by the
usage in the Sanskrit dramas where tlie « s ^ dialects are reserved for
the lowest classes. The drama fragments from Central Asia give
specimens of a Prakrit with this i^eeuliarity. We have thus in these
texts our earliest examples of the Magadhi form of Praeya ; of an
* Old Magadhi,^ in fact (Liiders, ' Bruchstiicke,' pp. ff. 11),
40. The Sutanuka inscription in the Jogimara cave in Ramgarh Hill,
in Sarguja State, Chota Nagpur ( = South-west Magadha) is the earliest
specimen* of Magalhi proper that we possess (Annual Report, Arch.
Survey of India, 1903-I90it, pp. l-^S ff, ; Liiders, ' Bruchstlicke,' p. ll).
It runs thus :
« Sutanuka nama devadasikyi
lam kamayitha balanaseye
Deradine nama lujmdakhe »
( = «^utanuka namadeva-dasikyl, tam kamavittha Bala-
naseye Devadiune nama lupa-dakkhe », in Sanskrit —
« Sutanuka nama dev^a-dasika : tam akamayista V'araiiaseyah
Deva-datto nama riipa-daksah »)
Satannka hy name, a hnndftiaid of the Gods (zs: leuijj/e-ddficer) ;
her loved he of Beitares, Devadbirui hi/ utitne, nkifled in form^
pal titer or -sc nipt or ^ skil led hi ^ fifj ft re a u r ncco u n ts ^ ) .
' Meution may be made of d Br.ilimi seal from Patiia, datiuLr }>robably froni pre-
Maurya times, with the iuscripCion ' Ai^ap iUsa Asrt;a-plla?3i,' = ' A£>ra-p5laaya ' ; of the
Buddha Gayii seal, c. 2nd century B.C., with the legend ' Mokhalikasa * Maskarikasya ' ?
and of the Nanidi-vadha seal, lind-pUice unkaf^v i, c. B.C., with the inscription ' Xamdi-
vadhasa' = ' Naudi-vardhasya, -vrddhasya' (O. Franke, 'Pali and Sanskrit/ Strassburg,
1902, pp. 17, IS, 11 ; 55, 98). Franke notes sporadic case« of occurrence of ^ (and s) for s
in other epigraphical recoids, incladiug those of Asoka
60
INTRODUCTION
The above inscription, written in early Brahmi characters^ supplements
our knowledge of the dialectal conditions in Aryan India of the ord
century B.C. as revealed by the inscriptions of Asoka. In these inscrip-
tions, three main varieties of dialect are represented ; one, at Shahbazgarhi
and Mansehra, is the dialect of the extreme North-west, the phonetics of
which resembles OlA. to a remarkable extent ; tico, the dialect of the
South- westj Gujarat country, also retaining many 01 A. features ; and ffu'ee,
the dialect of the East, presenting some minor variations. This last seems
to represent the actual spoken lauguao^e mobt faithfully ; the other two have
occasionally adopted forms of the eastern dialect, as the standard speech, to
the exclusion of their })roper local forms. Thus there seem to have been
attempts at standardisation on the lines of an official langua^jje. (Cf. E.
Senart, ' The Inscriptions of Piyadasi/ translation by Grierson, Bombay,
1 81) 2 J pp. 137 ff. : the latest opinion on the question is Truman Alichelson's, in
the American Journal of Philology, 1909-1910, in the JAOS., 1909, 191 1,
and in the IF., 1908-1909.) In the Sutanuka inscription, we have thus the
evidence of another variation of the eastern dialect.
The language of the Midland does not seem to be represented in the
Asoka inscriptions found within the Midland tract (Kalsi, Topia, Meerut,
and Bairat-Bhabra). Here it is practically only a variant of the eascern
dialect, which as an official language thus seems in the ord century B.C. to
have almost overwhelmed the Midland speech in its own home. But the
Midland speech, with its « r » words, and its « -o » nominatives and « -9 »
accusative plurals, seems none the less to have maintained a vigorous
existence outside the official circle, and to have slowly ousted the Pracva
speech from its power : witness the growth of Pali, narrated above. The
Midland speech had its fullest revenge later ; and from the transitional and
second MIA. periods, it is the M idland speech, as SaurasenI Prakrit and
Apabhransa, as Braj-bhakha, and at the present day, as Hindustani, which
has been dominant in the Purabiya and Bihari (/.<?., eastern) areas. The earlv
epigraphical records, post-Asokan, found in the Midland region (Mathura),
in Malwa (Sanehi), as well as in the South (Nasik and Karle caves), show
dialects, more or less, but not entirely, free from the Pracva characteristics ;
MIA. DIALECTS IN SANSKRIT DRAMAS
local dialectal forms seem to have gradually reasserted themselves. In the
.Midland, however, there have also been found inscriptions of which the dialect
is of the North-west, showincr its intluenee in the former tract throuiih
political reasons. Bat owing to the cavelessness of writing and spelling,
to the influence of neighbouring dialects or of official speeches, and, as we
advance, to a growing desire to approximate to Sanskrit, the MIA-
inscriptional records of the transitional jMIA. peiiod ('200 B.C. — 200 A.C.)
are very unsatisfactory in determining the lines of dialectal differentiation ;
and in this respect they fall far below the Asoka inscriptions, which more
or less faithtully reHect the actual dialectal conditions.
By the Isfc century A.C, however, the fact of tlialectal ditt'crence
became a noticeable thing in the social life of Aryan India. If ihe writers
in the Midland during the late OIA. period (800 — liOO B.C.) casually told
us about the purity of the speech of the Northerners (Udicyas), and
seemed to have hinted at the Prakritic s])eeeh habits of the Vratyas of the
East (pp. -ij, -17), dramatists and their audiences from the time of Christ (or
earlier) keenly appreciated the variations in local dialects ; and in Indian
drama the practice of employing a local dialect to suit the social position otthe
speaker came into being. The Midland dialect, ^luraseiil, wa> thought most
litted to be the speech uf the best and most cultured clas'^es who did not speak
Sanskrit. The Mahariistri or southern dialect, with its mellifluous nature
brought about by early dropping of the intervocal >tops, was utilised
as the dialect par excellence for songs by those who employed Sauraseni in
ordinary speech. And Magadhi, as an uncouth provincial dialect spoken
in the extreme eastern frontier of Aryandom, a dialect which showed a
wide deviation from the common MIA. norm, was thought suitable for the
lowest and least cultured clashes. In the Buddhist drama fragments Ardha-
magadhi is also used, but x\rdha-magadhi ceased to be employed in later
dramas, Sauraseni apparently taking its place. In the main, these three
dialects — SaurasenT, Mahavasbri and Magadhi, became established in drama
in the transitional and second MIA. periods. Later, other dialects were
sparingly used: and as something resembling a local dialect would satisfy
the author or the people, the specimens in the dramas do not have the
6-2
INTRODUCTION
importance of genuine dialectal documents. The earliest Prakrit gram-
marian^ Vararuci (oth century A.C. ?), seems already to be actuated by ideas
as to what the Maharastrl, MagaJhi, .SaurasenI, and Paisae! speeches in a
drama onghf to be, rather than what they adualltj were in current usage.
Later grammarians are much more influenced by these theories ; and later
writers of Sanskrit drama follow the grammarians as models, more than
anything else.
41. Geographical situation, linguistic evidence, tradition, history,
all go to prove that the Aryan language came to Bengal as an overflow
from Bihar. It cannot be divined when the Aiyan speech first came
to Bengal, — to North Bengal probably from Mithila, and Central and
West Bengal from Agga. Magadha entered into the community of
Aryan states before 600 B.C. ; and outposts of Aryan eolonisatioHj or,
rather, centres of Upper Gangetic language and culture, would start being
established immediately afterwards in the lands of the East, which were
inhabited by non- Aryan tribes like the Pundras, the Radhas, the Vaggas and
others. These peoples were known at least by name to the Midland Aryans
of the late OIA. period. The * Aitareya Araiiyaka ' mentions the Vaggas,
the Vagadhas, and the Cerapadas, meaning no doubt the people of Vagga
or East Bengal, the Magadhan people and the aboriginal Cheros or
Chorus of West Bihar, who are Kol in origin ; and they are described as
ijirds ( = birdlike men?), whatever that may imply (Aitareya Aranyaka, II,
] , 1, 5 : « praja ha tisrah atyayam lyur iti, ya vai ta imah prajas
tisrah atyayam ayaris tanimani vayansi vagga vagadhas ccra-padah » :
duic three racea tnmsyressed {tJie Fedic path); those three races ivkich
did transgress ivere indeed these birds — the Vniigas, the Vagadhas aivl
the Cera-pailas. Sayana explains differently ; ef. Ait. Ar., Bib. Ind.,
1876, p. 147. Cf. also the article * Vagga ' in Macdonell and Keith's ' Index
of Vedie Names,' London, 19U). The 'Aitareya Brahmana ' (VII, 6)
speaks of the Punrlras, who gave their name to Pun«jra-vardhana or North
Central Bengal, and are now represented by the « Pur^ » or
« Puro » caste of Bengal, as an aboriginal people. Some of the early
Brahmanical works regard the countries of the East, including Magadha,
SPREAD OF ARYAN INFLUENCE
63
as barbarian lands not suitable for Brahmans to settle or sojourn in :
penances are prescribed, for instance, in the ' Baud Havana Dharma-sutra '
(I, i, 3:i, 33) for Vedic Brahmans who went to Punclra, Vagga and
other lands. The Radhas are mentioned as a barbarous people in Jain
tradition, which goes back to the 6th century B.C. : an opinion which has
its echo in Middle Bengali literature. (See below, § 45.)
No inscription of A§oka has been found within Bengal proper ; this
is strange, considering the proximity of Bengal to Bihar, the home pro-
vince of the Maurya empire, and considering also the fact that Kaliijga
was conquered by Asoka. But we know from the * Divy&vadana ' that
Punrjra-vardhana (North Central Bengal) was under Asoka (* DivyS.vadana,'
ed. by E. B. Cowell and R. A. Neil, Cambridge, 1886, p. 427). But the
mere presence of an Asoka inscription in Bengal, even if it were to
be found, would be no evidence of the Aryanisation of the people in
language. Asoka inscriptions, for instance, have been found in Dravidian
tracts, at Siddapur and at Ma ski in the Deeean and at Jaugada (Ganjam),
where the Aryan tongue was never adopted by the people ; and round about
Dhauli, Aryan (Oriya) is now spoken, but it is extramely improbable that the
Aryan tongue was the vernacular of the people of Orissa (Kaliijga) at that
time. Kharavela, the Jain King of Kalirjoja in the 2nd centnry B.C., has
left a long inscription in an MIA. dialect. But as the Kaligga people were
the ancestors of the speakers of modern Telugu, no Aryan speech could be
adopted by the Kaliggas in the 2nd century B.C. The Aryan language,
however, often came in the wake of the North Indian religions, Brahmanism,
Buddhism and Jainism, and was used by royal patrons of these religions
among Dravidian and other non- Aryans, merely as a sort of religious lan-
guage, in documents of a religious, and often of an administrative, character.
The advent of a northern religion in non-Aryan tracts certainly meant the
coming of Aryan-speaking Brahmans, Sramanas or Yatis from the North.
The influence of Aryan was felt in the non-Aryan languages in another way.
namely, by the introduction of numbers of Aryan words into the latter. We
can see from a few lines in Old Kannaf'a, given as a specimen of an Indian
language in the papyrus fragments of a Greek drama from Oxyrrhynchqs
04.
INTRODUCTION
in Egypt, how great the influence of Aryan was on Kannacja of the 2nd
century A.C., when it had ah'eady begun to borrow Aryan words in
large numbers (E. Hultzseh^ JRAS., 1901', p. 390). Like the Andhras or
Kalirjgas, and the Karnataka^, as well as other no n- Aryans, it may be
reasonably supposed that the pre- Aryan peoples of Bengal began to be
influenced by the Aryan (or Upper Gangetie) culture and language
immediately after Mithila ami Magadlia were Aryanised. This may haA^e
taken place .before 600 B.C. But for a long time, Bengal remained outside
the pale of Aryandom ; and it is hardly likely that there was anything like
an appreeiablt^ Aryanisation east of Mithila and Magadha and Ai]t>;a before
the time of Buddha. The Mahabharata (200 B.C.— 200 A.C in its
present form) mentions Bengal, no doubt, but there is nothing to show it
was part of Aryan India when the original or even the received Maha-
bharata was compiled.
42. Is there any evidence about the class of speech that prevailed in
Bengal before the coming of the Aryan tongue There is, of course, the
presence of the Kol and Dra vidian speakers (the Santals, the Maler, the
Oraons) in the western fringes of the Bengali area, and cf the Boclo and
Mon-Khmer speakers in the northern and eastern frontiers. There are,
again, some unmistakably Dravidian affinities in Bengali phonetics, morpho-
lojyy, syntax and vocabulary : but these agreements with Dravidian are
not confined to Bengali alone, but are found in other NIA. also (see
Appcntlij: B). Apart from that, local nomenclature in Bengal mav be
expected to throw some light on the question. Place names in Bengal have
not been studied in detail, although individual writers have occasional Iv
touched upon the topic. (Cf. Ram Comul Sen, ' Dictionary in English and
Bengali/ Serampore [834, Preface, p. 9 ; Rai Bahadur Yogesh Chandra
Vidyanidhi, ^ Bag gal a Gramer Nam/ in the Pravasi for Asvina, L:il7, in
which there is an able discussion of the names of places in Bengal ;
H. Blochmann, ^ (contribution to the Geography and History of Bengal,
I, ' JASB,, 187:3, pp. '211-'244, giving a study of some Moslem place-names ;
cf. also F. Hahn, * Kolarian and Dravidian Place-names/ JASB., 1903,
Part III ; Bijay Chandra Mazumdar, ' Sonpur/ Calcutta, 1911, pp. 18-19.)
BENGALI TOPONOMY
Go
The study of Bengali toponomy is rendered extremely difficult from the fact
that old names, when they were not Sanskrit, have suffered from mutihi-
tion to such an extent that it is often impossible to reconstruct their
original forms ; especially when they are non-Aryan. Fortunately for us,
Bengal inserii^tions, from the 5th century onwards, like inscriptions found
elsewhere in India, and occasionally works written in pre-Moslem Bengal,
have preserved old forms of some scores of these names. But it is a pity
that generally there was an attempt to give these names a Sanskrit look.
In other eases, the forms preserved are translations, supposed or real^ of
vernacular names, due to a Sanskritising tendency which is noticeable in
such learned concoctions as as ^^^St « Bhatta-palli » for «t§^^1 « Bhat?][-
par5 », ^'^C^^ « Yugma-setu » for C<[t^f^^tC^1 « J<jra-sako ^t%I^:^ « Kali-
ksetra » for ^f^^^sl Kalikata 5f^T?t ^ Dagdha-vatI » for C^t^^T
« Pora-barl ». Still, they are of very great importance, as they indicate
the line of ehano^e in the phonetics of these names, and help us in making
guesses at the genuine old forms. If it were not for the forms preserved
in the inscriptions and in pre-Moslem works, it would have been impossible
for us to find out that « Balube ^ and Murundl » were some-
thing like « Ballahitta » and « ^[(TKialandl » in the 12th century, ^t^^Jl
«Pab^na» was something like « Pawubanna » (written « Paduvanva ») in the
ILth, or ^^if^t^ <c Brahma-eal^ » was « Barawaueala » or « Barawaneala >
(written « Varapaneala ») in the 9th. (Cf. Sita-hatl Grant of Ballala SC*ua ;
Rama-earita of Sandhyakara Nandi, ed. H. P. Sastri, ASB. ; Sylhet Bhatera
Grant : see Apj)eu/lLi' C, in which some of the more interesting nanie>
obtained from early inscriptions in Bengal are given.)
In the formation of these names, we hud some words which are
distinctly Dravidian : e,f/.y « -jola, -i~>t'x, j~>li, -j'jfcikii » etc. : « hitti, bhifcfci,
-viti, -hist(h)l » etc. ; «-ga;(Ja, -gajdi» ; « -pola, -vola » ; and probably also
« -handa », « -vala », « -kunda, -kuirjl », and ^ eavati, cavafja » etc. ; and
besides these, there are many others which have a or non- Aryan look.
The first word, as in « Pintlara-viti-jotika, Uktara~yr>ta jr>tii), DharniniayO-
jotika, Na'Ja-jolT, Camyala-jnli, Sik(ph ?)-ga'ji-joli^ Oijamakka-joli »,
meaning v/iannel, Wiiter-cofn'ise, nvei\ tjuder, is found in modern Bengal place
0
66
INTRODUCTION
names : 5Rt?t^^^ ^ Nara-jol^l Cv5t^^ « Dom^-jur^ C^ft^t^^ll^
« Jora-sako » ( = river-hridge, probably wrongly explained as double-bridge y
and rendered into Skt. as « Yugma-setu ») ; cf. also ^?fJR^FI « nayan^-juli »
conduit. This word is certainly Dra vidian : it is found in Kandh as « jorr
whence the name of the Kat-jun river in Orissa (B. C. Mazumdar, ^ Sonpur/
p. 19) ; we can compare the Bengali word C^T^ « jhol^ » .souj)^ water}/ mass,
(also saliva y as iu s^t^ <J^\^ « nal^-jhol^ and Kannada « jollu Telugu
« dzollu » saliva ; of. also Kanaa^Ja « joru » ^^/v/, J'?^?^'^ trickle. « (B)hitti »
occurs in Modern Bengali in the form o£ or f^l « bhifci = bhiti, bhita =
bhita » horfiesteady homestead hind. It occurs in a number of village
names in the old inscriptions : « Pindara-viti- », « Campa-hitti, -histT
« Hastini-bhifcta » , « \'illa-histi » (« -st- » is an easily explainable
Sanskritisatiou of « -tfc- ») : we can compare Dra vidian (Tamil) «viju,
v^ifcfcu » /lOHse : « bh » <c v » and « h » do not present any insurmountable
phonetic difficulty. « Gad(ja, gaddi also « gudi ^, as in « Aiiha-gad jT,
Sura-kona-gaddi, Sila-gaji » (ct. Modern Bengali f*tfil<S3T^ « iSili-guri >»,
^ttt^^ « Jalpai-guri »), can be compared with the common Telugu
affix ^< gadda Kannada « gatjde » litmp^ uiass, clot ; baak^ brink, edge,
« Pola^ vula 5> with which we may compare Telugu « polamu » ^(^^Jd, corn-
land, Kannada « polal » field, common in place names, is found in early
Bengal in names like « Jayarati-pola, Unai-pdla, Ajha'Ja-cau-vola, Dhra-
vi5la» etc. « Handa», as iu « Tiksa-handa « Kala-handl » (in the Taraeandi
inscription of Pratapa-dhavala, e. 1169 A.C., in Shahabad District),
might be from Sanskrit « khanda >^ : cf. « Tamra-pathara-khanda » iu the
7th century Lokanatha inscription from Tippera ; but one may compare
Tamil « aiifjai » nearness^ vicinitij, raised side of a field, houndary. « Vada »
is partially the source of New Bengali -^1 « -ra », a common affix in place-
names: e.g,,i\^\ <^ Bdkursiiy>z=z Bankura//,^-\Q^\ <^ Iisb6v2k »^ Hoivra//,
« Cflcura »= Chinsnrah, fir^ « Ris^ra ^55^ « B^gura », 'l^f^Fl « Ig^ra ^s^,
« Som^ra 5t^^ ^ Cap^ra » etc. I^. is found plentifully in older
inscriptions out of Bengal as svell ; ejj., at Bharhut and Sanchi ; it may
be from an OIA. « vrta-ka », but we may note the common Kol word
for house, « orak' ». « Kun^a, kuncji as in « Sriksi-kurida, Sila-kunda,
PRE-ARYAN PEOPLE OF BENGAL
(17
Nandi-haripa-kiindl », seems to be the same word as the New Bengali f ^
« knr^ » heap, 111 tie hillock, dnnghill, with which may be compared Telnj^u
«konrja > hill, rock. The Benc^ali « -g«ri », as in « Siliguri » mentioned
above, may be a variant of « kur^ » ; c£. Bengali C^Tt^ « g6r^ » Jleshj/
itaveL <c Cavacjl, capati, cavada », as in « CavatI, Kula-capaoi, Tata-
eavarja », is the source of the New Bengali word ^ « cati » [efoti]
lodge ^ posthonse, caravanserai ; it is found in other NIA. language^,
but it is probably a Dravidian word ( = Telugu and Kannar'a <c eavarji »).
An investigation of the place-names in Bengal, as in other parts of Aryan
India, is sure to reveal the presence of non-Aryan speakers, mostly
Dravidian, all over the land before the establishment of the Aryan tongue.
43. Bengal originally did not form one country and one nation.
The Ganges (Padma or Padda) with its branch the Bhagirathi or Hugli
and the Brahmaputra divide the country into four tracts, in which dwelt,
several hundred years before Christ, at a time when the riverain system
of the country must have been a gieat deal different from the present
one, the tribes of the Pundras (in North Central Bengal, roughly in
the tract bounded by the Ganges to the south, and the Karatoya in the
east), the Vaggas (in Bengal east of the Brahmaputra and north of
"the Padma), and the Rajhas and to their south the Suhmas (west of
the Hugli). A great deal of the delta was marshy and uninhabitable
in the early period of Bengal history. The above four tribes, Puntjra,
Vagga, Ralha and Suhma, were the important ones, who gave their
names to the various tracts they inhabited. But there were other tribes
as well, some of which, like the Kaivarttas or Kevattas (Keots), were
spread all over the country, while others, like the Cauf.alas (CSrals), the
Dombas, (Doras), the Hadldikas (Hans), the ancestors of the Bagiidls
(=:« * Vyaghra-dvipikas » ?), the Yathurls (Ba[h]uris), the Cubadas,
were more or less confined to parts of the country. Under the influence
of the Upper Gangetic (Brahmanie) idea of caste, many of the non-Aryan
tribes have become occupation castes in an xAryanised society, their
position in the present-day Hindu society being determined by the nature
of their occupation as a community. The tribes of Agga (East Bihar)
GS
INTRODUCTION
and Magadha were perhaps allied, and so were the Ocjras and the Kaliijgas
of Orissa. There seems to have been an unbroken connection between
Bihar, AVest Bengal, Kaligga and the Andhra country, racially and
linguistically. (Cf. F. E. Pargiter in the JASB., 1897, i, pp. 85 ff.).
The Kvl tribes (Santals etc.)? now found in West Bengal are recent
arrivals from the plateau of Chota Nagpur ; but before the advent of the
Sautals, there were earlier Kol tribes e,^., the Bhumijes, — ancestors of
some of the humbler sections of the West Bengal people — who, with
their Dravidian neighbours, have become completely Hinduised. The
Maler of the Raj-mahal Hills, the Oraons of Chota Nagpur, and the
Kandhs of Orissa are some of the ruder Dravidian speakers who still
preserve their language in their hill and jungle fastnesses. The Suhmas
of South-west Bengal had their capital city in Tamralipti, or Damalipta, as
it is called in the ' Dasa-kumara-carita ' (8th century A.C.) : this is a
Sanskritised form of some name like « * Damalitta, Damilitta », and here
we probably have a connection with the word « Damila » ( = Tamil), as
Mahamahopadhyaya Hara-Prasad Sastrl has suggested. (« *Damilitta »
for a « * Damil-vittu home of the Da unla people ). The modern name
of this town is ^t^^ « Tam(o)luk^ » : the affix suggests,
according to Dr. L. D. Barnett, a connection with Kannada « okkal » house^
home (ef . the name Utkala ^ for Orissa, probably also of Dravidian
origin: Kannacja « gkkala » —homehohle)\ farmer] the Ofira people =
« 6 Ida » delving labourer, in Dravidian ; see F. KittePs 'Kannada Dictionary,^
Bangalore, 1804r, under <c odda 1 » and « o jra »). The Mahabharata legend
of the five princes Agga, Vagga, Kaligga, Puncjra and Suhma being
brothers, who were sons of the Rishi Dirghatamas begotten on the wife
of King Bali, is probably based on traditions of ethnic kinship among
the tribes of which the live princes were the eponymous ancestors,
(Cf. F, E. Pargiter, JASB., cited above). These early tribes of Bengal,
Dravidian speakers mainly, were well-organised, and they seem to have
possessed a culture of their own. The early history of Burma and Siara
tells us that at a time when the Tibeto-Chinese tribes (Burmese, and
Tai) had not yet arrived on the scene, and these countries were inhabited
TIBETO-CHINESE ETHNIC ELEMENTS
69
only by Mdn-Khmer peoples, Dravidians from Bengal and Kaliijga were
eaiigrating into these lands, and becoming the ruling race there. Later,
when these non-Aryans from India assimilated Biahmanic culture, their
princes claimed connection with the ancient royal houses of Aryan Upper
India (a thing which was repeated in the case of the new Rajput elans
at a later period), and introduced among the Mons and the Khmers in
times jjod Christ the Sanskrit language as well as traditions connected
with Hastinapura and Ayodhya which yet live.
44. The Tibeto-Chinese tribes came into the field later. In Indo-
China, two of their powerful tribes, the Mran-ma ( = Bramm5, Byarama or
Burmese, Indianised into ' Brahma and the Tai (better known by the
name given to them by their Burmese kinsmen, viz,, Rham or San
[Shan J, Siem or Siamese, Indianised to 'Syama'), conquered respectively
the Mons and the Khmers, the conflict beginning sometime in the middle
of the 1st millennium A.C. and continuing down to the ISth and 19th
centuries. (Cf. R. C. Temple, ^ Outlines of Indo-Chinese History,' lAnt.,
1916, pp. 37 ff.) The Bodo section of the Tibeto-Burman branch of the
Tibeto-Chinese people (Boijo, Mec, Koe, Kacarl, Habha, Garo, Tipura) came
to Assam and East Bengal, and were spread all over East and North Bengal.
The time of the Tibeto-Burman incursion and settlement in Assam and
East Bengal is not known, but it could not have been long before the begin-
ning of the Christian era, at the earliest. Hiuen Thsang's remarks about the
people of Assam in the 7th century A.C. 47) are to be noted in this con-
nection. In pre-Moslem Bengal, in the 10th century, the Kambojas ( =
*Kam(3ea, Kawoca, K8c^), one section of the Bodos, for a time, usurped the
throne of Bengal, at least in the northern part of the country (R. D.
Banerji, ^ThePalasof Bengal/ Memoirs of the ASB., V, 3, pp. GS-69;
Rama-Prasad Chanda, ' Gau^a-raja-mala,' Rajshahi, 1319 San, p. 37);
and during the Moslem times, the Koces, under their Hinduised Kings, had
a powerful state in North Bengal and West Assam which continued till
the middle of the 17th century (E. A. Gait, ' History of Assam,' Calcutta,
1916, Chap. IV ; the Assamese verse chronicle ' Darang-raj-baiisawal!/ ed.
by Hem-Chandra Goswami, Calcutta, 1917, Introduction). Aryanisation of
70
INTRODUCTION
the Bodos and of the Kol and Dra vidian peoples, and probably also of Mon-
Khmer tribes allied to the Khasis, in North Bengal, Assam and East Bengal
must have begun immediately after Central and North Bengal became
Aryanised : and the kingdoms of Pragjyotisa and Kamarupa, claiming a
fabulous antiquity, were established. Assam possessed a Hindu king
in the 7th century, according to the testimony of Hiuen Thsang and
of contemporary epigraphical documents. From its geographical position,
Assam was practically an extension of North Bengal, so far as its speech
and early history were concerned. The Aryanisation of the Tibeto-Burmans
in North Bengal and in Assam is still progressing ; and a strong Bodo
influence has been seen by one scholar at least in the growth of Bengali
(J. D. Anderson postulated Bodo influence on Bengali syntax and accentua-
tion : JRAS., 1911, pp, 5^4 ff., 1913, pp. 183 ff. ; and ' People of India,'
Cambridge, 1913. p. 54). But it seems it is to Dravidian stress and
Dravidian idiom rather than to the Tibeto-Burman Bofjo, that we are to
look for the source of influence in the above points,
45. The people of Bengal, in the middle of the 1st millennium B.C.,
do not seem to have been Aryan speakers, but they possessed great skill
in some arts and crafts which was recognised in Aryanised, imperial
Magadha. Kautilya's * Artha-sastra ' (end of 4tb century B.C. in its
original form) praises the silk and other stuffs made in Puntjra, Suvarna-
kurjya and Vaijga (II, 11) : the second tract has been identified with
Karna-suvarna in Murshidabad District. The original author of the oldest
Indian treatise on elephant-training and the diseases of elephants, the
' Hastyayurveda ^ ascribed to Pala-kapya, a work compiled during the
Sutra period (600-200 B.C.), is described as a man from * where the
Lauhitya (Brahmaputra) flows towards the sea,' from East Bengal
near the mouths of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra (H. P. Sastri,
* Presidential Address to the 8th Bengali Literary Conference,' VSPdP.,
1321, No. 4). It does not seem hkely that Bengal (even North and
West Bengal), was brought in line with the Aryan states of India before
the Maurya period, by being conquered by Magadha. The Pali Jataka
and Tri-pitaka literature which gives a faithful account of Aryandom in
THE RADHAS AND SUHMAS
71
India in the centuries immediately before the Maurya period, mentions?
16 great nations^ among which Paajra, Yagga, Radha or Suhma have no
place. Jain tradition as preserved in the * Ayaragga Sutta ' (1, 3,4:
p. 84; * Gaiua SAtras/ trans, by H. Jacobi^ SBE. [the work dating from
the 3rd century B.C., at least in a more ancient original which is lost,
but referring to the 6th century B.C. : cf. oj), cit,, pp, xl-xliii]) describes
Lajha and Subbha (=Ra]ha, Suhma) as countries inhabited by a wild
and churlish people. In fact, the tradition, that the Ra lha people of West
Bengal were wild and barbarous, is present down to Middle Bengali
times : e.g.^ Mukunda-rama writes (c. 1580) in his * Caivji-kavya,'
(Vaijgavasi edition) :
p. 70— ^It5( C^t-ft^s^^ ^t? I
« byadh^ go-hinsak^ rar^^ ( = rafjha) »
A hinder J a cow-killer, a Badha,
p. 73 — "5if% ^ ^t^^ I
« ati nica-kule janma, jati-te coar^ ;
keha na p^ras^ kare, loke bale rar^
« Birth in a vert/ loir caste ; hy caste, a Cd(/i)dd (or Ctthad : any con-
nection with the Cuh^das or sweepers of Northern India and the Panjab?) ;
)io one touches [jiie')^ people call (fne) if Rudha.
The attitude of the Brahman law-makers towards Bengal in early
times (p. 63) may be recalled.
Panini just mentions Gaurja (VI, 2, 100) : this Gau(?a seems to be in
Bengal. Later Buddhist tradition as in the ' Divyavadana ' mentions Pun-
dra-vardhana as being under Asdka (see above, § 41), and Tamralipta, the
capital of Suhma, was also under Asoka (V. A. Smith, ^ Early History of
India,^* Oxford, 1911, p. 16'2). The inference which can be drawn is as
follows. Bengal was not within the Aryan pale in the 6th century B.C.
In the 4th century B.C., Bengal was joined to Magadha, at least by
commercial ties. A large number of pre-Maurya and Mauryan coins
n
INTRODUCTION
(pui'anas), o£ the same kind as those found in Magadha, have been dis-
covered in South-west, West, and North Bengal (R. D. Banerji, ^ Baggalar
Itihas,^ Part I, pp. 31-32). Jainism, and perhaps also Buddhism and
Brahmanism, were spreading among the people in North, Central, and West
Bengal: Punrlra-vardhana was a Jain centre according to the ' Divjavadana,'
in the time of Asoka ; and in the beginning of the 2nd century B.C., the
King of Kaligga was a Jain ; and he was also a patron of the Brahraans
(Hathl-gumpha Inscription of Kharavela), North and West Bensral,
contiguous to Magadha and Kaligga, were under Asoka in the 3rd century
B.C. From that time, we might assume, there was the commencement of
a vigorous movement towards Aryanisation in Bengal.^ The Aryan speech
was undoubtedly brought into Bengal, from Magadha and beyond, by
^ The Ceyloiiese Pali chronicles ' Dipa-vamsa ' and 'Maha-varhsa' narrate the story of
Vijaya- Both these works mention ' Lala,* or * Lala-rattha ' as the home of Vijaya. This
' Lala ' is only a variant of ' Lada/ and is the same tract known as * L&ta * in Sanskrit, and
' Larike ' in Greek = ' * Ladika,' which corresponds to the Gujarat coast country (Kathia-
war), and probably also to South Sindh, which is still known as * Lar ' = ' Lada.' Some
scholars prefer to see ' Radha ' or West Bengal in this ' Lala/ : if this identification were
correct, it would establish the existence of an old tradition in favour of there having been
a considerable Aryanisation of West Bengal in the 6th or oth century B.C. But the only
ground of connection with Bengal is the mention of Vanga iu narrating the story of
Vijaya in the Pali works : both agree in saying that the mother of Siha-bahu, Vijaya's
father, was a princess from Vanga or East Bengal. The Dipa-vamsa, which is slightly older
than the MahS-vaiiisa (the latter dating from the end of the 5 th century after Christ •
cf. M. Winternitz, ' Geschichte der indischen Litteratur,' II, Leipzig, 1920, pp. 168, 170),
gives a only bald version of the wild legend of the lion and the Vanga princess, and men-
tions Vaiiga only casually, and speaks of Siha-pura, Vijaya's native citj-, and describes his
sojourn at SuppSra and Bharu-kaccha during his voyage to Ceylon ; the Maha-vamsa gives
an elaborate version of the legend, mentions not only Vanga but also Kalinga and
Magadha (although once), and omits Bharu-kaccha. (H. Oldenberg, the Dipavamsa, London,
1879 ; W, Geiger, English Translation of the Maha-vamsa, London, 1912.) The bringing in
of the names of Vanga and Magadha, especially of the latter, looks like interpolations ; the
contiguity of Lala, the home of the first Aryan King of Ceylon, with Magadha, the Buddhist
holy land, which would be emphasised by the frequent mention of Vanga as in the
MahS-vamsa version, was sure to please the Ceylon Buddhists of early times. Siha-pura,
from where Vijaya came, may be represented by the modern Sihor ( = Slha-ura, Sinha-pura)
in Bhavnagar state, not far from the sea. Above all, the mention of Bharu-kaccha and
•
ARYANISATION OF BENGAL
73
Magadhan and other oi&cials and soldiers^ Brahmans^ Buddhist and Jain
missionaries and priests, traders and artisans in large numbers, and adven-
turers in search of fortune, who made the land their home. The
upper classes among the orig^inal people of the land, like the upper classes
everywhere under similar circumstances, would be most susceptible to this
cultural and linguistic influence coming in the wake of a political suzerainty.
When the upper classes are captured in this way, the spread of a foreign
culture and language among the masses is a question of time only. People
of humbler ranks were continually coming into Bengal from Magadha,
KasI and beyond, as they have always been doing uptil now, and by set-
tling down in the country were re-inforcing the position of the Aryan speech.
It is very likely that Pragjy5tisa and Vagga, from their comparatively
remote position, received Aryan speech later than West. North, and Central
Bengal; and this early contrast between an advanced and Aryanised
North and West Bengal, and a rather backward East Bengal, possibly
Suppfira is a strong evidence in favour of the west coast having been tbe home of the first
Aryan settlers in Ceylon several centuries B.C. Hiuen Thsang narrates the Hon legend
at some length, and the story of the colonisation of Ceylon (S. Beal, ' Buddhist Records,
etc.,' Vol. 31, London, 1906, pp. 236 ff.)f ^® places the scene in Southern India. The
people of the Western Indian Coast were adventurous sailors from very early times, even
before the advent of the Aryans; and not to speak of their voyages to lands beyond the
Ajrabian Sea, Java in the Eastern Ocean was first colonised from India by the Gujarat
people in the 1st century A.C., according to Javanese tradition (see RadhS-Kumud
Mookerjee, *A History of Indian Shipping, etc.,' London, 1912, pp. 150-151). The Sinhalese
language, according to Geiger, is connected with Western Prakrits, Saurastri and Maha.
ra^tri, rather than with Ma gad hi (cf. W Geiger, ' Litteratur und Sprache der Sinhalesen,'
pp. 90, 91, 92 ; P. Arunachalam, ' Sketches of Cevlon History,' Colombo, 1906, pp. 9, 10 ;
see also infra, Appendix B, § 81, ' Echo Words ' in NIA and Dravidian). But there is no
denying that in later, post-Asokan times, after Buddhism was taken to Ceylon from
Magadha, the connection between Bengal and Ceylon grew very intimate — regular trade
through the harbour of TSmralipti being carried on between Magadha and Bengal and
Ceylon — a connection which continued down to the middle of the 13th century at least
(when the Sanskrit scholar Rama candra Kavi-bharatT, a North Bengal Brahman, perse-
cuted by his people on becoming a Buddhist, went to Ceylon : R. D. Banerji, * BAngftlSr
Itihas/ II, Calcutta, San 1324, p. 59), and traditions of which in the shape of stories of
commercial voyages to Ceylon undertaken by Bengali merchants are present in Middle
Bengali literature,
10
74
INTRODUCTION
differing linguistically and racially (in having a prominent Tibeto-Burman
element) from West Bengal, is at the root of the contemptuous use of the
term ^TTTR* Baggal » for an inhabitant of East Bengal (= « Vagg-ala »),
even at the present day when the name Vago^a has been extended west to
Puij4ra and Ra^ha (jointly known as Gau^a-desa). South Bengal (the
lower reaches of the Gauges delta) does not seem to have been very much
habitable below the 23rd degree of latitude, perhaps not much below the
Tropic of Cancer, at the period we are speaking of (some four hundred years
B.C.) ; it seems to have been a marshy and jungly tract, infested by tigers/
in which settlements were made from Pundra, Radha and Vagga later.
The Kaligga country which Asoka conquered, far removed from
centres of Aryan speech, has always remained Dravidian, and the 04ra
people, the ancestors of the present-day Oriya speakers, were not Aryanised
even as late as the 7th century A.C,^ according to the testimony of Hiuen
Thsang (see infra ^ § 47), But the early use of the Aryan language for adminis-
trative and cultural purposes in Dravidian Kaligga and Odra can be inferred
from Asdka's and Kharavela's inscriptions.
46. There is nothing known definitely about Bengal till the time of the
Guptas ill the 4th century A.C. Saka kings of the family of Kaniska ruled
over Northern India during part of the period between the fall of the
Maury as and the rise of the Guptas. Their power extended over Magadha
(R. D. Banerji, ^Baggalar Itihas,' I, pp, 36 £E.), but it is not known
^ The delta of Bengal is known by the name of ^t^fjft * BSgp< Bagad?.' The name JI^T^fe
* Sama*ta$a * is somefcimes used for the delta, bat it is properly a name for East Bengal, Vafiga,
rather than for Sonth Bengal (BSdhS.Govinda Basftk, * Sama-tater Raja-dhSnl,' Sahitya,
Asvina, San 1321). The word ^Bagadi' has not been satisfactorily explained. It is some-
times derived from a Sanskrit ' Vaka-dvipa,' which is phonologically inadmissible. There
is a * Bflgri ' or * BSga^I ' in Midnapnr District, near Garbetfi, but it is far away from the
lelta In the Khalimpur grant of Dharma-pSla (c. 800 A.C.) we find the mention of a
Vyaghra-ratl * district, forming part of the Pnndra.yardhana province. This place has
nor. baen identified, bat it may be in the delta. Can ' YySghra-tatT ' ^tiger-coast, a fitting
nama for a delta district as the home of the Royal Bengal Tiffer, be the source of * BSgadi '
(through '•V'aggha-adi,"*B«ghawa<Ji/ '•Bfigba^li/ with deaspiration of ' gh 'in Middle
Bengali) ?
CANDRA-VARMAN OP PUSKARANA
75
whether Bengal formed a part of the Saka empire. But there is evidence
of the industrial and commercial activities of the people of Bengal during
the Kusana period, e.g., from the contemporary Greek work the Teriplus
of the Erythraean Sea* (1st century A.C. : Section 63).
The oldest epigraphieal record found in Bengal is a very short San^krit
inscription, in Brahml characters of the ^th-oth cen. A.C, on Su^^unia
Rock in Bankura District, which mentions a king Candra-varman, the son
of Siddha-varman (? Siriha-varman), ruler of Pu-karana, a devotee of
'the Lord of the discus' (eakra-svamin = Visnu) (Ep. Ind., XIH ; H.
Liiders, ^ List of Biahml Liseripticns/ No. 961, Appendix to Vol. X of the
Ep. Ind.) This Candra-varman has been regarded as identical .vith the
king Candra mentioned in the Meherauli Iron Pillar Inscription^ as well as
with the kino: Candra-varman named in the xAllahi<bad Pillar Inscription of
Samudra-gupta ; and it has been also suggested — and the suggestion has
been accepted by some scholars — that the Candra-varman -Candra of these
three inscriptions was a scion of the Varman dynasty of kings mentioned
in some inscriptions from Mandasor in Gwalior State (the oldest of which
is dated 404-405 A.C), and that he was a ruler of Western Rajputana,
the place Pu8karana in the Susunia inscription being identified witb
Pokharan city in Western Jodhpur (H. P. i^astrl in the I Ant., 1913,
pp. 217-219 ; R. D. Banerji, ' Baggalar Itihas,' I, pp. 89-41). The
presence of the inscription of a king of Rajputana at Susunia in distant
Bengal has been explained as a memento of the « digvijaya » undertaken
by this king : the Meherauli Inscription which mentions the conquests
of king Candra from Baikh to Bengal supplying the explanation. But
this identification of Candra-varman of the Susunia Rock Inscription
with a supposititious ruler of the Varman dynasty of Mandasor, not
mentioned at all in the Mandasor records, fails to be convincing ; and
Candra-varman of Susunia can very well be a local ruler in West Bengal,
distinct from the Candra of the Meherauli Inscription, and very likely
he was the same Candia- Varman who is mentioned in the Allahabad
Pillar Inscription (J. F. Fleet, ' Corpus Inseriptionum Indiearura,' III)
as one of those chiefs of Aryavartta who were * forcibly rooted out ' by
76
INTRODUCTION
Samudra-gupta ; and ' Puskarana ' of which he was the king is in all
likelihood a place in West Bengal. If this view is correct, then Candra-
varman would be the oldest ruler of Bengal of whom we have a
contemporary record : and he belonged to the middle of the 4th century
A. C, when Bengal was recognised as a part of Aryavartta and could no
longer be omitted from the tale of North Indian Hindu states. The poet
Kalidasa (end of the 4th century A.C.), in describing the conquests of
Raghu in his ' Raghu-vansa/ brings him to Bengal (Vaijga and Suhma),
and apparently is of the same mind. The Sanskiit drama ' Pratijna-
Yaugandharayana,' ascribed to ' Bhasa^' which is probably not older than
the 4th century A. C, suggests that the ruling families of Bengal were
regarded as equals to those of Northern India for inter-niarriage with
thebouseof Malava.^ The Jaina Upagga>', again, redacted e. 454 A.C., but
preserving earlier traditions, include Bengal (Tamalitta and Vagga) among
Aryan lands, as opposed to « Milikkha » (=:Mleccha or Barbarian) peoples like
the Saka, Yavana^ Parasa, Damila, Pulinda, Huna, Romaga, Botfchakana
and others (lAnt., 1891, pp. 374 ff. : I am indebted to my friend Prof.
H. C. Kayehaudhuri for drawing my attention to this). All this would
presuppose a considerable Aryanisation of Bengal by 300 A.C.
With the establishment of the Gupta power in Bengal in the 4th
century, Bengal became finally and completely linked to Northern
or Aryan India. The Allahabad Pillar Inscription of Samudra-gupta
states that the people of Sama-tata, KSma-rupa and Davaka ( = East
Bengal ?) paid him tribute. The Guptas were zealous Brahmanists,
and from their time began a large settlement of Brahmans from the
Midland, to whom were made substantial grants of land to enable them
to carry on their Sanskrit studies and their religious rites for the benefit
of the colonists from Upper India. The great number of Old Bengal
* Act II of the drama : king Pradyota of Ujjayini says, discussing with his queen
a suitable match for their daughter VSsava-datta : * asmat-sambaddho Magadhah Kasi-rajo
Vadga^ Sinr5§tra5 MSithila^i Surasenah : ete nSnslrthair iobhayante gunfiir mam : kas te
▼ftitesSm pStratam ySti rajfi?' connected with us are the kivgs of Magadha, of KaiX^ of
Vanga, of Surastra^ of MithiB and of &urasena ; they attract mehy their manifold qualities :
which hing among them is deemed a proper hridegroom hy you t
BRAHMAN SETTLEMENT : HIUEN THSANG
77
inscriptions consist of deeds recorded on copper-plates of such grants
of land to Brahmans. The Brahman ' coming out of the Midland ^ —
« madhya-deSa-vinirgata » — as he is frequently described in these deeds,
was a missionary of Hindu Aryan or North Indian culture, and it was
a meritorious act with all classes of people, from the rulers downwards,
to settle him in villages with grants of land. In this matter, in later
times even the rulers professing the Buddhist faith followed suit.
Scions of aristocratic families — « kula-putras » — from Ayodhya and else-
where in Northern India bought lands in Bengal for the support of
Brahmanieal temples, and in other ways helped to establish Hinduism ;
and these < kula-putras » probably gave or reinforced the aristocracy of
medieval Bengal (cf. the Damodar-pur copper-plates, No. 5, of 533-34
A.C. : Radha-Govinda Basak, ' Epigraphia Indiea,' XY, p. 115).
47. When Fa Hien came to Bengal, in the beginning of the 5th
century, the country was apparently flourishing in (Aryan) learning and
culture, at least in the West and the North : for the Chinese pilgrim found
Tamralipti a seat of learning, where he spent two years, copying MSS.
and painting images (J. Legge, * Record of the Buddhist Kingdoms, etc.,'
Oxford, 1886, p. 100). Another Chinese traveller, Hiuen Thsang, visited
Bengal during the 1st half of the 7th century. He has an occasional
remark about the language of the tracts he passed through, and his state-
ments are valuable and interesting. (S. Beal, 'Records of the Western
World,' II, London, 1906, pp. 194 ff.) Crossing the Ganges from Agga
and Kajaggala, he came to Punt^ra-vardhana, or North Central Bengal, to
the north of the Ganges, where he found that the country was thickly
peopled, the men esteemed learning, and Maha-yana and Hina-yana
Buddhism, Brahmanism and Jainism were all flourishing. From Punrjra-
vardhana he went to K§ma-rupa or Western Assam and East North
Bengal. The people of Kama-rupa were simple and honest in manners,
and were of small stature, with a * dark yellow ' complexion. About their
language, Hiuen Thsang says that it differed ^ a little ' from that of
'Mid-India.' The people were also impetuous and wild, but their memories
were retentive, and they were earnest in study. They were mostly
78
INTRODUCTION
Brahmanistic^ and the king of Kama-rupa^ Bhaskara-varman^ is said to
have been a Brahman. Hiuen Thsang remarked that the tribes living in
the frontiers of Kama-rupa were akin to the Man tribes of South-western
China, a wild Tibeto-Chinese people. From Kama-rupa he came south to
Pama-tata or East Bengal, bordering on the sea. The land was low and
rich ; the habits of the people were agreeable ; they were hardy, small of
stature, and of a black complexion ; and they were fond of learning, and
exercised themselves diligently in the acquirement of it. As in Punrjra-
vardhana, Brahmanism existed side by side with Jainism. From Sama-tata,
he passed on to Karna-suvarna, identified with Kan-sona in Murshidabad
District, in Central Bengal. The men there were hardy and brave, and
quick and hasty in manners; they were both heretics and believers. Thence
Hiuen Thsan«: went to Tamralipti, the people of which place were honest
and amiable of manners, loving learning exceedingly, and applying them-
selves to it with earnestness. They were both Brahmanists and Buddhists.
This finishes his itinerary in Bengal. He then comes to 0(Jra, which cor-
responded to modern South-west Midnapur and North Orissa, to Koggoda
or Central Orissa, and to Kaliggaor South Orissa and Ganjam. The people
of all these tracts are expressly mentioned as speaking a language different
in forms and sounds from that of ' Mid-India ^ ; obviously they spoke
Dravidian dialects, although c. 619 A.C. we have in K6gg5da a ruling
house employing Sanskrit in inscriptions, like KharaveWs house in the
2nd century B.C. using the North Indian Aryan speech (Radha-Govinda ,
Basak, ' Madhava-varramar Tamra-sasan/ Sahitya, Phalguna, San 1319).
Thus from the evidence of Hiuen Thsang, it can be concluded that by
7th century A.C. the iVryan language had been generally adopted by the
people all over Bengal, and it had penetrated as far east as Western
Assam, but it had not spread among the masses even in Northern Orissa.
But it is curious to find that, according to him, the language of the
Kama-rupa people ' differed a little ' from that of Mid-India. Hiuen
Thsang is silent about the lanofuage of Pun;Jra-vardhana or Karna-suvarna :
it can be presumed that the language of these tracts was identical
with that of Magadha, which was the ' IJidland,' or * Central India/
THE SPEECH OF KAMA-RUPA
79
or ^ Mid-India ^ of the Chinese traveller. Now, one would expect one
and identical language to have been current in North Central Bengal
(Pundra-vardhana) and North Bengal and West Assam (Kama-rupa) in
the 7th century, since these tracts, and other parts of Bengal, had
almost the same speech, at least in morphology, in the 15tli and 16th
centuries, as can be seen from the extant remains in Bengali and Assamese.
Perhaps this ' differing a little ^ of the Kama-rupa speech from the speech
of * Mid-India ^ (and presumably also from those of Puncjra-vardhana and
other places in Bengal) refers to those modifications of Aryan sounds, which
now characterise Assamese as well as North and East Bengali dialects,
« ts, s, dz, z » for « c, eh, j, jh », « r » (rather then « r ») for « -4" *j
« h » for < §<s s s ». The presence of a large Tibeto-Burman element in the
population of Assam and East and North Bengal may have something
to do with this (cf. the Tibetan and Burmese pronunciation of lA. « c, eh,
j [jh] » as « ts, ts-h, dz » and « ts [s], s-h, z *, and Burmese pronunciation
of « s » as a spirant « th » [^] ) ; and these phonetic modifications very
likely were first brought about in the Magadhi Prakrit or Apabhransa dialect
current in Kama-rupa, with its predominantly Tibeto-Burman population,
as noticed by the observant Hiuen Thsang ; and from Kama-rupa the
« ts, dz », « r » and « h » pronunciations might have spread into the con-
tiguous tracts of Bengal, — where, however, they do not seem to have become
regularly established in the way they have done in Assamese.
48. Aryanisation of Bengal, inaugurated probably in the 4th century
B.C. under the Mauryas, and vigorously carried on under the Guptas, seems
thus to have been completed by the 7th century A.C, By this time the Gupta
power waned in Northern India. In the early part of the 7th century,
a chief named Sas(ii)ka Nareudra-gupta, believed to be a scion of the house
of the imperial Guptas, tried to create a strong and independent kingdom
in Magadha and Bengal, but he failed, and Harsa-vardhana of Thanesar
made himself master of all Northern India. During: the first decades of the
7th century, Bengal seems to have been conquered by BhSskara-varman
of KSma-rupa, Harsa's contemporary. After the death of Harsa there was
period of confusion and internecine warfare^ accompanied by
80
INTRODUCTION
attacks by kings from other parts of India, and Magadha and Bengal
suffered from anarchy (R. D. Banerji, ' Baijgalar Itihas,' I, Chapter VI),
But now Bengal, well-known by the joint-name of Gauda-Vagga,
figured largely in North Indian politics. The Prakrit poem ^Gaiida-
vaha' of Vakpati-raja describes the victorious campaign of Yasodharma-
deva of Kanauj into Magadha, Gau:]a and Vagga ^ by the side of the sea,'
in the early decades of the 8th century. Barring the short period of
Hafsa's rule, for about a century and a half (600-740 A. C.) there was no
stable government in Bengal. Petty chiefs warred against each other,
and there seems to have been general misrule and anarchy. Out of this
chaos, the people of Bengal at last elected a strong man to be king over
them — Gopala, the son of Vapyata (« matsya-nyayam apohitum prakf tibhir
laksmyah karag grahitah * i7i order to do aioay with ' the way of the
fishes^^ or anarchy^ he tvas made by the subjects to receive the hand of
Fortune— 2t& the Khalimpur grant of Dharma-pala puts it); and with him
(c. 740 A.C.) began a line of kings — the Pala dynasty — which ruled Bengal
for over 350 years, and which wicaessed the highest political and intellectual
achievements of the people of Bengal before the coming of the Turks in 1200.
The tribes of Bengal were already welded into an Aryan-speaking
nation, and its distinct character was in its formative period. This new
people took to learning with great zeal. Monasteries and colleges in
Magadha and Bengal become famous as seats of Buddhistic learning, and
an extensive Buddhistic religious and philosophical literature was pro-
duced. Indian culture was transmitted to Tibet and to Burma (among
the Mons and the Burmese) by Bengal scholars. In Sanskrit scholarship,
Bengal already made its mark, and before the beginning of the 8th century
when Bhamaha and Daufjin the famous writers on Sanskrit poetics
flourished, the * Gaucjiya-rlti » or Bengal style of composition obtained an
honoured place in Sanskrit rhetoric (M. Winternitz, ' Gesch. der ind. Litt.,'
Ill, Leipzig, 1922, p. 14 : SushU-Kumar De, aiistory of Sanskrit Poetics/
I, (Calcutta, 19>3, pp. 49, 66, 67, 70). There grew up flourishing
seats of Brahmanieal learning, like Siddhala and Bhuri-srestha in West
Bengal. Composition in the vernacular of the land as well as in the
GROWTH OF BENGALI INDIVIDUALITY
81
literary Apabhransa of the West started during Pa la times, the teachers and
preachers of the Sahajiya Buddhist cult and the newly-risen Sivaite sect of
the Yogis or Nathas, and probably also the Vaisiiavas, taking the lead in this
matter. (Cf . H. P. Sastrl, ' Literary History of the Pala Period,' JBORS.,
V, ii, 11)19). A new movement in sculpture arose in the 9th century in
VarSndra {i,e,, Pundra or North Central Bengal), according to the evidence
of the Tibetan writer Taranatha, who mentions two eminent artists Dhiman
and Bitpalo (TaranStha, ' Geschichte des Buddhismus,' by Anton Sehiefner,
Petrograd, 1869, pp. 279-280) : and this school gained distinction as the
Gauija-Magadha style of Northern Indian sculpture.
When the Pala power waned, c, 1100 A.C., and the dynasty of the
Senas, originally feudatory chiefs in West Bengal, ousted the Palas from
Bengal and forced them to be confined to Bihar for the next century, the
people of Bengal had probably already formed their separate individuality,
with the dialects they spoke developing a common charaete.-. in contra-
distinction to those of Mithila, Magadha and Odra. And Bengal, which so
long formed more or less an appendage of Magadha, seems to have distinctly
broken away from the latter about 1100, with the elevation of the Senas.
This break grew wider with the destruction of national life and the
accumulated culture of ages in Magadha by the Turks in the course of
their conquest, and by the subsequent affiliation of Magadha in matters
social and cultural to Hindostan proper as one of its outlying provinces.
Mithila under her Hindu kings continued a self-contained, intellectual
existence for some time, and she remained the teacher and inspirer of
Bengal in higher Sanskritic learning, and to some extent in poetry, for over
two centuries after the Moslem conquest.
By the middle of the 10th century, to which period the earliest extant
specimens of Bengali can be referred, the Bengali language may be said
to have become distinctive, as the expression of the life and religious
aspirations of the people of Bengal, with the nucleus of a literature uniting
the various dialectal areas, A new speech entered into being, to give expres-
sion, later in its life, to some of the highest flights of the human spirit in
the regions of poetic imagination and perception.
11
82
INTRODUCTION
49. The lado- Aryan speech thus took over a thousand years to be
transformed into Bengali, after it came to Bengal during the first MIA.
period (roughly, 400 B.C.— 900 A.C). The story of the development of
lA. during these long centuries cannot be taken up here ; the broad lines
of it have been indicated in ^ 'ZO. Linguistic studies of the Asoka and
other inscriptions, grammars and philological works on Pali, the Prakrits
and the Apabhran^as, and above all, the texts themselves, enable us to
form some idea of MIA. The materials for the study of MIA. in Eastern
India are the following (but it must be noted that MIA. documents
relating to dialects current in other tracts are equally important, for their
parallel forms, for their throwing valuable light on the development of
MIA. as a whole, for their often preserving an eastern form, and for their
influence on the dialects of the East) :
(1) Stray words and forms in the language of the Vedas, the
Brahmanas, and in early classical Sanskrit, which, from their phonetic aspect,
can be regarded as eastern : * vikata =vikrta « danria =*dandra »,
« slila =srira », « sithila > hose (for *sithila = 2nd MIA. sidhila = *srthira),
« y^gil = gir » swalloiCy < ksulla » small (for ^ksudla = ksudra). (Cf. § 36.)
(2) The oldest inscriptions in the East : Asokan, and other Brahmi
{€,g,y the Sohgaura plaquette inscription, the Piprahwa vase inscription, the
f^utanuka inscription).
(8) Ardha-magadbi forms in Pali (ef. § 39).
(4) Old Ardha-magadhi and Old Magadhi specimens in the Buddhist
drama fragments of the 1st century A.C. (edited by Liiders : §§ 39, 40).
(5) Passages in Magadhi Prakrit, in Sakari, Candall and other
dialects based apparently on Magadhi, in Sanskrit dramas. Especially
important in this connection are the ' Mrcchakatika ' and the ' ^akuntala/
Jaina Ardha-magadhT.
(6) The Prakrit grammarians, beginning with Vararuci (5th century)
down to MSrkandeya (17th century), where they describe the eastern
dialect (Magadhi speech) ,
In the development of NIA. from OIA., the phonetic changes brought
about in the transitional period between early MIA. and second MIA.^
INTERVOCAL STOPS IN MIA,
8S
and the gradual decay of intleetions throughout all the MIA. stages, have
served to make NIA. almost entirely change its character, and to begin
afresh, as it were. As it will be seen under Morphology^ very few 01 A.
inflections have survived iu NIA. But it is the loss of the intervocal
stops, and the weakening of the aspirated stops to « h » in MIA., which
have transformed the Aryan language in India. A lax pronunciation of the
unvoiced « -k- -c- -t- -t- -p- » turns them easily into the voiced « -g- -j-
-(]- >d- -b- when they are preceded and followed by vowels, which are
voiced sounds. Further laxity prevents complete closure of the mouth-
passage, and the voiced stops become open consonants, spirants or conti-
nuants, namely, « g., y (fricative, =[5]), some kind oi: fricative cerebral 1 or
[4]^,^, » respectively: and these open consonants often lose their
audible friction, so that the consonant is reduced to zero. The voicing
of the tenues is found sporadically as early as the 3rd century B.C. in
Asoka's eastern iq^griptiocs : <?.//., « ava- » for ^ apa- » at Sahasram :
« ajala * at Dhauli, corresponding to « aeala » at Jaugada ; « loga » for « lo-
ka » at Jaugada ; libi = lipi » at Delhi-Topra ; « Antiyoga » for < Anti-
yoka * = Greek «j^ntiokhos at Kalsi, (Also cf. « rathidara = rathitara *,
Brahm! inscription from Kaugra Valley, :3rd century B.C. see J. Ph.
Vogel, Ep. Ind., VII, pp. 116 ff.)
In the transitional period of MIA., :iOU B.C. — 200 A.C., we see that
these voicings are on the increase in the inscriptions ; and cases of elision also
appear, growing more numerous as we advance to the second MIA. stage :
« Anadhapedikn = Anatha-pindika « Maghadeviya = Makhadeva- »,
* avayesi<ava5esi<avadesi = avadayat 5»> (Bharhut, :Znd century B.C.) :
* padhame = prathame », « cavutha < *caButtha <eaturtha », « radha =
ratha », « vitadha=s vitatha *, « Bharadha< *^Bharatha = Bharata », * Mvaka
V
^ The intervocal cerebrals in MIA. did not become fricative, i)ut weie changed either
to ' J * or to the so-called cerebral * r ' * the latter is not a continuant, but a * flap ' sound
The very character of the cerebrals, which needed the tongue -tip to be rolled back and
struck against the roof of the mouth for their proper pronunciation, ensured the motnen-
tary closure, even wheu the othtn- coiisouant sounds became <ipen. See later, under
Phonology, where the phonetic hiatory of lA. is discussed.
84
INTRODUCTION
=3napakai> (Kharavela Inseriptionj 2nd century B.C.); « chatrava=
ksatrapa », « ateurena=antepura- », « thuva=stupa « niyadido = nirya-
tita >, « Nakaraasa=:Nagarakasya » (a hybrid form, with Dardic or North-
west Indian * -k- » for « « ayarij^a = aearya « veya-udin6 =
vegodTrna « viyaa=vijaya » (Mathura Lion Capital Inscription, early
1st century A.C.); « apratithavita=apratisthapita » (Taxila Plate, of the
same date as the preceding). Similar forms, with voiced stops for unvoiced
ones, and « y » possibly for an open spirant pronunciation, are found in
the Nasik and Karle Cave Inscriptions of the 2nd century A.C. Of the
literary Prakrits (as in the older Sanskrit dramas), which were based on the
spoken MIA. vernaculars of the ist — oth centuries A.C, we find that the
voicing of the tenues, and their retention side by side with the original
voiced ones, to be quite the rule in Magadhl and ^auraseni (only « -k->
-g- » is generally elided, but « -t'>-d- » never); but in the dialect named
Maharastrl, they are in all cases elided. Modern I A. languages derived
from Magadhi and l^auraseni, e.^., Bengali and Hindi, show that those
original single stops of 01 A., which were preserved as voiced stops
in the literary Prakrits, were subsequently dropped as well : OIA.
« satam » > Mag. « sade, sadam », Saur. « sadaiL> » : cf . Bengali « sa »
from « saa, sawa », Hindi « sau^ sai » from « sa(\V/y)a » ; OIA. « pada »>
Mag., Saur., « pada » : cf . Bengali ^1 « pa », Hindi ^ paw » ; OIA. « ealati »>
Mag. « ycaladi Saur. « caladi » : ef. Bengali « cale, Hindi « cale
calai << calai ». This stage of Magadhi and SaurasenI, in which all the
intervocal stops were elided, has not been indicated in the oldest grammar
of Prakrit that we have, that of Vararuci, who says that « -t-, -th- »
become « -d-, -dh- » in ^auraseni ; and Magadhi follows Sauraseni in this
respect ; and later Sanskrit writers, who turned Sanskrit words into
Prakrit, followed Vararuci and the usage of Sudraka^, Kalidasa and the
rest. But in Sauraseni Apabhransa^ we have the genuine state of
things in the spoken language indicated by plenty of forms without the
intervocal consonants. For a final or intervocal stop to be elided, it must
be either laxly or lazily pronounced, leading to absence of contact, as
described above ; or ' throttled ' into an unexploded stop, as it has
SPIRANT PRONUNCIATION IN MIA.
85
bappened to the final stops in many speeches ; or changed into a glottal
stop, [ ' ], as in dialectal English^ ejj.^ London cockney [wo:'9, ba'j,
p^^ai^a, moi^i] foH (!oate)\ butter ^ paper ^ JZ/c/^-r?/ = standard Southern English
[wo:t9, bAt8, p^^eipa, maikl]. The process, namely, stops > voiced stops,
lazily uttered > open stops, or voiced fricatives with very little friction >
complete elision, or zero, — seems to have taken place in Northern India.
The « ya-sruti » of Jaina Ardha-magadhi, which may be represented « -y- »,
probably represents an intermediate stage between frif^ative pronunciation
and complete elision, when the suggestion of a spirant uould just be
heard. This, as S. Levi has noted (JA,, 19l2, ii. pp. 511-512), is found in
the word « avayesi » = « avadesi, avadayat » in the Bharhut inscriptions,
•2nd century B.C. Later ML\. inscriptions of the transitional stage show-
it ; and probably the Jain traditional spelling of Ardha-magadhi with the
« ya-jsruti » is a systematisation in writing of what was no doubt heard
in actual speech some time or other in the history of the dialect. Now, it
seems that the occurrence of « -g- -d- -b-, -gh- -clb- -bh- » (as well as
« -j- -jh- ») intervocally in Magadhi and Sauraseni m the second MIA.
period, as illustrated by Vararuci and by the early dramas, could only
have been as fricatives : witness also the existence of « -p- » as « -v- »,
in spelling, = bilabial fricative « -fe- » {i.e., [r], in the IPA. script).
Similar indication of fricative or open consonant sounds by letters which
originally were always pronounced as stops is quite common in many
languages, old and new : ejj., in Gothic, in Old Irish, in Modern Greek,
in Spanish. (vSee under Flionoloffy^ Sound-System of Second MIA.)
Occasional hesitancy in spelling, between retaining a voiced stop and
dropping it, which is noticed in contemporary documents of the transitional
period and in Prakrit texts , the name « Moa = Moga » respectively
in the coin of that Indo-Parthian king and in an inscription of his time)
also supports the assumption of the presence of a spirant pronunciation.
The aspirates « kh gh, th dh, ph bh » similarly became « g-h, ^h, "bh », and
finally « -h- ». In MaharastrT, however, the stops were already dropped
at a time when they were yet preserved as open consonants in ^lagadh!
and SaurasenI and in the dialects of the North-west, and possibly as strons:
86
INTRODUCTION
fricatives indicated by the «ya-sruti » in Ardha-magadhi. It is not certain
by which process this was brought about in the Southern dialect, but the
presence of « -5-- » forms in the Nasik Cave Inscriptions (of. R. G.
Bhan4arkar, ' Wilson Philological Lectures/ pp. 88, 30^), which
belong to the present day Marathi linguistic area, probably indicates the
change here also was gradual, as in Northern India, only it was accom-
plished earlier. This peculiarity of pronunciation as soon as it was attained
was probably noted in Northern India which still adhered to intervocal
sounds. ^ The predominance of vowels in Maharastri, as the result of the
dropping of consonants, made it more melodious, and this, coupled with
the prestige of a rich literature of lyrics and little couplets which was
growing up in it from the beginning of the Christian era, was probably
responsible for its being accepted as the Prakrit dialect for songs and
poetical stanzas by Sanskrit and Prakrit dramatists and poets everywhere.
Like Braj-bhakha in Northern India from the loth century downwards,
Maharastri became the recognised dialect for lyrics in the second MIA.
period. (See p. 6L)
50. The Prakrits of the transitional and second ill A. periods came
to have some literature in them, through the endeavours of the Buddhists
(the Prakrit speech of Gandhara or the North-west, e.g., the ' Dharma-
pada ' discovered by Dutreuil de Rhins in Central Asia, and tirst
published by E. Senart in the J A., 1897, and edited by Beni-Madhab
Barua and Sailendra-Nath Mitra, Calcutta University, 19^1), of the
Jains (the Ardha-magadhi dialect, now apparently re-edited from ' Old
Ardha-magadhi ' — ef. p. 08 — with influence from Sauraseni and other
^ In the ' Mrcchakatika ' drama, probably 4th century A.C. (cf. il, Winternitz,
' Indische Litteratur,' III, p. 203), a character says : ^ vaam dakkhmattS avvatta-bhasigo *
jfg Southerners speak indistinctly (Act VI). This is perhaps a comment on the early
elision of the stops in the South, which would be contrasted with the comparatively dis-
tinct — ' vyakta' — albeit fricative, articulation of the North. The speaker, Candanaka.
speaks familiarly of the ruses of the Karnata people in starting a quarrel ; he is apparently
a man from the Mahara-^tra country, borderinj? on KarnSfca ; and his dialect is not pure
SauraaeuT, — it is described aa Avanti, spoken in Ujjayini — something intermediate between
Sauraseni and Maharastri. Of. Pischel, ' Gram, der Prakrit Sprachen/ § 26.
^ APABHRANSA*
87
dialects), and of the Sanskrit dramatists, and vernacular poets in general
(the Saurasenl and Magadhl dialects, the Maharastrl dialect). Grammars
of some of these were written in the second MIA. period : and these
dialects soon became stereotyped as literary languages, and did not keep
pace with the spoken dialects, both in the scholarly Sanskrit dramas
and in the Prakrit compositions in which they figured. The spoken
dialects developed and changed ; and during the period between the
second MIA. dialects as in the dramas and the modern languages, these
arrived at a stage (§ -0, p. 19) which has been called ^ Apabhransa,'
following Hema-candra, who definitely describes by that name a typical
late MIA. speech which is younger than the Prakrits of the dramas,
but older than the modern vernaculars. Thus the ^ Saurasenl Prakrit ' of
the second MIA. stage, which was used in the Sanskrit drama, and
was actually based on the spoken language, say of the 3rd, 4th and
5th centuries, continued to be written in the 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th centuries,
and later; and being then confined to high literature only, and to a great
extent removed from the actual, living Saurasenl of the later period, it
became a matter of the scholar^s and the grammarian's interest, to be
written according to the grammars based on earlier specimens and modified
by later views, opinions, theories, and, very rarely, by actual (later) contem-
porary linguistic conditions. While this was going on, the current late
Saurasenl came to be used in literature by the masses ; and then it grew
to have a position of its own, as a younger Sauraseni Prakrit ; it developed
into a ' Saurasenl Apabhrani§a,' in which gradually a literature was created.
What happened to Sauraseni undoubtedly happened to the other Prakrits ;
only the literary counterparts of the ' Apabhransa ' forms of these latter —
Maharastrl, Magadhi, Ardha-magadhi, and the North-western Prakrit-
are now wanting : either because the literatures in these have entirely
perished ; or because such literatures did not exist, at least on a large scale,
which is equally likely — Sauraseni Apabhransa alone having taken up the
whole field for literary purposes.
51. When did MIA. have its new ^ Apabhransa ' characteristics fully
developed ? Vararuei does not speak of any speech named Apabhran§a
88
INTRODUCTION
in his grammar : apparently it was not known to him. H. Jaeobi gives
evidence from literature and epigraphy, from Bhamaha and Dandin,
and from the inscription of king Dhara-seua of Valabhi, that some form
of speech called Apabhransa was used for literary purposes as early as the
6th century A.C. (' Bhavisatta-kaha/ Munich, 1918, pp. 54* — 55*). Jacobi
also notes certain Apabhransa traits in a Prakrit work, ' Paiima-cariya/
dating, according to him, from the £nd-'3rd century A.C. at the earliest {op.
eit., pp. 59* ff.). Jaeobi thinks that the spoken dialects, partially at least,
developed the Apabhransa traits by that period. But contemporary
epigraphical documents, which certainly are more faithful than post-1 1th
century MSS., do not at all justify us in assuming the Apabhransa stage
so early. In the Dutreuil de Rhins fragments of the Prakrit ^ Dbarma-
pada/ which belongs to the latter half of the 3rd century (see § 50), we
come across the nominal « >u » affix for « -5 no doubt ; this weakening is
one of the characteristics of Apabhransa ; but « -o » forms are equally
common, and « -u « -o » both might be irregular graphic devices for one
sound, namely, a very close « 5 », in this dialect. The * Mfcchakatika ' has
Prakritie portions, which resemble Apabhransa in some points : cf. Act II,
the dialogue between the gambling-house keeper and the gambler, whose
dialect has been called * Dhakkl ' (seePisehel, * Gram, der Prakrit Sprachen,'
§ 25) ; this ' Dhakki ' is really ' Takki,' based on a North Panjab, at any
rate a North-western, dialect, and it has nothing to do with phakka=phaka
or Dacca in East Bengal (see Grierson, JRAS., 1918, pp. 875 fE.). These
* Takki ' portions do not represent the true Apabhransa ; here it seems we
have a dialect of the North-west, like the Dutreuil de Rhins fragments
which tended to change final « -o » to « -u » as early as the 3rd -4th centuries
A.C. The stanzas uttered by the king when he lost liis reason in the
4th Act of the * VikramorvasI ' of Kalidasa seem to be Apabhransa in form
and metre ; this would bring Apabhransa to the 4th century A.C. But the
genuineness of these stanzas has been doubted by some scholars (Jaeobi,
op. eit,, p. 58*). Moreover, here the characteristic Apabhransa phonetic
change — ^intervocalic « -m- > > « > — is absent, and the Apabhransa
pleonastic affixes like « -ilia, -alia » and « -dla » are not found. The affix
ORIGIN OF APABHRAl^f^A
89
«-da», of which the Sanskrit (OIA.) counterpart is « -ta», is very sparingly
used in 01 A., and is equally rare in first and and second MIA. (See under
MorpJiology : ^ Formative Affixes.') Personal and other names with « -ta »
become plentiful in Sanskrit literature and inscriptions from the 7th
century A.C. onwards, like « Kaiyata, Yapyata, Tatata, Subhata, Devata,
Bhogata, Jayata, Uvata, Mammata, Rudrata, Vakhata ». Such names are
unknown in the earlier periods, and they are Sauskritisations of names
in « -da » which were becoming common in the spoken languages. It
would seem that the germs of the Apabhransa stage were present as early
as the 5th century, and « -5 » became « -u » first in the North-west and West
— among the Gandharas, the Takkas, and other North Panjab peoples, and
among the Abluras and other tribes who were spread over Sjndh^ Rajputana
and also the West Midland. The language of these latter was first
distinctly called Apabhransa (cf. Jacobi, * Bhavisatta-kaha,' pp. 67* ff.), as
a group of dialects which had deviated from standard ^aurasenl and other
speeches in certain respects, probably as early as the 5th century A.C.
The term * Apabhransa ' originally had no special significance, and
merely meant speed falleti off {ffooi the norm), vulgar speech. The
learned man^s contempt for popular speech is manifest in the use of
the terms « apasabda, apabhransa, apa+ v^bhas » by Patanjali (cf.
Jacobi, op, cif,y p. 81*). No one would suggest that the word
■A-pabhransa as used by Patanjali meant anything but rlinlectal, nngmm^
malical or vulgar speech ^ or that it can mean anything like the
tertiary development of Ml A. In Bengal, the Pandits used to describe
the Sanskritised literary Bengali aa yft^sW « sadhu-bhasa », and the actual,
living Bengali as "sy^f^f^ « apa-bhasa » or t^^-«t^ « itar^-bhasa » (cf ,
H. P. gastrl, VSPdP., San 13-21, p. -ISa). One can very well understand
that after the MIA. forms (Pali and Sauraseni and other Prakrits) were
established, deviations in the vulgar speech, especially of some of the less
cultured peoples of North-western and Western India, would be described
as ^Apabhransa' forms ; and when these new traits {e.g.^ «-r)> -u») became
established in the speech of all clashes in Western and Northern India, and
certain other new characteristics, not noticed before in the 5th or 6th
90
INTRODUCTION
century, were developed and established^ the term ' Apabhransa/ or
* Apabhrasba ' would come to be restricted for this new phase of the
speech, to distinguish it from the well-attested ^ Prakrta ^ of the earlier
• epoch. The Apabhransas, as popular dialects, came to be employed by the
' masses for their songiS and couplets ; and, with a popular literature, they came
later to obtain recognition from scholars as well. Hema-candra, evidently
following earlier and generally accepted nomenclature, called this late
form of MIA. as used in literature an ' Apabhransa.^ The necessity for
, exact definitions in modern scholarship has gradually established, in Indo-
Aryan Linguistics, the use of the term Apabhransa to indicate the stoj^
between the Prakrits of the dramas (second MIA.) and the modern verna-
culars : a stage, as one can postulate from what has been said above, which
was well established by HOO A.C. (For Apabhransa, see R. G. BhSniJarkar,
op, cif., 2:)p. 109-118; R. Pischel, * Materialen zur Kenntnis des ApabhrarfaSa/
Abh. der kon. Gesellsch. der Wiss. zu Gottingen, 1902 ; H. Jacobi,
' Bhavisatta-kaba,* Ueber den Apabhransa, pp, 53* ff., and Sanatkumara-
earitam,' Munich, 1921, pp. xix-xxx ; P. D. Gune, ' Samyama-mafijarl,'
Annals of the Bhain4arkar Inst., Poona, 1920; Grierson, 'The Apabhransa
Stabakasof Rama-sarman Tarka-vaglsa/ lAnt., Jan., 1922, Jan. 1923.)
The lA. dialects spoken in Gujarat, Rajputana and the Midland
alone are fortunate in possessing specimens of the Apabhransa stage. A
kind of Midland or SaurasenI Apabhransa was a sort of literary speec^V
for Northern India in the closing centuries of the 1st millennium A.C.,
and some centuries later. The power and prestige of the Rajput courts,
which had their centres in the Midland and the Ganges Valley, was
responsible for it, The Jains of Gujarat cultivated it a great deal; and
often it became a mixed dialect. Nagara Apabhransa, also cultivated by
the Jains, is probably based on the late MIA. source-dialects of Rajasthani-
Gujaratl, strongly tinged with Sauraseni. We are also told about Vracada
( = Sindh), Kekaya ( = West Panjab) and other forms of Apabhransa,
Doubtless, there were similar Apabhransas derived from MaharSstr!, Ardha-
magadhi, and Magadhi ; but we have no specimens in these. (Cf. Grierson,
' The Apabhransa Stabakas of Rama-sarman Tarka-vagisa,' referred to
MODERN MAGADHAN SPEECHES
91
above.) In the East^ the local pafoia does not seem to have been
cultivated after the days of Asoka : in any case^ Ma^jadhi never seems to
have been. It was a despised dialect — the speech of the lowest classes in
the drama. Sauraseal was established for literary purposes io the Ardha-
mS^adhl and Magadhi areas. Possibly iSauraseni was the polite languao:e
of the day when people employed a vernacular ; and in the Apabhransa
period, eastern poets employed the Sauraseni Apabhransa, to the exclusion
of their local jmfoi^. This tradition, that of writing in a western, SaurasenI,
literary speech, was continued in the East down to middle and late NIA.
times, even after the eastern languages had come to their own. The writers
of oldest poems in Bengali (I0fch-13th centuries) also composed in this
Saurasenl Apabhransa ; Vidyapati, the Maithil poet of c. l iOO, WTote in
his native Maithili as well as in ^ Avahabtha,' or ^ Apabhrasta/ which is
only a late form of Sauraseni Apabhransa. (See § 61, ) So far as the
eastern languages are concerned, we have to come at one bound from the
specimens in second MIA. (pre-6th century) to the specimens in the
crystallised modern speeches (lOth-1 3th centuries for Bengali, early 14th
century for Maithili, and later for the other languages).
52. The modern representatives of Magadhi Apabhransa are Bengali,
Assamese, Oriya^ Magahi, Maithili and Bhojpuriya. In the middle of
the 7th century, as the testimony of Hiuen Thsang would seem to suggest,
there was one language spoken in Bihar, Bengal and Western Assam :
only in Assam there was a deviation, probably in phonetics only. Bengali
and Assamese are practically one language, when a comparison is instituted
among the Magadhan speeches ; and Oriya is most closely related to
Bengali- Assamese. There are some points of agreement between Maithili
and Bengali- Assamese-Oriya. The ' Prakrit ' and Apabhransa dialects
bro ight to Bengal and Assam (and Orissa) may have largely belonged
to Agga and Mithila, the tracts contiguous to Bengal. But Maithili and
Magahl, in having a complicated verb-system, with its infixed pronouns
and its honorific forms (cf. Grierson, ^ Seven Grammars of the Dialects
and Sub-dialects of the Bihari Language,' Calcutta, 1883-87 ; LSI., V,
Part II), stand apart from other Magadhan. This verb-sj'stem of Maithili
9^
INTRODUCTION
and Magahi seems to be a rather late development, originating or asserting
itself long after the differentiation of the MagadhJ speeches. Early Maithill,
as in the ^ Varna- ratnakara ' and in Yidyapati, shows a simpler conjugation,
which might have become archaic, and thus was restricted only to the
language of literature, in the 14th century ; but it certainly indicates that
the intricacies of later Maithili were absent in Old Maithill. The same
may be said of Magahi, although here we do not have early documents
Bhojpuriya somewhat stands apart from its sister-speeches, having come
under the influence of its western neighbour Awadhi (Ardha-magadhi) from
very early time*. Magadhan speeches can very well be classified into the
following 3 groups :
1. Eastern Magadhan : Bengali, Assamese, Oriya.
2. Central Magadhan : Maithill, Magahi.
3. Western Magadhan : Bhojpuriya, with Nagpuriya or SadanI,
Grierson calls 2 and 3 ' Bihari," regarding them as variations of one
type. But the sharp distinction between Bhojpuriya and Maithill- Magahi
iu their conjugation would justify their relegation to two separate groups,
at least for the modern stage.
The more important points of agreement among the Magadhan
languages can be summarised as follows :
(i) Common to all Magadhan :
Pho7ietic : Tendency to turn the original « a » sound samvfta '
[a]) of OIA. and MIA. into an « ^ » [o] ; original «sss»>«s» [J],
(but in Central and Western Magadhan, Upper Indian influence has helped
this sound, after the development of these languages, to change to a
dental sibilant, while in the extreme east, in Assamese, it has become a
guttural spirant, [x] ) ; epenthesis of « i » developed in all Magadhan,
except probably in standard Bhojpuriya. Morj)hological : an instrumental
in « -e, -S, -e, -e » ; « -k^ra » as a genitive aflSx ; original genitive > oblique
plural in « -n(i) > ; locative in « -e » ; (see below under Mofphology^ ^ Case
Inflections j « -1- » for the past base, « -b- » for the future base and also
for a verbal noun ; remnants of an « -h- » future derived from the
synthetic « -sy- » future of OIA. (^.^., BhojpuriyS 3 pers. sing. « dekhi
COMMON & EAST MAGADHAN CHARACTERISTICS 93
< "^dekhihi », Bengali 2 pers. preeative future OT^1 = aff^'« = CWf^=C5ff^
« dekho <dekhio <dekhia <dekhiha »), Roots « ho, ah^, rah and possibly
also « ach », for the substantive verb (« ach » not found in present-day
Bhojpuriya and Magahi). Sf/ntacfical : active construction in the past
tense of the transitive verb, and affixation of personal inflections to the past
base {e,[/,, base <cdekh-il-, dekh-al- » : dialectal and standard Bengah
CVfRf^, CffRmctl > C^rf^g^, CWf^^t^ - dekh-il-i, dekh-il-a-ho > dekh-il u,
dekh-il-am, »^ Assamese « dekh-iUo Oriya « dekh-il-i, dekh-il-u », Magahi
dekh-^l-I, dekh-^l-fl Maithill « dekh-^l-i, dekh-^l-a-hu Bhojpuriya
« dekh-^l-i^ dekh-^1-8 ») came to be developed independently in each.
The differentiation between transitive and intransitive verbs, 3 person only
(e,^., standard colloquial Bengali < dekh-l-e » he satt\ but 5^5r«T « col-
1-0 » he went^ Assamese « dekh-il-e » but « ts&Uil-^ Maithill « dekh-sll-ak »,
but « eal-al-^ »j Bhojpuri\a « dOkh-^i-0, dokh-^l-as never « dekh-al-^», but
« cal-al-^ »), can be called a common Magadhan trait, having its germs in the
Magadhi Apabhransa. There was a general tendency to give up the
distinction between the nominative and obli(|ue forms of the noun, which
is now absent in the modern Magadhan speeches,
(ii) Characteristics of Eastern Magadhan :
Pull « » [o] pronunciation of the short « a » is the only one that
obtains. The palatal nature of the Magadhi sibilant is most faithfully
retained. Epenthesis of i, u » fully established. « ks » (in faUsama
words) pronounced as « (-k)khy- ». Genitive in « -r^ », from « -kera,
-kara » ; disuse or restricted use of the genitive in « -ka », except in
Oriya. Past and future bases in « -il-, -ib- », instead of « -al-, -ab- >,
which characterise other Magadhan ; a passive participle in < -a » — ejj,
« dekha » see7i ; confusion between roots <c ah » and « h5 » (^.^., Old Hindi
« (a)hai* » and < howai' » both meaning is, but derived from different roots ;
so Magahi « hal » and <c bhel, hoi » tvus*y in Bengali, Assamese, and Oriya,
old forms like « hai * and C^T^<C^fl « hoi » have merged together.
See below, under Morpkologi/ : ^Defective Verbs').
Nominative in « -e », locative in < -t(e) », and absence of number in
verb, are common to Bengali and Assamese ; formal differentiation between
94
INTRODUCTION
the past of the transitive verb and the past of the intransitive verb in the
3rd person only (e.g., (y\ fvr^ « se di-l-e » he (jave^ but Q\ « se ge-I-li »
lie went)^ is found in West and North Bengali and in Assamese ; « s > h,
e eh j jh >ts s dz z » , found in dialectal (East) Bengali and Assamese.
Non -initial stress, giving rise to forms like « gaeha, raja » tree, king
(cf. Bengali ^fW, « g^ch^, raja » ), and absence of < o, u^ u » pronoun
for the remote demonstrative, are common to Assamese and Oriya.
Special plural forms : ?f1 « -ra » « -dig^ », ^«Tl « -gula » etc. in
Bengali ; « -bilsk, -bor, -hat » in Assamese ; « -e, -mane » in Oriya. The
ablative in « -u » and the eonjuntive indeclinable in « -inS. » are peculiar
to Oriya only.
(iii) Characteristics of Central Magadhan :
Short « a » approaches the [o] pronunciation of Eastern Magadhan,
rather than the [a] of Northern India. Sf)eeial verbal forms, with affixed
and infixed pronouns : elaborate system of honorific and other verb forms
with reference to the object {e,g,, Maithili forms — « dekh-^l-ak, dekh-al-
^k-ai, dekh-^I-a-nhi, dekh-al-^k-ai-nhi, dekh-^l-athi, dekh-al-^thl-nhi, dekh-
al-^th-u-nhi * he saw or they saw) ; present participle in « -at » used for
the future^ in the 3rd person only {e.^., Maithili and Magahl « dekh-at,
dekh-^t-ai » ie or they will see) ; « -th- » aflix distinguishing verb plural,
now sino^ular honorific as well (e.g., Maithili and Magahl « dekhai » he
sees : original plural> dekhathi » the// see, now both honorific plural and
singular) -
The honorific pronoun of the second person, « aha », is peculiar to
Maithili; the substantive roots « (a)ch, thik» characterise Maithili,
and are not found in MagahT ; and the root « ah, ha », beside « ho »,
common in Magahl, is not characteristic of Maithili. A group like
«a + single consonant + i, u » results in « a (i.e., long ^=[o:])-f- conso-
nant > in Maithili.
(iv) Characteristics of West Magadhan :
« a » is pronounced as in Northern India, = [a] . There is a developed
long « a » sound/ [ o: ] . Use of an affix « -as » for verb 3 pers. singular,
through influence of Awadhi {e.g,, « dekhe, dekh-as » he sees, « dekh^le,
EAST MAGADHAN AND CENTRAL & WEST MAGADHAN 95
dekh^l-as » he saw, « dekhat, dekh^te, dekhit, dekh^t-as » he used to see) ; a
present indicative and future with the particle « la » (« dekha-18 » / ^'^/lall
seey « dekh&-, dekhe-la » he loill see) ; synthetic future in « -h- for the
3rd person only, retained ; root « vrt » for the substantive verb occurs as
<e bat, bar, ba » ; (root « ach » 6e, now absent in Bhojpuriya, seems to have
existed in Old Bhojpuriya) ; use of the particle « khe » in connection
with the verb (« nahi khe ba, nahi khe, naikhe » is iioty does )ioi exist
« hokhe » is) .
(v) Common to East Ma^yadhan and Central Mac^adiian :
Nominative in « -e » ; use of the affix « -ka- > in connection with the
verb 3rd person ((?.//. Bengali C*f f^C^^ « dekh-il-e-k^ », Early Oriya « dekh-il-a-
k&», Maithili-Magah!«dekh-4Ua-k»/^t^.5//^(?) ; tendency to change intervoeal
« -b- » in some forms to « -m- » (^.//., Assamese « dim », dialectal Bengali
« dimu » < « dibO » I .s/iu/^. fjive, Oriya « dekhimi », beside « dekhibi *
/ shall see, Magahi « lema < leba » yo^^ ?c'ill take) ; the roots « ach (=aeh,
ch) » and « tha (thik, thak, thak) » for the substantive verb ; and the
post-positional * article ' « -ta, -ti ».
« -i*a » plurals^ from the genitive^ oi: personal pronouns (ef. Maithili
« ham^ra-sabh », Magahi « hamar^-ni » = Bengali 'Sftst^l ^ « am^ra-
s&b(h)^ » we : later this was extended to the noun in Bengali) ; genitive
in « -kera » (= Bengali lil^ « -er^ ») : common to Bengali and Central
Magadhan.
Pronominal adjectives in « -h- », e?.y. « ^jaihana, kaihana » etc., = Mai-
thill « jehan, kehan », Bengali [j5ieno, ka^no] from earlier (M^^
C^^^^j « jeh(e)n&, keh(e)n^ », Assamese 0\C^ C^m « zene, kene » :
common to Bengali- Assamese and Maithili.
(vi) Common to East Magadhan and West Magadhan :
Root « vf t » as a substantive root (= Bhojpuriya « bat, bar, ba »,
Oriya «§,t», Bengali ^§ «b4t»).
Number in the finite verb-forms, all persons, retained in Bhojpuriya
and Oriya, but distinction of number lost to other Magadhan.
The use of a particle (or post-position) «la» in connection with the
verb also found in Middle Bengali ('r) (see Morphohgy : * The Verb —
Pleonastic Affixes ^).
96
INTRODUCTION
(vii) Common to Central Magadhan and West Magadhan :
Weakening of long vowels when words are extended or compounded,
through reasons of stress (a characteristic found in Eastern and Western
Hindi as well : e.g.y «pani» but «pania» « pani-har » icater-
earner). Dental pronunciation of the old Magadhi palatal sibilant, although
written ar (s) in the Kaithi alphabet in which these dialects are generally
written; «r» for Magadhi <c 1 » « har^ phar_, raur = hala, phala,
laula=raia-kula {^lioiioured ») — a well-marked tendency perhaps at
one time the rule in Central and Western Magadhan ; 3, and sometimes
4 forms for the same noun, with preference for the «awa» and «auwa»
forms {ejj., « ghur gh5r^ ghora, ghor^wa, gh 6 ran wa j> >^(?/'5^, respectively
' weak,' ' strong or ordinary/ ^ long * and * redundant ' forms) ; an oblique
form in « -e » for nouns often retained ; genitive of nouns in « k^, -ka»,
of pronouns in « -kar, -k^ra » ; dative in « -se », locative in « -me » ; « -al-,
-ab- » and not « -il-, -ib- » ; a verbal noun in « -al- ».
53. If we compare Maithili of the Mth century, which forms the
oldest extant specimens in it (see § 56), with 14th century Bengali as
in the ' Sri-Kf sna-Kirttana,' and with the Oriya of the Puri inscriptions
(15th century), we find that these languages are already widely different,
and have almost arrived at the stage where they are now. Maithili, Bengali
and Oriya are by 1300 A,C. fully developed languages, each with its own
characteristics, and not mere dialects of a common Magadhf. In its
phonetics and its forms Oriya is the most conservative of Magadhan
languages, and Bengali is the most advanced, or farthest removed. The
difference between Maithill-Magahi and Bengali-Oriya is manifold, so
much so that these groups must have parted company, each taking up its
own line several centuries at least before 1300 A.C. When precisely this
split of Magadhi Apabhransa into a Western, a Central, and an Eastern
group had become accomplished, it cannot be determined. When Hiuen
Tbsang came to Eastern India (1st half of the 7 th century), it seems there
was not much difference between Magadhan as spoken in its own home
(South Bihar) and in Bengal ; it was just spreading from South-west
Bengal into what is now Orissa, and it had already penetrated from
mAgadhi apabhran^a
97
North-eastern Bengal into Assam, where it probably underwent some
easily noticed phonetic modifications. The Apabhratisa stage was one in
which lA. was shedding off most of its old affixes, when the old inflectional
system was being whittled down out of existence. New affixes and post-
positions were coming into prominence in the declension of the noun, and
the temporal and finite use of the participles was established for the verb.
A few of these were already to be found in Magadhi Apabhransa of
the 7th century, the common source of all modern Magadhan languages
(see § 22). But as the modern Magadhan languages show, each local
form of late Magadhi Apabhransa, in the Bhojpuriya tract, in Mithila,
in Magadha, in Bengal, in Orissa, solved more or less independently its
own needs, in the 8th-llth centuries A.C. This period was one in which
the language was in a formative, ^ fluid ' state in all Aryan India ; this
was roughly a period for * Proto-Bengali,* ' Proto-Maitlnll/ * Proto-Oriya,'
etc., when the speeifieally Bengali, Maithill and Oriya charaefceristies were in
all probability manifesting themselves, but were not as yet fully established ;
when the dialects still looked back to the past, to second MIA. ; and the NIA.
characteristics (e.ff,, loss of one consonant in double consonant groups with
compensatory lengthening of preceding vowel) were but in the process of
formation. Thus, Oriya- Bengali- Assamese normalised the affix « -kara>
-ara, -ar^ » for the genitive ; Bengali also showed a predilecftion for
* -kera > -er^ » ; the old plural inflection was lost, and in this matter
Bengali hesitated for a long time, until, in addition to a number of Sanskrit
nouns of multitude, it took up the « -ara^ of the genitive, strengthened
with « -S » affix into « .^ra », and also the words ^^fl « -gul3 » < Sanskrit
« kula- » and f^^t « -diga » < Sanskrit « adi-ka » in the Middle Bengali
period ; whereas Assamese differentiated itself in that period by building up
the affixes « -bor, -bilak, -hat » ; Oriya, on the other hand, probably as
early as in the Proto-Oriya stage, adopted the Magadhi Apabhransa
word « manawa » = Sanskrit « manava » man as a plural sign, in addition
to employing an oblique plural form in < -e ». The differences in affixation,
such as are noticeable in the plural form in Bengali, Assamese and Oriya,
cannot have been inheritances in thei^e speeches from their common
13
98
INTRODUCTION
source-dialech Early Maithill of the 1 4th century, as in the * Varna-
ratnakara/ shows a plural nominative in « -aha, -aha », and a plural oblique
in « -nhi »^ which are inherited forms from Apabhrarisa Magadhr, traces
of which are found in all forms of Modern Magadhan. The Modern
Magadhan genitive affixes « -r^, -kar^, -kara, -kara < -kara-, -er^, -ker^,
kera < -kera-, -k^, -ka, -ke < -kaa the nominative^ instrumental,
accusative and locative « -e^ », are inflections derived from the
common molher. The passive construction for the past of the transitive
verb was inherited by all Magadhan speeches, as can be seen from traces in
the oldest specimens of these ; but this method was given up independently
in each.
Taking into consideration the differences and agreements among the
various forms of Modern Magadhan, the assumption of a split of late
Magadhi Apabhrarisa into the three groups enumerated above can be
justified. Eastern Magadhi further split up into (a) Bengali-Assamese
and (b) Oriya groups, the link between the two being the South-western
dialect of Bengali as current in Midnapur (LSI., V, Part I, pp. 305-11 9).
When this differentiation between Assamese-Bengali and Oriya took place
it is not easv to determine, in the absence of documents. The lanoruao-e
of the * Carj a-padas ' (see §§ 60-63) is Old Bengali, modified to some
extent by a Western Apabhransa : Bengali with its characteristics was
already established in the 11th century. Differentiation from Oriya
might have bt^en in progress at that time : for there are certain indications
that in the Old Bengali period (lOth-1 lth-12th centuries) there was a
shifting of stress in West Bengali, which served to give Modern Standard
Bengali its definite character, and distinguished it from its neighbour
Oriya and the rest (see later, under Fhonologjj of the Xadre Element,
Vowels and Stress System), The Bengali group of dialects early came to
be united by a common literary language based on West Bengali, which
became fully established by the 15th century, and exerted an influence
on all the other dialects. The common dialect current in North Bengal
and Assam continued as one speech, as a member of the Bengali- Assamese
group of dialects. In the 15th century it split up into two sections^
BHOJPURIYA
99
Assamese and North Bengali, when Assamese started on a literary
career and an independent existence of its own by not acknowledojinoj
the domination of literary Bengali, already established in East Bengal as
well.
54. The oldest specimens in the various Magadhan languages may
now be discussed.
West Magadhan, viz,, Bhojpuriya, is the language of a splendid
martial race : it is also the speech of the tract which has the city of
Benares for its chief centre. But Bhojpuriya does not seem to have been
much cultivated ; at any rate, it was neglected by the scholars. The
Bhojpuriya territory has always been under the influence of the West,
and Western forms of speech, like Braj-bhaka, and Awadhi, and literary
HindostanI (Hindi and Urdu) in later times, have been cultivated
by poets and others who spoke Bhojpuriya at home. Barring the
composition of a number of ballads and songs, which are as beautiful
specimens of folk literature as any, and which still have a vio^orous existence
in the countryside, there has been no conscious literary effort in Bhojpurij a.
The oldest specimens in this speech that we possess are probably a few
poems written by the great religious reformer and mystic teacher of
Northern India, Kabir (loth century), Kabir was an inhabitant of the
Bhojpuriya tract, but following the practice of the Hindostan poets of
the times, he generally used Braj-bhakha, and occasionally Awadhi. His
Braj-bhakha at times betrays an eastern (Bhojpuriya) form here and
there : and when he employs his own Bhojpuriya dialect, Braj-bbakha and
other western forms frequently show themselves. As specimens of Kabir's
Bhojpuriya poems, the following may be mentioned (from Kshiti-mohan
Sen's Selections, in Bengali characters and with Bengali translation, 4 Parts,
Santi-niketan, Bolpur, San 1:317 ff.) :
Part I, pp. 20-21 :
« kanawa pharaya j5gl jatawa barhaulai :
darhi barhaya jogi hoi gailai bakam
kahahl Kabira, ^ suno bhai sadho,
Jama-darajawa bandhala jaibe pakara.'»
100
INTRODUCTION
Splitting {his) ears^ the Yogi has grown matted locks :
Growing a beard the Yogi has become a goat
Saith Kablr : ' Hear, brother devotee^
At the gate of Yam a you will be bound and seized,^
Part III, pp. 86-87 :
♦baba-ghara rahaulau, babui kahaulau,
WW V w
salya-ghara, eatura sayana
eetaba gharawa apana re »
In my father's home 1 was retained^ and was called a darling ;
My Husbandh home — loise and grown-up ^
I shall know that home to be mine^ 0,
Part III, p. 98 :
« ka lai jaibau^ pitama ghara aibau ?
www w w
giwa-ke loga jaba puchana lagihai,
taba hama ka re bataibau? »
w w
With what will he depart {when) my Love will come to {my) house?
When the ^people of the village will begin to qnestioUj what indeed
then shall I say /
Part IV, pp. 70-71 :
« sutala rahalft mal nida bhari ho, piya dihalal jagaya ;
carana-ka^ala ke anjana bo naina lelfi lagaya »
/ remained sleeping in deep slumber^ ah me ! My Love he made {me)
awake ;
The colly rinm {of the dtist)from his loins like feet I put in {my) eyes.
55. Magahi has been one of the least fortunate among lA. speeches.
The land of Magadha was one of the most prosperous parts of India in
pre-Christian times, and its people, probably together with their brethren
from other eastern (Praeya) tracts like Benares (Kasi), formed the most
powerful nation in India during the time cf the Mauryas. But with the
fall of the Mauryas, the importance of Magadha waned. In the 4th
century A.C., according to the testimony of Fa Hien, the Chinese pilgrim,
there was a decay in Southern Bihar, — ^the country had become jungly,
and was sparsely peopled : and the reason of this decay is not known. But
MAGADHAN HISTORY & MAGAHl
lOl
Magadha, as the holy land of the Buddhists and the Jains, and later, with
its newly established place of pilgrimage at Gaya, of Hindus as well,
always had some importance. The establishment of the Buddhist colleges or
universities of Nalanda during the time of the Guptas, and of Vikrama-sila,
made Magadha once more famous throughout the Buddhist world in
Asia as a centre of culture. During the time of the Palas, who were
professed Buddhists, Magadha seems to have flourished exceedingly. But
the conquest of Bihar by the Turks in the last decade of the 12th century
was fraught with disastrous results for the intellectual life and culture
of the province. The story of the sack of Bihar, as preserved by Minhaj-
i-Siraj in the Tabaqat-i-NasirT, is typical of what had happened all over
Magadha. Catastrophes like these extinguished learning in the land. The
learned men were slain, or else they fled to Nepal with such manuscripts as
they could take with them : in this way many precious MS. treasures from
Bihar dating from pre- Moslem times could be preserved in the monasteries
of Nepal, In Magadha, all indigenous literary culture was at an end.
Magadha has been aptly described as the cock-pit of Eastem India, and
it was the scene of constant fights during the Turkl, Pathan and Moghal
periods. The desolation of the country favoured the incoming from the
South of the Musaharas and other non- Aryan (Kol) tribes, who were
partially Aryanised, and took up the Aryan speech from the original
Magadha people. All sense of connection with the past was lost, all
knowledge of the glories of pre-Moslem Magadha. The only important
places were the small town of Gaya, where a few Brahmans might have
kept up a little study of Sanskrit, and the city of Patna, which was
dominated by the Indian Mohammedan culture from the West. The
contrast with Mithila across the river was very great. There was no
cultivation of the language of the country. The masses were rude, and to
a great extent, in the lower classes, recruited from aborigines. The new
upper classes were Brahmans and Ksatriyas as well as Kayasths, mostly
from the West : the original Brahmans, the ^ Babhans,' took to agriculture
and became degraded. The aristocratic communities spoke or affected Hindi
(Braj-bhakha, and Awadhi) as well as Urdu. The local dialect was never
102
INTRODUCTION
seriously employed in literature, so that Magahl, the NIA. speech of
South Bihar, has had to lead the existence of a humble pafois from the
very beginning of its life. But the masses, as in other parts of India,
sought to express themselves in this patois of their daily life, and as
a consequence in Magahi we have a small literature of ballads and folk-
songs, some of which have been collected in the end of the 19th century
by scholars like Grierson. The educated classes in Magadha at the present
day do not feel any interest in their mother- tongue, High Hindi and
Urdu taking up all their attention. It is said, however, that a little
other literature in the shape of a verse adaptation of the Ram&yana, and
one or two similar works, exists among the masses. All this corpus of
composition in Magahi does not go back to any early period.
56. Maithili has been more fortunate. For a long time after the
conquest of Magadha and Bengal, Mithila retained her independence,
at least internally, and the first flood of TurkI invasion did not pass over
her, wrecking the ancient intellectual life. Even after the conquest by the
Moslems and virtual suppression of the native kings (c. 1500, cf. R. D.
Banerji, 'Baijgalar Itihas,' II, p. 205), there was nothing like the
sweeping destruction of temples and the slaughter of scholars which
accompanied the Turki conquest in the 12th and 13th centuries. The
Maithili Brahmans were renowned for their Sanskrit learning, and right
down to the 16th century, Mithila used to be the resort of students from
Bengal and other parts of Eastern India (R. D, Banerji, op. cit,^ pp. 130
ft.). The Brahmans of Mithila did not despise their mother-tongue,
and we have an unbroken literary record in Maithili from the beginning
of the 14th century, probably even earlier, down to the present day.*
The earliest Maithili work which we have is the ' Varna- ratn&kara '
of Jyotirlsvara Thakura, who wrote it during the 1st quarter of the 14th
* Maithili as language of public life and literature has been largely suppressed by High
Hindi and Urdu during the latter part of the last century. The University of Calcutta
has within the last five years taken up seriously the study of Maithili, and has received
strong support from many scholars and noblemen in MithilS ; and it looks as if there will
take place a revival of this descendant of the old MSgadhi speech of Eastern India.
BRAJA-BULI
103
century. This work is a sort of lexicon of Maithill and Sanskrit words
in the frame-work of several descriptions {e.g., the description of a king's
court enumerating all the functionaries and officials who would be found
there). It is preserved in a unique MS.^ dating from the beginning of
the 16th century, now in the library of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.
(R. D. Banerji, * Baggalar Itihas,' IT, p. 133 ^ jNIanomohan Chakravartl,
in the JASB., 1915, Nov. and Dee., p. 414; Hara-Prasad Sastri,
' Bauddha Gau O Doha/ VSPd,, Introduction, p. 35.)
Vidyapati T^akura (end of 14th — beginning of 15th century) is the
greatest writer of Maithili. Vidyapati's songs on the love of Radha
and Kfsna (edited by Nagendra Nath Gupta, VSPd., San 1316) are among
the fairest flowers in Indian lyric poetry. These exerted a tremendous
influence on the Vaisnava lyric of Bengal. They spread into Bengal,
and were admired and imitated by Bengali poets from the 16th century
downwards, and the attempts of the people of Bengal to preserve the
Maithill language, without studying it properly, led to the development
of a curious poetic jargon, a mixed Maithill and Bengali with a few
Western Hindi forms, which was widely used in Bengal in composing
poems on Radha and Krsna. This mixed dialect came to be called
[^^^^ « Brajli-bull » or speech of Vraja, from the fact that the
poems composed in it described Krsna's early life and his love with
Radha which had for its scene the Vraja district, round about Brindavan,
near Mathura. This < Braja-buli » is of course entirely different from the
Western Hindi dialect, called ' Braj-bhakha,* which is current round about
Mathura (§ 13). The literature in this artificial Braja-buli dialect is one
of the most beautiful expressions of the poetic spirit of the Bengali people,
deservedly popular poets like Govinda^dasa and Jnana-dasa, among a
host of others only less famous, having composed exquisite lyrics in it.
Braja-buli as a poetic dialect is occasionally taken up by the present-day
Bengali poets as well, and even Rablndra-nath Tagore has emulated the
* An edition of the text has been prepared, to be printed by the University of Calcutta
(August 1923).
104
INTRODUCTION
poetic predecessors in his own language by writing a whole series of poems,
the ' Bhanu-sinha Thakurer Padavall/ in Braja-buli. Biaja-bull poetry is a
standing example of the extent to which an entirely artificial dialect ean be
utilised by a whole people for poetic exercise ; and its position in Bengal
can be compared with that of iSaurasenT Apabhransa and Avahattha outside
the Midland in the late MIA. and early NIA. periods.
In addition to poems in his own vernacular Mai thill, Vidyapati has
left compositions in a Western Apabhransa speech, a dialect archaic in spirit
for his age, which he calls * Avahattha.' (See p. 91.) There are some short
poems, and two long works, the ' Ktrtti-lata ' * and the ' Kirtti-pataka/
connected with the achievements of Kirtti-sinha, one of his royal patrons at
the beginning of the 15th century.
The oldest specimens of Maithill, as in the ' Varna-ratn&kara ' and
the poems of Vidyapati, present a language which is extremely archaic
and simple when compared with the Maithill of the present day : especially
noticeable is the simplicity of the verb-system, with its freedom from
the ramifications of pronominal infixes and affixes. This is a sufficient
indication of the fact that the elaborate conjugational devices of Maithill
(and Magahi) are late : since, some traces of these would have been found
in these remains if they were in common use in the 14th century. Could
these pronominal modifications of the verb have begun in Magadha, with
a fresh, peaceful influx of Kol people from the South, manifesting
themselves first in the Magahi speech and in Maithill as spoken to the
south of the Ganges, namely, in the ^ Chika-chiki ' dialect, and then spread
into Maithill as spoken to the north of the Ganges ?
It may be mentioned that prior to 1200 A. C, we have a few place-
names in inscriptions referring to Magadha and Mithila, but they are
not important enough, either numerically or in their forms, as documents of
the language in those tracts in the late MIA. period.
* This Avaliattha work, under the editorship of Mahamahopadh\i5va Hara.praBdd Sastri,
is novr (August 1923) in the press in Calcutta.
ORISSA AND ORIYA
105
57. Oriya is very closely related to Bengali. West Bengali and Oriy$
seem to have developed from one from of Ma^dhi Apabhransa, as current
in South-virest Bengal in the 7th-8th centuries. This speech was
differentiated among the Odra or Uclra people^ who lived on the borderland
between Suhma (South-west Bengal) and Kaligga. Hiuen Thsang described
the Odras as a barbarous people, whose words and language differed from
* Central ^ India ; but they loved learning, and applied themselves to it
without intermission, and they were mostly Buddhists. With regard to the
people of Koggoda, corresponding to Puri district of the present day,
Hiuen Thsang makes a more definite statement, that although the Northern
Indian alphabet was current among them, their language and mode of
pronunciation were quite different (S. Beal's Translation of H, T., London,
1906, II, pp. 204-206). In the early part of the 7th century, we have
thus the testimony of the Chinese traveller that the sea-board conntry
where Oriya is now spoken was non-Aryan in speech. Yet we have
epi graphical evidence to show that Brahmans were settled in non- Aryan
Koggoda with grants of land precisely when Hiuen Thsang noticed the
general linguistic condition of the country (Kalha-Govinda Basak,
' Madhava-varmar Tamra-sasan,* Sahitya for Phalguna, 1319). What u ould
seem to have been the case is that the Odra people were receiving Aryan
sijeech from the neighbouring Suhma and Ra(Jha, in the 7th century and
before, as well as during the subsequent period, and they rapidly became
^ Odra is the Sanskritised form of the word Odda, the name of a Dravidian people,
Kittel's opinion about the meaning and affinities of the word is given at p. C8. For a
different derivation, from a Dravidian root meaning to run arcay, see B. C. Mazumdar,
Introduction to Vol. I of 'Typical Selectiongr from Oriya Literature.' *0ddlyaa' ( = Skt.
' Au^rlyaka') > 'OriyS'; ' Odra-visaya/ or ' Audri-visaya ' = ' Oddi-visaa, ()divi^'>
' OrisS/ the modern Oriya name for their country ; whence Bengali ^f^jl ' UfisyS,' the
Ofiya pronunciation of ' s ' as something like ' sy,* together with a vague sense of this word
being connected with the word ' visaya ' with a cerebral * § ' being responsible for the Bengali
spelling^ * -sya.* The form 'Odivisa* is preserved in TSranStha (16th cen.) and other
Tibetan writers. The name ' Utkala' seems to be from a Dravidian word meaning house'
holder, farmer (see supra, p. 68; also B. C. Mazumdar, op, cit).
14
106
INTRODUCTION
Aryanised. West Bengal was the centre from which Aryanism spread into
Orissa and into Chota Nagpur, as far as Sambalpur side, where it joined forces
with Aryan influences from the Midland and Kosala. (Cf. B. C. Mazumdar,
^Sonpur/ pp. 30-31, 115-116: the influence of Bengali Kayasthas in
Orissa of the lOth-llth centuries, as can be seen from epigraphical
evidence, is noticed by Mazumdar; also ef. Introduction to Vol. I of ' Typical
Selections from Oriya Literature ^ by B. C. Mazumdar, Calcutta
University, 1921). The Magadhi Apabhransa of West Bengal was
differentiated in Orissa, where it was transplanted, by that speech changing
more in its original seat in Bengal than among the Odras and the Utkalas,
among whom it acquired a most conservative spirit. The Old Bengali
specimens of the 10th- 13th centuries, as preserved in the ' Caryas,* already
shows a stage in some respects in advance of that which is represented by
Middle Oriya of a later period. Kf sna Pandita, ^ author of the ^Prakfta-
eandrika ' (12th century), mentions ^ Udra ' as one of the 27 Apabhransas:
this is perhaps the earliest reference to Oriya as a distinct Prakritic speech
(Manomohan Chakravarti, 'The Language and Literature of Orissa,' JASB.,
1897, i, p. 319). The spread of Oriya was at the expense of Dravidian
and Kol, as in Bengal ; and a civilised Dravidian speech, Telugu, seems
to have receded before Oriya.
The earliest specimens of Oriya, in connected expressions, hitherto
discovered, occur in two copper-plate grants of king Nfsinha-deva IV,
dated c. 1395 A, C. (edited by Manomohan Chakravarti, JASB., 189 5, i,
pp. 136 ff.). In these we find a respectable number of Oriya words which
show that the Oriya language is already formed. Some of these words are
very valuable for phonological study : for example, the word « ciari
occurring twice, for the modern « cari » four', the « -i- » after the
« c- » is found in Marathi, « ciari > eyar > ear * , pronounced
as a palatal affricate, [ tj ] or [ cj ], and not as a dental affricate [ts ],
which would be the regular pronunciation of a <t c » before « a, a » in
Marathi; and this « i » is a puzzle. (J. Bloch, ' Langue Marathe,' § 216 ;
4( cyari=ciari » is found in Old Hindi, and in Old Gujarati also. See later,
Morphology y under 'Numerals'). Before that date, we can mention a
EARLY ORIYA IN INSCRIPTIONS
107
few place-names in earlier inscriptions {e,g,, the copper-plate srrant of
Nfsinha-deva II, 1296 A, C, edited and published in the JASB., 1896,
5, pp. 254-256 ; the grants of the Trikaligga Gupta and the Bhanja kings
of South Kosala or Sambalpur, for which see B. C. Mazumdar, * Sonpur/
pp. 83 ff. ; the grant of Madhava-varma of Koggoda, 7 th century, referred
to above) »
But the most considerable and most noteworthy specimens, apart
from the literary records, which in the works of Jagannatha-dasa and
others go back to the 15th century, are in a series of inscriptions, some
12 in number, all in OriyS, in the temples of Puri and Bhuvaneshwar,
dating from I4-<56 to 1542 (published by Manomohan ChakravartI, JASB.,
i, 1893). Along with these is to be reckoned a grant inscribed on a
copper axe-head, with a short Oriya inscription, dating from the time of
Purus6ttama-deva(1466-U96) (E. A. Gait, JBORS., 1918, Part IV).
These inscriptions prove that Oriya was to all intents and purposes the
same language in the first half of the loth century that it is now.
The spelling of some of the words in these inscriptions is worthy of
attention, and it throws a great deal of light upon the stress syste m of the
language, and also on one or two points connected with the pronunciation.
Epen thesis of « -y- > after a consonant was quite a regular thing ; « jn »
in tat'Sama words was pronounced « gy » as now; « f > was pronounced
as <5 ru » ; and syllables contiguous to a strongly stressed one were dropped :
e,g,, = « rajye * (inscription of 1466) ; ^T?nT ~ « agya, ajna »
(1450); also ^fmt (1470); ^if%5T = « bajhya, vahya « (1459) ; and forms
like ^^Xm, ^tfir^ (1466), '2^n:=5^t ( F pronounced as « ru » )
(1459), ?(=;)ift^ (1470), w=5WT, H^nn, H^nri, (1470), stsb (1542), show
that the stress was ante-penultimate, and that a preceding or following weak
vowel was dropped : e.g., « gajap'^ti, purusOttama, jogibara, gurubarc,
purasottamli,, pur^^na, par^m^swibr^, nar^ka ». The early Oriya of
these inscriptions is a living speech. Oriya as in literature is more
Sanskrit-ridden than Bengali, and the language there is never so interesting
as in these not very long specimens in the inscriptions : except that a
few archaic or obsolete forms are preserved in the former (<?.y., the
108
INTRODUCTION
conjunctive in « - ink, » ), and that in quantity it is quite a respectable
body of national literature in the language.
58. The agreement between Assamese and Bengali is so close that
the dialects of Bengali and Assamese may be described as belonging to the
same group. Dialects are independent of literary speech : as such, East
Bengali dialects, North Bengali dialects (with which Assamese is to be
associated) and West Bengali dialects are not only independent of one
another, but also they are not, a« it is popularly believed in Bengal, derived
from literary Bengali, the « sadhu-bhasS » , which is a composite speech on
"an early West Bengali basis. (See §§ 68, 70, 71, 72.) Assamese dissociated
itself from the other Bengali dialects when the speakers of these acknow-
ledged the supremacy of a literary Bengali, and thus accepted the bonds of
linguistic union. Assamese continued to be the language of an independent
community ; and, under the peculiar circumstances under which it was
placed, as it progressed deeper and deeper into the Brahmaputra valley
among the Bodo and other Tibeto-Burman, and Shan peoples, it developed
some peculiarities of its own. The earliest Assamese remains date from the
middle of the 15th century ; and at that time the language is practically
identical with contemporary literary Bengali as employed in North
and East Bengal, with the distinctive Assamese characteristics rare and
not at all prominent. Yet Assamese traits are occasionally noticeable :
the confusion between dentals and cerebrals, the use of if « -w- »,
the absence ^ « -r- », the absence of the « -i * affix for the verb 1st
person present, etc. But on the whole, Early Assamese, and even Modern
Assamese, are not much removed from the Common Bengali type. The
Bengali dialects of the extreme east and south-east (Sylhet, Chittagong)
are certainly more removed from Standard Bengali than is Assamese.
The earliest poets in Assamese are Madhava Kandali, ^agkai-a-deva
( ? 1449-1569), Madhava«deva and Bama-SarasvatI (Ananta Kandall).
Some Assamese writers would assign a Middle Assamese work called
' Dipika-chanda ' to the 11th, 9th or even to the 6th century, but the work
ig palpably post-1 5th century in its language (Devendra Nath Bez-b4rua,
'Asamiya Bh&^a Aru SShityar Buranji,' Jorhat, Saka 1833, p. 71;
OLDEST EEMAINS OF BENGALI
109
Padma-nabha SarmS, in the VSPdP,, 1319, No. 1, pp. 45-58). The
oldest linguistic remains of Assamese are some names in inscriptions ;
but in pre-Moslem times, Assamese and Bengali were certainly one
language ; and a study of these names can be better made in connection
with old Bengal place names {Appetullx C)*
59. The oldest specimens of Bengali, prior to 1300 A. C, are the
following.
(1) A number of place-names in inscriptions and in old books,
beginning from the tirst half of the 5th century A, C. As has been said
before, these names have been Sanskritised a great deal, but some of the
iadbhava and dehl words can be distinguished. In the ^ Raraa-carita ' of
Sandhyakara-nandi, 11th century, similar names have been found (cf. R. D.
Banerji, *The Palas of Bengal/ pp. 87-90), and one or two in other
works, but their value is not so great as in the epigraphical records,
(2) A glossary of over 300 words, scattered in a Sanskrit commentary
on the ' Amara-kosa,' by a Bengali Pandit, Vandya-gbatlya Sarvananda,
written about 1159 A.C. This work, bearing the name * Tika-sarvasva *
was noticed in the catalogues of Sanskirt MSS. by Aufrecht and Burnell
(ef. Ep. Ind., VI, p. :Z08). The work was lost to Bengal, but was preserved
in Malabar, and it has been recently edited from Malabar MSS. by T.
Ganapati i^astri in the ^Trivandrum Sanskrit Series.' The vernacular
words preserved in it belong to the Old Bengali period, and they embody
valuable material for the study of Bengali phonology. A great many
of these words have become obsolete now, and c|uite a number of
them present a slightly Sanskritised appearance, which was due to the
scholastic tendencies from which Pandits have never been free. A few
of these words have been found in pre-Moslem (Old Bengali) and early
Bengali literature described below. [The VSPdP. for San 1326, No. 2,
has two papers, in one of which these words have been discussed (by Rai
Bahadur Ydgesh Chandra Yidya-nidhi, * Sire Sat Sata Vatsar Purver
Baggala J5abda '), and in the other they have been arranged alphabetically
for the benefit of students (by Basanta-Ranjan Ray, * Dvadas Sataker
Baggala Sabda')]*
110
INTRODUCTION
The above lists of names and words are but meagre materials to
reconstruct the history of a language. Sentences and connected phrases
of the language in its oldest period, just after it had evolved from the
Apabhransa stage, would be invaluable. Fortunately, we have been
possessed of such specimens of Old Bengali, after it had manifested most
of its peculiar characteristics, and before it could crystallise into the
Middle Bengali of the established type. These specimens allow us to
have a glimpse of the language in its formative period.
60. (3) These specimens consist of some 47 ' songs, called
* Carya-padas,' or ' Caryas,' composed by teachers, « siddhas of the Sahajiya
sect, which was an off-shoot of the Tantrika or late Mahayana Buddhism.
This sect seems to have been connected with the Saiva sect of the Yogis
(Natha-panthls), in their doctrines, in the possession of some common
traditions, and apparently of some common teachers as well, like
Matsyendra-natha, Goraksa-natha and Jalandhari-pada. (The doctrines of
the Sahajiyas, as set forth in the * Caryas,' can be compared with those of
the Yogis as in the ^ Gorakh-bodh,' a 14th century work in Hindi :
of. L. P. Tessitori, ' Kanphata Jogis,* in Basting's Cyclopaedia of Religion
and Ethics ; Grierson, ' Gorakh-nath,' in the same work.)
These songs are preserved in a MS., which, according to
Mahamahopadhyaya Ifara-Prasad Sastri, who discovered it in Nepal and
edited it under the auspices of the VSPd, of Calcutta, belongs to the
beginning of the 12th century, bat Rakhal-Das Banerji expresses a doubt
as to its being earlier than the end of the Hth century (in his article on the
date of the MS. of the *Sri-Kfsna-Kirttana,' one of the introductory essays
in the edition of that work, for which see below). H. P. ^astri published
this MS. along with 8 others in one volume, to which he gave the
title ' Hajar Bacharer Purana Baggala Bhasay Bauddha Gan O Doha '
Buddhist Songs and Couplets hi the Bengali Language a Thousand Years Old.
' There were 50 songs in the MS., and these are nambered. Five leaves in the MS. are
wanting. Throngh this reason, we have only a portion of Carja 23, and Caryas 24, 25 and
48 are missing entirely, leaving the actual number at 47.
^BAIJDDHA GAN O DOHA^
ill
Of the four MSS., printed in this book^ the first one alone, the * Carya-
earya-viniscaya/ containing the songs mentioned above, have a supreme
importance in studying the origins of Bengali,
The second and third, called respectively the * Doha-kosa ' of
Saraha, and the ^ Doha*kosa ' of Kanha, are in an Apabhransa
dialect, in which the distinctive Bengali traits such as are found in
the Caryas are absent, but their language has an important bearing
on the development of NIA. The subject matter of the poems and
and couplets in these two ^ D5ha-kosas ' is the same as that of the Caryas.
The last MS. printed in Pandit Sastrl's volume, the ' DakSrnava,*
presents a third variety of Prakritie speech. This work is a Buddhist Tantra,
named in full * Dak&rnava Mahay oginl-Tantra-rajya,' and it is in a number
of chapters (patalas) ; the MS. gives the text only in a mutilated form.
The text consists of Sanskrit hloTcas interspersed with portions in the
Prakritie speech. There is no Sanskrit « chaya » , or commentary, and the
interpretation of the work is rendered extremely difBcult. The Prakritie
portions appear to be in svJm form as well as in verse. These are at
times intelligible ; and a word or two here and there {e.g,y the root
«acch», the form « ke », interrogative pronoun, rather than « ko » )
indicate eastern inlluence. The MS. is palpably late: the text also
appears to be corrupt : we have even post-Middle Bengali forms
like « tumi The ignorance of the Newari copyist, who had a little
Sanskrit and less of Apabhransa, is responsible for making the language
the enigma that it is in the MS. In any case, being at its basis a Western
Apabhransa, as even a cursory glance at the language will show, the
connection of the speech of the ^ Dakar nava ' with Bengali is but remote ;
and although the restoration and explanation of the passages in it is sure
to be of some value in the history of late MIA,, the consideration
of the problem may be laid aside for the present as having no immediate
bearing on the origins of Bengali.
In the MS. of the 'Carya-carya-viniscaya,' we have the poem in the
Prakritie speech given first, and then a Sanskrit commentary on the poem.
The commentary occasionally gives short quotations from similar Prakritie
in
INTRODUCTION
literature — Old Bengali and Western Apabhransa, an interesting example
being two short couplets in Old Bengali attributed to Mina-natha (iu
comm. to Carya 21). In the second MS., the Prakritic lines of Saraha^ or
Saroja-vajra, are not always given by themselves, but are quoted in extenso
in the Sanskrit commentary by Advaya-vajra : the author of the
commentary has the text before him in another MS., from which he is
content to introduce tags or full verses in his work, Kanha or Kjrsn&carya's
Doha-kosa, the third MS. in iSastrl^s book, gives first the Apabhransa
couplets and then the Sanskrit commentary to it.
The subject matter is highly mystic, especially in the ^ Caryas,'
centering round the esoteric doctrines and the Yoga and erotistic
practices of the Sahajiyaa ; and the commentary, being itself in a
highly technical jargon, does not make the text any the clearer,
notwithstanding the fact that it quotes extensively from a large analogous
literature. The poems in the ' Doha-kosa * of Saraha are not so mystic,
but they are abstruse enough : and the same may be said of the second
' Doha-kosa,' of Kanha.
Two different dialects are found in these three works. The dialect of
the ' Caryas ' alone is Old Bengali, as its peculiar Bengali forms show {e.g.,
the genitive in <£|^, ^ « -era, ara > , dative in c?[ « -re », locative in « -ta » ;
post-positional words like ^ « majha » , ^ST^ « antara » , Jftsf « sagga » ;
past and future bases in « -il- , -ib- » and not « -al- , -ab- » of Biharl ;
present participle in ^ « -anta » ; conjunctive indeclinable in ^ « -ia » ,
conjunctive conditional in tc^ « -lie » ; passive in « ^ -ia- » , which is
preserved as a relic in Middle Bengali; substantive roots ^«ach» and
« thak «, not « thik » of Maithili or « tha » of Oriya; and a number
of Bengali idioms). The two ' Doha-kosas ' present the same dialect, which
is a kind of Western (&.uraseni) Apabhransa, as its « -u » nominatives,
its '•c -aha » genitives, its « -ijja- » passives, and its general agreement
in forms with the literary Western Apabhransa amply indicate. There
was a considerable amount of Eastern Buddhist (Sahajiya) literature, of
the type found in the ' Doha-kdsas,* in the Western Apabhransa. C.
Bendall has published some fragments of such Apabhransa strophes (in the
IMPORTANCE OF SAURASENI APABHRANSa 113
' Subhasita-saggraha/ Le Museon. new series, Vols. IV, V, Brussels, 1905).
In the monasteries of Nepal, some of these Sahajiya Apabhransa songs and
strophes are even now preserved and sung (H. P. Sastri, VSPdP., 1329 San,
No. 1, pp. 44 ff.). And a great many, along with poems and other
compositions in Old Bengali, seem to have been rendered into Tibetan and
included in the ' Bstan-Hgyur ' (Tan-jur), the Indian originals being lost (cf.
Cordier's Catalogue, mentioned in footnote at p. 119).
61. As has been said before, as a literary language this Western
Apabhransa was current in Eastern India. During the 9th-12th centuries,
through the prestige of North Indian Rajput princely houses, in whose
courts dialects akin to this late form of Sauraseni were spoken, and
whose bards cultivated it, the Western or Sauraseni Apabhransa became
current all over Aryan India, from Gujarat and Western Panjab to
Bengal ; probably as a llngna fraaca, and certainly as a polite language, as a
bardic speech which alone was regarded as suitable for poetry of all sorts.
Professional bards, ^ bhats,' in other parts of India had to learn this dialect,
as well as Sanskrit and the Prakrits, and compose in it. In the first
centuries after the development of NIA., this Sauraseni Apabhransa
continued to be used, but it yielded more and more to the local dialects
in the various parts oE India, and ultimately, by the middle of the I5th
century, it was no longer, or very sparingl}-, used, other vernaculars like
Maithill, Awadhi, and RajasthanI having asserted themselves ; and in its
own home, the Midland, it gradually approximated itself to Braj-bhakha,
which was in a way its direct representative. The Old Hindi of the
'Prithiraja-Rasau' is very strongly influenced by Apabhransa forms, is
almost overwhelmed by them — the genuine NIA. character of the work
showing itself nevertheless. A younger form of this Sauraseni Apabhransa,
intermediate in forms and in general spirit to the genuine Apabhransa of
times before 1000 A.C. and to the Braj-bhakha of the Middle Hindi period,
say, of the 15th century, is sometimes known as ^ Avahattha.' The
' Prakrta-Paiggala ' (see § 64) embodies an anthology of verses in this
Avahattha speech. In Rajputana, Avahattha was also known as * Piggala,'
and local bards continued to compose in * Piggala,' as an archaic literary
15
114
INTRODUCTION
language, almost as much as they composed in ^ Diggala ' or local
Kajasthani dialects. The prestige and influence of Sauraseni Apabhransa
was no less strong in Bengal than in Bihar, Panjab and Rajputana. During
the formative period of Bengali (? 700—900 A. C.) and the Old Bengali
period (950 — 1200 A. C.)> a great deal of the early Buddhist (Sahajiya)
literature was composed in it. Being a dialect that was not the mother-
tongue of those who composed in it, local easiern (Bengali) idioms and words
have crept into it : ejj,^ « karjhiu rava » raiml a shout, in the ' Doha-kosa '
of Sai-aha (p. 91 in Ssstri's book) : cf, Bengali ^1 ^^t^l « ra kara » ; «bhirli»
tightly, fast (ibid., p. 90) : e£. Middle Bengali f^f% « bhiri » ; use of roots
« acch » and « thakk » (pp. 104, 105) : Bengali ^t^, * aeh, thak » ;
« jabb§, tabbS » wheUy then (p. 107): Bengali ^r.^ « jabe. tabe»;
< chacX'.Oai * hares (p. 112) : cf. Bengali ^tC^ « chare », but Hindostani
« chore » ; « tahara > his (p. 115) : Bengali sSt^t^ « tahar^ » « bujjhiau »
/understood (p. 1'29) : cf. Bengali ^ « bujh » ; etc.
The practice of employing this western Hterary speech in the eastern
tracts continued in Mithila at least as late as the time of VidySpati.
Vidyapati's compositions in Avahattha have been mentioned before (see
p. 104) ; and in his Avahattha, naturally there is a considerable mingling
with contemporary early Braj-bhakha forms, as well as Maithili forms ;
and frequently the influence of Maithili phonology and orthography is
noticeable, and, at times, the influence also of the classical Prakrit as
used in the Sanskrit drama. Here, with Yidyapati, the Avahattha dialect it
is more or less restricted to court poetry of a formal, panegyrical character.
In Bengal, ^yestern (Sauraseni) Apabhransa and its younger form
Avahattha ceased to be employed as soon as Bengali came to its own.
But the practice of using the language of Upper India on formal
occasions at least seems to have lingered on as a tradition in the courts
of Bengal princes, along with the courtly etiquette and ceremonial
which was Rajput or Northern Indian ; and it was revived in
post-Moghal times, with the influx of Rajput and other officials from
Northern India. In Bharata-candra^s ^ Annada-mag^ala ' (middle of the
18th century), we have some Hindi verses in which a Bengal prince,
f^ATTR. APABHRANSa INFLUENCE ON OLD BENGALI 115
the ruler of Burdwan, and his ' bhat ' or court bard and emissary talk
with one another. The use of Western Hindi, or Braj-bhakha,
by the Bengali poet is an echo of this revived tradition ; which thus
2:oes back to the days when Western Ajjabhransa was cultivated by
Bengal poets.
62, The language of the Carjas is the g-enuine vernacular of Bengal
at its basis. It belongs to the Early or Old NIA. stage. The declension
is still more like MIA. rather than NIA., although the NIA. system of
post- positions has come in. The past base, when the verb is transitive,
is still an adjective qualifying the object, as it is still the rule in Western
Hindi. But the influence of the ^aurasenl Apabhransa was very
great on it : and occasionally of Sanskrit and the literary Prakrits
of the second MIA. period. There is the old passive in « -ia- » , which
is lost to New Bengali, but which lingers in isolated instances in Middle
Bengali* {^qq imier Morpkologi/ : The Verb : Passive Voice.) The affix
< -ilia > -ila > has not as yet become universal for the past base, « -ia »
forms, without the strengthening « -1- > affix, being retained in a few
instances (see below, under Morphology/: Con jusration, Past Base). The
text at times gives a form in « -ia », but from the commentary and from
the rime it can be seen that the original word was in « -ila » : e.g^, Carya
31, « chadia » in text=« eha-'Jila » in commentary; 35, « laia » in text, to be
read as < laila », to rime with « kaela » ; so 50, « phulia » is for « phuhla», to
rime with « taela » = « bhaila? nela? » . Still, forms like < bujhia, bharia »
were used side by side with « bujhila, milila > etc. The past past
participle) in « -iu, -u », as in « kiu, biapiu, gaii, abariii, bikasaii, thakiu,
bahiu » etc., which, however are not many, are borrowed from Sauraseni
Apabhransa. So also the pronominal forms like « jo, so, ko, jasu, tasu »,
= 01d Bengali « je, ke, ja(ha), ta(ha) » , also found in the Caryas ;
these, again, are not very common ; and also the pronominal adverbs « jima,
tima » , and the] pronominal adjectives « jaisana, taisana, jaiso » (Old
Bengali forms would be «*jemanta, temanta ; jaihana, taihana*). Echoes of
the older literary Prakrit? of the West are not absent {e,g., the * -o »
affix; stray forms like instrumental feminine in « -ia : samahia =
116
INTRODUCTION
aamadhya > ; reteation of double consonants in a few cases ; and an occasional
phrase like « kim pi = kim api »). It seems that in these Caryas
we have the first attempts at literary employment of the Bengali speech.
And bein^ but first attempts^ the speech is not sure of its own forms,
and leans on its stronger^ better established (in a literary sense) sisters
and aunts. The literary languages and models which the poets of
the Caryas, Lui and Kanha^ Bhiisuku and Catila, Saraha and Kufekurl,
and the rest, had before them, were Sanskrit, the various literary Prakrits
(of the Second MIA. stage) ^ and Western or iSauraseni Apabhransa,
and the rich and ever growing literatures in them. Of these, the f^auraseni
Apabhransa was in spirit and form nearest the vernaculars, presenting
with them almost a similar stage of development. SaurasenI Apabhransa,
again^ was the most cultivated literary language based on a slightly
archaic form of a contemporary vernacular: and its influence was
paramount from Gujarat to Bengal. Naturally, it may be expected
that there would be a great influence exerted by it on the Old Bengali of
the period : especially when the latter was practising its first steps, so to
say, in the hands of men fully familiar with the former. Hence it is
not strange to find a number of Saurasem Apabhransa forms in this
offspring of Magadhi Apabhransa. The manuscript in which the Caryas
are preserved was written in Nepal, in a land where the scribes were perhaps
more familiar with the standard Sauraseni Apabhransa than with Bengali :
at any rate, the readings of the poems as in the MS. suflSciently show that
the scribe was not familiar with their dialect : and through this reason,
the suppression of dialectal Bengali forms by others from the Western
speech, at least in a few cases, is very likely ; nay, it is proved by the
correct reading often being given in the commentary, as in the case of
the word « chadila » quoted above, ^auraseni had already exerted a
profound influence on its neighbour and erstwhile rival, Ardha-magadhl,
so much so that the SaurasenI Apabhransa affix « -u » for the noun had
become established in the Eastern Hindi dialects (Awadhi etc.), the native
Ardha-magadhl « -e > -i » affix being entirely given up. The « -u » affix
also invaded the Magadhi area, but not to the same extent.
OLD BENGALI OF THE CARYAS : METRE 1 17
The MS. of the ^ Car^^acarya-vim^caya' was written in Nepal, where
Maithill was current and was cultivated in the drama; and in South-eastern
Nepal, the Morang country, Maithili was spoken. Hence, through
contamination, it is not stran^L^e to tind in the Carya MS. two Maithili
forms, « bhaiiathi » and « bolathi » ( = 01d and Early ^[iddle Bengali
« bhanaatij bolanti ») and one or two cases of use of « -a- » instead of « -i- *
as the link vowel in the « -b- » forms of the verb.
The language of the Caryas seems to be based on a West Bengal
dialect. Some of its forms belong rather to West Bengal than to East
Bengal : e.g.j the use of the « -k- » affix for the dative, rather than « -r- » ,
the latter occurring in two instances only ; the employ of the post-position
« sagga » and « sama » , rather than « satha » which would be preferred
in East Bengali. There are two remarks on the people of East Bengal
which do not show any admiration for them ; this is a thing which is
noticeable in the I'lth century West Bengal scholar Sarv^nanda (§ 59),
who, in his commentary on the ' Amara-kosa/ speaks of the
« Vaggala-vaecara » the mdgar Bengal people who were fond of dried fish,
meaning, no doubt, the semi-Aryanised masses in East Bengal. (See
pp. 73, 74.)
The metres of the Carya poems are nHdra-vrtta, being mostly
^ Padakulaka/ or * Caupai,' which originated in the late ML\. period. A
specifically Bengali or East Magadhan metre like the ' Payar * of 14
syllables is not found. Perhaps the ^ Payar ' w^as not yet developed. It
seems that the * Payar ' is a later transformation of the ^ Padakulaka ' or
' Caupai ' (see under Pkoiiofogt/ of the Native Element, Stress System). Or
it may be that the * Payar ' had already shaped itself in folk-poetry, but
the poets of the Caryas, with their acquaintance with the common jVIIA.
and Early NIA. metres, ignored it in their compositions.
There cannot be any serious objection (which could be supported by
a detailed study of the grammar of the language, as well a^ by taking into
consideration the development of Modern Bengali) which can be urged against
the Caryas as presenting the oldest connected specimens of a characterised
Bengali speech that we have been enabled to possess. The language is
118 INTRODUCTION
*
not ' Prakrit " or ^ Apabbransa/ as it has been ur^ed by some, since it shows
simplification of the MIA. double consonants ( « dhama < dhamma=
dharma, jama < jam ma =:janmaj tanti = tSriti <tanti = tantri, bata <
^vatta= vartraa, aila < * ayilla = ayata-ila-ka, haja- < hadcja, seji =seji <
*sSj'ji2;=sayyika » etc.), and has developed some ^nuine Ben^Ii
morphological forms. It is not ' Magadhi/ i.e., Magahl, because no
specifically Magahi characteristic is traceable, and the verb system is as yet
primitive. And ifc is not an artificial jargon made up of shreds of different
dialects, because, barring those few Western Apabhransa forms, discussed
above, there is nothing in its grammar which cannot be explained with
reference to the development of Middle and Modern Bengali,^
We have in these Caryas some of the oldest documents in any NIA.
language, documents of prime importance for NIA. philology, which can
be placed side by side with the SaurasenI Apabhransa fragments, in
Hema-candra, in the ' Kumara-pala-pratibodha,^ and in other works ; with
the Avahattha fragments in the * Prakrta-Paiggala ' ; with the oldest
Marathi fragments as in the epigraphieal remains and in the ' Jnanesvari ' ;
with the ' Prithiraja- Rasau ^ in its primitive form ; with the Old Western
Rajasthani remains, which are later in date ; and also with the artificial
Buddhist and Jain literature in Western Apabhransa — like the ^ Doha-kosas'
and the ^ Subhasita-tai)2rraha,' and the ' Bhavisatta-kaha,' the ^ Neminaha-
caria,' the ' Samyama-maujari/ and other works.
63. What is the date of the Caryas y Judging from the language,
one would be inclined to place them at least 150 years before the
'fSrI-Krsna-Klrttana,' which belongs to the last quarter of the I4th century,
* The importance of the Carya-padas has not been sulRciently appreciated in Bec^^l,
and only about half a dozen papers or notes on them have been pablished so far by Bengali
scholars. They only valuable article is by Maulavl Muhammad ShahiduUah, now of the
department of Sanskritic studies in the University of Dacca ; his paper (in the VSPdP.,
1327, pp. 145-152) offers very satisfactory readings of some obscure passages, and on the
whole is extremely helpful and suggestive. Prof. H. Jacobi cursorily refers to the
language of the Caryas as being * Alt-Bengalisch ' (in the Introduction to the * SanatkumSra-
carita.' pp. xjcvii-xxviii, Munich, 1921).
THE CARYA POETS ; THEIR AGE
and which is our oldest Middle Bengali text : roughly, before 1200 A. C.
The authors who composed these poems are Lui-p^ or Luyl-pada (2 poems),
Kukkuri (2 poems), Biruwa or Virupa (1 poem), Gu(n)dari (1), Catila (I),
Bhusuku (8), Kanha or Krsna-pada {I'Z), Karaali or Kambalambara (1),
Dombl (I), Santi (2), Mahitta or Mahidhara (1). Bajila or Vina-pada ( L),
Saraha or Saroja-vajra (4), Savara (ii), Aja or Arya-deva (1), Dhendhana (1),
Darika (1), Bhade or Bhadra-pada (1), Tstlaka (1), Kagkana(l), Jaya-uandl
(1) and Gunjarl (1) : 22 names in all. They are among the 84 Siddhas, or
great miracle-working saints and teachers who are worshipped by the
MahSyana Buddhists in Tibet and in Nepal, and about whom there are
current a number o£ legends in Nepal, in Tibet and also m India. Their
compositions have always been held in honour by the Northern Buddhists :
these are even now sung by the Buddhists in Nepal (H. P. Sastri, VSPdP.,
1329), and they were rendered into Tibetan and are included in the
*Bstan-Hgyur' (Tan-jur).^
The date of one of these Siddha composers of the poems, Lui or
Luyl-pada, seems to be certain : he was an elder contemporary of
Dipagkara Srijnana, or Atisa, and they prepared a Buddhist Tantrika
^ In the ' Tan-jur/ Cho XLYIII, there are translations of a mass of short poexus
(a reference to which I obtained from Dr. F. W. Thomas of the India Office Library)
in the Prakritic dialects — Old Bengali, perhaps, and Western Ai)abhranba, attributed to
oni" poets of the Caryas and to other Siddhas who are not represented in the 'Caryacarya-
viniscaya.' With the help of Cordier's Catalogrue of the * Tan.jur ' (* Catalosfue du Fond>
tibetain de la Biblioth^qae Nationale,' par P. Cordier, Deuxieme Partie : Index du Bstan
Hgyur, Tibetain 108-179, Paris, 1909), and through the courtesy of M. Jean Przylubki
(of the E'cole des Langues Orientales Vivantes of Paris) I had copied out some 40
likely versions of these Indian songs from the volume concenied (Tibetain loT) in
the Bibliotheque Nationale. M. Przyluski read these for me, and vre compared them
with the^Caryas, and so far only one CaryS poem agreed with a text from the * Tau-jur'
(Section 2, in Cho XLVIII, Tibetain 157, p. 26 : the lines beginning ' dnos po yaii ni ma
yin z'in, d&os med la ni ma skyes pa'i/ agreeing with CaryS 29 in Sastri's book, p. 45)
This sufficiently detnonatrates that the vernacular and Apabhrausa literature of the peHod
800-1200 A.C., or later, was to a larjre extent translated into Tibetan : a comparison of
the text and the Tibetan translation, wherever this will be possible, is sure to help in the
restoration of the former, which is generally in a very mutilated form).
120
INTRODUCTION
work named ^ Abhisamaya-vibhar|ga.* A tisa went to Tibet in 1038 A, C,
when he was 58. The literary life of Lui, when he composed these songs,
can very well be placed in the second half of the 10th century. (H. P.
Sastri, English Preface to the ^Bauddha Gan O Doha,^ p. 2.) This period
provisionally may be regarded as the upper limit for the Caryas : Lui seems
to have been the most venerated in the group — there is a respectful
reference to him in the poem by Darika (No. 34), and in a poem by Kanha
(No. '^6), and he is worshipped even now in Bengal (cf. ^astiu^s Preface) :
possibly he was the oldest. As many as I'l poems are by Kanha. It is
quite possible that there were more Kanhas than one; the IZ poems, in most
cases signed ' Kanha, Kanhu,' are introduced as being ' Kanhu-padanam,
Krsnacarya-padanam, Kfsiia-padanam, Kf sna(carya ?)-padanam, Krsna-
vajra-padanam.* In the Tibetan ' Tan-jur,' there are apparently quite a
number of Krsnas who iigure as authors of Tantrika works. The
Cambridge University Library has a MS. of a work called ^ Hevajra-
pailjika Yoga-ratna-mala/ by ' Panditicarya Sri-Kahna-( = Kanha)-pada.'
It was written in Magadha during the 39th year of Govinda-pala, the last
king of Magadha ( = e. 1199 A. C), and was taken to Nepal, whence it
was brought to v 'ambridge by D. Wright. (R. D. Banerji, ' The Palas of
Bengal,' p. IIL) This *Kahna' must be one of the Kanhas, if there
were several. That would place some of the poems in the second half of the
12th century, as the MS. can well be contemporaneous with the author.
The Sahajiya sect of Bengal had unquestionably some connection
with the Sivaite Natha or Yogi sect, which originated in Northern India
as an expression of a revived Hinduism, during the beginning of the
second millennium A. C. The history of the origin of this sect is
shrouded in mystery, and a great deal of the religious, social and
literary life of Northern India will have light thrown on it when we
come to know the story of the origin of the Natha-panth, and about
the personality of Goraksa-natha. Goraksa-natha, or Gorakh-nath, was
the greatest teacher of this sect, and he seems to have been a man from
Northern India (Pan jab). There are legends current all over Aryan India
about Gorakh-natli, and his -^a/v/ Mina-natha or Matysendra-natha
THE GOpT-CANDA LEGEND AND KANHA-PADA 121
(Maehindar-nath) — how the latter obtained secret knowledge from Siva in
the form of a fish, how he forgot his wisdom and was ensnared in the love of
life and of women^ and how his pupil Gorakh-nath came to him and
brought him back to his life as a YogL Contemporary with Gorakh«nath
was Jalandhari-^pada, known also as Harl-pa, according to the unanimous
agreement of traditions still current among the masses in Northern India
and in medieval vernacular literature, from Chittagong and Assam to
Maharastra^ Gujarat and the Panjab. G5rakh-nath was the guru of a
queen Mayana-vatI of Bengal; and Mayaua-vati's son was the famous
Raja Gopi-eanda, who, while quite a young man, gave up his kingdom and
his wives, and became a Yogi, and followed Jalandhari-pada, as his guru.
Gopl-canda's renunciation is the theme of a large mass of folk poetry,
songs, ballads and romances, in Bengali, Oriya, Bhojpuriya, Hindi, Panjabi,
Marathi, Gujarat! and other languages, and is the subject even now sung
by itinerant Yogi beggars in Hindustan and in the Deccan. According
to some versions, including Tibetan ones, Jalandhari-pada in common
with Mayana-vatI, was a disciple of Goraksa-natha. And according to
the unanimous agreement of the legends, Jalandhari had a devoted disciple
in Kanu-pa or Kanha-pada. Now, one of the Caryas, No. 36, attributed
to Kf snaearya-pada, and signed * Kanhila lagga ' ^ Naked Kanhila=
Kanha ' (line 4), expressly mentions Jalandhari-pada in the last verse :
« sakhi kariba Jalandhari-pae :
pakhi (pasi) na cahai [mori] pandiaeaye. » ^
I shall make Jalandhari-pada (niif) icitaeffs :
a great scholar {Pardifdcarffa) does not look to iny side.
The Kfsna of Carya 36 is therefore Kanha-pada the disciple of the
Natha Yogi Jalandhari of the legend. This Kanha is described as
* Kfsn&carya * in the Carya commentary. The author of the * Hevajra-panjika
Yoga-ratna-mala ' (the MS. of which dates from 1199 A.C., see p. 120)
* The text as piinted by H. P, Saatri rana thus : T^f^ ^twft *ltai y ntft 1
CTtft ^ftfS^i 5Kf a *sathi kariba Jalandhari pfitra pSkhi na rfihaa mori pandiS cSde/
It has been emended in my quotation, following the reading and interpret at iou of the
commentary
16
INTRODUCTION
is described as * Panditdearya SrI-Kahna-pada.' The word * pandiaeaye/
in Carya 36, as I read it, following the Sanskrit equivalent ' panditaearya '
given in the commentary, can very well be a reference by Kanha to
himself, the last verse usually giving the name or title of the poet : / shall
call to witness my Guru Jalandltari-jpada ; my 'Panditaearya {i.e,, mynelf who
am a great scholar) does not loo'k at me (Z.^., my knowledge I owe to the
grace of my gum, and not to my studies and my being a Panditaearya).
If the author of Carya 36 were also the author of the Tantra work
mentioned, as it can be reasonably supposed, then we would get e. I'iOO A.C,
as the lower limit for one Kaaha at least; and consequently for Jalandhari
and for Goraksa-natha, and for the main personages who figure in the
Gopi-canda story, if that story has any basis in fact and there is nothing
to show that it does not have. This Kanha must have been the Siddha
Kanha mentioned in the Tibetan and Indian lists of 84 JSiddhas : and
all the poems in the Caryas, as well as the Doha-kosa, may very well
be by one and the same individual.
From Marathi sources, we have some indication as to the date
of Goraksa-natha (and consequently of Kanha). Jfiana-deva in the
' Jiianesvarl ' (c. 1^90 A. C.) says that he received initiation from his
elder brother Nivftti-natha, who was born 1273 A. C. ; and Nivrtti-natha's
guru was Gaini-natha, or Goyani-natha, whose guru was Goraksa-natha,
the disciple of Matsyendra-natha. (V. L. Bhave, ' Maharastm-sai-aswat,'
pp. 39, 40, 4*Z.) It may be that the tradition ]>resented by the * Jnanesvari '
is faulty, and as it often happens, omits some intervening names in the
^ guru-parampara ' (succession of masters). Assuming that Gaini-natha
was an old, old man when he initiated Nivftti-natha, we can make an
adjustment of the chronology from the Marathi source with the dates
suggested for Goraksa-natha and Kanha in the previous paragraph, namely,
the end of the 12th century.
The Tibetan legends about the 84 Siddhas, including the poets of
the Caryas, profess to give details about the life and history of them,
but they are hardly reliable. (These have been translated into German,
by A. Grunwedel in the * Baessler Arehiv,' Berlin, Vol. V.) Tara-natha,
THE CARYAS. the ' PRAKRTA-PAINGALA '
123
in his * History of Buddhism in India/ in Tibetan (German translation
by A. Scbiefner, PetrograJ, 1809) also gives legends about them^ but in
the matter of chronology^ the Tibetan authority is hopelessly confusing.
He, however, makes this interesting statement that at the time when
the Tajiks and the Turks were ravaging Eastern India, i,e,^ at the end
of the 12th century, the Yogis who followed Goraksa-natha became devotees
of Siva (p. 255, Schiefner). Can this suggest a date for Goraksa-natha ?
Tara-natha, however, gives elsewhere (p. 174, Schiefner) a date several
centuries earlier for Goraksa. Among other interesting things, Tara-natha
quotes a Bengali word (« Ajischa » in Schiefner, p. 205 =*^tf^ « *ayisa(a) »
ill Old Bengali, written "^H^t^ «; aisa » cornel in ordinary Bengali), as
being uttered by Virupa, who is one of the poets of the Caryas.
The other poets, from the style of their composition, from language,
and from general spirit, belong to the same age. The period 9."j0- 1200
A. C. would thus seem to be a reasonable date to give to these poems ;
and they are preserved in a post-14th century MS. These poems must
have been very popular in Bengal : and we have echoes of lines from them
in Middle Bengali literature, beginning from Canrji-dasa in the ^Sri-Kfsna-
Kirttana.' *
64. Other remains of Proto- or Old Bengali are possibly in a few
poems and couplets in the ' Prakrta-Paiggala.' This work is a treatise
on Apabhransa and Early NIA. versification. Various metres are
described, and examples are quoted. These examples are from the floating
mass of popular poetry and song current among the poets and the
poeple of Northern India during the period 900-1400 A. D. The book
in its present form dates from the latter half of the Hth century.
^ jSr.?., C5ryH6, ^^ftl ^f\C^ ^*t1 ' apana mamseiTi harinabairl ' Hie deer i< a foe {to
all) because of its own Jiesh; cf, ' Sn-Krsna-Kirttana,' p. 78, "^C^l^ ^^C^a?
f^^^t: *it?na banera barini la nija miiiiise jagatera bairi ' ; p 88, ^''I'tt^J ^'iC^ ^f^^l ^^tTsl^
'apanara raarase harin! jagatera bairi ' ; also SKK., pp. 358-359 : the lines on Sahajiya Yoga
practice are echoes of similar passages in the Caryas ; and the same may be said of line?
from Middle Bengali works like the ' Gorak^a-rijayd.'
INTRODUCTION
Most of the poems are in the artificial, literary Western Apabhransa, or
in Western Avahattha, based on earlier literary ^auraseni : two verses
are even in regular literary Prakrit of the 2nd MIA. stage, being taken
from the Pmkrit drama ' Karpura-manjar! ' of Raja-sekhara (e. 900 A. C).
But there are some which belong to a stage which might be called Old
Western Hindi : e.g,, the poems at pp. £49, 375, 412, 435, 463, 470, 5] 6,
541, among others, in the" Bi6, Ind. edition. B. C. Mazumdar first
suggested that a few' of the poems in the ' Prakfta-Pair|gala ' are in Old
Bengali ; e.g., those at pp. Vl, 227, 334, 403, 465, from their general style,
their vocabulary in some eases, and specially from their verse cadence (cf.
' History of the Bengali Language,' Calcutta University, 1920, pp. 226 fE.).
It is very * likely that in their original form these poems were in Old
Bengali, or rather, in Proto-Bengali, with MIA. characteristics still
present. But as they stand in the ' Prakf ta-Paiggala,' there is nothing
in their forms to mark them out specially as Bengali : rather, some
grammatical forms, like « jata » is going in « eafieala jobbana jata », and
* chaila », in the poem at p. 227 (cf. Western Hindi « jatu, jata, jata », and
<« chaila » ) ; « natthi » in the poem at p. 465 (cf. Gujarat! « nathi » is
not) ; « lijjia », passive participle in < -ijj- » in the same poem ; * dijjaV »
in the poem at p. 403 ; < jimi » in the poem at p. 334 (cf. Hindi « jima,
jiwa, jy5 ») ; « jini » for « yena » in the same poem (the Modern Bengali
« jini » 2vhOy honorific, did not originate till later, in the late Middle
Bengali period, from (7[t « jeha » or f^[t « jiha »), — ^are not Bengali or
Old Bengali at all. Then, many of the forms are MIA., without the
simplification of double consonants which characterises NIA. in the
Midland and in Eastern India. But it is quite possible that these poems
were originally Bangali, especially from their verse cadence ; and through
their passage from Bengal to Western India, their grammar and language
has been to a great extent westernised. In their present from, they are
at the best useful for comparison with Old Bengali : but, as they stand,
they do not have any bearing on the development of Bengali.
Two poems ascribed to Jaya-deva, the great Bengal poet of the 12th
century, may be mentioned here. They are preserved in the Sikh ' Adi
JAYA-DEVA AND APABHRAN^A
1^5
Granth/* which is a collection, made in the i6th century, of devotional
hymns composed by the Sikh Gums and by saints of Northern India.
The earliest of these hymns go back to the 12th century, and they embrace
works of poets who lived in Aryan India from Bengal to the Fanjab
and right down to tlie Maratha country, — poems by Northern India saints
like Ramananda, and Kablr^ as well as by the Marathi poets like Trilocana
and Nama-deva being found in it. Jaya-deva had become well-known in
Northern India as a Vaisuava saint and poet by the 16th century, and
the two poems in the ^ Granth ' ascribed to him may really have been
composed by him ; but in their present form, they are sadly altered, and
no one can recognise Bengali of any period in them. It seems very
likely they were originally in the Western Apabhransa as written in
Bengal. Western characteristics are noticeable in them : e.g.^ the « -u »
affix for the nominative. There is strong influence of Sanskrit as well.
They were later altered and mutilated to their present shape.
65. The ' Gita-govinda' of Jaya-deva may be noticed in this
connection. Jaya-deva of Kendu-bilva in Radlha ( = K6duli in Birbhum
District), in the latter part of the 12th century, just before the conquest
of West Bengal by the Turks, composed a number of songs (padas)
describing the love of Raiha and Kfsna. These songs, in the form in
which we have them, possess an exquisite verbal melody and a most
cloying sensuous charm. Their language is professedly Sanskrit, but
in their style and execution, and in their rimed maira-vriia metre, they
are more like vernacular than anything else. Scholars suspect (Pischel,
' Grammatik der Prakrit Sprachen,' § 32; B. C. Mazumdar, Introduction
to the Bengali Translation of the * Gita-govinda,' Calcutta) that these
songs were originally composed in V some Prakritic speech, which in this
ease would be either Western Apabhransa as written in the East, or Old
Bengali, both the alternatives being equally likely; and from their music
* One of these occurs under RSg GajarT, aa the last poem • this one has been given
in the original by Trumpp, in hia Translation of the 'Granth'; the other under RSg
IffSru. (I am indebted to my colleague in the University, Mr. Inda-Bhiishan Banerji, for
these references.)
INTRODUCTION
and their poetic charm they had an enormous popularity. Avahattha
poems similar in form and spirit to some hymns by Jaya-deva are found
in the ' Prakfta-Paiggala/ e.g., the poems at pp. 570, 576, 581, 586.
Jaya-deva, who was a Vaisnava of the Sahajiyili type, as later legends
would seem to^testify, might very well have written in the vernacular
of the country* However, it seems that even the learned Paufjits,
who would scorn anything composed in a vulgar tongue, were charmed
with these 'paAm of Jaya-deva ; and quite early in their history, some
worthy scholar, or a group of scholars, it may be contemporaneously
with the poet himself, rather than lower themselves by reading or
chanting poetry in the vernacular, touched these poems up a bit,
and garbed them in the dignity of Sanskrit, of a sort, just as it
would not be very difficult to restore into Latin a line of Old Italian.
After that some laborious verses in Sanskrit, in the most approved classical
style, were composed, and these verses told the story of the love which
is the theme of the songs j and thus they were formed into a sort of
framework for the songs, the whole being arranged in a connected poem
of 1 'I cantos. This made-up work is one of the most popular books in
Sanskrit literature, and, under the name of ' Gita-govinda,' is well-known
wherever Sanskrit is studied. Later on, when * there was a Vaisnava
revival in the 16th century in Bengal and Orissa, it was venerated as a
religious work, — it was enjoined to be sung before the image of Jagan-
natha in the temple at Puri, as we know from an inscription of 1499 A. C.
in the temple. The style of the songs had an enormous influence on
the Bengali lyric Jaya-deva, together with the poets of the Caryas,
stands at the head of A^aisnava and other lyric poetry in Bengal : and
it would have been a great thing if we had his songs in the language
in which he possibly wrote them. But undoubtedly they have been so
carefully preserved because they happened to be rendered into Sanskrit : like
other popular things in vernacular literature, e.g., the songs of Candl-dasa,
with the passing of centuries they would have been altered beyond recogni-
tion to medieval or present-day Bengali. The languages of the Caryas and
of the ' Sri-Kf sna-Kirttana ' have been preserved only because they were
MIDDLE BENGALI MSS.: THE ^SrI-KRSNA-KIRTTANA ' 127
fortunately locked up in old MSS,, which were not replaced by later
copies in which the language would certainly have been altered.
66. The next great landmark in the study of Bengali, after the
Caryas, is the * Sri-Kfsna-Klrttana ' of Caiifii-dasa. This work, from
point of view of language, is of unique character in Middle Bengali
literature. There is a fairly copious Middle Bengali literature, of which
the most important, and by far the earliest extant works are the ^ Padas *
of Candi-dasa^ the * EamSyana ' of Kftti-vasa, the ^ Padma-purana ' of
Vijaya-gupta, the ' iSri-Kfsna-vijaya ' of Maladhara Vasu, the * Maha-
bharatas ' of Sanjaya, Kavlndra Paramesvara, and Srikarana Xandi, the
* Dharma-maggala 'of Manika Gaggull, the * Canoi-kavya' of Mukunda-rama
CakravartT, the ' Padma-purana ' of \'ansl-dasa, the ' Manasar Bhasan ' of
Ketaka-dasa Ksem^nanda ; besides, the poems about Gopl-eanda, and other
pre-MosIem romance ; and Buddhistic treatises on religious ceremonial and
ritual, like the ' Sunya-purana ' of Ramai Pandita ; in addition to numeroui?
fragments from diverse poets. The Middle Bengali period in literature is
continued down to 1800, and a mass of songs, proverbs and popular poetry,
which have been collected in recent times, also properly belongs to the Middle
Bengali period. The help afforded by ^Middle Bengali literature, which
covers a period from the 14th to the 18th century, is not as great as it
might be expected, in tracing the history of Bengali. Earlj- works as
a rule have not been preserved in their original shapes, almost always in
language and frequently in subject matter. The oldest MSS., mainly
on paper, and also frequently on palm-leaf, seldom go beyond the middle
of the I6th century, and commonly these are of the 17 th and 18th
centuries; and these give but late recensions of earlier works, in which
it is useless to expect anything like a faithful rej^resentation of the
author's language. By the beginning of the 15th century (but the
tendency or movement had started considerably earlier) a standard
literary Bengali grew up and rapidly came to be used all over Bengal.
This was the more or less conventional language of verse : of prose
literature there was little or nothing before 1800 ; and it is prose which
properly represents, under ordinary circumstances, the normal habits of a
128
INTRODUCTION
language. MSS. do frequently show local forms : but in an ordinary
Middle Bengali MS., no matter where it was written, we always find
standard literary forms which are even now unknown to the spoken
language of the place, side by side with the genuine dialectal ones. The
Bengali literary language is a ' high ' dialect, which has utilised forms
from the various spoken dialects, and these latter are from the beginning
independent of literary Bengali. If we could find a MS., say, of Kftti-vasa
(15th century), which preserves the language of the poet intact, its
importance would be inestimable. But there is no Middle Bengali work
dating from before 1500 which is pi*eserved in a contemporary MS. ;
except one, and that is the *Sri-Kfsna-Klrttana.'
The MS., from the style of script it employs, according to expert
opinion, belongs to the latter half of the 14th century. It gives us the
genuine West Bengali as used in literary composition in the middle of
that century. The genuineness of the work is borne out by the remarkably
archaic character of the forms, which agree with such widely distant
dialects as North Bengali and Assamese ; and some of its expressions are
found in Early Oriya, The resemblances with Early Assamese have been
put forward as an argument, among others, for the spuriousness of the
work, — and even in favour of its having passed through North Bengal,
to be edited to its present shape. *
The MS. of the ^ SrI-Kfsna-Klrttana ' has been almost miraculously
preserved, to be discovered by Basanta-Ranjan Ray and edited by him
in a style rarely attained in the edition of an old text in India (VSPd.,
San 1323). The work seems to have been lost sight of from the 17th
century, and it is in this way that the language could not be altered, from
the original form in which it was composed, to late Middle Bengali, or even
» Bai Bahadur Yogesh Chandra Vidyanidhi called into question the gennineness of the
* Sri.Kr§na.Kfrttana ' in a paper to the VSPdP. for San 1326. A atudy of the language with
reference to the development of Bengali will show that this great and versatile scholar
of Bengal is off the track here. Satish Chandra Bay and Basanta Kum&r Chatterji in the
VSPdP. for the same year have contested the issues raised by T. C. Vidyanidhi in
favour of the geaoineness of the work.
THE OLD BENGALI PERIOD
129
Modern Bengali, in the hands of subsequent copyists. The grammar of
the speech of the * SrI-Krsna-Kirttana ' gives a clue to many of the forms
of New Bengali. The speech here is not what may be called Old Bengali,
taking Old, Middle and JSew in the sense in which they are used with regard
to the Germanic and Romanic languages. The Caryas are in Old Bengali,
and are comparable to Old English (Anglo-Saxon) remains in the study of
English : Old in the sense that the speech belongs partly to an ancient
stage rapidly passing away. The ' SrI-Krsna-Kirttana ' belongs to what
may be called the Early Middle Bengali stage : and its importance in the
study of Bengali, in the absence of other genuine texts, is as great as
that of the works of Layamon, Orm and Chaucer in English.
67. The Bengali language in its history may be conveniently divided
into three periods.
[I] The Formative or Old Bengali Period: 10th-13th centuries
(c. 950-1200 A. C). This period wajj, in the Proto-Bengali stage, have
gone beyond 900 A. C» : in any case, it may be said to have overlapped
the late MIA. (Apabhransa) stage. It may be compared to the ^ Old '
period of the modern Romance and Teutonic languages ; only necessarily
for the Indian language, as being the last stage of an already decayed
order (and herein the Romance speeches can be compared), the inflections
in it are few, as compared with the later language with its new post-
positional affixes and other devices.
The sound system is practically the same as that of late MIA., only
there has been a simplification of double consonants and transformation
of a nasal preceding a stop to a mere nasalisation (often expressed
in writing by leaving the nasal letter untouched), with compensatory
lengthening of the preceding vowel ; « a » probably had not been drawn uj)
to its present open « o » [o] value; final vowels were retained, except where
there was simplifieation of groups like « -ia > -I » ; and there is no
indication of «i» or «u» epenthesis. Elision of intervocal labials and
gutturals seems to have been in foitJe, as in second MIA ; and the
occurrence of euphonic « w » between vowels. The genitive affix was
< a, aha < -asya », « -era, -ara, -ka < kera, kara» kaa », and, in the plural,
17
130
INTRODUCTION
« -na » ; instrumental, « e » ; dative based on genitive ; locative in « -i,
-ahi, -ahi»; some post-positions ; use o£ the plural forms of the 1st and
2nd personal pronouns for the singular, « amhe, tumhe » for « mal, tal
is established; and the old « ahakam> hau (hau) » / is Estill present. In the
verb, the past base ordinarily has « -ila », but sometimes the « -1- »
does not figure ; and the construction is passive for the transitive verb,
adjectival for the intransitive, — the system of pronominal affixation,
rendering the construction active, is as yet unknown. There are traces of
the « -h- < -sy- » future ; and the « -ia- » passive is a living form, but
the analytie « v/ja passive is also used.
The vocabulary is mainly tadbhava, but taLwna words also figure
slightly. Literature is just at its beginning, and in addition to the Caryas
which we now possess, it possibly consisted of similar songs on Radha and
Kfsna, and of some hymns and ballads, the last being the sources of the later
Gopi-canda, Dharma-maggala (Lau Sena), Lakhindar and BehulS, Srimanta,
and Kala-ketu tales, — but of these no trace belonging to this age remains.
68. [^] Middle Bengali Period: UOO-1800. This is better
subdivided into 3 stages :
(a) Transitional Middle Bengali, 1200-1300 A. C.
The language bad all its Bengali characteristics fully established
during this period, so that from the speech of the Caryas it was
transformed into that of the ' Sri-Kr^na-Kirttana.' The post-positions in
the declension were fully established; the conjugation became active in
the past and future forms of the transitive verb, and the system of
pronominal affixation to the past and future bases came in, though it
was not fully established till the loth century and later. The old
maira'Vfita metre, of 16 or 15 monp, found in the Caryas, became,
by an arrangement of ak-^aras, a syllabic metre of 84-6 = 14 aksaras
or syllables during this period : tendencies towards the development of
this special metre of Bengali, the ^ Payar ' metre, found also in Assamese
and Oriya, are noticeable in the Old Bengali period and were possibly
present in Common Eastern Magadban (Apabhransa Magadhi of the
East).
TRANSITIONAL MIDDLE BENGALI
131
We have no genuine specimens of Bengali which can be relegated to this
period. But the national legends of Bengal, the stories of Gopi-canda, of
Behula and Lakhindar, of Khullana and Dhana-pati, of Phullara and
Kala-ketu, and of Lau-sena which were treated in great poems in
the following centuries, were probably taking shape during this century.
But nothing can be asserted about the language and literature of this
period, although a little can legitimately be guessed. Politically, it w^as an
age of chaos and destruction, being the first century of the Turk!
conquest. But there was some literary activity, and Kana Hari-datta,
Mayura Bhatta and Manika Datta, who are mentioned by later poets as
being the first to take up resj^eetively the Behula legend, the Lau-sena
romance and the Candl legends and treat them in long narrative poems
to be chanted before a gathering of people at a number of sittings, seem
to have flourished before 1300. The fragments that we have from these
poets are in ordinary late Middle Bengali MSS.
Rai Sahib Dinesh Chandra Sen {e,g.^ in the ' Vaijga Sahitya Paricaya,'
Calcutta University, 1914) refers to the llth-TZth centuries the poems of
^ Manik-candra Kajar Gan ' and ' Mayanamatlr Gain/ narrating the
Gopi-canda legend (cf. p. 1^1), which were taken down from the recitation
of North Bengal villagers and edited respectively by Grierson in 1878
and by Bishweshwar Bhattacharya in 1908 ; to the 10th- 11th centuries
he refers the * Sunya-puiana,' the MS. of which, according to its editor,
Nagcndra-nath Vasu, is only 300 years old, and which, as Y. C. Vid} anidhi
has shown (VSPdP., 13UJ, No. 4), must belong to a period subsef|uent to
the 13th century. Certain distichs embodying the proverbial wisdom
of the land, — agricultural maxims, and comments on life and on ttin^^s,
which are attributed to ' Daka ' and ^ Khana,* two personages (the second a
woman) about whom there are numerous legends current in Assam
and Bengal and who are connected with Varaha-mihira of Ujja^inl,
the famous astronomer of the 5th- 6th centuries A. C, Dinesh C
Sen refers to the 8th-12th centuries: but all these proverbial distichs
attributed to Dak and Khana were collected within recent years. All
these above-mentioned works, and some others too, occasionally do represent
132
INTRODUCTION
archaic or pseudo-archaic forms, it is true : the ' Sunya-purana ' and
similar Buddhistic works show a surprisingly large number of old
forms for MSS. only 300 years old. But in their grammar, there is
nothing archaic, generally : they are good Middle Bengali, although some
of the poems, with their loose metre, their antitpiated spelling, and their
occasional old forms, do present an archaic look at times : but it is
impossible, on both philological and literary grounds, to relegate them
to any period before 1400: although their lost prototypes, models, or
originals might quite reasonably be regarded as having belonged to the
14th, or even the l-Uh century.
(b) Early "Middle Bengali Period : 1300-1500 A.C.
Bengali literature becomes fully establitshed, by the end of tho 15th
century, with a number of considerable works, which ha^ve become the
classics of the language. We see the working of the influence of classical
Sanskrit on Bengali from this period : the ' RamA,yana,' the ' Bhagavata
Parana/ and the ' Mahabharata ' are adapted into the language : the
language changes its spirit under the umbrage of Sanskrit : there is a great
access of tatsamas, making many old tadhhavas obsolete or restricted in use.
The literary language, based on West Bengali, is perfected, and is employed
in all parts of Bengal, slightly modified by local dialects, no doubt.
The ' Sri-Krsna-Kirttana * is the most important w^ork, philologieally
(before 1400) ; Candi-dasa composed his songs ; Krtti-vasa rendered the
' BamSyana ' into Bengali in the middle of the 15th century ; and Vijaya
Gupta and Maladhara Vasu flourished, as w-ell as Srikarana Nandi.
In phonetics, the most noticeable thing, found in the SKK., is the
weakening of independent « i (u) » after « a, a », resulting in new
diphthongs « ai, &u, au » , which were regarded as one aksara in
which the second element was pronounced very short, and the first
element tended to be modified ; this was followed by epenthesis of « -i^ -u
« -enta < -anta > of the present participle is found as * -it& >, the change of
« -ent- > -§t- > -it-> -it-» having been carried out during the preceding
period. The aspiration of the nasal in the groups <t -mh- *, ^=^?$'
« -nh- » is lost by the middle of the 15th century. Final « -4 » seems
EARLY AND LATE MIDDLE BENGALI
133
to have become quiescent, « », by the middle of the 1 5th century.
The conjugation of the verb is purely active in the past tense. There are
still a few traces of the old iu fleeted passive. Compound tenses* come into
being. The use of a strong form of the genitive, « -ra 5>, for the plural,
noticed in its incipient stage in the SKK. (where it is found with the
personal pronouns only) becomes established by 1500. The plural affix for
the verb, « -anti » , is found as « -anta, -enta » in the loth century, and
finally, by the 1 7th, it yields to the form « -en^ », which is influenced
by the old plural aflix for the noun oblicpie (see under Morphology :
Declension).
Cc) Late Middle Bengali: 1500-1800.
The earlier part of this period, during the 16th century, witnessed
the development of Vaisnava literature through the influence of Caitanya
(1485-1533) and his disciples. Biography as a yeure was added to Bengali
literature. There was a very great influence of Sanskrit, and of JlaitbilT,
and a restricted one of Western Hindi (Braj-bhakha) ou both language and
literature. The artificial literary dialect ' Braja-buli'' grows up (see p. 103).
Epenthetic « u » became « i » during the earlier part of this period,
and came to modify the preceding and following « a » and « a » sounds,
and ultimately were dropped entirely in West Bengali dialects by the
close of the 18th century. Affixes like t^l « -iii », verbal or nominal, were
contracted, and were gradually turned to the monophthong [s, e], written
.^Tt, in many dialects : ?rtf^f1, ^t^^Tl, im, a^Jl, (.^vMiaving hepi
[ia>ia>ea>sa>5>e : rakhia > raikhia > raikhea > rslkhsa> rs(i)khs>
rekhe]. In West Central Bengal, along the Hngli River, the habit of
vowel-mutation and general contraction of syllables begins, and this invades
the other dialects as well. The aspiration of 7 « -rh- » is continued
till the beginning of the 17th century and then is gradually lost, Middle
Bengali words like ^ « parhe <pathati » re(uh and ^f^^ « p&re<patati »
falh becoming identical ( ) in Modern Bengali.
There is a great influence of Persian on the vocabulary, especially in
the 18th century; and to a slight extent, of Portuguese. The loss of
the final « -a » gives an impetus to a system of metre based on stress, —
134
INTRODUCTION
tendencies towards which are not absent in the 14th century ; but the
syllabic metre is perfected and holds the field in all formal poetry, the
stressed metre being confined to popular poetry, songs, lullaby s, charms,
etc., and its presence and importance are recognised by learned people only
by the end of the 19th century.
All these ushered in, by the end of the 18th century, the Modern
stage of the language ; and the medieval spirit in Bengali literature
was entirely done away with by the middle of the next century.
69. [3] Modern or New Bengali : from 1800.
Prose is written for the first time seriously, but for fifty years
the literary language is under the tyranny of Sanskrit. Out of the
large number of forms, dialectal, and archaic, which prevailed in
Middle Bengali, specially in the verb, documentary and epistolary
Bengali of the three centuries 1500-1800 was evolving a standard
language for prose, in which only a few recognised forms were
used ; and this documentary and epistolary Bengali, based as it
was on the speech of the I5th century, or it may be, of the 14th, was
adopted as the language of ordinary prose composition, when the advent
of Western learning brought in a sudden demand for a prose style.
Literary Bengali of prose, during the greater part of the 19th century,
was thus a doubly artificial language ; and, with its forms belonging
to Middle Bengali, and its vocabulary highly Sanskritised, it could only
be compared to a ^ Modern English ' with a Chaucerian grammar and a
super- Johnsonian vocabulary, if such a thing could be conceived. This
literary form for prose became the standard, and growth of the printing
press established the grammar and the orthography : the latter, the
work of Sanskritists ignorant of the history and phonetic tendencies of
the language, threw overboard the meagre traditions of spelling for the
tadhhava words that obtained in Middle Bengali. Good, simple prose
which had a relation to everyday life was occasionally written, but
the forms of the verb remained archaic. The colloquial, occasionally
attempted to be represented in a work like Carey's * Dialogues ' (1816),
went along its own line, and the stilted Sanskritic ' sadhu-bhasS '
NEW BENGALI OR MODERN BENGALI
135
carefully avoided its contamiDation. In the meanwhile, Calcutta became
the intellectual centre of the Bengali people, and through literature
and actual contact in life, the Calcutta form of Bengali spread and
infected the dialects. The colloquial of Calcutta made its first eclatant
advent in the ' Hutom PScar Naksa' (1862) Sketches of the Hooiiny
Old of Kali-Prasanna Siiiha, which is one of the raciest books in Beno'ali.
a work which is full of life, being sketches of social life in Calcutta
in the middle of the 19th century, written in the choicest collo(|uial spiced
with slang terms and unconventional expressions such as a man about
the town would use. The actual spoken language gradually came to its
own in a mass of unconventional literature, and in ephemeral poctr}^ :
and it attained to dignity in the early writings of Kabindra-nath
Tagore. It now reigns supreme in the drama (in the fifties and sixties
of the last century, and later, characters in a play speak the ^sadhu-bhasa '
which no Bengali would dream of using in actual life), and to a great
extent in the conversational passages in novels. In poetry, the colloquial
shares honours with the literary, both forms being used in the same
poem, nay, in the same line, side by side ; it has become a serious rival
of the ' high ' language of prose as well j and, observing the fact that
the colloquial of Calcutta has become the speech of educated classes
everywhere in Bengal, it may be predicted that in about another half
a century the disuse to the largest scale imaginable, if not the entire
suppression, of the literary language will be in the course of things.
The phonetic changes, ushering in the Calcutta colloquial as the
most advanced or progressive Bengali dialect (the other dialects remaining
true to the Middle Bengali), were mostly evident by the second half of
the 18th century : only, the close < e , as derived from an earlier « a »
through the infiuenee of i » , seems to have been more open in the
18th century than in the early 19th. There has been some influence
of the literary speech in modifying the normal growth of the dialects,
including even that of Calcutta. ^ * ^\\^ bh » developed their spirant
values [f, f ; i?, v] in the standard colloquial during the beginning of the
19th century.
136
INTRODUCTION
The enormous and evergrowing influence of English on Bengali, in
vocabulary, and in some cases in idiom and in expressions, is the most
noteworthy thing in New Bengali : and the influence o£ Sanskrit has
been placed on a different footing, at least in the best writers, restricting
it to borrowing of words pertaining to higher culture only, and often
to coining of new words with the help of Sanskrit vocables, to meet the
necessity of having synonyms for terms of Western life, institutions and
science.
70. A classification of the Bengali dialects is to be, in the first
instance, from the stand -point of Modern Bengali. The composite nature
of the literary speech does not make the early literature which is written
in it very helpful in this matter. Special peculiarities are occasionally
found : <?.^., East Bengal MSS. represent in many ways the [)ronunciation
of the epenthetic « -i- », in spellings like Z^W ^•>^>^«^«t «laikkhya=laksa,
saity& = gatya, tataikkhyan^ = tata ksari^ » , or they show a 1st person
future form in -^^^ « -ibam » side by side with -trti, -ib8, -imu >
from other dialects. In reconstructing the history of the dialects, what
help can be obtained from the forms in Middle Bengali literature is to be
taken, but the basis of dialectal division must be the living dialects
themselves. One work, however, although it is less than 200 years old,
has an exceptional value in the study of dialectal Bengali, as well as
of Bengali phonology : and its value is due primarily to the script in which
it is written. This is the ' Crepar Xaxtrer Ortb-bbed ' ( =^^t^ ^^fe)^f
* Kfpar ^astrer Artha-Bhed ' J» Explatiatioit of the Scripture of Mercy) ^
a catechism of the Roman Catholic religion, written in 17*34? in the
dialect of Dacca by a Portuguese missionary, and printed, in the roman
character according to the Portuguese system of orthography, at Lisbon
in 1743. (S. K. De, ' luropiya-likhita Praelna-tama Mudrita Baggala
Pustak,' and S. K. Chatterji, • Krpar Sastrer Artha-bhed O Baggala
Uccarana-tattva,' in the VSPdP., San 1:3^3, No. :3.)
The dialects of Bengali have some important points of agreement
with Maithili, the most noteworthy being the presence of the root
« aeh » to he; the speech of Agga (Bhugalpur District south of the
EAST MAGADHI APABHRAlNf^A DIALECTS 137
Ganges, and Santal Parganas — ^the ' Chika-chiki ' area of Maithili) and of
Mithila^ tracts adjoint to Bengal proper^ forming probably the basis on which
the dialects of Bengali grew up in Bengal. From Arjga, the Aryan speech
(Magadhi, Prakrit and Apabhransa) seems to have passed down to Rarjha, and
crossed over the Ganges to Pan(Jra-vardhana or Varendra, where the Aryan
language might also have come overland from Mithila. Along the Ganges,
it spread from Agga, Pundra and Racjha to Vagga. A wave of emigration
and cultural influence from Mithila joined forces with Varendra, and later,
perhaps, from Vagga, and the Magadhi Apabhransa was carried to North
Bengal and Kama-rupa, and thence further east into the Assam Valley.
From Ra(]ha, the language spread among the Odra tribes of South-west
Bengal, and from thence it was taken to what is now Orissa. From Souths
west Bengal, the Odra from of Magadhi advanced westwards, in to Jhaija-
khan(]a (Chota Nagpur) and South Kosala (East Central Provinces),
where it came in touch with the speech of South Bihar (Magahi) and
with West Magadhan (Bhojpuri} a), as well as with the Chattis-garhl form
of Eastern Hindi. With the last two, the Oriya speech shows some points
of agreement : c,g,^ the retention of singular and plural distinction in the
verb forms obtains in Chattis-garhi, Bhojpuriya; and Oriya, and the affix
« -man » for the plural of nouns and pronouns oB Chattis-garhl is also
found in Oriya, as « -mana » . The Aryan speech seems to have been
in two forms in Badha, one of which used as a substantive auxiliary
the root « tha » along with the root « ach > , and employed the word
« mang,., mana- < manava » for indicating the plural of names of sentient
beings, and also retained the affix « -n »< « -anam » (the OTA. genitive plural
affix) in the oblique plural (<?..^., « karu-aehai » i>i doing ^ but « karu-thila »
was doing : cf . Bengali ^f^I^f^ « karite-chila » ; « loka-mane » inen,
« l5kag-ka=loka-n-ka, l6k&-man&-g-ka » of men) \ and the other form of
Ra^ha speech did not have these characteristics. From the former
originated Oriya, and the so-called Bengali dialect of South-west
Midnapur. The other is the source of ordinary West Bengali, which,
again, falls into two groups, one of the West, and the other of the
East on the two sides of the Bhagirathl.
IS
13S
INTRODUCTION
71. The dialects of Bengali fall into four main classes, agreeing
with the tour ancient divisions of the country : R3(jha ; Pumjra or
Varendra ; Vaij^a ; and Katna-rupa. Radha and Varendra, and to some
extent Karaa-rupa, have points of similarity which are absent in Vagga ;
and the extreme Eastern forms of the Vagga speech, in Sylhet, Kaehar,
Tippera, Noakhali and Chittagong, have developed some phonetic and
morphological characteristics which are foreign to the other groups. A
great deal of these have unquestionably an ethnic basis. The differences
in pronunciation and stress, as well as in general enunciation and
grammar, which are observable in the Bengali of a Maubhum peasant,
and in that of one from Maimansing, are certainly connected with the
fact that one is mainly Kol (or mixed Kol and Dravidian), and the other
modified Bocjo (Tibeto-Burman), by origin.
An intermingling of dialects, in addition to the dominant inliuence
of the literary language, has made the question complicated. There were
also class dialects, spoken by members of the same class or caste scattered
over a large area. Ever since the beginning of her history, Bengal has
been receiving settlements of people from the West, from Bihar, from
the Benares and Gorakhpur side, from Oudh, from the Pan jab, from
Gujarat, and from the South — ^from Orissa, and even from the Dra vidian
lands. Sometimes these peoples were numerous enough to form self-
contained communities, which stereotyped themselves into castes, thanks
to the exclusiveness of medieval Hindu society ; and when they became
Bengali speakers, their speeches often came to retain certain peculiarities,
and merited the name of ^ class dialects.' The speech of respectable
Brahmans and others scattered all over the country would thus retain
some class features, mainly in vocabulary and idiom, occasionally in
phonetics and morphology, despite the approximation to local dialects.
A respectable non- Brahman caste of West Bengal, for example, has
some peculiarities of speech, one of which, the confusion between
^ « > and ^ « r » , is noticed in and about Calcutta even now,
although education is fast driving it out ; and the Kaivarttas or B§uris,
Bhuin-mahs or Rajbansis, have their communal peculiarities in speech.
LOCAL AND CLASS DIALECTS
Communities which have exerted a dominant cultural influence, like the
Brahmans, have imposed their stamp on the speech as a whole. Bat
as this sort of communal inter-dialectal influencing has been going on
for centuries, guided in some cases by notions and theories of grammar
and good usage, nothing very much definite can be insisted upon it.
But there has been a certain amount of internal movement of
population within the country, from West to East Bengal, and back again,
from East Bengal to North Central Bengal, and from both these tracts to
North Bengal. Brahmans have shared in this movement more than other
communities^ perhaps. There has been also mutual influence in the case
of dialects which are contiguous. The delta tract cannot be said to have
any special dialect of its own, unlike the other parts of Bengal. It is
attached in the west to West Bengali (Rarlha)^ and in the east to East
Bengali (Vagga), with perhaps the influence of Yarendra in the north.
In the border districts of the delta, namely, South Faridpur, East Nadiya,
West Jessore, West Khulna, the Rajha and Vaijga forms intermingle,
where Rajha influences Vagga. The speech of the upper classes in the
western part of the Delta and in Eastern Rajha gave the literary language
to Bengal, and now the educated colloquial of this tract, especially of the
cities of Nadiya and Calcutta, has become the standard one for Bengali,
having come to the position which educated Southern English now occupies
in Great Britain and Ireland.
72, The dialects can be tabulated as in the next page, with the
Districts where they are spoken mentioned under them.
The Benorali dialects cannot be referred to a sinjjle Primitive Ben^^ali
Speech, but they are derived from various local forms of late Ma^adhi
Apabhransa, which developed some common characteristics that mav be called
pan-Bengali: i'.//., * -ila, -iba » for the past and future base, rather than
« -ala, -aba » : « -ia » rather than simple « -i » for the conjunctive ; « -era
<-kera > besides « -ara<-kara » for the 2:enitive; * -ke, -re >^ for the
dative, rather than < -ku » as in Oriya : etc. These pan- Bengali features
link the dialects together as members of a single group, and enabled them to
lie attached to a composite literary language as a matter of cour^e. Takinj^
140
INTRODUCTION
O c3
j5 ^ s ^
> 'S ^ w ^
5?;
to
2 C p ^
OD W >
o
o
2 ^
5 'TJ
5 c ce
o £ g
&0 C3
2 flC
^5
S £ S o 'S '5 -S .« d
B o '
O © ^ h5 Q
f2
CI'
GO
^ r3
^ ^
1
_Q ^ ^ ^ L
§•1 itlMM^.Z^s^^^
o a-,
2 c
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o
^ cs p IS
525
O OQ c '-t
IBS
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33
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^ ^
DIFFERENCES AMONG THE DIALECTS
Ul
this pan-Bengali basis, a Proto-Bengali or Old Bengali Stage can for
practical purposes be postulated in the history of the dialects, or, in mass,
in the history of the Bengali language. Dialectal peculiarities, as much
as common characteristics, were developed independently in the various
dialects^ apart from those cases where mutual influence is plainly visible.
Thus, East Bengali t'lt'f « -il^m » (1st person past) and ^^t^ « -ibara » (1st
person future) are independent formations in the dialect of Vagga, just as
West Bengali forms * -ilum, -ilG, -il5 » and ^C^, ^rtl
« -iba, -ibo, -ibS » are derived fiom similar independent formations in
the Radha dialect ; and neither group can be referred to the other, or to a
Common Old Bengali : although we have to speak of the source forms
of all these — « -ilam, -ibam ^ and < -(i)lum, -(i)bo » , which are found
in the Modern dialects, as equally Old Bengali or Early Bengali forms.
The literary language has all the pan- Bengali characteristics, but
sometimes it leans to one dialect and sometimes to another, although
its basis is *' Gaudiya' or Typical West Central Bengali. It is eminently
representative. In the study of Bengali FJionologij and Morphology in
the following pages, the forms of this full and rather archaic literary
Bengali are considered, as well as those of the Standard Colloquial which
is most intimately connected with it : and dialectal peculiarities, wherever
they are important and interesting, have been noticed.
73. The more important points of divergence among the various
dialect groups of Bengali are noted here.
Phonetic.
The vowel system, in general, is more conservative in Vagga and
North Bengal than in Radha and other parts : Middle Bengali conditions,
with epenthetic « -i- >, are better preserved in the former than in the rest.
East Radha, the Standard Colloquial, has advanced more than any other
dialect in effecting a total change from the Common Bengali type by
introducing largely the habits of mutation, vowel harmony etc. p,g. : East
Radha ^'c^, C^t^ [kore], [rekhe], fiffit [difi], f#Tf% [biliti]=:
Typical East Bengali [koira, raikha, de/i, bilati], respectively hiring done
INTRODUCTION
having ^ept^ mtiite, Eiiropea/i, The open t£i « e » figures as [se] in
Rarjha, but in Varendra, North Bengal and Vagga it is found as a
slightly higher sound, [s] ; and the close « o » of West Bengali frequently
becomes open [s] in Vagga : €,g,, Bengali CS^ oil, <il^ one, CW'I co^unirij,
C^5f icliij are found as [te:], ie:k^ de:J, kaeno] in West Bengali, but as [ts:l,
s:k, ds:J, ks:n] in Typical East Bengali, [s] is occasionally present in
West Bengali as a final sounds but it is not a characteristic sound of the
Standard Colloquial. The tendency in West Bengali is to turn the ^ « a »
[o] sound, as in English dot, to a close <i: o » as much as possible : this
tendency is invading other dialects^ but it was foreign to these. « o » and
« e » , derived and original, are by for ihe most common vowel sounds
of West Bengali ; and < u, i »are laxly pronounced in West Central Bengalij
and tend to become « o, e » . Late Middle Bengali front [a] has merged
into the central or back [a] in the Calcutta colloquial. West Bengali
« o » , original or derived, often becomes « u » in Vagga : this trait is
met with in the extreme West Bengali area too. West Bengali and North
Central Bengali have kept intact the original nasalised vowels ; these
seem to have also been maintained in North Bengali, but in the Vagga
dialects nasalisation is entirely dropped : only in certain Eastern Vagga
dialects, e Chittagongese, nasalisation has recently developed from a
Bengali intervocal « -m- > {e,g,, ^Tt^ < amar^ » w/3^>^^ « Sr »). The West
Ra'rjha dialect in characterised by a fondness for nasalisation, especially in the
verbal indeclinable in « ia » ; in literary Middle Bengali, this West Rsdha
feature is prominent in some authors : e.g., Tff^^ll « rakhiya » West Racjha
^t^l ^t^^T [rakhg], in Middle Bengali written Wtf^^l « rakhina > .
The stress system in West Central Bengali is predominantly initial,
both in words and phrases. This results in the dropping of vowels
in unstressed medial syllables, and thus in shortening of the forms of words
{e.g., West Bengali ^1; '^t^^ [kojti pathor] loucli stone =.^oxi\\ and North
Central Bengali [kojoti], from Old Bengali [koJo:ti] =MIA. « *kassa-
vattia » ==Skt. < karsa-pattika » ), and in polysynthetic expressions. (See
later, under Stress System in Julorphologif.^ The stress system in other
dialects has not been properly studied ; the general tendency now seems
CONSONANTS IN THE BENGALI DIALECTS
to be to bring it to the head of the word, but non-iQitial stress is still
present in many forms of folk- Bengali.
As regards consonants, Vagga is easily distinguished by some
special features, the disaspiration of the medial aspirates in all cases :
«gh, dhj bh » being pronounce i in all cases as « g, d, b, > , and «3h» as
« z » ; and « (Jh-, -(Jh- > -rh- » as -r- » . In other dialects, it may be
said that the old values are preserved iniiialli/ : only « bh » tends become
a bilabial or denti-labial spirant, [u] or [v] : and medialhj^ there is a
tendency to lose aspiration of all sorts, of the tenues as welL The
palatals « c eh, j jh » are pronounced as dental affricates «ts s, dz z» iu
Vagga and in North Bengal ; in Radha and Varendra, the old values
of palatal affricates, made with the front of tha tongue flattened out and
pressed on the supra-alveolar region, still obtain, but Varendra has been
much under the influence of Vagga in this respect, and the tongue-
tip-alveolar affricates are also heard there. The latter sound occasionally
is found in Radha also. « -d- -dh->-r-, -rh- » are pronounced as « r, rh *
in Vagga and North Bengal; and although mrely iu some of the Vagp^a
tracts « r » does occur, the absence of it can be said to characterise
the eastern dialects. « n- » and « 1- » are interchangeable in Radha ; and a
North Bengali characteristic is the omission of initial « r- » , or the
intrusion of it in a word beginning with a vowel {ejj.y < ram » for « am^ *
mango, and < am > for « Ram^ > : like the Londoner's h-), Intervocal « -h- »
is weak in all dialects, except in West Radha, where « -h- » is often brought
in to give force to a stressed, emphatic syllable. Initial « h- » is preserved
in West Central and in North Central Bengali ; but it is very weak in A'agga
and in North Bengali. In Vagga it is generally dropped ; and in many parts
of Vagora, a glottal stop is substituted for it : e.g,, Standard Literary Bengali
^tc^ « haibe » ^vill he (3rd person)=West Radha [Rob'bsk, fiab'fisk^, West
Central [fiobe], Typical East Bengli [oibo, ''oibo]. This dropping of « h » is
another peculiarity of most of the Vagga dialects. The single «s»of Common
Bengali, derived from « s, ^, s » of OIA., tends to become « h * in initial
positions (and in rare cases medially) in Vagga, and in initial and other
positions in North Bengali. It is a regular characteristic of Assamese, where
144
INTROBUCTION
the sibilant became an « h » ((?.^., Assamese « manuh§l<maiiusa; bahi<bftsi»
etc.) : in Assamese now it is the unvoiced guttural spirant [x] : but in Vaijga
this tendency was checked, and was not allowed to have full play, probably
through resistance of communities speaking West Bengali dialects.
« -y- » in a consonant nexus brings about epenthesis in Vagga and North
Bengali, and to some extent in VarSndra ; and the groups ^ ^ ^ « ks,
311, hm » , pronounced like « kkhy, ggy, my behave in the same way ;
Ba^ha is free now from this < •y-> -i- * epenthesis.
Eastern, especially South-eastern Vagga, is remarkable for further
changes in phonetics. « k , p » initial or intervocal, tend generally to be
spirantised to [x, r], and [f] frequently is reduced to [h] in Chittagongese.
There is elision of single intervocal stops and aspirates on a large scale in
South-eastern Vaijga (Chittagong) ; where also the groups « -1-s- > -1-z-,
-r-s- > -r-z- » , (where the « -s- » is the verb root « aeh, ch » ), develop into
* 'h(y)'y -rg(y)- * * standard Bengali 5l%tfl ^?tf^ < ealiySchi,
k&riyachi » I have walked^ I have done = Chittagongese ^ ts&il-si, kair-si>
tsoilzi, koirzi > *tsoilyi, ^koiryi > tsoilgyi, koirgyi, tsoilgi, koirgi » ;
Standard Bengali ^f%^ « kuriya » lazy = Chittagongese « kurya >
kurgya » , etc.
Morphol ogica I .
In the declension of the noun, ' South-west Bengali ^ shows its affinity
to Oriya by possessing the affix « -m&n^, -men^ » for the plural, and the
ablative affix « -u » : cf . Oriya « -mana ; -u ». Radha proper hast he affix
« -adi-era < -der^ » for the genitive plural and oblique plural ; and
«-der^» is found in Varendra also, but seems to be absent in North Bengali,
and not to be popular with the Vagga dialects. The literary dialect prefers
« adika -f -era > *adi-kera > -diger^ ». West Radha has the Common
Bengali plural affix « gula < kula » in the form of « gul-a-k »,
East Radha as « guno », VarSndra as « gula», North Bengali as « gula, gila,
gla, la > , and Vagga as « gulain, gun » ; and East Vagga « -ain < -ani »
is an old affix which is based on the genitive plural affix « -anam » of
OIA. Radha South-West Bengali,' West Radha, West Central Bengali),
Tarendra and Kama-rupa agree in having « -kt',-ki » as the proper affix
DIALECTAL DECLENSION & CONJUGATION
145
for the dative, whereas the Vagga dialects prefer « -re » (except Chakma).
The locative affix is « -t-e » in Kadha, « -t-e^ -t » in Varendra, and « -t »
in Kama-rupa and Vagga. The post-positions are numerous, and each
group shows its special predilections : e.y., Radha would prefer ^tcsf
^ sS-gge » ivith, but Vagga ^jt^^ « siithe », and in some parts ^C5t « l&,ge ».
As regards pronouns, West Radha has strong forms like « mohir^
m^har^ » 7711/ = Standard Bengali c^f^ « mor^ » , and North Varendra
and North Bengali show, apparently as a result of Maithill influence,
forms with « h- * like « ham- > for^fsf « ami- » /'etc. The Vagga dialects
have the affix « -go » which is added to the singular genitive to form
the genitive plural : e.g,^ « mor-go, tor-go, ta-g5 » our, jjonVy their.
This « -go » affix is found in Radha as well, but employed differently :
* ama-go, toma-go » owr, your. In Varendra and North Bengal, this
* -go » is apparently extended to « go-r, gho-r, gh&r » . South-east Vagga
has developed a double form for the 3rd personal pronoun : * hi-te » for
se » he^ she.
In conjugation, there are some noteworthy points of divergence,
specially between Western Bengali and Eastern Bengali. ^ South-west
Bengali ' has the affix « -u » for the second person : « tui c§,lu, c&l-l-u
(e&l-n-u, can-u-u), cal-b-u » ihou walkesf^ thm duht tvalky thou shall
2calk : this « -u » is found in Varendra and in North Bengal. The
affix <c -i » for the first person, past tense, is found in * ^ outh-west
Bengali' (as in Oriya) and in Western Radha: * mui di-l-i » I gave
but it is absent in the other dialects. The past first person affix « -(i)lum,
-lii, -lis » is found in Radha and in Kamarupa, and obviously it existed
in Varendra as well : the Vagga form « -ilam » has been adopted
in the ^ sadhu-bhasa,' and « -ilam > -ilera » has been super-imposed
on most dialects, including even the West Central {Le, StandarJ,
Colloquial) Dialect. In the formation of the compound tenses, the
progressive tenses show a difference in Kadha and Varendra on the one
band, and in Vagga on the other: the latter formed it with the
present participle in « -ite » + the verb substantive, whereas in the
former, it seems to be made, not with the « -ite » participle, but with
19 •
146
INTRODUCTION
a different verbal form -h the verb substantive : e,g,y literary Bengali
^HCvdC^ (in prose) « c&lito-che » , sf^^W (in poetry only) « eali-che » , both
meaning is walking^ = Radha dialects, ' South-west Bengali/ West Radha,
and East Radha, respectively [cfol-the, cjol-cjhe, cfol-c(e], Yarendra [cfoUse],
which are forms without « -ite » ; but in West and South Vagga
[ 1soilte-se]. West Ba4ha occasionally has a past perfect with the
adjective in «-!-»: e.^/., C^f^^ « gel^-ehila^ » for Common Bengali f^f^Tf^«1
« giya-chila » had gone. Eastern and South-eastern Vagga dialects are
characterised by the « -r- > forms for the progressive tense : which are
discussed at their proper place in Morj)hoIogf/.
74. Political and social reasons have brought about the present
unity of speech in Bengal, despite the fact of dialects. From the time
of the Palas, the greater part of Bengal formed portions of one empire.
Gauda and Vagga are frequently spoken of together, Cauda meaning North
Central Bengal, West Bengal, and the Western part of the Delta,
and Vagga including not only Bengal beyond the Brahmaputra, but also a
considerable part of the Delta. Brahmans were settled in the country
from very early times in the history of Aryan Bengal. They first
established themselves in the Aryanised parts, Varendra and Radha, and
thence spread to Vagga and elsewhere ; and they formed a common
intellectual aristocracy for Bengal, bound together by the closest ties of
social unity. The Brahmans, both of Varendra and Radha, who trace
their descent from a common ancestr}', rendered, together with the
Kayasthas, who were partly the landed aristocracy of Bengal, perhaps
the greatest service in uniting the four Bengals, the masses of which could
not have any notions of kinship and union. Ra^ha and Varendra
Brahmans formed settlements in Vaijga, and those who were settled in
Vagga kept up their marital and social relations with their kinsmen in
the West, even when separated by hundreds of miles, throughout the
medieval (Moslem) times down to the present day. It was an object
lesson in social and communal unity for the other sections of the people.
If it had not been brought about by some sort of political union under
the Palas just when the foundations of the Bengali language were laid, and
FACTORS HELPING LINGUISTIC UNITY
147
by the dispersion o£ a well-organised Brahman community all over Bengal,
and Kayastha participation in their efforts, the evolution of a common
nationality and of one type o£ culture and literature among the people of
heterogeneous origin in West Bengal, in East Bengal, in North Bengal,
would have been extremely problematic » There would have grown up,
linguistically and culturally, three Bengals — Radha, Yarendra and
Vagga, — North Bengal going to Kama-rxipa (Assam), and thci Delta being
divided up between Ba.'ha and Vagga: and each of these Bengals
almost as self-contained as Orissa or Assam* In this way, Bihar has been
split up into two tracts : the Gauges has its share in this division, no doubt,
but the absence of political union and of a common intellectual aristocracy
are among the reasons that the very slight dialectal differences between
Maithill and Magahi have not been bridged over by a common literary
language, and the two peoples speaking these dialects united into one.
Of all the extra-Bengali dialects contiguous to Bengali, namely, Maithill,
Magahi, Assamese and Oriya, it is the last which has the greatest sense
of closeness with Bengali. Magadha lost all her ancient culture and her
glory, and she gradually became a part of Hindostan. Maithili and
Bengali scholars kept up an intimate intellectual communion for some
centuries, bat socially Mithila Brahmans and Bengal Brahmans formed
distinct communities, and when from the end of the 16th century the
University of Nadiya took up the study of NyHya seriously, Bengal
students ceased to go to Mithila, and all entente with the * Tirahuta ' or
Maithila Pandits ceased. Orissa, with her independence, and her high
culture, her contiguity to a great Dravidian people, the Telugus, and her
openness to be influenced culturally by the Dravidian South, as wqW as
with her developing her peculiar alphabet from that current in Bengal and
all Eistern India, would havedriftei away from Bengal as much as Mithila
and Assam, But the shrine of Jagannatha at Puri has always attracted
Bengali pilgrims, and in this way some sort of connection with the heart
of Orissa was kept up by the Bengali people ; and the personality of
Caitanya, who was received with as much enthusiasm in Orissa as in
Bengal, served as a strong link in binding the two peoples. The Vaisnava
148
INTRODUCTION
revival under Caitanya gave an additional impetus towards effecting the
solidarity of Bengal. It gave an exalted expression to religious impulses
and emotions which are peculiarly Bengali ; and it considerably increased
the stock of national literature. The Vaisnavism of Caitanya spread
into Orissa, where it was whole-heartedly received ; and there it did not
weaken Oriya culture, but on the other hand gave a distinct impetus to
Oriya literature, which became as firmly established as that of Bengal.
Through the Vaisnavism of Caitanya and his personality, a communion
of spirit between the Oriya and Bengali peoples has been established,
in which the speakers of the other Magadhan speeches have no part.
Assamese under her independent kings, and her social life entirely
self-contained, became an independent speech, although her sister dialect,
North Beagali, accepted the vassalage of the literary speech of Bengal.
In the Mahapurusiya movement of iSagkara-deva, who was an elder
contemporary of Caitanya, the Assamese language and literature came to
their own, and union between a self -conscious Assamese people with that
of Bengal in matters linguistic and literary is unlikely, when such a
union would mean the merging of Assamese into Bengali.
75. With the Moslem conquest, the united tracts of Radha, Var^ndra,
Bagarl (the Delta), Vagga with Srlhatta (Sylhet) and Cattala (Chittagong),
and West Kama-rupa received a common name, ' Bangalah ^ or Bengal, which
is merely an extension of the appellation for the people of Vagga or East
Bengal. The various dialests of the provinces which were members of
one family group did not rejoice in a common name even when a literary
standard was fixed and generally adopted. These now came to acquire the
common name of the ^ Language of Bengal,' Bengali. The Persian-using
Moslems (and following them the Portuguese) first called the language
by the name which came to be applied to the whole country — « zaban-i-
Bangalah* (and « Idioma Bengalla*). The people themselves spoke of their
native speech merely a^ « bhasa » or current speech, as opposed to Sanskrit
or Persian : and the word « prakrta », to mean the language of the land, was
frequently used by the Pau4»ts. The term Gaurla, which at first referred to
West and North Central Bengal generally, the tract the speech of which
NAMES FOR THE BENGALI LANGUAGE
149
was regarded as the standard form of Bengali, came gradually to be used
with regard to the language. In the 16th century, Nadiya is described
as being within Gauda-desa ; and the Vaijga country or East Bengal,
as well as the dialect of Varjga, is contrasted with the land and speech
of Gauda. The first native name for Bengali was thus « Gauda-bbasa, »
probably coming into u«?e as early as the 16th century. This name
continued down to the beginning of the 19th century, nay, even later, side
by side with the new name « Vaijga-bhasa » or « Baggala-bhasa Raja Ram
Mohan Ray, the first Bengali to write a grammar of his mother tongue,
called his work ' G audiya Vyakarana * (in English, ^Grammar of the
Bengali Linguage,' published in 1833, but finished several years earlier).
Madhusudan Datta, the poet, refers to the people of Bengal as C^\^-^
« GaU'ja-jana » in his ^ Meghanada-vadha Kavya,' in the sixties of the
last century. The Persian name for the language, <c zaban-i-Bangalah »,
and the HindostanI form of it, « Bangali zaban » , were heard in the
law-courts ; and the name « Bangalah » , in its Bengali form
<c Baijgala » , later ^T^^l, ^tS^'^l, ^t'^l « Baggala, Baggglla, Bsgla » , became
familiar to Bengalis as a name for their language. Even HindostanI
borrowed the word again from Bengali in the form Ufij « Bagg^la »
tke Bengali language. And the English, following the Portuguese and
the Mohammedan rulers of Bengal, used no other name. In 1778,
Nathaniel Brassey Halhed published his 'Grammar of the Bengal Language*
from ' Hoogly in Bengal ' — the first book printed in Bengali characters.
Some 35 years before that, the Portuguese Padre Manoel da Assumpijam
had written his ^ Yoeabulario em Idionia Bengalla, e Portuguez ' (Lisbon,
1 743). In the title-page of the Serampore edition of Krtti-vasa*s 'Ramayana'
(180-i), we see the note f T^^^f ^^tf^ ^T^^ * Kf tti-bas^ Baijgali-bhasay
racily » A', composed in the Bengali language. The term ^ Gaufjiya bhtisa '
or ^ Gamjiya sadhu-bhasa,^ which was common enough in Bengal, gradually
fell into disuse. ' Baggali-bha^a ' is the name given in the ' Hutom P^car
Naksa' (186 i), ^^^1 * Bagg(a)la-bhasa, Bagla, »
and in the high style, ^5f « Bagga-bhasa » are the Bengali names for the
language now in universal use.
APPENDIX A
A Note on the Affinities between the North-western and the
Eastern Groups of New Indo-Aryan Languages, upon which
Grierson bases the Theory of a Connexion between them as
Members of an * Outer ' Group (as in §§ 81 ff. in Sir George
A. Grierson's Paper on Indo-Aryan Vernaculars, in the
* Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, London
Institution,' Vol. I, Part III, 1920). (See Page 32.)
76. A. Phonetic,
(a) Retention of final « -i, -e » (and « -ii » ) in the North-western
and Eastern languages. Grierson compares Kasmlrl « aeW » , Sindhi
« akh> » ei/e, with BihSrl (Maithili, see p. 92) « 5kh^ , aggor < aggarii ,
dekhathii » = et/e.^charcoal, let him see*
The retention of final vowels, fully or slightly pronounced, cannot
be adduced as an evidence of close connexion between the two groups of
speech. All lA. vernaculars at some time or other retained the final
vowels. Some are conservative in this respect : e.g., Oriya, and certain
forms of Eastern Hindi and Western Hindi, which still cling to them.
Others have begun dropping them, and the almost inaudible « i ii » which
we find are only what can be expected during the transitional stage :
Maithili and Sindhi present this stage, although in Maithill there seems
to be a greater advance towards the dropping of these final vowels than
in Sindhi. In others, again, the final vowels have been entirely got rid
of ; as in the case of Hindostani, Marathi, Gujarat!, Bengali (in the last,
however, tatsama and foreign words ending in two consonants have a
vowel after them). Bengali has « Skh » e)/e as an archaic word in
the colloquial, and ^tf^ « akhi » , the fuller form, obtains in the language
of jx)etry. Five hundred years ago, the final vowels were pronounced in
Bengali. They are pronounced even now in Oriya, in which language
AFFINITIES AMONG THE NIA. SPEECHES
151
they say « ja,]^, Gopal§r, Narayana, Ramii, » and even « s&r&dar& » for
the Hindustani (Persian) « sardar ». Hindostani (Hindi) has dropped
the final vowel « -a » or « -u » in words like « Kasyap, sumiran, santap,
dan, bic, ueit, sukh, puttr, anugrah » , etc., but the final vowels
were retained in Western Hindi (Braj-bhakha of prose) at least as late as
the first half of the 17th century, as can be seen from a late ^Middle Hindi
text (Commentary on the ' Srijgara-sataka ' of Bhartf hari ; see ' Journal
of the UP. Historical Society/ Vol, I, No. 1, article by R. P. Dewhurst).
Even at the present day, the final « -i, -u » are not absent in Braj-bhakha
and in Kanaujl, which are representative Midland speeches : e,f/., in the
Braj of Aligarh, we have batu » s/mre, « malu » pi'operfj/ (from the
Perso- Arabic « mal »• ), « sabu » ol/, <^ akalu » /amines « kaggalu » poor,
« phiri » again, « petu » heU^, « auru > and, « duri » fitsfance, « naukaru»
servant (Persian), « jwabu » anmver (Perse- Arabic « jawab »), « eku » one.
(LSI., IX, Part I, pp. 281-282.) Kanaujl has similar forms in « -i, -u». In
Braj, the present participle affix is both « -tu » and « -t »; and the verb
indeclinable has « -i e.g., « kari, dhari, bhari, dekhi, jai » = Hindostani
« kar, dhar, bbar, dekh, ja ». Similar final « -i, -u » pronunciation obtained
in Eastern Hindi at the time of Tulasi-dasa : there is ample evidence in
his poetry, and in the deed of arbitration written out by Tulasi-dasa
(Grierson, * The Modern Vernacular Literature of Hindustan/ Calcutta^
1889, pp. xxvi-xxvii), we find fornas like « taphasllu » ( = Perso- Arabic
« tafsll » ), « Ananda-ramu, Todara-malu » and « tini ansa » (hree -sZ/ares,
and even « hujati » ( = Perso- Arabic « hujjat »). Modern Eastern Hindi
has retained the final vowels even at the present day : e.g., in a recent
Hindi drama ( ^ Netronmilan Natak/ by the Misra Brothers of Allahabad,
Calcutta, Samvat 1971; Act III) a character, speaking the Awadhi
jjatois, employs the forms « sScU; jhutu, hatbu, dinu, agahanu =
AgrahSyana, sathu, aju, halu (= Perso- Arabic hal), manu, kamu, kaju,
parapaiicu, curu, khetu ; lari, pahiri, beci » etc. In Eastern Panjabi,
associated with Western Hindi, an indistinct « -8 » is frequently heard at
tiie end of words. In the Bihari dialects, the suggestion of a final vowel
occurs only in Maithili : it is lost in Magahl and in BhGjpuriya.
152
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX A
In the matter of retention of final sounds, it seems no inference
can be drawn, connecting the Eastern (Magadhan) speeches with those
to the west and north-west of the Midland speech. All NIA. languages
which have dropped the final vowels passed through the transitional stage,
which is now noticeable in Maithill and SindhI, and also in dialectal
Western Hindi.
(b) Epenthesis is certainly present in the Eastern languages, and it
is specially a characteristic of Eastern Mai]^adlian (Bengali-Assamese-Oriya).
On the other hand, it is absent in Marathi and in Sindhi among the 'outer ^
languages of the West, although it is found in Gujarat!, and Lahndi,
as w^ell as in the Dardic KasmTrL In the Midland speech, sporadic
cases of epenthesis do occur : €,g.^ in Sauraseni Prakrit, we have
« para-kera-ttanarrpara-karya-tvan-x, peranta = paryanta, sundera=
saundarya » (Pischel, * Gramm. der Prakrit-Spr.,^ §176). But epenthesis
cannot be said to characterise Western Hindi. Epenthesis is entirely absent
in Old Bengali, and it developed only in the Early Middle Bengali period.
Maithill epenthesis, and that in Western Panjabi (and Kasmin) are also
admittedly late ; and it would be extremely hazardous to refer the epenthesis
as found in the modern Eastern and in some of the modern Western
speeches to a common source in a hypothetical ^ outer ' Aryan dialect.
[The Bengali word quoted by Grierson under this head, ^^i? « bagun »
aubergine^ as being from « *vai)gan^ », is a dialectal from, = Standard Bengali
C^^5( « begun » , f rom « baigon, baigan < baigana <baiggana » (the last
form found in Old Oriya as in the inscription of Nrsinha IV, A. C. 1395),=
Skt. « vatiggana » : the « -u » aflix, as in « *vagganu », is typically Western,
and not Magadhl. The word 'srf^^^ <c agun y> fire is not from a form like
«*aganu », but it is a seyni-taisama, ^^f^? « aguni < agni», « agni » being
pronounced like [^Jgg^ni] in the Magadhi Apabhran^a stage, the neutral
sound of [a] becoming [u] in Old Bengali through the influence of the
preceding velar consonant. The old tadbhava 'Spffff « agi < aggT, *aggia <
*agnika » occurs in Middle Bengali] .
(c) Pronunciation of « i » as « e » , and of » u » as o » . In the
eastern languages, especially Bengali, «i» and «u» are lax vowels,
AFFINITIES AMONG THE NIA. SPEECHES 153
like the vowels o£ 'English pU, put. Naturally, as the tongue does not have
a very high position, there is a tendency to turn them to the low sounds of
« e, 0 » . In the Prakrit stage, « i » before two consonants often became
« e » , and short « u » similarly became « o » : e.g., « bella = bilva, pokkhara
=puskara, p6tthaa = pustaka » . Alternation of « i : e, u : o » is not
unknown to Western Hindi : e.g., Braj-bhakha « mohi : muhi, ti3hi : tuhi
and the fact that the short forms of « e, o » are '•t i, u » in the causal and
other forms in W. Hindi, e.g., « bolaa : bulana ; dekhna : dikhana ; ek ;
ikattah* etc., shows that there was the lax pronunciation of « i, u » and the
close one of « e, o » , approximating to each other, as in Bengali. (Cf. also
Kellogg, ' Hindi Grammar^', p. 3).
(d) Change of « u » to « i » is not a chaniderhtic of the Eastern
languages, although it is found in them, as in all other NIA. speeches,
more or less. It also occurs in W. Hindi : ^.y., « khilna » beside < khulna »
to openly m a 6iid; « chigguli » beside < ehuggull » little Jinger'=:< "^ksull'-
aggulika*; « phislana, phuslana » lead astray by sweet words. Against
W. Hindi < balu » sand, with « u » , Skt. « valuka »,= Bengali ^tft « ball » ,
cf. W Hindi « ginna » counts Bengali ^S<R « gun&n^ * i » in W. Hindi,
but « u » in Bengali, f or « a » of OIA.).
[The word « tanik » a little , derived from a Magadhi Apabhransa
form « *tanukki » , by Grierson, is not Bengali, but it is good Western
Hindi, being found in Sura-dasa, among others.]
(e) The change of « ai < ai » and < au <aii » to an open « e » =
[s] and open « o » lb [o], is not a characteristic of the Eastern * outer '
speeches, although it is found in Kajasthanl-Gujaratl, Sindhi, Lahndi,
and other Western ' outer ' dialects. It is also a noteworthy characteristic
of modern Western Hindi as well : so much so that at the present day,
the English sounds of [jb] (as in man^ which is a rather low kind of [&]),
and of [o] (as in hot), are indicated respectively by the letters q « ai »
and ^ « au > in High Hindi : e.g.^ %^ hat, m^^x manager, fft^if Harriion,
^Xzx beside daughter, etc. In a Hindi translation, from English, of
Victor Hugo's * Les Miserables,' the name Cosette is written ^its. Cf .
« kahi>kai> kai > > ke ; kahu >kau > kau > * [ko:] > ko ; ai,
20
154
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX A
au<ai, ail » are ordinarily pronounced with rather low tongue position
in the AVestern Hindi homeland: « hai » sounding as [fise, Bs:], or even as
[fise:], « aur » as [Aor, o6r, 3:r].
« au » in tatsama words, = «au > of Sanskrit, is pronounced [ou]
in Bengali, much like the Southern English o in joke [dgoiik] ; and of
course, in tadbhnva words, <c au » of Skt. occurs as « 5 » . The Assamese
pronunication given by Grierson, « oxodh » for « ausadba » , is a late
semi'tatsama pronunication, coming from an earlier [o^Jodfio], [*>^]
changing to [o]. Similarly, we have « ai » >[oi]>Lo] in East Bengali :
« aikya » = [oikkio>oikko>9ikko> okko], «aisvarya» = [oj/w3r^jo>
ojjordzo] . The Bengali ^^t^^ « bhala » is pronounced "^^^1 [bfialo], and some
reformers of Bengali spelling write the word as^tC^I : it comes from an Old
Bengali « *bhala\Va »=Magadhi Apabhransa « ^hallawa, bhallaa », Magadhi
Prakrit « ^bhallaga », Skt. « bhadra-ka « awa » of Old Bengali changing
into « a » i.e,, long « a » in Early Middle Bengali, and then to « o » in New
Bengali. Bengali « bhala, -o » cannot be from « *bhalaii>bha]au »,
which would be a Western Apabhransa nominative form : the Bengali form
is the mere base ; and the nominative form from Magadhi Prakrit expected
in Bengali would be either « *bhali < bhalle = bhadrah » , or « *bhale
< * bhallai < "^bhallage = bhadrakah » .
(f) The change of « c, j » to « ts (s), dz (z) » is found only in East
Bengali and Assamese, and is absent in West Bengali and * Bihari.' The
Assamese and East Bengali dentalisation of the palatal affricates is due
probably to the influence of Tibeto-Burman (see p. 79) ; and in Parbatiya
and other PaharT, a similar source for dentalisation can be postulated. In
Southern Oriya, dentalisation similarly occurs through the influence of
Telugu (LSI., Vol. V, Part II, p. 369) ; and in Marathl, where the
palatal pronunciation is found before the front vowels, « ee, ei, el » , and
the dental before the back ones, « tsa, tsa, tso, tsii, tsu », we have also
W V/ V> V v>
nrobably the influence of the Dravidian Telugu. Even in Assamese and
Aast Bengali, the palatal « e, j » pronunciation is not absent. The dental
affricate sound in NIA. does not in any way prove specially intimate
connection between those languages or dialects which have » it. Grierson
AFFINITIES AMONG THE NIA. SPEECHES
155
himself explains some of the statements of the Prakrit grammarians with
regard to the pronunciation of the palatals to mean that in ^auraseni,
the source of Western Hindi, and in MaharastrT, IA.« c, j » had developed
the « ts dz » sound. (This question has been discussed later, under
Phonology — Phonetic History of I A.) Later, according to him. North
Sauraseni « ts dz » again became « c, i » . (Cf. JRAS., 191-3, pp. 711 ff.,
' The Pronunciation of the Prakrit Palatals So that, if that were ?o,
Mftgadhi, an ^ outer ' language, which did not dentalise, disagreed with
Sauraseni, the Midland, ^ inner ' language, on a point in which the latter
agreed with Mahariistri, another speech which is relegated to the ' outer '
^roup. Further, the dental sounds are not found in the ' outer ' speeches
Sindhi and Lahndl, So that this point iivould prove no greater connection
between the Eastern and Western groups than between the Western and
Midland groups. Moreover, although full « ts dz » sounds seem to be
absent in the Midland language, opinion differs on this point : Hoernle
observes Gaudian Grammar,' §11, following Kellogg) that ' the W. Hindi
palatals are rather more dental than the English ; /.e., more like U dz ; '
while Prof. Daniel Jones (in the course of a private talk) regarded the
Hindostani « e, j » as being more like pure palatal stops than affricates ;
and my own observation is that they are palatal affricates [cf, J5], rather
than the tongue-tip alveolars ones [tjf, dg],
(g) The letters \g, « i|, u > represent, intervocally, the sounds of
y » in Early Bengali, and to some extent in Modern Bengali. These
arise commonly from a single « m » between two vowels. In practice,
these letters indicate only a mere nasalisation of the connected vowel : the
the word C^tWf^ « gosaili » = « goswami » is also of written C^t'Tt^^j
C^tt^t^ « gosfti » in Bengali. Assamese C^Wf^ is really [goxai]. The palatal
nasal, « n » [ ], such as is found in French, Italian and Spanish, does not
occur in NIA. W. Hindi words like « bhul, gusai » can also be written
with ^ « n » : this is only a device in spelling.
[The words « thaw, thani > , quoted by Grierson, are probably
developed thus : 01 A. « sthaman > place, whence Sauraseni Prakrit
<«*thama» and iSaur. Ap. « *thawu », resulting in AV. Hindi* thaw »;
156
INTRODUCTION: APPENDIX A
Magadhi Prakrit « ^fchame » > Magadh! Ap, « *thawi » , whence Bengali
« thSi » , written ^tfi)3, ]
(h) The use of « r » for « 1 » and « r < » is almost as common
in W. Hindi as in the ' outer ' languages Sindhi and Biharl. In the
Braj-bhakha, as in the poems of Sura-dasa and fiibarl-lala, and others, we
find words like « bara (bala), gara (gala), jarai (jalai, jale), pakarai (pakarai),
larihau ( = lar&ga), bigarai ( = bigare), sabhara (samhala-), bira (bira),
kiwara (kiwara)^ pawara ( = prabala), bijurl (bijll), dubara (=durbala),
ghari (gharl), phari (=^phalika, phalaka), pajaryo (=prajvalita), baura
( = mukula), sara ( = salya), tamora ( = tambula), bahuri ( = vi-a-^ghut-),
jura jura), bhlra ( = bhira), saraha-(=-v/s]agh-) » etc., etc., instances
being numerous. Lallu-lSla in the * Raja-niti ' has < syar^ (=srgala),
(found also in HindostanI), nikaryau (=nik^la), ber ( =vela) », among
others.
This confusion betwween « r r 1 » , with preference for « r » , is
unknown to Bengali (dialectal Bengali confuses « r » and « r »j but
never these sounds with « 1 » ), to Oriya, to Marathl, and to Lahndi.
In this matter, however the Eastern (Magadhi) Prakrit, the hypothetical
source of the ' outer ' languages of the East, stood apart from all other
forms of MIA., and possibly also OIA., in having only «1», and
no « r » .
(i) Interchange of « d, d » cannot be called a peculiarity which is
shared in common between the languages of the East and of the West,
in contrast to the Midland speech. The case of the Sindhi « dd » = [d']
is peculiar. In Assamese, the substitution of alveolars for both cerebrals
and dentals is unique among Indian languages, Aryan, Dravidian, and Kol,
and is undoubtedly due to the influence of Tibeto-Burman. The Eastern
languages generally maintain a rigid distinction between the two classes
of sounds, whatever may be the ease in dialectal forms of Lahndl (Thall)
and Gujarati (Pars! dialect). « d > d » is not an uncommon phonetic
change in the Midland language too : <?.^., in the ' Satasai ' of Biharl,
we have «dlthi (=dfsti), dfyorhT (=dehall), cjorha ( = dvyardhaka) ». In
High Hindi we find « dabh (=darbha), darha ( = c?arldha, dagdha), darhl
AFFINITIES AMONG THE NIA. SPEECHES
157
( = (]aDstrika)^ darim ( = cladimba), dandi ( = dandika), dasna ( = ^dans),
(]6ll (= Vdul) » ; cf. Hindostani « derh » = Bengali (Tf^ « der^ * y Ih-
(j) Change of « d » to « J » through influence of a preceding or
following palatal vowel is an extremely rare phenomenon in lA., although
change of « d(h)y » to « i(h) » is a regular phonological law. It certainly
cannot be described as a characteristic common to the * outer ' languages,
because we have at the best only some unique sporadic cases in
East Magadhan {e, g,, Bengali « jhi », Oriya « jhia » = « dhita,
duhita*), in Marathl («Dij» = « nid, nidra»), in Sindhi (« ggi3ha»=«giddhu,
gfdhra »).
(k) « -mb- > -m- » is a change found also in W. Hindi, and « -mb- >
*b » is found in the Eastern languages, at least in Bengali. W. Hindi has
« jamun » besides « jSbu » ( = jambuka) ; and in W, Hindi < nim » is more
common than « nib » ( = nimba). But ef. Bengali dialectal ^t^t «ab^
(amra), tiba (tamra) » , besides -sppl, < am?l, tama Bengali has C^T^,
C5?^« lebu, nebu » for the HindostanI « lemu * ( = nimbuka). In Early
Bengali, « ^b > and « -mb- » both are found : Old Bengali « tabola » (Carya
28) ; Middle Bengali « cumba, jamb(h)ira, lamba » etc,
[The form « lam » given by Grierson, = « lamba » , is not Bengali.]
(1) Elision of intervoeal « -r- > : it cannot be said to be specially
noticeable in the 'outer' speeches, and it is also found in W. Hindi: e.g.,
« kari > kai » having done ; < apara > avaru > auru, aru > aur, au » a)id
(« au » an Indo-Aryan word, rather than from Persian « u » < Old Persian
« uta », Avestan < uta ») ; « pari > par, pai » /(/jo/i (from « upari », rather than
from <c prati »). Omission of « r » in the middle of a word before a stop or
aspirate is a characteristic of folk- Bengali even of the present day,
and it is a Prakritic habit which still persists in the language; but
intervoeal «r» is never dropped in Bengali.
[The word ^«1t^ < mailam », quoted by Grierson as an example of loss
of intervoeal « r » in Bengali, is archaic and dialectal in Bengali, and is from
« *maya + illa + amha<*mrta-|-ila-hasma » : « mrta>maya » is a Prakritic
form, the eounterpai-t of which is found in « mua » in W. Hindi, which
would be a case of exactly similar kind of early loss of « r > .]
158
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX A
(m) Change of infervocal « s- » to « -h- » is not a specially * outer '
characteristic, and it is found in a few instances in W. Hindi also : e, g,^
« tasya > tassa > tasa > taha > ta- (ta-ko, ta-hi etc.) » \ « karisyati >
karissadi > karlsai > karihai » ; in the second instance, future « -sy-, -sy-
> -h- » , the Western ^ outer ^ languages preserve the sibilant: e.g,^
Gujarat! « kai^se » , Kajasthani (Jaipur!) « kar^s! » , Lahndi « karesi » .
In the num^als, the change of -s- » to « -h- » is found in all MIA.
and NIA. : e.g,^ W. Hindi « igarah, barah, cauhattar > etc., and it cannot
be determined where these forms originated : but it looks as if they are
Midland in origin (the Pali forms resemble the Hind5stani ones most
closely, but they do not show the change from < -s- » to « -h- » , which
took place in the late MIA. period). Isolated words like « kehari »
(=:kesarin), « pahan » ( = pasana) are met with in Braj-bhakha. The word
« pohe ^cattle ( = pasu ?) is a good Hindostani word.
The change of initial « s (= s) » to « h » in dialectal Bengali, and of
«s (= s) initial and intervocal (and final) to the guttural spirant [x] in
Assamese, is something remarkable, and is paralleled by what we see in
Sinhalese and in Kasmlrl. But this is also noticeable in other IE. : cg.y
in Iranian, in Hellenic, and in Celtic (Welsh) ; so that this agreement, and
quite imperfect at that, between Kasmirl and dialectal Bengali cannot be
regarded as a proof of a particularly intimate connection between them.
(n) « s » for « s, s, s » is a peculiar Magadhi characteristic, and there
is nothing like it in the other groups of lA. This <c s » of Magadhi is
irrespective of the connected vowel. But <cs<sss» in Marafchi and
Gujarat! is the case of an earlier dental « s < s s s » becoming palatalised
through the influence of a palatal vowel, « i, i, e » , or of « y » : « s »
before the back vowels, and « s » before palatal ones, being the
rule. E.g., Marathl « dzosT > ( = jyotisin), « sikng » C=siksanam), but
« sakne » (< ^/sak), « san » (=sana) ; GujaratI ^ kar^se » ( = karisyati),
but « sad » (=sabda). (Influence of Sanskrit, however has determined
some spellings with « s » in GujaratI and Mamthi), The MIA. * outer'
dialect Maharastrl, according to the testimony of the Prakrit grammarians,
did not palatalise the sibilants, exactly like the Midland dialect Saurasenl.
AFFINITIES AMONG THE NIA. SPEECHES 159
(o) The tendency to disaspiratioi^ of « kh, gh, cb, ]h, th, rh, th, dh,
ph, bh > as well as of « rli, nh, mh, Ih » is a noticeable thing in Bengali,
no doubt, but it is an entirely new thing, and can be taken to present
only one more coincidence with Marathi, Gnjaiati-Rajasthani, and
Sindhi. In the Eastern (Magadhi) group of speeches, disaspiration
of intervocal and final stops is more or less common at the present
day, but this is not more than 300 years old. Disaspiration of initial
aspirates is unknown to West Bengali, and is very uncommon in
the case of the unvoiced aspirates in East Bengali and Assamese,
although initial unvoiced aspirates also tend to drop their « h » in some
East Bengali dialects. Disaspiration and transference of aspiration are
of occasional occn-renee in W. Hindi as well : e, « bahin < *bhaini
< bhagini » , cf. Oriya « bhaini » ; « nahla-duhla < nhala-dhula » bathhig
and ^cashing ] « fit < "^flth < uttha, u-rtra » cinnt'l \ « eatna » //c/('<
* *cathana <*^catfchanaa< casta- » ; « ita <*itha < istaka» brick: « tiwari
< *tiwarhi < tripathin » a Brahman surname. But disaspiration is
extremely rare in the Midland language ; and on the other hand, it must be
admitted, aspiration is frequently noticeable in the Midland ; e.g,^ « bbes
< besa < vesa ; bhabhut < bibhuti < vibhiiti ; phin, phuni < punah ».
This entirely opposite tendency is also found in some specially Bengali
forms : e. g,, (^T^ < phele » throws down = Middle Bengali c^c^ « pele » <
Mag. Ap. « pellai = prerayati » ; Middle Bengali ^^^l^ « phukare » shouts,
cf. Hindi « pukave » ; Middle Bengali rt^^ « pakhar^ » catch, cf. Hindi
«pakar»^; « kbab&I^ » hamlful, graqy, = Skt. « kabala » ;
« jhuna » oU, dried up = ^junna-, jurna ^ .
The Panjabi change of the voiced aspirates * gh, jb, dh, dh, bh »
to « k, c, t, t, p with accompanying low tone making up for the loss
of aspiration and voice, is something unparalleled in New Indo-Ar^an
phonetics.
[In the words given by Grierson, « kurall » axe is the proper
Bengali form, and not « kutari » ; and « bhap^ * steam is a case of
transferred aspiration, from « *bhappa, bappha, baspa » , and the word is
found in W. Hindi as well. All the Bengali words quoted by Grierson
160
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX A
have the aspirate, or had it (in fiq^l positions) till Late Middle Bengali
times.]
(p) The Eastern speeches (Bengali, Assamese, Oriya, Maithili,
Bbojpurija, and Eastern Hindi) as well as Gujaratl-Rajasthan! and
Marathi agree with the Midland speech in simplifying the MIA. double
consonants and in lengthening the preceding vowel as compensation :
only in the Eastern Magadhan area, the orthography does not ordinarily
record this lengthening in the case of « I, u » , but always does in the
case of « a » , Sanskrit orthography having interfered in the spelling of
the « i, u » words : e, g., f^^ for « bhikh^ » for « bhlkh^ » , cf,
< bhiksa » ; f or « put^ » for < putgt » , cf . « putra ». This simplifi-
cation of consonant group c^^;;^ lengthening of the preceding vowel is a
great point common to the Midland speech and those of the East, and the
Western speeches (Sindhf, Panjabi and Lahndi) disagree with other NIA.
in this matter, but agree herein with the Dardic KasmirT. This may show
a special point of contact or affinity between Western NIA. and Dardic,
but this rather emphasises the difference between the former and the
' outer ' speeches of the South-west and the East.
[In the Midland speech, we have numerous instances of forms in
which there has been no compensatory lengthening, although one consonant
has been dropped : and a few such cases are found in the Eastern
and South-western NIA. also: in fact, in all NI A. This may be due to
dialectal influence from the North-western regions, first upon the Midland
speech, and then, through the latter, upon those of the East, and the South-
west : e.g,, W. Hindi « sac, saca » besides « sacc, sacca, saca » true (Bengali
3^T^ « sacca » borrowed from the West ; 7rt5l « saea » seems to be native) ;
« kal » yederday, tomorrow for « *kal » ; « eak ^ district (cakra) ; « cakh »
(caksu) ; « barhai » (vardhate) ; « lakh » sight (laksa) ; « bhSlIa » (bhadraka) ;
« sab » (sarva) ; « nft » , beside « nit a semi-tatsama^ (nitya). Shortening
of a long vowel in a weak syllable in a compound or other form is a
different thing: e,g,, « gana » to sing; but « gawaiya » ; « kajar >
lavip-Uack ; but ^\i^^v^yd. * casket for colli/ rium ; « bhat khana » to eat
rice^ but « bh3;t-kh^uwa » rice-eater J\
AFFINITIES AMONG THE NIA. SPEECHES
16]
77. B. MorphoJogicaL
(a) The « -I » affix for the feminine took the place of the eommon
01 A. affix « -a » , which was reduced to « -ii ^ , from the Apabhransa
period. The « .a »- termination is lost to all iadhhavu feminine forms in
NIA. In Hind5stani as in other NIA., « -i » is quite a common feminine
affix ; and this affix cannot be said to be a special bond of union only amon^
the Eastern and Western ' outer ' languages.
(b) Bengali ablative post-position '^V^^ « haite » , Early and
Dialectal Bengali '^(M, (^TM « hantO^ honte » , from « %hite < ^ahente,
*ahante, < *as-ant- = s-ant », certainly agrees with the Sindhi « sando > ,
W. Kajasthani « hando » j and what is more, Bengali C^, C^f^^, ^ttf^^l
« the, theke, thakiya » havinr/ heen as an ablative post -position is the exact
counterpart of the Gujarat! « thi, thaki » , But the use of these verbal
derivatives as post-positions is certainly a new thing in lA., being not
earlier than late MIA. ; and the use of the substantive verb to denote case
relation would only be natural in the various NIA. languages.
[The MIA. forms < sunto, hinto » do not seem to be connected with
the Bengali « haite » . This is discussed later, under Morphology :
Declension.]
(c) A synthetic declension is said to exist specially in the ^ outer '
languages, and to be present only as relic in the Midland one, thus
bringing in a point of contrast between the ' outer ' languages and the
' inner ' language. As a matter of fact, the old synthetic declension is
preserved but fragment ally in the NIA. languages ; and where one
language preserves a particular case-form, another retains a different one.
The persistence of one old inflected form (instrumental? genitive?)
in the Midland language, as the oblique case, is at the root of the
distinction we find between W. Hindi and other I A. declensional systems :
e,g,, W. Hindi « ghore ka < ghrxjahi kaa » = « ghotasya + krta* ? or
«ghotaka» + instrumental plural affix < hi < -bhih » + «krta»? : here the
oblique « ghore » preserves a synthetic ease ; but in Bengali C^t^ « ghorar^
= gh6taka + kara », and Bihar! « ghorak = ghotaka-hkrta ? ghotaka-f -ka,
-kka ? » , we apparently do not have an earlier synthetic form, which is
21
162
INTRODUCTION: APPENDIX A
lost, but we have a compound formation. Not considering post-positions,
we find that this is how W. Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and Lahndl (the three
latter being described as * outer ' speeches) stand with reference to each
other in the matter of preservation of the earlier, synthetic declension
of MIA. :
Western Hindi.
Nominative Singular : « ghorau* ( = MIA. nominative singular^ preserved in
Braj) ; « ghora » (Hindostani base form) ; « gharu » (Braj neuter form).
Nominative Plural : <Kghorahi, ghoral, ghore » ( = MIA. instrumental plural ?
with genitive influence ?)
Agent-instrumental : affix lost in nouns, but cf . « mal — *mayena », « tai »
= *tvayena» ; and post-position « -nal, -n? = *kannai, *karnakena».
Dative-oblique Singular: « ghorahi, ghore » ( = MIA. genitive singular?
or MIA. instrumental plural, transferred to the singular ?).
Dative-oblique Plural: * ghoran(i), ghdrS, ghoi^ » (= MIA. genitive
plural).
Locative Singular, rare form : « ghar-e, ag-e » ; « hindor-e » i/i the swing
(Bihari-lala), « math-6 » on the head (Sura-dasa), etc. (-srMIA. locative).
Ablative Singular (rare, dialectal) : « bhukkha » from hunger, in Vernacular
Hindostani and Bangaru dialects ; « bhukhan, bhukhS » (Braj, Kanauji)
( = MIA. ablative + genitive plural ?)
Bengali.
Nominative : affix lost.
Agent-instrumental Singular : ^ « -e» : C^ftFf^i), C^t^t^ « ghorS-g » ( = MIA,
instrumental : < -ena > -ena > -§ > -e »).
[Oriya Ablative: « -u : ghora-u, ghora-r-u » ( = MIA. singular ablati^^e ?)] -
Genitive Singular, lost : except in the pronoun, where it occurs as « -a »
Nol-^ « ta-ra ^1-^ « ja-ra » etc. ( = MIA. genitive singular).
Genitive Plural, as rare relics, in the affix ^srf^f, ^ « -n, -an -in »,
dialectal 'Sftf^T, «ani, al*: e.g., C^t^^, -^^fe « ghora-gulan,
-gulin » horses; v5t^ « tan^ » his (honorific) < their = (MIA. genitive
plural). [In Oriya, this MIA. genitive plural was preserved :
« ghora-g-ka » of horses: see p. 137.]
AFFINITIES AMONG THE NIA. SPEECHES
163
Locative (merged into Instrumental) : i£i « -o » : « ghare ( = MIA.
locative singular). [In Assamese, base -f- aflSx « at » : « gh^r-at
Marathl.
(See Jules Bloeh, ^Langue Maratlie/ Uecleusion.)
Nominative : preserved i)artially, in the plural.
Instrumental : preserved in Old MarathI, but now obsolete.
Obli(.|ue Singular = OIA. dative : preserved.
Oblique Plural = OIA. genitive : preserved.
Ablative : extremely rare.
Locative : rare, in Old Marathi.
The Marathi form in < -a-s < -a-si », e,g,^ « ghor-a-s », which was
explained formerly as beinjy the OIA. genitive in « -asya » , is shown by
Bloch to be really the oblique ( = original dative) singular in « -a » + the
post-positional word « -s, -si » (Bloch, op, cif,^ § 198).
Lahndl.
(See LSI., Vol. VIII, Part I, pp. 252-258.)
Nominative Singular : traces of the « -u » affix in umlaut forms only ;
Plural : traces of the late jNIIA. « -a » affix : e,Q,^ « j^gg"! < *jagga]u »,
pL « jagga} < ^jaggala » , forest.
Agent-oblique : Singular : traces of the late MIA. genitive (?) : « jaggal
< *jaggalaha (?) » ;
Agent-oblique Plural : « -a : jagg^ja » ( = late MIA. genitive plural).
Ablative, in « -5 » : « jaggalo » ( = late MIA. ablative singular + genitive
plural ?).
Locative-Instrumental : « jaggil < ^jaggali > , plural * jagg^li * ( = late
MIA. locative singular, and locative singular + genitive plural).
Taking into consideration the nett remains of the earlier, MIA.
synthetic declension, it cannot be said that Bengali, Marathi and Lahndl,
as 'outer ' languages, are synthetic to any special degree when compared
with the Midland W. Hindi. The post-positional declension of NIA., with
help-words reduced to the status of inflections, is a different thing ; and
164
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX A
it must be admitted that, through phonetic decay, certain words in Bengali
and Marafchi, which used to be combined with or affixed to base or oblique
forms of nouns, have been worn down to mere inflections, and thus formed
the nucleus of a new synthetic declension : ejj,^ Bengali C^t^f^, ^^^^
« ghorar^, gharer^ < kara, kera = karya C^t^t^^ « ghorader^ < -adika +
kera » ; Marathi « ghoraca » < -kftya-ka » , But the W. Hindi speech
is not free from this in its declension, although it has not joined up the
genitive post-position to the noun in a synthetic declension : 6-.^., « ghore-ng »
= oblique of «gh(3ra » + instrumental of <c karna-ka » ; the ' outer * speech
Lahndl here agrees with the Midland form not only in preserving an analytic
genitive, but also in building up a new synthetic agent and dative case :
<?.^., Lahndl genitive < ghore da » = oblique of « ghora »-h« da < dia <
*dita-ka = datta-ka » (cf. W. Hindi « ghore ka » , where « ka = kaa, kia
< krta-ka but agent and dative « ghore nS, -nft ^ , where « n§, nft »=
oblique forms of « karna-ka » , as in Western Hindi. In W. Hindi, in the
speech-feeling of many speakers^ the post-positions < ko<kaksa, se<sama?
sahita?, par < upari, me=madhya » are as much organic inHections as are
the Bengali genitive and locative affixes « -ar^, er^, -e, -te » etc ; and many
writers of High Hindi advocate the writing of the post-position with
the noun as one word. The influence of Persian (with its separate
jor^-positions) on Hindi may have been partially responsible in instilling
into the minds of some speakers of W. Hindi the idea of a separate existence
of the post- positions.
In any case, there is nothing in the deelinational system of the ' outer '
languages to mark them off from the Midland speech, and to bind them
closely as being similar in spirit : Western Hindi and Lahndl and Sindhi
agree with each other in spirit as much as they do with Marathl and
Bengali and Maithili.
(d) Except in Lahndi and Sindhi, where it may very well be due to
the influence of the contiguous Iranian and Dardic, affixed pronouns are
not used with nouns in other NIA. In Assamese, however, there is a
restricted pronominal affixation with nouns of relationship, which Grierson
has connected with the affixed pronouns of the North-western languages
AFFINITIES AMONG THE NlA, SPEECHES
165
(JASli., 1895, Part I, p. 347); but some of the Assamese forms, e*.^,,
< tor zlyer > ^oitr (n on -honorific) daughter^ and « tumar zly§, ziyera » your
^honorific) daughter, where the affixes are « -er » and « -a > or « -era » ,
are obscure in origin. It is very unlikely that this isolated phenomenon in
Assamese is connected with Dardie : rather, this may be a case of Tibeto-
Burmau (Bo(Jo) influence, Bo'jo possessing the peculiarity found in the
Aryan Assamese (cf. LSI., Vol III, Part II, p» IG).
(e) The formation of the past ten^e of transitive roots with the help
of the passive participle adjective, which (pialified the object, the subject
being in the instrumental, came to be fixed in MIA. with the loss of the
OIA. inflected, finite verb-forms. AllNIA. languages inherited this passive
construction for the past tense of the transitive verb from their respective
source Apabhransas — Bengali and Biharl included. But while the passive
construction is preserved in the Western and Southern ^ outer ' languages —
Lahndi, Sindhi, Gujarati-Rajasthaai, Marathi, — Eastern Hindi and the
Magadhan speeches have now entirel}- given up the passive form and have
developed the active one. This is done by making the passive participle
adjective a verb-form, and adding to it pronominal affixes for the persons.
The Western speeches (Lahndi, Sindhi) add pronominal affixes to the
passive participle, but they fully retain the old passive idiom, in that the
verb form agrees with the object in gender and number. The use of the
pronominal affix is rendered necessary in the Western speeches from the
fact that the agent case in them does not always retain the proper post-
position (=« -ne » of W. Hindi), and is often merely the simple obli(j[ue form.
There might be some influence of the neighbouring Iranian is this matter :
e.g., Persian ^ kard-am » / did, Fast^* « kr-am < "^kar-am » I do — Old
Iranian «"^karta, k9rata + me » : Lahndi « kiu-m » = Skt. •* krta + me In
any case, there is a fundamental agreement between W. Hindi and Lahndi
etc. in idiom and in speech-feeling, in maintaining the passive idea;
and MarSthi and Rajasthanl-(jujarati agree with W. Hindi in })reserving
the passive construction. From this point of view, NIA. speeches are
capable of being divided into two broad groups. Eastern, or ' Active,' and
Western, or ' Passive ' :
166
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX A
/ read {past) a hook.
Western group :
(Passive Coustructiou)
r W. Hindi : < mal-nS pothi parh-I »
j Gujarat! : « m§ puthl v3c-i »
V Marathi : « mi pot hi vac-il-I »
h(j-me a-hooJc read {fern,).
C Sindhi : « (rafi) puthi parh-I-me »
Lahndl : « (mal) pothi ])arh-i-m »
{hy-me) a-hooh read {fern,) + Oy-me,
The Northern languages (Paharl dialects — Khas-kura, Garhwall,
Kumauril, and the Western Fahari speeches), on the whole, agree with the
Western group, with which they are intimately connected.
Eastern Group :
(Active Construction)
E. Hindi : < mal pothi parheu »
Bhojpuriya : « ham p5thi parhali »
Mai thill : <c ham pothi parhalahil »
Bengali : « ami puthi parilam
(mui puthi parili, -lum) »
Oriya : « ambhe pothi parhilu
(mu pothi parhili) »
/ 0'hook read (past, 1st persou).
The neuter construction, which characterises all the members of the
• Western group, is not present any longer, or at the best is very much
obscured, in the Eastern group ; and surely in this matter a grouping of
Bengali and the Eastern languages together with Sindhi, Lahndi and Dardic
would be hardly allowable. (The present-day formation of the past
paradigm of the verb in the Eastern languages agrees remarkably with that
of modern Dravidian.)
AFFINITIES AMONG THE NIA. SPEECHES 167
(f) The adjectival « 1 » alBx is an Indo-European inheritance in NIA.,
and occurs in the Midland speech as well : only, in the Eastern languages
and in Marathl, it forms the basis of the past tense, and in Gujaruti
and SindhJ, it is regularly employed in a passive participle form. Panjabi
and Lahndi do not have this as a characteristic affix, thus disasrreeinsc
' or?
with the other ' outer speeches. AV. Hindi instances of it are plentiful : <?.^.,
some 20 separate examples of it, like « lajill * hasJifuI, « raijgile » ooIoKm]^
'"Sportive, « chaila » I/a)nlf<onfe, « katill » cuit'nKj etc., are found in the
' Satasal ^ of Biharl-lala; and it is not uncommon in Eastern Hindi
as well.
78. C. GloBsic,
On examining the common roots and words of Lahndi, Sindhl,
Gujarat!, Maiathi, W. Hindi, Bihari and Bengali, it would be easily found
that Bihari and Bengali do not have a special agreement with the AVestern
languages, or with Marathi : the agreement with W. Hindi, which is
so very close, is often forgotten, when a word not found in W. Hindi is
traced to exist in common in the Eastern and the Western languages. The
question of lexical affinity cannot be always insisted upon as a strong
argument for a genetic relation. To take an important root, that of the
substantive verb, « aeh, ach», we find that among the Magadhan languages,
Bhojpuriya and Magahl do not use it now, but there are traces of its use
in Early Bhojpuriya remains (<?. in a poem ascribed to Kabir— « achalau
mana bairagl » I was a bairagi in (jni/) mind, quoted b}^ Jfianendra-mohan
Das, in his ' Bengali Dictionary,' Calcutta, San 1323, under ^srf^ « Vaeh *) ;
Early Awadhi (E. Hindi) shows this root, although it is not found in
Modern E. Hindi ; of the other ^ outer ' languages, Sindhl and LahndT
have not got it, but it is found in Gujarat! and in some forms of RajasthanI,
and in Pahari. The Dardie Kasmirl also shows it. There is no trace
of it in Western Hindi now, but it seems to have occurred in SaurasenI,
according to the testimony of Vararuci Prakfta-prakasa,' XII, 19), and is
found in Pali. It can be well expected that some OIA. roots and words
have been preserved in common in certain widely separated dialects, and
lost in others contiguous to these.
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX A
79. The phonetic grounds for postulating a connexion between the
North-western and Eastern groups of NIA., as being more intimate than
that between these and the Midland group, are not convincing, — ^as
phonetic peculiarities supposed to be shared only by the ' outer ' groups
are found to occur in W. Hindi as well. Again, in certain points, W. Hindi
agrees with the Eastern languages : e. g., OIA. initial « v- » occurs as « b- »
in W. Hind], E. Hindi and the Magadhan languages, whereas in Gujarat!
MarajhT, Sindhi, and Panjabl it remains as « v- » ; and in other points,
the agreement is between W. Hindi and the Southern and Western speeches
as against the Eastern ones : e. the tendency to make « ai, au » into open
« e, 6 » [s, o] sounds. The * outer ' languages in their deelinational system
agree with the central language ; only the circumstances of development
were slightly different in HindostanI, the most important W. Hindi
language, the speech which came under the influence of Persian more than
any other. The conjugational system, aoain, manifests a uniform spirit
in the North-w^est, in the South, and in the Midland ; and it is only in
the East that a new^ construction has been evolved. It may be assumed
that the dialects which w^ere the sources of the North-western and the
Eastern groups possessed characteristics which were not present in those
that gave rise to the Midland speech. But that does not warrant us in
assuming fivo independent groups in the earliest period, as it might also
be shown that the North-western and the Midland dialects show
agreement in points where the Eastern group disagrees, and so on. The
evidence of the older stages of I A. is against it. The Asokan Prakrits
show three varieties of speech, differing from each other in phonetics and to
some extent in morphology : North-western, South-western, and Eastern.
(See pp. 44-, 47, 54 — 61.) The differences between the North-western
speeches, and those of the East, were profound in the oldest period of
which we have records : if the North-western and the Eastern languages
were specially connected, we should expect them to show greater agreement
at an early stage. But the contrary is the case. Beyond assuming the
possibility of a number of popular dialects, modern representatives of
which have in some eases retained, in others dropped, some of their
AFFINITIES AMONG THE NIA. SPEECHES
169
words and forms (§ 32), there are no convincing proofs for the eates:orieal
subdivision of lA. into (1) a Midland group, of different origin from
(2) a surrounding ringj of 'outer' speech,— the first being Indo- Aryan
par excellence, the immediate relation of Sanskrit, and the second being
allied to Dardie.^ From racial (anthropological) reasons, the North-western
(Lahndi and Sindhl) speakers are entirely distinct from the speakers of
the Eastern languages, whereas there is affinity between the former and
those (at least among the upper classes) of the Midland. The division
would appear to be into Westerii, and Uasfeni, the « Udlcya> and « Madhva-
desTya » on the one hand, and the « Pracya * on the other : the outstanding
characteristic in these two groups within one lA. family being in the
resistance to cerebralisation and in the retention of « r » in the Western
group in the OIA. and early MIA. periods; and at the present day it is
in the fact that the Western group preserves the passive construction in
the past of the transitive verb, whereas the Eastern has made it active :
and in both the eases, it is the West which has been the more conservative.
^ Of. A. Meillet, ' Introduction a I'E'tude comparativa des Langnes indo.etiropeen»es,'
5th ed, Paris, 1922: * II ne s'y trouve presqiie rien qui ne s'expliquo par la lanj^ue
vedique. Les documents du nioven indien donneut une idee du developpement de la lanj^ue
mais ils ne permettent pas de supposer qu'il y ait jamais eu dans I'lnde a date ancienne un
dialecte qui ait differe de celui que repn'sente le vediquo autremont que par dcs details
d'importance secondaire/ (Pp. 37, 38.)
APPENDIX B
Points of Similarity between Indo-Aeyan and Dravtdian, showing
PROBABLE Influence of the Latter.
80. A. Phonetic.
(a) Paucity of diphthongs. The avoidance o£ hiatus in Vedic and
Sanskrit must have been maintained by the insertion of « y, w > between
udvHta vowels, after the dropping of intervocal stops, and, rarely, of a nasal
(in a compound word), in spoken MIA., down to NIA. times, although
MIA. spelling (barring that obtaining in Jaina Ardha-magadhl, where
« y » was used) does not ordinarily represent it. This euphonic insertion
of the palatal and labial semivowels, in connection with front and back
vowels respectively, and of « n » , is characteristic of Dravidian. (In
certain forms of very recent NIA., e,g., Bengali, numerous diphthongs have
been developed from the elision of the earlier euphonic glides).
(b) Comparative absence of spirants (see p. 37)^ The change of
the Indo-Iranian spirant « i (zh) » to the stop * j (jh) » might have
been brought about in India in Dravidian surroundings. (But opening
of the voiced aspirated stops «gh, jh, dh, bh », leading to their transforma-
tion to « h », seems to have characterised the basic dialect of the Rig- Veda
speech, which in all probability was a western dialect contiguous to Iranian ;
and Iranian favoured spirantisation : see p. 34).
(c) The occurrence of cerebrals. < t, d, n, 1, 1 > (the last = a cerebral
fricative, [i]) are peculiarly Dravidian sounds, and are not found in any
other ancient IE. speech than Vedic and Sanskrit. In Modern Swedish,
among New IE. tongues, however, « d > has developed out of « r+d», which
is paralleled by a similar eerebralisation in Old Magadhi. (In Magadhi,
however, * r » always became « 1 » , and ic r » + dental stop > cerebral
AFFINITIES BETWEEN ARYAN & DRAVIDIAN
171
stop was in all probability a case of « 1 » + dental stop > cerebral stop in
OIA., due to indigenous influence). Then, there are cases of spontaneous
cerebralisatiou in lA. from very early times. The pronunciation of
intervocal « -cj- -dh- » as « r, rh » in NIA., and possibly also in MIA,, is
found in Dravidian also.
(d) Insertion of short vowels by anaptyxis (« svara-bhakti, viprakarsa »)
in consonant groups, which is such a characteristic feature of MIA.
and NIA. {e, in words like « kilesa, sineha, harisa, ratana, sumirana,
parana, baramhana » etc., etc.), is paralleled out in Dravidian (^.^., Kannada
« baramana » , Tamil « pirammana;^ » = a Brahman ; Tamil « sinegam ==
sneha, mittira« = mitra, tiru = sri, Kiruttina« = Kfsna, sandira« =
candra» etc. etc.). The general view is that Dravidian did not have
consonant groups initially, and had only double consonants medially ; and
this trait was imposed upon the Aryan speech in the MIA. Period. But
J. Bloch contends Les Consonnes intervocaliques en Tamoul,^ MSL., XIX,
pp. 85 fp., translated in the lAnt., 1919, pp. 191 ff.) that in the Old
Dravidian speech of several centuries B. C, groups like « tr-, dr- » existed
initially as much as in lA. : the word « dramitja, dravifja », with initial
« dr- » , being in all likelihood a true ' Old Dravidian ' word, slightly
Aryanised, of which « tami.l » was a development in the Tamil language
at a post-Christian epoch, through an intermediate form « *damila » ,
borrowed in Pali and in Old Sinhalese as « damila », and occurring in a
Greek transcription « *damirikc »>« damirice » (Latin) = «*damilakam » the
Tamil la7id : simplification of the consonant groups was thus a phonologi-
cal development which occurred parallelly in both Aryan and Dravidian.
(In the matter of simplification of OIA consonant-groups by assimilation,
which gave rise to MIA., it was probably internal, as it took place also in
Italic, among other IE. languages : but here lA. reached that stage
at least a thousand years before Italic ; contact with Dravidian,
as well as the adoption of the Aryan speech by Dravidians early in the
history of lA., had probably something to do with it.)
In other points of phonetics, e.y., change of « c, j » to « ts, dz » ,
of « s » to « h » , the voicing of intervocal unvoiced stops, the retention
172
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX B
of a final vowel, etc., Dravidian influence bas been postulated (cf. Grierson,
' Indo-Aryan Vernaculars/ BSOS., I, § 72). But in certain cases, the change
was only normal : e.g.^ modification of an intervoeal « -k-, -t- » to « -g,-
-d- » ; but in certain tracts at least, early Dravidian influence is likely.
81. B. MorphologicaL ^
(a) The most noteworthy thing is the gradual disuse of prepositions.
All other IE. languages developed the prepouiions as aids to the decliua-
tional system ; and when the inflections died out, the prepositions took up
their place, as in Enjrlish and Persian, French and Bulgarian. Prefixes, or
prepositions, as modifiers of the meanings of roots, still continue in the
above languages. In Primitive IE., the preposition, in origin an adverb,
came before or after the noun ; but it is remarkable that the development
of it in India, where it is not entirely suppressed, should be post-positional
(as in Sanskrit) ; that and in late MIA. and NIA., a series of help-words of
a different kifid, the post-positions of nominal and verbal origin, should
come in.
The deelinational system of NIA., with its agglutinated words like
« gana ; -kula > gula ; sarva>sab; manava>mana; luka> log; sakala »
etc. for the plural, and with new post- positional affixes derived from nouns
etc. like « madhya>me, m3 ; kaksa > ko; sthama > thai; parsva > pas;
sahita >se; *dita- > da; krta- > ka ; » etc., greatly resembles Dravidian.
The use of verbal forms — participles and conjunctiv^es — as post-positions
in declension {e,g,^ Bengali « haite » , ^tf^f^l « lagiya » , ^ff^
« thakiya » , « diya » , and similar forms in other NIA.), is a special
point of agreement between NIA. and Dravidian {e.g,^ Tamil « kattiyai-
kkondu » loith a knife ^ literally liavhg taken a knife \ « ava^^-odu » ,
from « ottu » touchy = with him ; Tamil « \fir\x, mnn\ » sfayuUng, having
been = Bengali and Gujarati ^zftf^^ll « thakiya » and « thaki » , ablative
post-position). (Cf. R. Caldwell, ^Comparative Grammar of Dravidian
London, 1913, pp. 25*Z ff. ; Julien Vinson^ 'Manuel de la Langue tamoule,'
Paris, 1903, 28, 29.)
The absence of the dative-accusative case with the affix (« ko, ke, ku » in
NIA., « -ku » in Dravidian) for neuter nouns is found in both the families.
AFFINITIES BETWEEN ARYAN & DRAVIDIAN
173
The above are cases where we eau look for Dra vidian influence, in the
inherent priaciple of formatio7i only, quite legitimately. But in the
development of NIA. post-positions and affixes, which took place towards
the end of the ist millennium A. C. and in the first centuries of the
2nd milleifaium, it would be too much to expect direct borrowing from
Dravidian, or building up on the model of Dravidian, as it has been
suggested in a number of cases by various scholars. Thus, ^.y., the NIA.
<c -k- » affix for the dative, as in W. Hindi « ko » , Bengali « ke > , Oriya
« ku » , comiug ultimately from the Skt. « kaksa » during the late MIA.
and early NIA. stages, has nothing to do with the similar Dravidian affix
« -ku » : the agreement is a ease of pure coincidence. Similarly, for the
Bengali plural affixes ^, ( 53f^) « -ra, -gula (-guli) » (see p. 97), which tiist
came into use probably as late as the I4.th century, it would be extremely
hazardous to suggest a Dravidian affinity, in the Tamil plural affixes
« -ar, -gal » for instance, notwithstanding the partial agreement between
the two that in Bengali «.ra» is restricted to intelligent beings, or
creatures to which intelligence is ascribed, and the Di-avidian « -ar *
is employed with reference to ' high-caste ' nouns, i.e., names of intelligent
beings.
An adjectival treatment of certain cases is noted in both Dravidian
and NIA. : e'.y., Bengali C^5?t^ « sonar^ bati » chjj of gold = Tamil
« ^on-n-vi ku4am » gold vessel. (This, however, is found in many
other languages, and it cannot be insisted that there is a specially Dravidian
influence here.)
(b) Absence of affixes in the comparison of the adjective in both
NIA. and Dravidian. The 01 A. affixes « -lyas -istha, -tara -tama » are
lost, and comparison is denoted by employing the positive form of
the adjective with the noun with which comparison is made, the
latter being put in the dative or ablative or locative with some nominal
or verbal post-position: e.g., Bengali (31^ '«tC^ » ergi ce}e bhalo »
better thati ihisy lit. good, having looked ai this ; Jf^t^ sr|^ -^^fl » sablirgi
majhe bhalo » best of all, lit. good in the middle of all , etc. This is also
the Dravidian way to indicate comparison. [Modern IE, languages
174
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX B
outside India have either retained the eom2)arative and superlative affixes,
€,g.^ Persian « -tar, -tarin » , Armenian comparative affix « -kuin < -goin » ,
Modern Greek « -teros, -tatos > , Russian comparative affix « -jelSu, -jee » ,
English « -er, -est or employed words meaning yyiore and most before
the adjective in question, as in English, in French (« plus, le plus ») and
other Romanic speeches, in Modern Greek (« piece, o pleon »).]
(c) With the want of prepositions to modify meanings of verb-roots,
both NIA. and Dra vidian have developed the use, in a most curious and
idiomatic way, of conjunctives and participles with an adverbial function,
giving rise to what is known as the ' Compound Verb ' : e.g,^ Skt. « ni-h
y/sad » , English sH domi^ Bengali ^f'!?! ^\ « basiya p&iti » = literally,
having sat doivii, fo fall, Hindi « baith jana » = liavhg sat dowu^ to go ;
English ruh off, but Bengali c^^l « muchiya phela » having
rubbed off, to throve Dravidian has this usage as well.
(d) An almost wholesale disuse of 01 A. moods and tenses reducing
the verb-system of Aryan to an indicative present form (and in some cases
an indicative future), a past participle forming the past, a present participle,
a conjunctive, and some verbal nouns, and a passive indicative present.
A similar decay has taken place in Iranian, But the whole principle of
phrasC'building tended gradually to become nominal or adjectival from verbal,
in lA. ; e.g,^ the normal OIA. (Vedic) for he went would be « so ' gamat »
or « so' gacchat* , or « sa jagama »; but in MIA. and NIA., this verbal
construction is changed to the adjectival : « sO gado, so gao, se gadic, *si
gay-ilia, su gaii, so gaaii » etc., = Skt. « sa gatah » , whence NIA. < so gayau,
gaya » (W. Hindi), «se gela » (Bengali) etc. : and herein there is a possible
influence of Dravidian, for in Dravidian the verb has an adjectival force,
it being really a noun of agency with reference to the subject. (See
LSI., Vol. IV, p. 295.) The Dravidian tenses developed out of participles ;
and in the development of Aryan, we find a gradually increasing
employment of the participle forms, to the exclusion of the IE.
finite verbal forms. The periphrastic future of Sanskrit, « karta »
=a doer for « karisyati » he will do^ « kartSsmi * I am a doer:=L^ karisyatni »
I shall do, is Dravidian in principle. The compound affix « -ta-vant- », rare
AFFINITIES BETWEEN ARYAN & DRAVIDIAN
175
in the Vedic speech, may be compared with the Dravidian (Tamil)
« -d-ava^ » : Skt. « krta » doney « kfta-vant- » one who has done ; cf. Tamil
< sey-du » having done, « sey-d-ava^i » having done he — one loho has done,
(LSI., Vol. TV, pp. 280-^281). The structure of the modern Mac^adhan
(Bengali, Oriya, Maithill, Magahl, Bhojpuriya) past and future verb, in
showing the root + past or future (passive) participle affix + personal
pronominal affix, affords a remarkable parallel to Dravidian. The importance
attached to the conjunctive with the sense of having performed or finished an
net, and its lavish use, e,g,y Tamil « kondu va » , NIA. (Bengali)
f5(^ «laiya ais&, nie csd » (Hindi « lao » may similarly be « le + ao »),=
having taJcen^ come, to mean simply bring, is common to both Dravidian and
NIA., and is undoubtedly an idiom borrowed by Aryan from Dravidian,
very early in the history of Aryan.
The inflected passive of OIA. is lost to, or considerably restricted in
NIA., which, like Dravidian, forms passives by means of compound verb
constructions, in which the roots meaning to go, to fall, to snjfer, to eat
etc. are auxiliaries. Herein the idiom is probably Dravidian.
(e) Onomatopoetic formations on a lavish scale are a characteristic
of both NIA. and Dravidian. (Cf. Rablndra-nath Tagore, ^ Sabda-tattva/
Calcutta, pp. I'l ff. j S Milne, 'Bengali Grammar,' Calcutta, 1913,
Chap XX ; Kellogg, ' Hindi Gramma^/ § 849 ; Khansaheb and Sheth,
^ Hints on the Study of Gujarati,' Surat, 1915, § 255, etc. : G. U. Pope,
' Tamil Handbook 278 A. H. Arden, 'Progressive Grammar of Telugu,'
§§ 686, 687, etc.). Vedic is remarkably poor in onomatopoeties ; as we
come down to MIA., and NIA., the number and force of onomatopoeties
is on the increase. (Cf. B. C. Mazumdar, ' A Study of some Onomatopoetic
DesI Words,' JRAS., 1905, pp. 555-557; R. Morris, ' Pali Miscellanies-
Some Onomatopoeties from the Jatakas,' Transactions of the Philological
Society, London, 1885-1887.)
[Onomatopoetic words and jingles, however, are characteristic of
Kol as well : cf. P. O. Bodding, ^ Materials for a Santali Grammar,* Part
I, Dumka, 1922, pp. 31, 32. It may be that in this matter there is also
Kol influence on Aryan.]
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX B
(f) Presence of ' echo words/ A word is repeated partiallij (partially
in the sense that a new syllable, the nature of which is generally fixed,
is substituted for the initial one of the word in question, and the new
word so formed, unmeaning by itself, echoes the sense and sound of the
original word), and in this way the idea of et cetera, and filings similar
to or associated with that, is expressed. This is found in Modern Indo-Aryan
and in Dravidian. R.rj.y Bengali c^t^l c5t?1 « ghora-tora » Maithill «ghora-
tora » , Ilindostaal « ghdra-ura » , GujaratI « ghoro-boro > Marathi
« ghora-bira » , Sinhalese * aswaya-baswaya » horses etc, horses and other
animals, or horses and eavipage: cf. Tamil < kudirai-kidirai » , Kannada
« kudire-gidire », Tehigu « gurrarau-girramu » . So Bengali « jltlgt-
tal?t *— water a7id things, refreshment, ~ Hindostan! « jal-ul » , Marathi
« jal-bil Tamil « tannlr-kinnir Kanna(la « niru-glru » ; Bengali #t^-fe"t^
« dit^-tatgt », Sinhalese « dat-bat » = ^^^//^ etc. In the formation of
these * echo words,' Bengali takes « t- » , and retains the vowel of the
original word ; Maithill takes the dental « t- >, keeping also the original
vowel ; Hindostaal substitutes « u- » , and Marathi « bi- » , for the whole
syllable; and GujaratI takes « b- » for the origiaal consonant ; Sinhalese
similarly has « b- » with original vowel ; [the agreement of Sinhalese with
GujaratI and Marafchi in this matter is to be noted in connection with what
has been postulated about the origin of Sinhalese : see pp. 15, 72-73] ; and
the Dravidian languages substitute the syllable « ki-, gi- » for the initial one
of the original word. (These ' echo words ' are different from compounds
like ^*t'?-C5t*t^ « kap&r?l-cop&r^ » clothes etc., or 5t§t-^ttt « eati-batl » pots
etCy where compare C5t^^ « eop§r^ » with 'S^^\ < m^^vi >^hasJcet, and
« cat! » = earthen pot : in such compound words, one element is
usually an obsolete word, and not an unmeaning echo-form, as in the cases
noted above.)
82. C. Syntacticah
Syntax is regarded as being of greater importance in linguistics, as
an inherited peculiarity, than phonetics or morphology, which are easily
acquired or modified. It is in syntax that Indian Dravidiandom and
Aryandom are one, A sentence in a Dravidian language like Tamil or
AFFINITIES BETWEEN ARYAN & DRAVIDIAN 177
Kannada becomes ordinarily good Bengali or Hindi by substituting Bengali
or Hindi equivalents for the Dravidian words and forms^ without modifying
the word-order, but the same thing is not possible in rendering a Persian
or English sentence into a NIA. language. The most fundamental agree-
ments are thus found between NIA. and Dravidian, and all this began
from early MIA., as is seen from a comparison of the syntax of Pali and
the Prakrits with that of the modern vernaculars. ' The syntactical
arrangement of a Tamil sentence {vakkiyamy Skt. vakya) is in many
respects similar to that of an ordinary Sanskrit sentence. As a rule,
first comes the subject with its attributes, second the object with its
enlargements; third the extension of the predicate, and lastly the verb.
As in classical Skt., so in Tamil there is the usual predominance of gerunds
and the clauses formed by them, of the relative participles which take
the place of relative clauses, and of the oratio red a instead of the oratio
obliqua.'^ (M. de Zilva Wickremasinghe, ' Tamil Grammar,' London, 1906,
p. 74 ; cf. also LSI., Vol. IV, p. 281.)
The omission of the copula is preferred by both lA. and Dravidian :
e.g,y Bengali ^\ ^?tl?f^ « 5-ta amader^ ban », Kannada « idu namma
mane » this {is) our house ; '^^^ « manus^Utl bhala » , Tamil « manidaw
nallava/2 » the man {is) good.
The most remarkable similarity in idioms is found in both : e.g., use
of a conjunctive meaning having said (Bengali ^fi^^l « b4liya » , E. Hindi
« bol-ke » , Marathi « mhanun » , Sinhalese « kiya » , Tamil « mm » ,
Kannarja « endu » , Telugu «eni »), in the sense of as, because, recapitulating
and introducing a conditional clause ; employment of the infinitive
for the polite imperative , €,g., W. Hindi « yah kam karna » , Kannada
« i kelasa ma juvadu » do this work ; use of the verb to give in forming the
* imperative ' or permissive mood, e.g., for Skt, « vadani » let me say^
cf . Bengali ^rWC^ Cf*^ * amake b&lite deo », HindostanI « mujhe bolne
do » , Telugu <s nannu ceppan-iyy ». (In connection with this, it must be
admitted that a similar idiom is found in other modern IE. languages
outside India, e.g,^ English let), lA. does not possess the above points
of similarity with IE. tongues outside India, but with Dravidian \
23
178
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX B
and unquestionably herein we have the impress of the Dravidian mind
on lA.
83, D. Glossic,
The Aryan speech has been borrowing words from the Dravidian ever
since the former came to India. The Brahuis are a Dravidian -speaking
tribe outside India : it is just possible that there were other Dravidian
speakers in Iran, with whom contact was possible for the Aryans (Indo-
Iranians) even outside India.
Caldwell, Gundert, Kittel and others have discussed the nature and
extent of Dravidian loan-words in Indo-Aryan. A great many of the
deal words, of which counterparts are not found in other Indo-European
speeches, are probably Dravidian in origin (many are also Kol, and possibly
even pre-Dravidian and pre-Kol). (Cf. F. Kittel, ^ Kannada Dictionary,'
Mangalore, 1894, Introduction; R. Caldwell, ' Comp. Gram, of Drav.
pp. 565 ff. ; Sten Konow, ' Notes on Dravidian Philology,' I Ant,, 1903,
pp. 449 ff, ; LSI., Vol. IV, pp. 276 ff. ; Grierson, * Indian Vernaculars ' in the
BSOS., I, iii ; A. A. Macdonell, ' Vedic Grammar,^ p. 33 ; P. T. Srinivas
Iyengar, ' Life in Ancient India in the Age of the Mantras,' pp. 6, 8, 15,
125, 126 ; F. E. Pargiter, ^Vfsakapi and Hanumant/ JRAS., 1913, p. 400;
K. Amrita Row, ' Dravidian Elements in the Prakrits,' lAnt., Feb. 1917 ;
'Notes on some Hindi words from the Dravidian,' I Ant., Jan. 1916 ;
B. C. Mazumdar, ' Baggala-bhasay Dravin Upadau,' VSPdP., 1320;
D. R. Bhandarkar, * Lectures on the Ancient History of India,' 1918,
Calcutta University, pp. 26-27.)
APPENDIX C
Old Bengal Place-Names from Insckiptions.
84. [1] Dhanaidaha Copper-plate Grant of Kumara-gupta : North
Central Bengal, c, 432-433 A. C. (R. G. Basak, 'Sahitya/ Pausa and
Caitra, 1323).
« Ksudraka » Village; « Khadapara » or <t Khatapara», a visaya or
district. The reading « Khata-para » would be better \ the word would
mean Creek-ford or Creek-ferry : « khata » for « *khada » : cf . New Bengali
^tt^ « khari > channel \ a « KhS^i- visaya » in the same Puntjira-vardhana
bhukti or province is mentioned in the Barrackpur grant of Vijaya-sena
(§ 106) ; the word « khatika » is found in the Khalimpur grant of Dharma-
pSla (§ 90) and in the Govindapur grant of Laksmana-sena (§ 108) j and
« kha^I » also, in the Tarpan-dighi grant (§ 108).
85. ['2] Five Damodarpur Copper-plates of the Gupta Period : North
Central Bengal. (R. G, Basak, Ep. Ind., XV, No. 7, pp. 113 ff.)
(i) 443-444 A, C. : Village « Pogga » : [« dogga > a desl word =
high land, higJiy occurring as vSW « fJagga » , « t&fl » ^iVj'^ land. Deri-
vatives from this word are probably Bengali « dagar » if^, grrnvn-up^
Assamese « daggariyS » /i?^/^ one, Sir, Bengali C&^^, &t^1 4^gg^ra,
tSgg^ra » upland (as in ct^l (^^1 <5 h§ta-tei)g^ra » /om; anrZ ^2^^, uneven;
of. « tegkar! » in § 94). This deal word occurs in other NIA. : e.g,^
W. Hindi « ^nggar » high place y hill (ef. the words cZaiJi^ and 4<>iruiaT in
the 'Index Etymologique ' in Jules Bloch's ^Formation de la Langue
marathe.')]
(iii) 476-495 A. C. : Villages « Palasa-vfndaka, Canda-grama,
Vayi-gmma » j the last = « *VapI-grama » = Mer-foii (?) : cf. « Vapika-
grama » in the Tipperah Inscription of Loka-natha (§ 88), and < Rolla-
vayika » in the Ashrafpur grant of Deva-khadga (§9:Z).
(v) 533-534 A. C. Villages « Svaechanda-pataka » (cf . Bengali
« para » neighbourhood ; a word found in Bengal, Chota Nagpur and Orissa),
180
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX C
« Lavagga-sika » , « Satu-vandsramaka » , « Paraspatika » , « Purana-
vrndika-hari » (where « -hari » <« *-gharia, gfhika » ; ef . « Vf ndaka » above).
86. [3] Three Copper-plate Grants from East Bengal : 6th century
A. C. (F. E. Pargiter, lAnt., July 1910).
(i) Villages « Hima-sena-pataka « Trighattika » (Sanskritised from a
form like « "'^Tighattia > = Modern Bengali C®^t§t * ^Teghati ») ; * Sila-
kunda » (probably for « ^ila-kuncla » Rock-hilly cf . Bengali ^ « kur^ » heap^
mass, dunghill \ a ^?^6J word ? =Telugu « konda » roc^ : see pp. 66, 67.
The editor of the inscription suggests the meaning as being tank),
(ii) Village « Navyavakasika » (any connection with « -sika » as in
« Lavagga-sika » in [2] (v) ? or « navya + avakSsika » = New Channel ^
for passage of water t),
(iii) Village « Dhru-vila-ti » = « ^Dhruva-bila-vadl, -vati » where
« bila-va^a » = (?r village hy the marsh {helonging to Dkniva) ?
87. [4] Inscription of the time of Jaya-naga of Karna-suvarna :
Central Bengal, 6th-7th century. (Unpublished : text and translation
obtained through the kindness of Dr. L, D. Barnett, who is editing it for
the Ep. Ind.)
Audumbara » District (visaya); « Kutkuta » Village (Sanskritised
from « kukkuda »?) ; Village « Amala-pautika » ; Village « Vappa-ghosa-
vata » ( « Ghosa-vata- » would give a New Bengali form like C^[W5l, or
C^Wft « "^Ghosara, -ri » : cf . C^ff^ftft « Goarr > from « Gopa-vatika > ) ;
Village « Vakhata-Sumalika » (« Vakhata », Sanskritised from « "^Bahada- »,
now found in Bengali as ^?v5l ^1 * B&h&ra, B&y^ra »:<?); « Gaggi.
nika » , Kiver (see § 89).
88. [5] Tipperah Grant of Loka-natha: 7th century (R. G. Basak,
SShitya, Karttika, IS'Zl).
District (vimya) of « Suvwgga (Subbugga ?) » ; « Kana-motika *
Hill (for « "^kana-malia > = New Bengali « "^kana-mun »
twist, « karnaka + ^/^^^^ =Skt. ^mut», desi root =/olJ, wrap, tvnst).
Villages « Pagga » and « Vapika » : « Pagga = ? pagka » clay from
bottom of tank : cf. the Faridpur village « Pagg^s5»=« ^Pagg&vasaka »
/7iorf^ of Panga (?).
OLD BENGAL PLACE-NAMES FROM INSCRIPTIONS 181
Village « Tamra-pathara-khanda » = Copper-stofie district (for
« *Tamba-patthara- » ).
89. [6} Nidhanpur Copper-plates of Bhaskara-varmman of Kama^
rupa : Central Bengal, 7th century. (Padma-nath Bhattacharya, Ep. Ind.,
XII, pp. 65 fP.)
« Gaggi(a)nika » river = 5ttf5f^ « Gagginl modern JalangI, branch
of the Ganges i found also iu [4J .
[Personal names : « Khasoka » the tradesman ; « Sekya-kara KSliya »
ihe engraver Kalit/a (cf . New Bengali : C^^1 « sek^ra » goldsmithy for which
see Appendix Vocahalari/ of Bengali: Foreign Words in Bengali);
« ^rl-ksi-kun(.»a the Kayastha « Dundhu-natha ». « jafcali » tree = Modern
Bengali ^^t^^f « jar^^l(i) *•]
90. [7] Khalimpur Grant of Dharma-pala: North Central Bengal,
1st quarter of the 9th century (Akshaya Kumar Maitra, ' Gauda-lekha-
mala' ; R. D. Banerji, ' The Palas of Bengal,' ASB. Memoires, V, No. 3).
The territory (mandu/a) of « Vyaghra-tatl » ( = ^T^'ft « BSg^rl » ;
see footnote, p. 74) ; the district {visa^a) of « Mahanta-prakasa » ; the
villages of « Kraunea-svabhm » (cf. « Hansa-koncl » in [19]), « Ma^jha-
sammali » and « Palitaka » ; the territory of « Amra-sandiika » Mango-grove y
the district of « Sthalikkata » ; Village « Go-pippali » ; Village « Udra-
grama*; « Punarama-Vilvai)g&rdha» stream ; «Nala-earmmata » (^«*cam-
mada * = « camera » in New Bengali) : « Namundika-hesadum-
mika (?) » ; « Vedasavilvika (?)» ; « Rohita-va^li » (for « ^Rohia-badt »=New
Beng. wf^'hft « Ru(h)i-barl ^Carp-Jish-toivn) ; « Pindara-viti-jotika »•=? the
Channel of the Hoinie of the Pinclara (tree) ; « UktSra-ydta » for « "^Uttara-
jola » Stream-crossing (?) ; « Viti-dharmayo-jotika » ; « Kana-dvipika »
(?) Edge Me (?) ; River « Konthiya » (ef . « Kontu-hada » in § 102) ;
« Jenandayika » ; « VesSnika-khatika » ( = « ^kharjia »=New Bengali ^\lt
« khari » cr^^yi : see [1]) ; « Hattika » ( = New Bengali ^t^t « -hati» market)
and « Tala-pataka * , village quarters (ef. « Tala-pataka » in § 9^, and
« Hatta-pataka » in § 94).
[Personal names : « Devata, Vifcaka, Bhogata, Subhata (= f^ubhata?),
Tatata, Vapyata ( == Vappata) ; Dedda-dovl » .]
182
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX C
91. [8] Tezpur (Assam) Rock Inscription, on the Brahmaputra:
1st half of the 9th century. (H. P. &strT, JBORS., 1917, Part iv, pp.
50S ff.)
« Harupapesvara-pura > ; « Nakka-josi » (cf • « Nokka-, Nekka- » in
§ 105); « Avara-parvata » = Abor Hills'^.
[Personal name : « Laha(i)ll-jha according to H. P. Sastrl, = Z«//m
f/^^=the Varendra Brahman surname «1tf^^ « Lahirl» + «jha<adhyapaka»5
or « ojhS < up^dhyaya » (?). Words : « buttika » for « bu(Jia » = New
Bengali « buri » score ; « pravista », with dental « -st- for « pravista »,
showing Assamese confusion of the cerebrals and dentals as early as the
9th century.]
92. [9] Ashrafpur Grants of Deva-khadga : East Bengal, 1st
half of the 10th century. (G. M. Laskar, Memoires of the ASB., I,
No. 6, p. 86 ff. ; R. D. Banerji, op. cit,, p. 67.)
Villages « Tala-pafcaka ; Dara-pataka; Datta-kataka ; Markatasi-pataka
( =r -^^Markat&vasika-pataka : Monhey-lioriie'villagel) \ Nava-ropya ; Para-
natana ; Dvarodaka; Vvara-mugguka ( = «*Dvara-mudguka for a verna-
cular *Bara-mug(g)ua [?]); Cata; Jaya-karm^nta-vasaka; Ta(a?)lyodyani-
kara-larala (?) ; Kodara-eoraka ; Palasata ; Siva-hradika-sogga-vargga ;
Srimetaj Para-natana-nada-varmmi (?); R5lla-vayika ; Ugra-voraka ( = vola,
^% field X) ; Tisanada-jaya-datta-kataka ».
93. [10] Nowgong Copper-plate of Bala-varmman of Pragjyotisa,
c. 975. (A. R. Hoernle, JASB., 1897, pp, 285 £f,)
The word ^ koppam » well may be compared with Bengali « kop^ »
slas/i, flip, C^tl « kopa, kupl » a vessel.
94. [11] Sylhet-Bhatera Grant of Govinda : 10th century? (Mm.
Padma-nath Vidyavinoda in the VSPdP., 1328, pp.175 ff . ; Proceedings
of the ASB., 1880, pp. 141 ff.)
The readings (as in the Proceedings of the ASB.) are extremely
problematic, but in this inscription we find quite a long list of names of
villages and of rivers, etc. The following are easily made out :
« Hatta-pataka ; Cata-pada; Vada-gama; Mahara-pura (= present
day Maura-pur) ; Haijhi-thana ( = sthana) ; Degigana(ma ?) ; NavapafieSne
OLD BENGAL PLACE-NAMES FEOM INSCRIPTIONS im
(=*Vara-paneala», the correct reading, = the present-day Baram-cal, Brahma-
cal) ; Si4dava ; Amanata ; Gudavayika; Kata-bacha (Village ?); YithayU
nagara; Yo jatitharka (=c^tv5l « jora » jmir) ; Balusi-gama ; Nava-chadi ;
Ka4di'ya; Savaga-nayi (== River Savaga) ; Ghati (= ghaut) Kaniyani
(Kaliyali? river); Yegamya-ganiya (?) ; Thava-sonti {arrested stream (?) :
< sthapa-srotas-f-ika » : c£. Modern Bengali C^ + C^t^ «v/tho + s6t^<sonta
[Old Bengali] < MIA. sonta<OIx\.sri5tas») ; Bhaskara-tegkarl ( = Bhaskara
Hill? ef. § 85) ; Natayana (= thana? Village) ; Anl-kathi, Adana-kathi
(« kathl = kafchi showing confusion between cerebrals and dentals in the
old speech of Sylhet? cf. New Bengali « kathi » in village names,
§§ 97, 109); Bhogadlatta (?) ; Sata-koi^S {-Seven Springs'^ c£. § 93);
Cedgambudika (?) ; Nafja-kutT-gama ; Hacji-gagga (gagga : cf. New
Bengali ^ttsf « gaijg^» stream)-, Dhana-kun4<3-4i ; PochaniyS ; BhSta-pacJ^ ;
Chadha-thana ; Hadldipa-grha (?) ; Piapi-nagara ; Sihadava- grama » : besides
a number of other tadbliava and rf^sJ-looking names, which cannot be read
properly or distinguished.
95. [12] Baagarh Grant of Mahi-pala: 9th year = end of the
10th century: (R. D. Banerji, op. cit,, p. 76; * Gauda-lekha-mala '),
« Gokalika-mandala » ( = Go-kavalika ?) ; Villages < Cuta-pall ika,
Kara^a-pallika, Hasti-pada, Cavati » (the last i= ^ « clbti > inn^ serai ; see
p. 67).
96. [13] Baidditya Inscription of the time of Mahi-pala : 11th
year. (^ Gauda-lekha-mala/)
Village « Tail&dhaka » = New Bengali C5^1 ^ Telara ».
97. [14?] Rampal Grant of ^rl-candra-deva : East Bengal, 1st half
of the 11th century (R. G. Basak, Ep. Ind., XII, pp. 136 ff.)-
« Naaya-mandala»; Village « Neha<kasthi» (=: « sneha-kasthika » ?) :
ef . the afl5x ^^t^ « kathI » in village names in South-west Vagga : = tcoody
forest (§ 109).
98. [15] Gauhati Copper -plate of Indra-pala of Pragjyotisa; c. 1050
A. C. (A. R, Hoernle, JASB., 1897, pp. 113 ff.).
« MSkkhiyana-villa » = beel (marshy lake) of the Makkhana tree (?) :
« Kuntavita-khambhava (?) » ( = ? ^tW * khamba < khambha < OIA.
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX C
^kambha-, stambba- » pillar) ; « Makuti-Makkhiyana-hasi- (?) » ;
« Kuntavita-lakkhyava (?) » ; « Kasi-pataka » Village ; « Svalpadyati (?) » ;
« Digumma (= dvi-gulma ?) » river.
99. [16] Silimpur Inscription of Jaya-pala of Kama-rupa : 11th
century (R. G. Basak, Ep. Ind., XIII, pp. 283 ff.)-
Villages « Bala-grama, Sirlsa-pufija, Kutumba-palli » ; « Tarkari,
Slyambaka >, Districts or Villages ; « J^akati » river ? ; « Vaieunda » tank.
[Personal names : « Sahila » ; « Kaliyavva = *Kali-parva » and
« Nitula » 5 female names.]
100. [17] Bhatta Bhava-deva Inscription of Bhuvauesbwar : llth
century (F. Kielhorn, Ep. Ind., VI, pp. 203 ff.)-
« Hastini-bhitta, Siddhala^ Vandya-ghati » ^ villages in West Bengal.
[Personal (female) name : < Saijgoka » ,]
101- [18] Belabo Grant of Bhoja-varmma-deva : East Bengal, 1 1th
century (R. G. Basak, Ep. Ind., XII, pp. 37 ff.).
« Adhah-patana-mandala » ; « Kausambi- Astagaccha » ( = « Afcha-gacha »
UiffM trees) subdivision ; Village « Upyalika, » (« ^Uppalika= Utpalika? »).
102. [1^*^] Kamaull Grant of Vaidya-deva of Assam : latter part
of the llth century (A. Venis, Ep. Ind., II, pp. 3i8 ; ' Gauda-lekha-mala ').
« Hausa-konei » district ( = « Hansa + kraunca » : cf . « Kraunca-
vSvabhra » in § 90) ; « Va4a-, Var^a-visaya » ; Villages < oanti-, Santi-vaija »
Peace Village^ occurring also as « Santi-pataka » ?. Mandara » Village ;
« Kansa-pala » ( = « -pola » ? Bell-metal field) ; Dig(h)-danrli-dhara » Village ?
(« dandi-dhara » = ? Holding the high road : cf. Oriya < dan da » main road
of a village ; cf . also « Lacchu-vadfa * below ; « digh » = <t dirgha » /(?/^^ ?
or « dirghika » ? or « dik, dis » direct io)i? : or any connection with New
Persian « dih » ? [ < Old Persian « dahyu » = country ^ Skt. « dasyu » ],
found in New Bengali as f^fefef^ «dihi, dihi»; Persian words were already
being adopted in MIA. : see later, Apfieadix 1), Vocabulary of Bengali ; see
also §§ 104, 105) ; A^illage « Siggia-dham »=« srggika- » ; « Legga-vada »
=? ' ShankJtam ' ; « Kontu-veuja, Konto-haja » = ? ; « Navadhara » youthful,
graceful (cf. New Bengali J{5f^ « n&dhar^ < navadhara » ) ; Villages
« Sira-vadS » ? « Sila-gudi » (see p. 66) ; « Jaya*rati-poIa « Unai-pola »
OLD BENGAL PLACE-NAMES FROM INSCRIPTIONS 185
* Spring-jield ' ? (cf . New Bengali < « unui, unai » ^)rmg^ icell
< •* unna — v^ud, und » f oiv) ; « Pipa-munda » = ? ; « Ajhacja^cau-bola »
= ? Treeless four jields ; <c Vudhi-pokhiri » ^a/l-^*, or /afe of the Old
Wovian'y « Kula-capadi » Pond-Jiostelri^ village ; « Nai-posrggarayo (?) »
(« nai = nai = nadi » ?); « Lacchu-va^a » = ? ^ StraUham ' (« laechu > =
Middle Bengali « laeha MIA. [Magadhi] « laccha » = Skt. « rathja »
) Village ; < Ghata-campaka » ; « Velavanlpata-nava-pala (?) » ;
« Dhravolaya » (=< Dhru-v5la? Dhmva-vula ? ») ; « Hela-vana-muncja »
Head of ike Hela wood ; River « Na^.Vjoli ^{^Beed slreaMf Skt. «nala»; or
Jloioing stream^ cf. Bengali ^ * * move).
103. [20] Manahali Grant of Madana-pala-deva : c. 1108: North
Central Bengal Gau(JaJekha.mala N. N. Vasu, JASB., 1900, i, pp. 66
fE. ; R, D. Banerji, cit.^ p. 104).
« Halavartta Mandala » ; Village « Kastha (Kostha ? )-giri » ; Village
« Campa-hitthi » {=:C/ia}/ipac Village^ New Bengali « CampatI »).
104. [21] Inscription of Isvara-ghosa of Dhekkari : West Bengal,
12th century (A. K. Maitra, ' Sahitya/ Vaisakha and Jyaisfcha, 1320 ;
R. D. Banerji, ' Baggalar Itihas/ Vol. I, pp. 301.30^).
« Dhekkari » town = New Bengali CI?^?f « Dhekur » ; « Piyolla
Mandala » ; « Galli-tipyaka Visaya > (= « *Gali-tipa » : ? « \/gal, gal »
/w, e.r«f/<? + « \/ tip » i?;7» ; « Digghasodiya » Village (= ? « dirgha +
avasa + dvipaka » ; for « dig- » , see § 102, § 105).
[Personal name : « Nivvoka-sarmman ».]
105. [22] Copper-plate Grant of Dharma-pala of Pragjyotisa : 12th
century (Padma-nath Bhattaeharya, ' Rangpur Sahitya Parisad Patrika/
X, No. 2, 1322 San).
Village * Khyati-puni » ( = « khyati + punya » ?) ; Village « Dig-
fjola * (for * dig- » , see § 102, 104) ; * Puraji Visaya » : « Nokka (Nekka)-
(Jevvarl-pala (?) » ; * Go-va<Ja-bhoga-ali(sa)na (?) » ; Village « Khaggali »
{ — BeedJjank? « khaclga> khagga », whence New Bengali ^^tvSl «khag^-
ra» reedy-^-^ ah » embankment)', < Camyala-jopi » river { — < cammala-joll ?
cammacla-jdll ? » 5^reaw / ) ; * Sovvadi » tank ; « Jau-galla » river =
iV/<?//eM Zflc (« ]au=:jau<jatu » /ac-f « galla cf. New Bengali « v/g&l »
24
l86
Introduction : appendix c
fimoy melt J ^\ « gala » molt€}i ^tiiff^ molten lac^ lac-stick or -caie) ; « Nekka-
deull» (cf. « deul < deva-kula » te9n2)le) ; « Sik(ph?)-ga4i-]oli » ;
« Vadijjuratibhuol (?) » ; * Nekka-sarmma » ; « Avanci, -ea (?) » ; « Thaisa-
dobbbi-cakkojana (?) > (* dobbhi ^ : cf . New Bengali c^t^ * 4oba » puddle) ;
« Dijamakka-joll » ; « Nokka-nada » . (« Nokka, Nekka » = ? ; cf .
« Nakka § 91, also in an Assam Inscription) ; « ps&rali » =*ft^ « parul(i)»
= patali tree.
[Personal name — « Manno-satka » = belonging to J/.].
106. [^3] Amgachi Grant of Vigraha-pala III: North Central
Bengal, second half of 11th century. (R. D- Banerji, VSPdP., 1823, pp.
283 ff.)
Village « Brahmani » in Pundra-vardhana llivMi^ KOti-varsa vimija ;
« Krodanci » district ? ; Villages « Matsyavasa, Chatra, Posali ».
[Personal name : < Khodula-devasarmman ».]
107. [24] Barraekpur Grant of Vijaya-sena; 12th century (R. D.
Banerji, Ep. Ind., XV, pp. 279 ff.)
« Kantl-jogga » ; ^ Ghasa-sambhoga Bhatta-vacja » Village ; « Khadi
Visaya » (see § 84) ; « Tiksa-hanr'a » marsh,
[Personal name — « -naga »].
[25] Sita-hatI Grant of Ballala-sena : Uttara Badha or Central
Bengal : early 12th century. (A, K. Maitra and R. G. Basak, ' Sahitya,'
Karttika and Agrahayana, 1318; R. D. Banerji, Ep. Ind., XIV, pp. 156
ff. ; Banwari-lal Goswami, ^ PravasI ' for Phalguna, 1^17.)
Administrative district {aasajia) of « Khandayilla »( = New Bengali -^X^^
« Kharule >) ; ibid, of « N54lea, Ambayill^, Nad^^na, Jala-sothi, M6]a(Jandi »
(present-day ^'^t^ * Murundi<Murandi » ; « Jala-sothi » = « *jala-
sdnii ? tvaier stream) ; «Auda-gafJdi (? Aubagadfjia), Sura-kona-gadc la-
kiyottarali, Simali, Tarali, Kuclambama »; Village « Valla-hitta* (=^t^fe
« Balute » in New Bengali) ; < Siggatia » river.
[Personal name : « Ovasudeva-sarmraan »].
108. [26] Five Grants of Laksmana-sena : late 12th century.
(i) Tarpan-dlghi Grant of Laksmana-sena (R. D. Banerji, Ep. Ind.,
XII, pp. 6 ff.).
OLD BENGAL PLACE-NAMES FROM INSCRIPTIONS 187
« Nica-cjahara » tank (= « *niea-4ahara » lotv and deep : ef. Bengali
5f??r, \5??r « dah&r^, dahar^ » r/^^/?) ; « Nandi-Hari-pa-kundl » ? spring of
Nandi Hari-puda ; « MoUana-khadi » ( « mollana = « mulanam » , or
« mfnala » : ef. Gary a 10 : (?rt^t^ = hti(S Mk ; found also in
dialectal Bengali, R. D. Banerji suggests that the word is the Perso-
Arabie « mulla and seems inclined to see in this word an indication of
the existence of Musalmans in 1 :2th century Bengal; which is not very
unlikely, as we have traditions of the advent of Moslem preachers even before
the Turki conquest).
(ii) Govindapur Grant : West Central Bengal. (Edited by Prof. Amiilya-
Charan Vidyabhushana : unpublished : through the kindness of the
editor.)
Village « Vetha44a » in « Pa^cima-khatika » , within « VardhamSna »
(Burdwan) district ; « L^ha-deva-man^apl (?) » temple ; « Vi44ara-
sSsana (?) ».
[Personal name : « Cahala-devasarmman » ].
(iii) Anulia Grant: Central Bengal. (A. K. Maitra, JASB., 1900,
i, pp. 61 ff.).
« Matharandiya-khanda-ksetra » in « Vyaghra-tati > (§ 90) district j
« Jala-pilla ? » , forming a boundary line.
[The word « malSmanca-v5ti » flower-garden house :=zTSlew Bengali
ajt^l^ ^rft « mal&nc&-bari » ].
(iv) Sundar-ban Grant : Central Bengal (original lost : imperfect
transcription in Kama-gati Nyaya-ratna's ' Baggala-bhSsa O Baggala-
sabitya-visayak Prastav,^ ' Chinsurah, San 1294, pp. 325-327).
< Khadi » district in Paundra-vardhana (see § 106) ; Village < KSn-
talla-pura » Village ; « Santya-savi » ; « Cita^i-khata » ; « Men^ala-
grama ».
[Personal names : « Visnu-pani Gadoll, Kesava Gadoli »].
(v) Madhai-nagar Grant : North Central Bengal. (R. D. Banerji,
Journal and Proceedings of the ASB., 1909, pp. 467 fP.).
Villages « Gaya-nagara, Gundi-sthira-pataka, Dapa(r)niya.pataka » ;
« Ravana-sarasiski-sthana (?) ».
188
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX C
109. [27] Copper-plate Grant of Visva-rupa-sena : East Bengal,
12th-13th century (Nagendra-Nath Vasu, JASB., 1896, i, pp. 6 ff.).
Villages * Atha-paga ; Barayl-pada ( = New Bengali ?t^^^5l « Bar&i-
para » quarter of heteUvine growers) ; Uneo-katthi (HigA wood) ; Vlra-katthi ;
Pinj5-kasthl ; NarSntapa ».
1 38] Edilpur Grant of Kesava-sena : East Bengal, 12th-13th
century. (R. D. Banerji, Journal and Proceedings of the ASB., 1904,
pp. 97 ff.).
Villages « Tala-pada-pataka ; Satraka-dvl (=dvipa)j Sagkara-pasS »
(New Bengali *rKI « pasa » = « parsvaka » side, quarter, in village names) ;
« Vagull-vitta-gado (?) » .
[Word: « laggavayitva » = having planted {trees), based on an Old
Bengali form] .
110. [29]. Chittagong Copper-plate of 12-43 A. C. (Prana-nath
Pandit, in the JASB. for 1874, i, pp. 318 ff.).
« Dambara-dama ; Kamanapaundiya ; Navrapalya ; Ketaggapala ;
Mftaccada ; Bagha-p5khira » . (For « Dambai-a-dama », cf. the town of
« Pamara », mentioned in the ' Bama-earita ' : R. D. Banerji, * the Pslas
of Bengal,' p. 91.)
[The word « lala > = Chittagong dialect ^Tt^ « nSla » arahle /and.]
\
APPENDIX D
The Vocabulary of Bengali.
TaTSAMA, ' SeMI-TaTSAMA/ TaDBHAVA, DesI and ^ VlDESl/
111. Following the terminology of the Indian grammarians, and slightly
extending it, the vocabulary of a NIA. language can be said to consist of
4 elements : (I) taf^mma, (2) tadbkara, (3) desi^ and (4) vtdesL By tatsama
the Indian grammarians (of Prakrit) meant only those words, in Prakrit,
wbich were identical in form with Sanskrit : e.g., « hari, sundara, kusuma,
deva, manda, cinta » etc. These words, as in the earlier forms of MIA.,
were among those originally inherited from OIA., but they were not
phonetically modified in MIA., since in their sounds they were not against
the genius of the speech in the MIA. stage. In the modern employment
of the term, tatsama also includes the learned words introduced from classical
Sanskrit into the Frakritic speech, after the latter became characterised
as NIA. The word tatsama has thus come to cover, in NIA., both the
unmodified words, exactly similar to Sanskrit, which formed a part of the
speech from its birth, plus later arrivals from Sanskrit as loan-words
(literary and other borrowings) : this is rather a loose use of the word,
which is only allowable on the ground that it is used with reference to
the form of a word, and not with reference to the time or manner of its
inclusion or admission into the language. Thus there would be tatsamas
of the oldest period, like « kala, desa, pasa, mana, nica^ gana, hasa *, etc.,
which may be described as being of the native element of the language ;
and these, from point of view of historical survey, should rightly come
under tadbhava words, at least in certain cases. Then, there would be
later taisamas admitted at different times in the history of the language.
When these later tatmmas were naturalised in the language, they also
underwent changes according to the phonetic laws operating in it at the
time, in addition to the slight modification in pronunciation which is bound
to come when the word is introduced straight from a Sanskrit book.
190
INTRODUCTION: APPENDIX D
It is quite possible to guess the time of admission of a taUama word by
noticing the change that has come to it : this change, in tatsamas admitted
in later times, is of a different character, for instance, from that which
turned OIA. to MIA., and MIA* to NIA. Thus, for example, the OIA.
word « srSddha » faitk^ devotion, desire, desire of a pregnant teaman for any
particular food etc, ( = « dohada »), became in early MIA. « saddha » (Saura-
senl etc.), and « *saddha » (Magadhi), whence in late MIA, (Apabhransa),
« *s3,ddh&, s^LddhS, », and in early NIA. «sadha, sadha », later « sS-dh, sadh » :
tf.^,, Bengali ft*f « sadh^ wrongly written with dental « s » through fancied
connection with « Y^^adhaya- », but pronounced *ft^f « sadh ». « sadh^l »
is a living tadhhava word in Bengali, used in the sense of « dohada » . But
« si-Sddha » has been borrowed anew in the sense of faith, devotion, resjpect,
after the formation of Bengali. In Middle Bengali times, this word, pro-
nounced as « sreddha, serdha, ehreddha, cherdha » , became naturalised, and
ultimately it has been vernacularised to « ehedda » in modern folk-
Bengali. This modified form of the tatsama, « ehedda » occurs side by
side with the genuine Sanskrit « sraddha » , now usually pronounced
« sroddha » . Grierson and other European scholars have employed the
convenient name semi-tatsama for these modified loan-words from the
Sanskrit, which are neither part of the inherited stock of the language, nor
do they preserve their original Sanskrit forms to the extent they
can do in the vernacular, and yet remain Sanskrit), but have accommodated
themselves to the spirit of the spoken tongue. The same Sanskrit word,
it can easily be seen, can have more than one seuii-tatsama form in the
same NIA, speech, following the time of admission, or dialect (local or
communal) where they occur; thus, OIA. (Sanskrit) « sraddha » funeral
rites, funeral dinner^ does not occur in its tadhhava form in Bengali,
which would have been « * sadh^ » ; but we have, in addition to the
tatsama form SSf^ (which is pronounced « sraddho » ), two semi^tatsamas : an
archaic, and rather rustic, f ^t? « cb&rad^ », found also in Middle Bengali,
and a current Modern Bengali Cf^K « eheradd^ » ; of which the former
is earlier, being based on a pre-Bengali (Magadhi Apabhransa) modification,
« ^saraddha > ^sariddha » (or possibly with « ch » for « s » ), whence Old
TATSAMa, SEMI-TATSAMA, tadbhava
191
Bengali semi4atsama « "^charadha > , becoming in late Middle Bengali
* eh&rad^ » ; the latter form, « cheiadd§r would be frona a Middle Bengali
aemi'tatsama pronunciation, « * ehraddha, cheraddhS, » .
The OIA. (Sanskrit) word « kfsna » with its modifications is another
tj^pieal case, OIA. « kfsna > > MIA. « kanha » > NIA. « kanha, kana » ,
(found in Middle Bengali as Wt^ ^t*? * kanha, kan^ » and now, with two
new affixes added, as ^t^^ * kan-u, kan-ai » a joet form of the
name Krsna), shows the normal development of the word. Side by
side with this tadbhava form, we have the tatsama, pronounced
in the old fashion as « kristo, kristyo » , and in the new fashion as
« krisna » ; and the various s€nii'tatfiamfff< — « kasana », now lost, in Old
Bengali (Carya 16 : « kasana-ghana gajai *'=^ihe black cloud nnnbles), which
is based on a MIA. 8€iu'i4ahama ; C^l C^^l « kesta, kesto », usually as the
name, based on a Middle Bengali pronunciation « kresta, ke(r)sta » ; and
lastly, f^^«| « kisaii^ » , as in the name of an image of Krsna, e.^., f^^*l
« Radha-Kisan^-jiu » t/ie images of Radha and Krsna {in a temple),
which is based on another Middle Bengali pronunciation, * "^krisan^ »,
modified by the pronunciation of Northern India : cf. Hindi « Kisan,
Kisen » .
It is sometimes convenient to treat the semi^atsamas, especially the
older ones, along with the tadbliavas.
112. The tadbhava element is the genuine folk or native element of
MIA. and NIA. It represents the bulk of words and forms derived from
OIA. which underwent a natural modification through wear and tear of
centuries; it forms the living and ever-moving stream of speech — its
original waters, so to say, derived from its very source, to which the other
elements are mere accretions and additions. This element represents the
oldest basis of the Aryan speech at its normal transformation.
Side by side with the tadbhava element is a class of words which the
Prakrit grammarians have called det^Jy and which also may be regarded,
at least so far as late MIA. and NIA. are concerned, as forming a part
of the native element. The term dekl^ in its present-day application,
embraces a numerous class of words which cannot be traced to Aryan
192
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX D
roots and which obviously were derived from the pre-Aryan languages
of the country, Dra vidian and Kol. The older grammarians, however,
included within this term all onomatopoetic and other words which could
not be traced to Sanskrit ; and also they classed as dehl quite a number of
genuine tadbJtamSjVfhifih are as much Aryan as Sanskrit itself, because their
derivation happened to be (»bscure and not obviously traceable to Sanskrit,
or because their equivalents were not used in Sanskrit. The * Desi-nama-
mala ' of Huma-candra, for instance, has scores of such ' /arfi^r/i a rfm '
words* The true de'ifi words are relics from the dialects employed in
the land before the masses took up the Aryan speech : and the Dravidian
and other non-Aryan loan-words in Vedic (see p, 42) can be also described
as forming a detsl element in OIA. As time advanced, quite a number of
these non-Aryan words became part of the language by the beginning of
the MIA. stage, and many more came in subsequently. In the second
MIA. Prakrit period, these words forced themselves to the notice of the
grammarians, especially when there was no similar Vedic or Sanskrit word
to explain them : and the grammarians found a label for them in the
word dekl, meaning of the coantry^ that is, ahoriginaL In the late MIA.
(Apabhransa) and NIA. periods, dehl words are as much a native element
in the speech as tadbhava words : only dehl words were not infrequently
discarded in writing, as these, forming part of the small currency of
daily speech, with their humble non- Aryan origin stamped upon them, were
looked upon with disfavour by scholars and litleratenrs.
It would be convenient to treat the dekl words along with the iadhhava
ones in discussing these elements in a NIA. speech, since they form part of
the same inherited stratum.
113. ^heridesl^ov ///leeci a, i.e., foreign or extra-Indian element is not
much noticed by the older grammarians, first, because the number of foreign
words was comparatively small, and secondly, because their origin was not
always known. Yet words like « pika » mchoo, * dinara •» a gold coin^
« dramma » a coin (= Latin « picus, denarius » , Greek « drakhme ») were
recognised as foreign in ancient times. The foreign, extra-Indian
elements in the Aryan speech, before the contact of the Indo-Aryans with
EOREIGN ELEMENTS IN INDO-ARYAN
193
the Iranians (Persians) in the Panjab after the Achjemenian conquest,
ai-e not properly known. Comparison has been made, however, between
certain Vedic words and some from Mesopotamia (Sumerian and Semitic),
and it has been thought that these words were borrowed by the
Aryans (see p. 28, footnote). From the beginning of the 5th century
B. C, when the Persians ruled a part of North-western India, there has
been some sort of connection between India and Persia, sometimes intimate,
sometimes distant. There was mutual influence between the two countries ;
and, as a result of the political and cultural influence of Persia on India,
we have a number of Old and Middle Persian words in Indo-Aryan
down to the period of the Moslem (Turki) invasions in the 10th century.
Words like « dipi » tvriting^ i7iscription, « nipista » 2vrilien, and « yona
(=yavana) » Greek {Ionian), found in the inscriptions of Asoka, and
« ksatrapa » s^i^rajo ( = Old Persian « dipi, nipista-, yauna, xSa^ra-pavan »),
belong to the early or old (pre-Christian) period of Persian influence ;
and in subsequent post-Christian times, we have quite a number of
Iranian words in the MIA. dialects of India : e.g., « mihira » stoi (=Middle
Persian [Pazand] « mihir » , Old Persian «mi^ra»=OlA. « mitra ») ;
«maga »a clasn of Brahmans {-^-Ix^mzxi ^ m2i.^2k- ^ Magus ^ priest of the
Zoroastfian faith)*^ « pusta » 4o6>/{- {= Middle Persian [Pahlavl] * post »
skin, skill for xoriting) ; « kunduru » frankincense ( = Pahlavi « kundur *) ;
etc. (See Berthold Laufer, ^ Sino-Iraniea,' Chicago Field Museum of
Natural History, 1919, and other works, for the study of Iranian influence
on Indian culture and speech). After the establishment of Moslem rule
in India by the Turks, the Tajiks and the A.f ghans, Persian was introduced
into the country as the language of administration and as the culture-
language of the Mohammedan courts ; by that time, the NIA. languages
had originated, and they came in direct touch with Persian, under its
umbrage and influence. Persian had already entered upon the present ^ev)
or Modern phase of its history.
Apart from Persian, Greek was the other extra-Indian language which
influenced lA. (in the MIA. stage). Greek adventurers and officers in
Persian service seem to have come to India even before Alexander's invasion
25
194
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX D
in 327 B.C. Intimate relations between the Greeks and Indians began from
the next century, and continued down to the end of the 3rd century A, C.
The Greek settlers in India, however, were rapidly Hinduised and absorbed.
Greek contact with India has given a number of Indian words to the Greek
language ; and as a result of Greek influence on Indian culture, we have a
number of Greek words in Indo-Aryan, the MIA. vernaculars and Sanskrit.
(These have been studied by Weber : see I Ant., May 1873.)
Modern I A. speeches have inherited a number of Persian and Greek
words from MIA. These words in their phonology conform to the tadbhava
forms of the language. We have in Bengali the following words at least,
which are old and inherited videsl words :
[1] From Old and Middle Persian > MIA.
^i^, ^f^, « puthi, puthi, puthi » bool^, mamiscript in the old
Indian sff/le : earlier « pothi » ; MIA. « potthia » : Iranian (Pahlavi)
« post » shiUy parchment^ Sanskritised to « pusta, pusta-ka, pust-
ika ».
*t1^ « paik^ » foot'Soldier, footman : MIA, « pSikka*, from Ii'anian
« paik * .
^ It mud » sJioe-maher^ earlier * moci » , as in Hindi : from MIA.
« *moeia » : from Middle Persian (Pahlavi) « moeak > shoe, boot
(whence New Persian « mozah^ muzah » , the source of the
New Bengali word c^lt^ « moja > hoots > socks),
* sek^ra > [Jaekra] goldsmith = Old Bengali « %ekara »,
found in a Sanskritised form « sekya-kara » engraver, for a MIA.
«*sekka-ara », in the BhSskara-varmman (Nidhanpur) inscription of
the 7th century (see page 181). The word « *sekka » is a loan-word
from the Middle Persian, which had a large number of borrowed
words from the Semitic (Aramaic). The Middle Persian source of
« *sekka », probably a form like « *sikkah » , is itself borrowed
from the Aramaic «sy kt ' die for coining. (Cf. S. Praenekel, *Die
aramaischen Fremdworter im Arabischen,^ Leyden, 1886, pp. 192,
194. [I am indebted to Prof. Jules Bloeh for the reference.])
«*sekka-k3ra » therefore originally = a die-engraver, then engraver^
FOREIGN WORDS : CLASSIFICATION OF NIA. WORDS 195
and finally gold* or silver-smith, in its Bengali form « sek^ra ».
(Arabic borrowed the word from Aramaic in the form « sikkat,
sikkah » , and in Persian the word was thus strengthened by the
Arabic. The Perso- Arabic vocable was later introduced into India,
and we have from the late Persian source the word f^T^Fl « sikka » a
coin, rupee,)
[2] From Greek :
Tt^ «c dam^ » price J WT^ft « dam^-ri » a small value , y/i of a pice :
MIA. « damma » = « dramma » in the speech of North-western
India in the Transitional MIA. period, Sanskritised to « dramya » :
from the Greek « drakhmti » .
C^«", t^^*tj seo, siiii = siwi » Indian vermiccHi, = Hindustani
« siw-ai, simai, siiX-aiya » etc. : cf . Skt. « samita, samida » line
W V* V '
?i7^^a^ Jlovr : Greek « semidalis » . The Greek word, with its
close « e » , approaching the sound of « i » , possibly gave a
* Transitional MIA.-' form « *simida whence the NIA. word.
* suragga, surag » tnnnel : Sanskrit « suragga » , from
Greek « surinks (syrinx) » .
The above foreign words, and possibly a few more, are among the
inherited element from MIA. Persian and other foreign elements acquired
after the beginning of the XIA. period, as direct borrowings or through
the intermediary of sister speeches which have merely passed them on, are
discussed in §§ 117 ff.
Classificatiox of NIA. Words.
114, A rigorously chronological classification of the vocabulary of
a NIA. language would be on the following lines :
[1] Inherited words, forming the 'speech commodity ' o£ MIA.,
which changed into NIA., and consisting of —
(a) iadhkava words ;
(b) borrowed Sanskrit words, or old iatsamas and semi-ia(san?af< ;
(c) aboriginal borrowings, and words unexplained by Aryan roots : the
dekt words ; and
196
INTRODUCTION: APPENDIX D
(d) a few foreign words, like the Persian and Greek ones noted in
§113.
[2] Borrowed words :
(a) Indian ; Aryan*
(i) From OIA. and MIA. — from Sanskrit, Classical and Vedie : a very
large number of recent taUamas and semUtaisamas ; from Pali and other
Prakrit : a few very recent admissions — e,g.^ words like « thera, kahapanai
pati-mokkba, avahattha » etc., which are restricted in use.
(ii) From NIA. sister-speeches : a very large number from Hindostani
(^.^.j « bani » making charges* of jewelri/ = Hindi « banal » ; ^tt^rW^
^V^odX. ^ immml artist = H. « kalawa(n)t » ; « luci » thin wheateu
calces fried in ghee = « lueui » ; the affix ^?jt^1 « -oala » = « -wala etc.,
etc.) ; and some from the other Aryan speeches, coming through direct
contact as well as through Hind(5stani, or, in recent times, through the
English newspapers conducted by both Indians and Englishmen : €,g,^
Panjabi « sikkh » = f»f^ « sikh » SiM ; * cahida » (jeing loanted = 5t%fl
4t cahida » demand; Gujarati * hadtal » closing of markets — ^^t^, ^^v5|tff
« h&r^tal?l, har^tal^ » Btrihej closing of shops ; « garba » a kind of dance
= « g§r^ba » , « kanvi » a caste = « kunbl » ; Marathi « patil,
kujakar^^i »=^ttf5«^, ^^^^ * patil^, kul^karni > village officers ; « Mawall ^
a Maratha tribe = 5(t^^t#t, STf^ « maoali, maull » . Genuine tadbhava
borrowings from NIA. languages other that Hindostani are rather rare in
Bengali. We have in addition a number of Sanskrit {tatsarna) and Pei^ian
words coming to Bengali through the intermediaey of Modern Indian
speeches : e.g., Marafchi « nyayddhis » judge = Bengali « bicar^-karta » ;
«srl-khan4a» a prej)aration of curds ; « bargir » irregular cavalry man, from
the Persian, = « b&rgi » Marutlia raider ; and a whole host of
Persian words from Hindustani.
(b) From the non-Aryan languages of India, and from extra-Indian
non-Aryan speeches belonging to groups represented in India. This list
is extremely small : and a few which are recent arrivals through English,
like cheroot > « eurut^ », from Tamil « iulu^tu, » should not be
considered here.
CLASSIFICATION OF WORDS : TADBHAVA, DE^I 197
(i) From the Dravidian languages : mainly caste-names, e.g,, <:Namburi,
NSmbudri ( = Nambudri), Pile ( = Pillai), Ceti ( = Cetti) » : names of
the languages — ^^tf^^ « Tamil » ( = Tamil), C5l«1^, « Telegu,
Telugu » (= Telugu) , ^W|t « Kanarl » (= Kannacja), ^Tf^^,
« Malay all, -lam » (= Malayalam).
(ii) From Kol : C^sfl, ^^^1 « bogga, b&gga » god^ ^jnnl, godlhig = Kdl
« boijga » ; fTf%^1 « hariya » r tee-beer, cf. Santali « here ».
(iii) From Tibeto-Burman : names of tribes i besides a few words like
«1W « lama » lama — Tibetan « blama » \ Burmese ^rff^t « nappi » fish a?ul
meat eondihieui = « ngappe » , « P^^^Bgi * Buddhist monk =
« hponggyi » , « luggi » loin-cloth = * lunggyi » , 5\S « elig » monastert/
— « kyaung », etc.
(c) Extra-Indian :
(i) Persian (= Persian; and Arabic and Turk! coming through
Persian), and other Iranian (see 117-120 ; also Phonology of the Foreign
Element).
(ii) European and other foreign (see 121, 122 : also Pkonology of
the Foreign Element^ :
(a) Portuguese ^
(^) English \ through direct contact,
(y) French, Dutch (a few) j
Foreign words generally, coming through the medium of European
languages, should be considered as European words : — e.g.^ ^1 « ca « tea,
(Chinese), « julu » 7Adu (Bantu), « sagu, sabu » natjo (Malay),
?t^tf^f^ « barakiri » (Japanese), ^cnT%^ « balsebhik » (Russian), ^^it^
« kuinain » quinine (Peruvian), sfTt^^^l « mviijenta », folk-Bengali 3^rt^>Qt?f
« myajen4ar » magenta red (Italian) etc., etc.
Tadbhava axd Desi Words,
115. The tadfJiava element is the most important one in the philology
of a NIA. language. OIi\. took special and definite forms in the different
parts of the country, and became characterised as MIA. of the various
tracts ((?.^., Udicya, Madhya-deaiya, Pracya; ^aurasenl, Maharastri,
198
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX D
Magadhi), Bat no NIA. language of the present day is the result of an
unimpeded development of a particular MIA. dialect. In a country like
India (which, however vast it may be^ presents one whole, and where
intimate communication between even the most distant parts was never
absent, both through the domination of political powers and through cultural
and commercial contact), there have always been influences and cross-
inHuences in the linguistic life of the people ; and this has made the
development of most NIA. speeches appear complicated and irregular in
some points. At times it is impossible to unravel the tangle presented by
the diversity and contrariness of development, in the iadbhava forms found
in the same NIA. speech, — a diversity which is due to the influence of
sister-dialects.
The main lines of development in a NIA. speech, however, are
generally clear. In the section on Phonologi/, an attempt has been made to
trace these main lines along which Ihe sounds of OIA. have changed into
Bengali : mention being made of those points where the lines are
blurred, and the history is obscured. It is comparatively easier in
Morphology.
Tadbhava words are connected with every-day life, and these had to
do by far the greatest amount of work, so to speak, in the language.
Frequently, through phonetic decay, the Modern Bengali forms have
preserved but very little of their OIA. originals. Yet this whittling down
of the forms of the words is only their historical development ; and the
lines along which this development has occurred, after they have been
found out, give the iJionologicai lairs of the language. Thus, the
Bengali word (Standard Colloquial) tiiCfl, « t*(y)o » is all that is left of
the OIA. word « avid ha va » ( « awidhawa > *aviShava > avihava >
*aihaa > ^ayiha\Va > aiha > aiha > ayya > eo ») ; ^C^,
(Tfl « s(u)o » [ J(u)o ] favourite wife represents the OIA. word « subhaga >
(«subhaga > *subha^ > *suhaa > *suhaa > ^suha > *sua>suo>so ») ;
^5rt^#f « Ayan^ » // Qiame in the Kr.^na legtnd is all that remains of
«Abhimanyu» (« abhimanyu > *abhimannu > ahivanna > *ahianna >
«rtt?*l aih&nli > *aiana > ayan^ » ) ; ^ « jhi » daughter, tenant-
THE TADBHAVA ELEMENT
199
ivof/iau, of « duhitr » (« duhita > *dihita > dhlta > dhida > "^dhi^a >
'^dhla > dhia > jhlh > jhl > ) ; « ojha » scholar, exorcist^ curer of
Bnake*Ut€s, of « up&dhy&ya » (« uvajjhSa > "^ojjhaa > ojha » ) ; ^ « pl^r »
icear, of « pari-dha- =^ (« pari-ha- > "^pairha > parha > par ») ; ^^Jt^,
« buei, bei » or danghter^s father-in-law^ of « vaivahika » ( « vevahia
>^vevahi > ^bewahl> *behai > C^^t^ bebai > OTtt beai > b?ei> bei »),
and ^rf^ 4c masi » of « matf-svasr » *matr-svasr-ika > *matussasika >
*madussasiga > ^ma^us-sasig^ > ^maiissasia > ^maii^sia > ^mausi >
*mausl > *maiisl > masi written with « -s- »).
The study of the dehl words is the least satisfactory part of lA
etymology. We have the modern desl words in the various languages,
from which, with the help of some of the Prakrit dehJ words, MIA.
originals may be reconstructed. Quite a number of dc'^7 words begin with
a cerebral sound, and many with a palatal. In Dravidian, in itial cerebral
is rare, if not non-existent (see footnote, p. 38) : and dehl words with
an initial cerebral would thus seem to be not from Dravidian. Quite a
number of words in lA, have been traced to a Dravidian origin (see
references under Apjjendix B ; also pp. 42, 64 ff.). A great many are
undoubtedly Kol or Austro-xAsiatie. The new method inaugurated by J.
Przyluski in the study of lA. borrowings from Kol^ by comparing forms
in the Austro-Asiatic and Austro-nesian languages, has led to some sure
results in this most obscure branch of lA , etymology . (Cf. J. Przyluski
in the MSL., Paris, XXII, pp. 205 ff., XXIV, pp. 118 fE. ; cf. also S. K.
Chatterji, ' The Study of Kol/ in the Calcutta Review for September,
1923). But in the absence of any knowledge of the Kol and other
Austro-Asiatic speeches of an early period (barring, however, the Khmer
of Cambodia: of. G. Maspero, 'Grammaire Khmere,' Paris, 1915,
p. 23), nothing definite can be said. There is also the possibility of
non-Aryan speeches (other than Dravidian, Kol and the later Tibeto-
Chinese), speeches now extinct, being present in India during the first
half of the fii-st millennium A. C, and contributing some desl words
and in other ways intlueneing Indo-Aryan. In the present state of
our knowledge, the dthl words in NIA. may be considered along with
300
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX D
the iadbJiava words, as forming part of the inherited element, citing an
attested non- Aryan word for reference only, wherever the latter, from
similarity in form and meaning with a word in lA., offers itself
for comparison.
The onomatopoetie jingles, so chameteristic of Bengali as of Modern
Indian speech in general, Aryan and non-Aryan (see Appendix p. 1 76),
have been brilliantly studied by Rablndra-nath Tagore Sabda-tattva/ pp.
22 ff.) and by Ramendra-Sundar Trivedl iSabda-katha/ pp. 17 ff.) : the
latter writer has included a number of words as onomatopoetics which have
an historical development from OIA. words, and happen to agree with the
Bengali scheme of onomatopoeia merely as a coincidence. The onomato-
poetie de&7 formations do not offer any scope for comparison with non-Aryan
speeches, except in noticing a general agreement in principle.
Tatsama Words.
116. The tatsama element can be dismissed after a discussion of
the modifications the Sanskrit sounds undergo in being pronounced by
Bengali speakers. It will be interesting to note how persistent is the
Prakritie or MIA. system of phonetics in NIA., in giving a tadbhava
look to recently introduced tatsama words, in pronunciation, and turning
them into semi4atsamas going xery close to tadbkavas, actually existing
or possible, — although the spelling would bcoru to note it: e.g., Tt?
« vahya » , pronounced [baj^fio] in the Standard Colloquial ; cf . a possible
tadbhava « ^bajh^ » ; '^^ft^ « smasana » , pronounced [Jojan], ef. tadbhava
3rtt^ « masan » ; ^r€t « l&ksmi » , pronounced [lokkhi] ; 1W « padma » ,
pronounced [poddo] . Words like « vatsara, matsya » were
formerly pronounced [bDccfhor, moecfho], but now we have a new tradition in
[bot-jor, mot-/o] ; so « jihva » ^srf^s? « ahvana » have yielded their
old pronunciations [jgibbfia, abbfian], to [jgiuGa, aofian]. This sort of
compromise between the tatsama and the tadbhava forms, by allowing the
former to reign supreme in the written (and printed) page, and the latter,
as far as practicable, in the spoken word, has been instrumental in the
gradual disuse from the spoken language of a very large number of good
TATSAMA WORDS
201
old tadbhavas. And this has made the Bengali pronunciation of Sanskrit
notoriously bad, from the Sanskrit standard, so much so that the most
erudite Bengali Pandit, following the traditional Bengali pronunciation,
would be understood only with great difficulty when talking Sanskrit
to a Pandit from Benares, Poena or Conjeeveram.
The use of a large proportion of tatsama words has familiarised the
Bengali reader and writer with a number of Sanskrit affixes, but the nicer
points in the genuine Sanskrit forms cannot always be noticed by an
ordinary writer or reader without a sufficient grounding in the grammar
of the classical language. The result is that since Early Middle Bengali
times (and the thing has never been so prominent as in the 19th century,
which brought in ^journeyman work' in literature), Bengali has been
flooded with solecisms, showing the vulgarisation of the Sanskrit forms.
Wrong spelling, wrong sand/ii, false gender, mistaken use of the various
affixes like « -ta » and « -ita » , changes of meaning, and hybrids with
tadbhava and foreign words, new coinings not warranted by grammar,
and barbarisms of all sorts are perpetrated. Even the best writers are not
free from them. But forms like « sf j^n^ » for < sarjana» , ^^f%^
« rd^j^kinl » for « rajaki », 1t*5t^ * pascaty& » for « pascattya », < kimba »
for « kimva » , f^|^tfft»l « pitr-mitr-hin^ » in the sense of orphan for
« mata-pitf-hina » , and a host of others, have become naturalised in
Bengali ; and as to false or incorrect forms, used by the lesser writers, their
name is legion. Here and there we have protests from students of Sanskrit
grammar, whose pedantic zeal for * correct ' writing and for strict adherence
to Sanskrit grammar is in strange contrast to their total ignorance and
neglect of Sanskrit pronunciation. (The wrong orthography and bad
grammar of a large portion of the t%tmmci element in Bengali, borrowed
and coined, has been ably treated by Lalit-Mohan Banerji in * Vyakarana-
Vibhisika/ and in ' Banan-Samasya,' Calcutta, San 1320, where copious
examples will be found.)
The Foreigm Element: Persian,
117. The Persian influence on the Bengali language has been mainly
2t)
203
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX D
lexical. With the substitation of English for Persian as the language cif
the law courts in Bengal in the year 1836, it may be said to have come
to an end. There is, however, the possibility of a revival of Persian
influence in the language in the hands of Persian-knowing Mohammedan
and Hindu writers of Bengali.
The language came to Bengal at the beginning of the 13th century,
and the influence it has exerted on Bengali for nearly 600 years can be
very well estimated now. The first Mohammedan conquerors of India
(neglecting the Arab episode in Sindh at the beginning of the 8th century)
were Turks who had settled in what is now Afghanistan : and they were
not Afghans or Pathans. The Afghans^ right up to the 14th century,
were confined to the south-eastern part of the country to which they now
give their name, and they began to take a leading part in Indian affairs
from the ]5th century, after they had established themselves in the
Peshawar region, in the highway between India and Persia. Before that,
they were but not very important auxiliaries of the Turki invaders of India,
occasionally siding with the Indians as well. The Afghans became
dominant in India in the early part of the 16th century, only to be
conquered finally, and to have their power broken for ever in India by
the Moghals (who were at first a Turki-speaking people), in the course of
that century.
The Turks who had settled down in North-eastern Persia and
* Afghanistan ' were Persianised in culture. They ruled over the Persian-
speaking Tajiks, and the Turk and the Tajik both took pai-t in spreading
the Persian language in India. Persian exerted an enormous influence
in Northern India ; and the speech of Delhi, the head-quarters of the
Mohammedan (Turki, Afghan, Moghal) power in India, became saturated
with Persian, and ultimately came to be transformed into Urdu. In
Bengal, Persian did not have much influence before the time of the
Moghals, i^e., from the last quarter of the 16th century. Under the
Turki and Afghan rulers, the administration of Bengal was left mainly
in the hands of Hindu feudatories, who were mostly Kayasthas by caste,
and ordinarily very little influence could be exerted on the life and language
INFILTRATION OF PERSIAN WORDS 20S
of the people from the Mohammedan court at Gaur or Sonargaon. The
Turki and other foreign Moslems who settled down in Bengal came them-
selves to be influenced by their subjects. At the end of the 15th century
and beginning of the 16th, we find that the Moslem king of Bengal and his
lieutenants in Chittagong were active patrons of Bengali literature. But
contact with the Moslems certainly brought in a number of Persian words
into Bengali during the early period of Mohammedan rule. Many of the
practices of the Sultan's darhar at Graur were adopted by the petty chiefs
of Bengal, and engrafted on the old Hindu court customs and etiquette
which were preserved in the independent states of Orissa (JSjnagar),
Vishnupur, Tirahut, Tippera, Sylhet and Kama-rupa. This meant an addi-
tion of Persian terms to the vocabulary of the Bengali. The Moslem Kazl
(Qadi) or district officer, who had control over the general administration, the
Amifi or governor, and in later times the Fauj-dar or military magistrate,
as well as the revenue ofiicials, brought to the people of Bengal Persian
words connected with justice, revenue and general administration : and the
number of such words even now in use in Bengali is quite a large one.
Constant fighting in Bengal brought in a number of Persian military
terms like « tir » arrow ^ ^fTt^T « kaman » boiv, later gun (=kaman),
« kd>t&l » execution (= qatl), « kella » /off ( = qilah), « buruj »
battlement, tower (= burj), « laskar » armj/, ^t^^ « hSjari » captain
over thousand (= hazari), « ph^te » victory (= fath), « muruea »
inirerichmnt {— moTCSih)^ etc., etc. The Mohammedan preacher taught
the Bengali converts and their Hindu kinsmen words like or ^^it
« k&l(i)ma » creed, C^^t^ « koran » the Coran, « bhest& » paradise ( =
bihiSt), ^?tW or CTt^^ « jabannam, dojakh » hell (= jahannum, duaax),
C^l « gona » sin (= gunah), « pak * holy, « pir » sainly ^^^f^
« p&yg&mb&r » prophet (= pay^mbar), C^^^ « ketab » the look (= kitab),
C^5fl « khoda » God ( = xuda), « h§,j » piUjrioiage ( = hajj), «sunn^t »
circumcision, c^t^ « roja » /a?^ (= rozah), 5t^5( « haram » forbidden
{= haram), and c^"^, ^ « bot, but*, Indianised to ^ « bhut », idol
( = but), etc., etc.
In all these ways, quite a number of Persian words came in by
204
INTRODUCTION: APPENDIX D
the end of the 16th century, as it is attested from literature.* In the first
century of the Moslem conquest, some Moslem names were in all probahility
familiarised to the people of Bengal, like « turuk » Turk, Mohammedan
(=turk),5f(^)^« m&(ha)mm&d > Muhammad, 5tt^ «gaji* warrior (=9azl),
^^t^ « phibkir » mendicant (= faqlr), « sek » Sheikh (= §ayx).
Intimate relations between the Turki and other Moslem conquerors of
Bengal and the Bengalis soon began. In the first quarter of the 15th
century, the Varendra Brahman chiefs of North Bengal were a power in
the Moslem state, so much so that one of them. Raja Kans or Gan^a, made
himself king, and his line, which became Mohammedan after his death,
continued for some time. Persian as the cultural and administrative
language of the Mohammedan rulers came to be studied by some Hindus in
Bengal, probably shortly after the establishment of the Turks in the land :
it may be from the beginning of the 14th century. During the first
quarter of the 16th century, a Bengali Brahman was the « dablr-xas » or
private secretary of the Mohammedan king of Bengal. But it was not
before the 17th century that Persian came to exert any preponderant influ-
ence on Bengali. In the middle of the 16th century, Jay&nanda in his
' Caitanya-maggala ' makes Caitanya describe the evils of the Kali age,
among which are the wearing of a beard by Brahmans, their reading
Persian, putting on high boots, holding a stick and a bow, and reciting
'mansari^ (= masnavi?) (p. 139, VSPd. edition). These remarks
show that many Brahmans were reading Persian and doing all these things,
but the orthodox thought it was wrong. In the 18th century, however, the
poet Bharata-candra's people were angry with him because he wanted to
* The following rough figures will give some idea of the rate of admission of Persian
words into Bengali, in the course of the several centuries. Fourth quarter of the 14th
century : * SrI.Krsna.KTrfctana/ about 9,5C0 lines, only 4 Persian words ; fourth quarter of
the 15th century : Vijaya Gupta's * Padma-Purana/ some 18,000 lines, about 125 words,
including some names ; middle of the 16th century, Manikft Ga6guli's * Dharma-madgala/
about 17,000 lines, over 225 words ; fourth quarter of the 16th century, Mukunda-rSma
Cakravarti's * Candl-KfiTya,' some 20,000 lines, between 200 and 210 words ; middle of the
1 8th century, BhSrata-candra*s * Annada-mangaia,* some 13,000 lines, a little over 400 words,
MOGHAL RULE & PERSIAN
205
read Sanskrit instead of Persian : and Bharata-candra belonged to a good
Brahman family. The attitude apparently had changed.
The Persian language was most dominant in Bengal in the 18th
century, when the importance of it in the country was like that of English
at the present day. HindostanI, Bihari and Bengali Mnnshls taught
Persian to sons of rich people, and there wei*e maktabs and madrasah
frequented both by Hindus and Musalmans. The Moghal rule in Bengal,
which began with Akbar's conquest of the province from the PathSns,
caused the Bengali language to be exposed to a greater degree than before
to the influence of Persian,
A direct and more intimate connection was established between the
capital cities of Delhi and Agra and the distant sfibah of Bengal. The
real ruler of the country was no longer the Hindu bhuyS or raja^ — the
feudal chief or semi-independent ruler, as before ; the bhuya became the
mere zamln-d^r or land-holder under the Moghal, and his powers weie
transferred to a great extent to officers of the emperor. The average
Bengali came in greater touch with the administrative machinery than
before. The services of Bengalis were largely requisitioned to carry on
the complex business of the state — executive and judicial, fiscal and military.
Bengalis looking for preferment had to pay greater attention to the Persian
language. By coming in touch with the men in the court of the
Nawab Nazim (military ruler) and the Diwan (civil administrator), by
mixing with Hindu and Mohammedan officials sent out from Hindostan,
the Bengali of the upper classes (who until recent times has always
accepted the guidance of Upper India in matters of culture), became far
more refined and polished, far more open in mind, and far more astute.
New things — ideas and objects — freely came to Bengal, and for a time
Bengal was no longer isolated, but became a real province of Hindostan.
The Moghal empire united all Northern India; and the 17th century,
which witnessed the zenith of Moghal power, saw also the establishment
of a new lingua franca for India — Hindostan!. In the Hth and 1 3th
centuries, India was the battle-ground of two peoples, Hindu and Turkl-
Tajik, with different sets of ideas. By 1605, when Akbar died, a synthesis
206
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX D
had been effected^ out of which arose an Indo-Moslem culture^ and the
Hindostani speech became its vehicle. HindostanI made itself the inheritor
and propagator of the Persian and Moslem spirit in India^ from the 17th
and 18th century; and it came to Bengal, and Persian words which
formerly were brought into Bengali mostly directly, now began to be
admitted in larger numbers through Hindostani into Bengali and the various
other vernaculars of the land.
The result of it all was that towards the end of the 18th century,
the Bengali speech of the upper classes, even among Hindus, was highly
Persianised. But a turn came from the next century, A great many
words which were used by the people in the 18th century continued to
be employed till the middle of the 19th century, but they were not
able to take root in the language (Cf. S. K. De, ' History of Bengali
Literature, 1800-1825,' Calcutta University, 1919, pp. 142, 169, 279, 280,
283) ; although some still retain their place in the speech of Musalman
Bengalis, and have thus become class-dialect words. A few new words
have been admitted, mainly through HindostSni, within the 19th century :
e.g.t * bima » insurance^ ^ft^ « khaki » Maii , ^^rt^^t^ « anjuman »
a society, etc. But so far as the standard Bengali of the present day is
concerned, the nett result of the Persian influence has been the imposition,
as a permanent addition to the vocabulary, of some 2,500 words (as in
JSanSndra-Mohan Das's Bengali Dictionary : see § 123), which would be
admitted as Bengalised words by most sections of the people : together with
a few Persian affixes which have become thoroughly naturalised. (See under
Morphology : Formative Affixes.)
118. Thes« words can be roughly classified under the following
heads :
(1) Words pertaining to kingly state, warfare, chase: some 200
such words are commonly found in Bengali.*
* E.g. ^t%, ^W?, cmpi, c^K f^t^. c^^%
mm, 's^. c^tt, vm, c^^, c^w, c^^. ^tp. wmm, c^t^n. ft^fii,
"prc^, jRft^, T^^, ft^^ I
NATURE OF THE PERSIAN ELEMENT 207
(2) Words relating to revenue and administration and to law:
over 600 words under this head, besides a number now obsolete or restricted
in use.*
(3) The Mohammedan religion ^ : naturalised words under this head, as
understood by Hindus and others, cannot much exceed 100 ; but naturally
Musalman Bengalis employ a larger number o£ Persian (and Arabic) terms
connected with their faith and its ritual. But in any case, the number of
such words actually in use among Bengali Mohammedans can be laid
down as not exceeding 300.
(4) Intellectual culture ^ : education, music, literature, general
refinement : not more than 100 words,
(5) Material culture* : objects of luxury, trades, arts and crafts : some
400 words of this type are found in Bengali.
^ftfe, c^tt^^l, ^t^K ^1, stw^f, ^3^51, ^t^^, Tftot^ii, ^nfw^, Pi^twi, Mlf^,
t»lt^, il^^, ^SW?, '6^ft7^, ^tf^. C3Ft^, c^1^, c^'^i
c^tt^t^, m^, ^Tl^, ^tlt, c^, ^tft^, 'R^, ^f^, 5f^^, sri^t^T, ^rt^i^^,
» E.g. ^nSf^nrt, ^fe^, t^^, t^t^, ^^t^, ^^^s^f?, ^^t^, ^^1.
c^5^t5«X ^^^5(1, -sTt^l, ^tt, oRrtw, <?5W, if^, ft^, C5ft^, ^ift. ^iw, fsr^, ^,
c^^i. f^Pml, n^r^, ^pfUr?, c^rtPfsf, c^rmi, »rf1^^, *nftw, ft^, ft^, i^ftJi,
it^, lit I
^^fe, ^5^%, ^% Cil^, *tt'5CT. JT^R ^51^ I
* i:.^. ^5|^, ^jt^Rl, '^rt^, ^te^l'T, 'Tt^, '^t^s-m^, ^t^, ^rsRf, cij^rt^i^^, ^^i^,
wf, fVt«ft^, f¥^Prn, c^t*, ^^PTt^, ^'t^. ^t«i, ^rmmi, -^rt^, ^t^, Pt^.
CfltW^, cirt^. Ri^, 5»t^j1, ^^m, bt^, ft^. ^Jt, ^W, f^, csrmi, ca^tw, ^t^,
^?t^, ^tf^sl, ?t5rt^, TOW. ift^'irtt, f?^, ofWs, ^^t. "^wl, *tt9W, c^tt^rts,
vteii, 'rimt, ftfft, -^fH, ciw, fsf^, ^'rr^, cwt^, am, ert^^, ^^t^, »trmt, nm, fif*i,
^=5^, ctW^, ^t^?l, ft^l, c^^' I
208
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX D
(6) Some 30 to 40 names of foreign peoples.*
(7) Some 500 words relating to common things and notions of life.^
Over 2,000 words can thus be accounted for, to give a general idea
of the character of the Persian vocabulary in Bengali. The rest consists
of variant and dialeetiil forms, or forms which are obsolescent, which will
come under one or the other of the above heads.
119. Among the speakers of Bengali, more than half are Moham-
medans. The percentage of Hindus and Mohammedans in the various
parts of Bengal is as follows (according to the census of 1911) :
Hindus. Mohammedans.
West Bengal 82'3 13-4
Central Bengal 50*5 48-0
North Bengal 37-3 59-2
East Bengal SO S 67 5
This may be compared with figures for other parts of North India :
United Provinces 85 0 14*0
Panjab 48-0 50'75
(including Sikhs)
South Bihar 90*4 9 3
The above tracts, along with portions of West Bengal, were exposed
to Moslem influence from the beginning ; and yet Islam could not win so
many adherents in the lands round the seats of Mohammedan culture —
Delhi, Lucknow, Jaunpur and Patna — ^as in far away Eastern Bengal :
and the percentage in the easternmost parts of Bengal can compare well
with that for Western Panjab, which lies in the highway of Mohammedan
invaders — Turkl, Pathan, Persian, and has always had to bear the first brunt.
The affiliation of the large masses of Eastern Bengal population to Islam
» E.g, ^t^lA, ^xK^, ^S^, T^^, ^t^, ( ft^ ) I
' E.g. "sm, ^NQ^sr, 'sit^?, ^t^-ft^?ri, ^^r^K 'W^, ^% '^^sf, ^*fT, Ttwi,
w^, w?i^t?, cwt^t=i, ^T^if, c:^% c^r^. ^f\, -^^^
wt^, ^c«ft^^, c^, cfrm Wl, c^rm, ^13^^, <:?Hs»tt, itwl,
ISLAM IN BENGAL
209
is partly due to the hostility felt by the non-Brahman people, who were
followers of Buddhism, to Brahmanism, — a hostility of which we find
an evidence in that interestinc^ Middle Bengali fragment — fj^^^C^^ ^'Sll
« Nirailjaner^ Rusma* tie Wrath of the Sinless One (i.e., Dharraa), in which
it is stated that the Gods were angry with the Brahmans because they
persecuted the Saddharmis or Buddhists, and they came down on earth
in the form of Musalmans and destroyed Hindu temples— a thing which
meets with the evident approval of the Buddhistic writer Sunya-Puiana/
VSPd., pp. 140-141). A form of debased Mahayana Buddhism seems
to have been quite the popular faith in East Benn;al before the advent of
the Mohammedan Turks, and the masses could not be wholly weaned
over to the Puranic Hinduism of the Brahman, even when Biahmans
from Ra.ha and Yaiendra settled in Yagga in large numbers after the
conquest ot* West and Central Bengal by the Turks. The masses professed
in large numbers the simple creed of the conquering Turk wh-n the latter
came to Bengal and to the eastern parts of the province. The Mohammedan
invasion of Bengal took place just when finishing touches were being given
to a newly-formed Hindu nation with a language and a mentality of
its own; and the Moslem faith quickly affiliated to itself, even though
in a nominal manner, a large proportion of the people about to be merged
into this new Hindu nation. There was no greater amount of religious
persecution of the people by the Mohammedans in East Bengal than in
other parts of Bengal and Northern India. There was, however, a certain
amount of Moslem missionary enterprise in East Bengal, from Northern
India, and, it is said, from among the Arab merchants at Chittagong : this
might very well have taken advantage of latent anti- Brahman ical feelings
among the masses and of the neglect of them by the Hindu higher castes.
But this large proportion of Moslems among the Bengali-speaking
people did not produce any appreciable increase of Persian influence on the
language : since the masses in East Bengal, inspite of their extra-Indian
religion, remained culturally and mentally Hindu (or Buddhist, with a
veneer of Hinduism), and carried on the native Bengali traditions in
literary and other matters. The greatest Middle Bengali Moslem Foot
210
INTRODUCTION: APPENDIX D
is Alaol (17th century), whose Bengali version of Malik Muhammad
Jaisi's * Padumawati ' (see p. 13) is as Sanskritic in language as the works
of any of his Hindu contemporaries. But during all these centuries,
the Mohammedans of Bengal were acquiring a respectable Persian voca-
bulary, mainly in connection with their religion and to some extent of their
social life as well.
The real conversion of the Bengali Mohammedans to Islam began
from the commencement of the 19th century, when some reform move-
ments seeking to bring their life and thought more in accordance with
the cosmopolitan Mohammedan notions took place. Urdii began to
exert a greater influence from a centre like Calcutta. The Musalmans
of the old school, however, in matters literary, continued to follow the
old Bengali tradition ; and Musalmans trained in schools and colleges
did not seek to differentiate themselves from their Hindu kinsmen in
the style of Bengali they employed. Side by side with the Hindu writers
of Bengali have come forward a number of Musalman waiters, some of
' whom hav^e made a valuable contribution to the stock of national literature,
and a young generation of Musalman poets and prosateurs are taking a
part in transforming the stilted literary Bengali into a natural language,
on a Sanskrit basis, and keeping true to its native spirit as a Sanskritic
lantyua^e. But within the last century has been established, in the hands
of some Urdu-knowing Maulavis, a form of Bengali which is known
as ' Musalmani Bengali/ in which a considerable literature consisting of
adaptations of Moslem and Persian stories and romances and religious
works and tracts has grown up. Works like the ' Jang-namah,' narrating
the tragedy of Karbala, biographies of Muhammad, legends of
Mohammedan saints, Persian epic and romance like the ' Shah-namah'
and the ^ Sikandar-namah,' Arab romance like the * Amir Hamzah^and the
Arabian Nights, and a host of other works, have been rendered into
' Musalmani Bengali,' and are quite popular with a large Mohammedan
Ben£:ali audience. The ' Musalmani Bengali ' employed in these works,
however, is often too much Persianised; but the metres are Bengali, and
* a large })ereentage of Sanskrit words are retained, cheek by jowl with the
MUSALMANI BENGALI
Perso-Arabic importations. It is the Maulavi's reply to the Pandit's 6i7^M?'«
Ma^d of the early and middle part of the 19th eentiuy. The percentage of
Persian words in a typical ' MusalmanI Bengali ' work, tlie ' i^ara Dastaii
AmlY H&mzdk^ Ike Greul Tale of Jmlr Ilattnaft, is about ol'74, as seen
from computing the words in o pages of a folio edition from the popular
Battala printing houses of Calcutta. This is to a considerable extent less
than in literary Urdu : 5 fihuzah in the latter language, by Dagh,
Maqbul, Zafar, Atish and Latlf, showing 23 j Persian words in a total of 030,
a percentage of about 10. The ordinary colloquial Bengali of the Hindu
middle and upper classes of Calcutta, as in the ' Hutom Peciir Naksu/
shows 7'1 of Persian words (see §1:^3). In the language of the Hindu
women of the upper classes, the percentage would be somewhat smaller ;
and in a Bengali Moslem home, it would rise to higher than 7 1 it
may be even , but it could never be as high as 30% , even in
the most preponderatingly Mohammedan parts of Bengal. One of the
features of ' MusalmanI Bengali,' which demonstrates its rather artificial
character, is the frequent use of HindostanI words and forms ^§
« paw» for ^1 « pa» foof^ QS^ * bhes » ^/m-.y, C^It^l «thura » for «ek^tu »
a little^ (M\ C«^) « mera, tera» for ^t^lt^ C^W^ or C^t^ C^t^ «amar^ tomar^,
mor^ tor^ » w^, %, "^Vm C^tWT^ « waste khtxlar » for C^Tt^ '^^^V^
« khodar karane* for GoiVs sake, ^£3^1 c'^^t « esa tesa = aisa taisa > for
C«^»( « eman^ teman^ » , in this inay^ In ihat way, etc., etc.), which
have no exiatenee in the Bengali as spoken by the Musalmans in
the villages, within the different dialectal areas. ^ MusalmanI Bengali '
thus savours of the mixed Bengali- HindostanI- A wadhi jargon which
is heard in the bazaars of Calcutta among Mohammedan working classes,
cabmen, petty traders and o'^hers, who speak Calcutta Bengali and
HindostanI equally badly, and unlike the Mohammedan masses in the
country, have no proper dialect. Books in ' Musalmaui Bengali ' begin
from the right side, following the way of an Arabic or Pertian book,
although the alphabet is Bengali. The literature in MusalmanI Bengali
has no merit, and some of the deathless tales of pre-Moslem Persia, as
in the * ^^hah-namah,' and of early Islam, have been ruined by the hack
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX D
versifiers of Calcutta and Chittagong in rendering them in this jargon.
The culture which is native to Bengali village life, Hindu and Moslem,
is often entirely crushed out of it ; and we have still to fall back upon the
songs, and folk- tales, and ballads, in the standard literary language,
slightly modified by dialect, which are still current among Bengali
Musalmans in the countryside, especially in East Bengal^ — to appreciate
the literary tradition that yet lives among them. Educated Mohammedans
of the present day have not taken kindly to this form of Bengali. The
earlier MusalraSn writers did not employ such a Persian ised language :
witness Alaol, who may be reckoned among the greatest poets of Early
Bengal; and witness the language of scores of late Middle Bengali works
by Musalman writers, as, for example, in Munshi Abdul Karim Sahitya-
visarada's Descriptive List of Bengali MSS., mostly from Chittagong
(' Baga:ala Pracin Puthir Vivaran,' 3 parts, VSPd., :!:an 1821). As an
ever-increasing number of Musalman writers of Bengali are coming to
the front, the accession to the language of more Perso-Arabie words,
specially relating to the Mohammedan religion and to Islamic culture,
will be in the nature of things : but this accession can very well be
without interfering with the spirit of the language by introducing Urdu
forms and idioms. (Muhammad Yakiib All, born 1666, a younger
contemporary of Alaol, wrote a * Jang-nSmah ' in ] 699 : his work as
preserved in MSS. and in printed editions, shows an almost equally
Persianised style as an ordinary modern work in Musalmani Bengali of
Calcutta ; but it is a question how far the current recensions, both in
MS. and in print, represent the 17th century Bengali of the poet, as their
Bengali is modern, and has modern Urdu forms, — the latter being as )et
an undeveloped language in the 17th century : ef. ^ Jaijga-nama,* by
Abdul Gafur Siddiki, in the VSPdR, 1:3*24, No. 2.)
120. By ' Persian Element in Bengali ' is to be meant not only
native Persian words, but also the host of Arabic words naturalised in it,
and also a few Turki words which the Persians received from their Tiirkl
neighbours and rulers. It does not seem as if Turk! exerted any influence
on Indian languages, although it was the home language of the Moslem
TURKI WORDS IN BENGALI
ruling houses in the early centuries o£ Moslem comiuest aud rule^ and aj^ain
in the early part of the 16th century when Babar wrested the Northern
empire from the Patbansaud the Rajputs. Hindostani has less than 100
Turki words (in Fallon's Dictionary the number is about 70), and Bencrali
does not seem to possess more than 40.^ A few of these Turki words in
Hindostani and Ben^-ah' may have come direct from Turk! as spoken in
India : but it is convenient to include them under Persian.
A few Pasto words_, not even half a dozen, can also be inchided under
Persian. -
^ I have been able to tiud the following;: ^^^1 ' atril ' inn^tef (Tiirki ' figa') ; ^f^^'ff^l
' dlkhftUa ' a /o^'Se rohe (alxaliq) ; S^^^, -^^ ' ujbak, -bu^^ ' an idiot ^ nn micnlfjircd feUv"'
(Persian * uzbaj;,' Turki 'ozbek* nnnieofa T"j/:7 ) ; ^?r*5» ' "I'udu, urtlu ' mffW.t'^,
the Vrdii (Persian ' nrrla,' Turki 'or<]u* ro»(jj) ; "^^^l. kalka, kalf^a aigrette
(' qalga') ; ^fft ' kamci ' -ct's.so/^ ('qainci ' • but cf. Old Bengali of Sarvanaoda [p. 109] —
' kasi ' — ' karttarika*) ; ^t"^ 'kabu' pos.^e^sioti, rrdi'ction to otic'ii pover ('qapu' >jnte,
opportunity^ 2)OS6es!>ioii, holdy gni>p) ' k.ili ' p<n'ti'V qnli' slave) \ C^t's^i 'kourka'
sticl (' qutka ') ; C^t^ ' koriiia ' meat ^teic (' qa^'unna ") ; 'khutiin' lady ('xatmi') ;
^'H, *r! * khan ' lord, p) mcc (' xan, xn([an ' ) ; ' khanuiu * laihj (' xanum ') ; ^fpi^l ' galica '
carpet ("qalica, galica ') ; ^^f^ ' cakmaki ' find ^tone for lighting fire (* caqmaq ') ;
'caku' finife ('caqn') ; * cik' sc/cew made nj finely >pld bamboo (Persian *cigh,* Turki
* ciq *) ; ^ffl'^'Srl 'takma' badge, ahield-badgr ('taniga'); ' tabak ' rifie (' tupak,
topak *) ; ^f^Tt^ ' tagar ' t roughs tnasoii*-< lime-jnt (• tagar ') , ^^^^ ' tnjuk ' regulation, rrtinne.
i'Omp, dignity (' tuzak ') ; ' turuk, turk * (' taik CTl^l as in ':«t'51 ^Pf *1T^T1 tora-
bandi khauS'/^a.sf viih dishe<- arranged ('torah, tora') ; Ci|t 'top' gnu, cnnnoii ('top') ;
VftCilt^l 'daroga* an ofiicer ; ^"^"tf ' baksi ' a aurnatne (Persian * baxbi/ Turki ' baksi '
mabter) ; ^t^TSt 'babiirci ' cook (* bawarci') ; ^1^15^ " bahSdur ' hi are (' bjihadur ') : f^ft 'bibi'
a lady ; cm'^^ ' begam ' ladtj, prince'^s {' begum ') ; C^t^^l * bomcka ' htn <^^' (' bugca, buqca ') :
^5cT-?|?( ' muchika' bojj/?, note of ?ia?t/J (' miicalka ') ; ?r^, "^IS^T^ ' rak, raolk ' Inlgc, xiitted
platform (' rawatj') ; ' las' forp^-e ('his') ; ^2^]"^ ' saogSt ' xtrn^eut ; ' ^"^f^ ' snruk,
surCik' trick, j usf (-sorSg' spying); and the affix fl ' -cl * in Home words (•■</.,
* masAlci ' torch ^beai-er, ^f?fT^, ^?T^-fl ' khajand ' - xazan-ci' ircae'ncr).
" The word '^ttit^ = ^%it^ * pathan < patthana' from ' Pastfma,' is an Indianised form.
The other Tasto words are ' tapas' i^cnrch (a borrowed word in Pa?t6, from the Arabic
'tafahtus'), at^STi, C?ltf^5i1 'rohiU' (a tribal name, Pafto * roh ' moH»faj/0, besides a
few other names of tribes.
214
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX D
Of direct Arabic influence; there has been practically nil, although
the Urdu form of Hindustani in the hands of Mohammedan writers at
the present day sometimes borrows Arabic words and phrases straight
from Arabic itself, and not through Persian.
The Persian lanijuaofe was brouo:ht to India bv the Turks, and some
of the peculiarities characterising the language as used by Turk! speakers,
in pronunciation and in vocabulary, are also found in the speech as employed
in India. The Persian language has changed in Persia itself, but in
India the early Persian pronunciation is still followed, e,g,, uiajhTil sounds
of ^ and Peisian words in Bengali naturally show an earh' Persian basis
in their phonology. (See Fliomlog/j of the Foreigti Element : Persian).
Portuguese, Dutch, French axd Exglish Wokds.
121. The other foreign elements in Bengali consist of between 100
and 110 Portuguese words, a few Dutch and French words, and an ever-
increasing number of English words. The Poituguese words are names of
objects and ideas introduced by the Portuguese into India^ and they indicate
the extent of the material culture which Bengal and India owe to the
adventurous Lusitanians. Tlie Portuguese came to Bengal early in the
16th century, and the influence of the Portuguese language continued
down to the close of the 18th. (Cf. Abinash Chandra Ghosh, * Vaijge
Portuglj-prabhav O Vagga-bhasay Portugij-padrir|ka/ VSPdP., San 1318,
No. 1 ; J. J. A. Campos. ^ A History of the Portuguese in Bengal,*
Calcutta, 11)19, pp. 2U.:ii0. J. J. A. Campos, following R. Dalgado's
lists in ^Influeneia do ^ ocabulario Portugues em Linguas Asiaticas,'
gives 174 words in Bengali as Portuguese. But some S of these are
native Bengali, and about 100 are now obsolete, although they might
have existed in ISth century Bengali ; and a few are English rather than
Portuguese, as their phonetics would show [e.g., CWt^ « koc » is from the
English co/fc/i, the Portuguese coc//e would give in Bengali the form
♦ "^kuci* or « "^kusi > ; ^C^^ «karnel» appears rather to be from the
English colonel than the Poraguese coronel from which the Bengali
form expected would be « ^kuronel » ; so « ^irgan » is from English
FRENCH AND DUTCH WORDS -Zlo
orgauy rather thau'Portuguese orgao which would give « *argam, argau >
in Bengali]. The following words, not noted in the above papers, are
also from the Portuguese : ^t^t»T « katan » a Mi:or(l = Portuguese cakino ;
^'Ml « kbana » ditc/if cf. Portuguese cano : and C^tSft, C^ts1 « kog(g)a »
de?U doable, as tcif/i arje^ cf. Port, cunlia = wedge).
The French and Dutch words do not appear to be over 10 in number.
Of course, there are numerous French words throifgli English^ but very few
are derived directly from French. French speakers (and Dutch speakers)
had occasion to come in touch with Bengalis at Chandernagore (and at
Chinsurah). The following words are from the French : « kaituj »
cartouche y ^t^'*t « barus » b-jronclie, « kupan » covjiOUy « i ska tor »
e%ci\ioire^ ecritoire, ^t^^ « anis » anis (liquor); ^t^^ « katur » fjnatre,
^t*f « §s * or ^§»t « §s » o?ne, CW{*t or « dos, dus » donee, and a few others,
in connection with card games ; and names of some European peoples, as
in 18th century and modern Bengali : ^^t^, ^i^^t^ « pharas, -si » Franrais;
'^^'^ftW « olandaj » Iloliandaiii, f*fW(t^ « Dineniar » Danemark,
« eleman » Allematid, and possibly also the form ^t^^?[Sf « aggrej » Ang/als
for ^^^^^ « iggJ^^j * = Portuguese Ingles, The Dutch words directly
borrowed are : the names of cards — ^^^^ « hi,r(a)tan » heads = harien^
^F^^J? «ruit&n » diamnds = niiten, \%\'^'^ «iskaban» sjmhs = schopen (but
the name for clul^, T&f%^»( « elritan » is Indian : ef. Hindustani « ciriya. »
^mZ), and « t(u)rup » ^r/^wy; //^ earr/^f = iroef ; t"?,^^
« isk(u)rup » 56T€^f = schroef) C^jST « bom » *//«/'^ o/* carriage, * it^//?^ ' =
Ao(?;iii ; and T^>?^t^ * pispas » a dish of rice and meal = poespas. In
addition to the above, there are probably a few more from the French and
Dutch, but they have not been identified. The Germans and the Danes
also came to Bengal, but no German and Danish word seems to have been
borrowed direct by Bengali.
122, Of English words it is not yet the proper time to estimate the
number and character. There is a steady increase going on in the English
element. The English loan-words are names of objects, ideas and
institutions brought into India by the Britons. In some cases, there have
been attempts to substitute for the Ensjlish names of material articles or
216
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX D
of new ideas Sanskrit (and vernacular) neologues, but these have almost
invariably failed when they referred to material objects : although Indian
equivalents of the English idea words and institution words, being confined
to the speech of the educated, have sometimes caught on : e.g., ^T'^»f^$
« baripa-sakat^ »> for railicat/, C^T^^t^t^ « kautukSgar^ » for mmeum have
failed, the speech of the masses enii^loying either C^^^Csl « reloC* » or
C^^5tt^ « rel-gari » or "^T^^ 5|t^5t « kalcr-gari » = machiae-carriage^ and
« jadu-ghar^ » = uiagic-house ; but ^"'^tT^f^ * sampadak?l » for editor,
* adhjaksa » for manager etc. aie freely used in speech. Many of the
Englisli words admitted early in the 19th century have become completely
bengalised : e.g., tt^f^tt^T^ « haspatal » hospital, cffS « ]at » lord, t^f^
« iskul » school y ^r§^^ « di^'^^^J' * doctor, C^WPf « gelas » glass, ^STtf**^
« apis » office, C^ft«T « lebil » iahle, C^f^ « beuci » hemh, « mastar »
master, 5ft^?f « garad » guards jjrison, q^s? « lanthan » lantern etc., etc. The
presence of the English language and the spread of a knowledge of
the English words in their proper pronunciation is preventing a Bengalisa-
tion of the words admitted within recent years. A few vocables, however,
have assumed a totally un-English appearance through folk etymology :
e,g, wnnicipalit}j = ^^}%^T^ « muusl-pal » = hand of clerical officers, or the
office r-^protecting ; honeysuckle = ^tf^^^ « hani^sik^l » a chain of injuries ^
and artichoke = ^tf^s^^T^ « hati-cokh » = elephant-etje, among the gardeners
and vegetable dealers of Calcutta. These popularised forms are used
only among those who have no English.
The English element is bound to be of the widest extent possible.
Any newspaper would show the amount of English which finds place in
Bengali journalese of the present day. Trades, literature, science, art,
polities, history,— in fact almost all the avenues of life and of literature
are favorable for the introduction of English terms : since English is the
medium through which the Bengali (and Indian) mind holds commerce
with the outside world. In the early part of the 19th century, and down
to the 4th quarter of it, the words adopted by Bengali were mainly names
of material objects, the achievements more or less of modern science.
Intimate acquaintance with European life and thought, and ideas and
ENGLISH WORDS
217
institutions, and the introduction of the latter into India, are responsible
for a vocabulary of culture words from English, such as is absent in
early l9th century Bengali. Words like « bhot » vote, ^Tt^§ « byalat »
ballot^ OT3j5^tft « sekretari », fij*^^ « printar » , C^m^ « gejet » gazeitCy
fet^*lC^^«l « taim.teb(^)I » are in common use now; and even such words
as C^^(T)t^ « rom(y)aus » romance^ C^Wf^'^^ * romantik » , ^(T)tf^^
^ k](y)asik » claBsic, ^l^fe, ^C^T^ « trajedi, kamedi » (for « viyog&ntlij
milan&nta natak^ » ), art » , f?-^5TT^^H * phiueariz(a)m » fuivrisw,
fc2f^Jtt^ff1t^§ « pri-rj aphelait » Pre-Raphaelitey ^it^^ « sayens » science,
C<2ri^?fT^^ « profcoplaz(a)m » protophsni, fff^ltf^^^ « plistusin » ideisiocene, ^
^ 1^ » te£7, « plat » wf^fg «kemistri» chemistry, f%ftr^
« phiziks », etc., etc., are being bodily adopted at the present day. Foreign
names come to Bengali through English ; and even Indian names of persons
and places outside Bengal. These are written in Bengali according to the
English pronunciation, although acc^uaintance with the original sources or
source forms sometimes gives us, in more careful writers, Bengali forms near
enough to the original, and not two degrees removed. Thus we have C?IC^1
« Pleto » , but also ?ttr«t^? «Platon»; but commonly it is the English
forms that obtain : e.g., t'^tt^^^ * Iskallas » , tfif^C^t^^ « Eristot(ii)l » ,
^«Wf^ < Bhalteyar » Voltaire, « Gete » Goethe, f%^^ « Bhiktar
Hiugo > ; and we have careful transliterations like ^fr-C^f-C^t^ffl * Gl-de-
Mopa^a » and C^t'^Tl « Rodyi » Sodin, "^"^I^T^IW^ « Turgeniebh » and ^t^H^
* Karducei » Canliicci, side b}- side with « Aito » = Marquis Ito
of Japan and f^^l^t'^l « Giokonda* for « J5konda » Gioconda, §Ttt « Tyag »
and Tts « Sag » [ = Tang, lhavg and Suttg dynasties of China), and even
S^tfe^ « Nyatisan > and C^1^| « Bhegkata » for the South Indian ^^^[^
and C^^§ « Natesa«, A'eijkafca » .
In considering the phonology of the foreign element, only those
English words which occur in popular speech, and have become Bengali
in form, alone have a right to be studied, side by side with the naturalised
Persian and Portuguese words ; and only such natuialised words have been
treated in the present work. (See later, Phoiwlofjf/ of (he Foreign Element :
English.)
'2S
218
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX D
Pb-Opoktion of the Various Elesients in the Bengali Language.
123. The latest Bengali dictionary, which is the biggest yet
published, and by far the best (by Jiiauendra-Mohaii Das : Calcutta,
1328 San = 1916), has^ as the compiler states in the Preface, some 75,000
words and compounds. A rough survey of this dictionary showed between
32 to 33 thousand Sanskrit words {tatsamas) ; and there are some 2,400
Persian (Perso- Arabic) words, about 700 English, and some 100
Portuguese, with a few Dutch (not identified) and French and other foreign.
The rest are either native Bengali {tadbkava and deil)^ or old borrowings
from Sanskrit (completely naturalised mni'taimmas), or borrowed from
cof^nate NX A. speeches. Taking, in round numbers, the iatsama element
at 33,000, and the Persian at 2,500, and the English and other European
at 1,000 (considering possible omissions, and also the fact that many
tadbhava words occur in different spellings), the percentage of words, on
the basis of Jiianendra-Mohan Das^s dictionary, would roughly be —
Native Words {tadbhavas, semi -tat sennas) and
tadbhava borrowings from sister-speeches ... ol-45
Tatsama or Sanskrit Words ... ... 44'00
• w A /Persian ... ... 3*30
foreign A\ords | English, Portuguese, etc. ... 1-25
100-00
Somewhat less than half is Ihus taimma : and this in a dictionary
which is conspicuous for the large number of common iadhhava words
it has included. In a dictionary, of course, all learned words have a place,
and the percentage of the various elements in a dictionary is not the true
guide to that in the ordinary speech.
The native tadbhava element has been suffering from curtailment ever
since the characterisation of the language as Bengali. The 47
Carya-padas contain, including repetitions, some 2,000 words and
compounds (1,957, to give something like an exact number, from Mm.
H, P- Sastri's lists in the ' Bauddha GanODoha'). Of these, 310 are
spelt exactly as in Sanskrit, but a great many of these 310 are equally
TATSAMA & TADBHAVA WORDS IN BENGALI
•219
tadbhava2LnditatsamamiQvmi words like * kulisa, nalinl-vana, vivaha »
are as much of the original stratum of the language as « baja < vajra,
* dudhu = dudha < dugdha, rukba = rukha < vfksa > , etc. There are
a number of semUatsamas like * niti = nitya, jautuka =x yaatuka, sadhi=:
sadhu, adhiata = adhyatma, avida = avidya, svapana = svapna » etc.,
etc. In fact, of the 310 words, real fntsamas are comparatively few.
Genuine tatsamas like « saclguru > (occurring 7 times), « sadbhava, vidya,
padma, -artha, avadhuti, karna-kundala-vajra-dharJ, sva-, sarva, sukha,
duhkha, bhava-nirvana, mansa, vak-path&tita, samjna, ista-mala, dvadaSa,
unmatta, earyya, candall, bhava-jaladhi, raga, punya, avakasa, nauka >
cannot be more than 100, at the highest computation : which would work
to 5% for the language of the Caryas, leaving the remaining 95% pure
tadbhava and dts7 words, with some semUahamas, for the language of
the ]0th-12th centuries.
But Bengali began to lean on Sanskrit from the beginning. The old
native tadbhava forms were dropped to a great extent, even from the
popular speech, fafsa?nas and semi-tatsamas taking their place. It would
be interesting to note the rate of admission of taUama words. In
Candi-dasa's ^ iSrl-Krsna-Klrttana,' out of 863 words (the sum total
occurring in 7 pages taken at random from the printed edition of that work),
109 are pure tatmmas (at least in spelling), and the rest are tadbhava and
de'sl, with a few semi-tatsamas. The percentage works out at ll'o for
pure tafsamas. Thus Early Middle Bengali has a marked excess over
the Old Bengali of the Caryas. Words like * saala, saara, meha, boba,
naari, niada, nai * either wholly give place to their Sanskrit proto-types
which most speakers of Old Bengali knew, like « sakala, sagara, megha,
bodha, nagari, nikata, nadi » , or are considerably restricted in use, as
archaic, poetic or dialectal forms. But still, in the ll-th century, a great
many tadbhavas prevail, only to be gradually eliminated in the snbseiiuent
periods : although here and there in the dialects and in place-names we
find old tadbhavas lingering {e.g., Chittagong ^ft^ < bayar * =^ ^ vata- * ;
North Bengali ^^tC^ « basoa » ox = « vasaha, vrsabha » ; Bengali poetic
Jft^^ « saylir^ » = * sagara » ; ^t?l * Nai-hati » , name of a West Bengal
INTRODUCTION: APPENDIX D
town, preserves « uai, na'i » , but every one says ^ « nadi » and no one
would understand ^ « nai although is a living word in Assamese). In
ordinary Middle Bengali, as in the popular legendary tales which are under-
stood by the masses everywhere, the percentage of tafsama words is 33"2, and
that of tadMavas (with desJ and a few semi-taisama and fewer foreign
words) is 66*8^ as worked out from the words occurring in 10 pages of the
' Vagga-Sahitya-Parieaya ' of Dinesh Chandra Sen, representing 5 works (2
pages from Ketaka-dasa Ksemananda's 'Manasar Bhasaa/ c. 1650: 78
tatsama words out of 338 ; 2 pages from Kavi-kagkana Mukunda-rama, c.
1580: 119 tatsama v^ovi^ out of 322^ of which 2 are Persian; Kasi-rama
Dasa's ' Mahabharata/ 17th century : 147 tafsamas out of 33G; KfttivSsa's
' Ramayana/ 15th century : 89 out of 366 [the small proportion in this
Early Middle Bengali work is noteworthy] ; and Narayana-deva''s
' Manasa-maggala/ Early Middle Bengali, but date unknown : 146 out of
313 : total, 579 tatsama words out of l,7i4).
It is noticeable that the use of Sanskrit words depends a great deal
on the preference of the writer ; but in the Middle Bengali literary
language, a third of the vocabulary had become Sanskrit by the middle
of the 17th century. The Sanskritising tendency was steadily on the
increase, and although the inherent grace and vigour of the language
was much encumbered by the gorgeous trappings of Sanskrit, it would
not be quite correct to say that the language of Middle Bengali poetry,
such as in Kavi-kagkana or Kasi-rama Dasa, or Bharata-candra, was or
is too learned for the masses. People were steadily becoming familiar
with a Sanskritised Bengali ever since the I4th century : but the language
was never stilted or artificial. It was when the Pandits of the College
of Fort William at Calcutta began writing text-books to order, that the
vicious habit of writing in strings of Sanskrit words and phrases, with
a Bengali verb or particle here and there, came in, and jiartly paralysed
the Bengali literary style (in prose) for half a centurj-. The work of the
Pandits did not affect the living Bengali speech at all : their legacy to
posterity was a laboured prose style, like 18th century and 19th century
journalistic Johnsonese in English ; and this laboured prose in the hands of
THE VARIOUS ELExMENTS IN NEW BENGALI
capable authors like Aksaya-Kumara Datta, lavara Vidyasagara, and
Bankim Chandra Chatterji in his earlier novels, as well as a host of lesser
names, became an admirable instrument of expression, and formed the
basis of the literary dialect of the present day.
In Modern Bengali, the colloquial has a surprisingly small percentage
of Sanskrit words : one of the reasons, of course, is that in the language
of ordinary conversation, the range of the vocabulary is not large.
Taking four works in the colloquial style, one by Bankim Chandra (his
' Indira,^ — the grammatical forms in this work are the full ones of the
literary language, but the style and vocabulary are entirely of the colloquial),
the second by Girish Chandra Ghosh (his drama ' Praphulla the third
a collection of folk-tales, in a slightly arehaistie but none the less living
speech of East Bengal villages, retold in the literary form going close
to the Calcutta dialect (the ' Thakur-dadSr Jhull,' one of the inimitable
compilations of Dakshina-Raujan Mitra Majumdar), and, finally, the
^ Hutom P^car Naksa' of Kall-Prasanna Sinba (see p. 135), and counting up
the words in several pages of each, and arrangmg them in classes, and then
working out the percentage, the following figures are arrived at: 79*1%
tadhhava and deal, vixih some semi-iaisamw, 17'1% tafsama; and 3*7%
foreign, mostly Persian (^ Indira,^ 5 pages = 5*36 tadhhava and ^/e^67 + 153
tatsama + 1 foreign; ^Praphulla,' 4 pages, respectively 724 + 137 + 20 5
* Thakur-dadar Jhull,' 5 pages, 734 + l:>5 + U; and ' Hutom P?car Naksa,'
1st edition, 4 pages, 576+140+81; total, 2,570 tadhhava^ de'xl and serni-
tatsama^ 555 talsama and 122 foreign words). In treating a literarv,
political or philosophical subject, the vocabulary has to be more Sanskritie,
although the treatment may be entirely colloquial. Avoidance of tatsunia
words is almost impossible in Bengali ; and long sustained narrative, as in
the Hindi novels of Insha' Allah Khan and Hari Audh, in which a purely
native, i.e., tadbhavay dekl and Hemi'tatsama Hindostani has been employed,
without Sanskrit or foreign words (see LSI., Vol. IX, Part I, pp. 103, 111),
cannot be thought of in Bengali ; although whole sentences in tadbhava
Bengali are frequently met with in poetrj', sentences perfectly natural
and well-balanced. But the Sanskrit vocabulary of an ordinary newspaper
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX D
or novel of the present day is understood by all who speak Bengali. In
the colloquial Bengali style discoursing of intellectual topics, the following
statistics will give a general idea of the percentage of Sanskrit loan-words.
In Rablndra-nath Tagore's discourse on Bengali metre (in the * Sabuj
Pattra ' f or Caitra, 1325), a most admirable treatment of an intricate
subject entirely in the colloquial, 4 pages, presenting a total of 860
words, show 482 tadbJiavay 352 taisama and 26 foreign words : i.e.,
a percentage of 56*0, 40*9 and 8*0 respectively ; and 4 pages of a paper
on a political topic by Pramatha Chaudhuri (Mr. Chaudhuri is an
active champion of the use of the colloquial in literature), a paper named
' Rayater Katha,' or ilie Tenant-farmer^ s Standpoint (* Sabuj Pattra ' for
Phalguna-Caitra, 1326), an aggregate of 857 words shows 495 tadbhavaSy
247 taisamas and 115 foreign words (Persian and English) : a percentage
of 57*7, 28*8, and 13'4 respectively. So that in Modern Bengali as used in
literature by the best writers, the percentage of Sanskrit words does not
exceed, generally, that of Middle Bengali. The early 19th century tradition
of the Pandits is not dead, but the language cannot be said to suffer
from it any more. Some of the early works in the Sanskritic Bengali
will always remain classics in style ; and the best writers of the present
day have passed through the discipline of the « sadhu-bhasa » .
Percentage of words of various kinds from 5 pages of the ' Kadambari ' of
Tara-Sankar Tarkaratna will give an idea of the amount of Sanskrit in
this kind of Bengali : 5 pages = 670 Sanskrit words and compounds-!-
328 tadbJiava forms + 2 Persian, respectively 67*00, 32*8 and 0*2 per cent.
The percentage of the Persian element may be briefly reviewed. The
proportion in Bengali, as in JnanSndra-Mohan Das's Dictionary is less than
4-00 (see p. 218). In Rai Bahadur Yogesh Chandra Vidyanidhi's Dictionary
(VSPd.), the number of Persian words is less than 1,450 : the total
number of words in this ' Sabda-kosa * does not seem to exceed 18,000,
on a rough computation ; and as these are mostly folk-words, the percentage
of Persian words in the popular Bengali of West Bengal and West Central
Bengal, as presented in this dictionary, would be about 8% . This is
slightly higher than what we find in the living Calcutta colloquial of the
PROPORTION OF PERSIAN WORDS IN BENGALI -lU
* Hutom PScar Naksa': in 15 pages of this book, taken at random,
containing some 3,000 words at the rate of 200 words per page, 21o
Persian words occur : the percentage is thus 7*1 for the speech of educated
Hindus of Calcutta over 50 years ago ; and this would seem to hold good
at the present day as well. The percentage, l'i-4, as in the article by
P. Chaudhuri mentioned above, is due to the nature of the subject discussed,
the land-tenure and law vocabulary of Bengali being mainly Persian, The
percentage in Musalmani Bengali, and in the ordinary language of Bengali
Musalmans generally, has been discussed before at p. 211.
APPENDIX E
Bexgali Orthography.
124. The Bengali language has always been written in the Indian
alphabet. The history of the origin and development of the Bengali
alphabet has been treated in detail in ' the Origin of the Bengali Script '
by R. D. Banerji (Calcutta University, 1919), and Mm. H. P. ^astrl's paper
to the VSPdP., Vol. XXVII, No. 1, ^ Baggalar Pracln Aksar/ is also to
be mentioned. The story of the development of the various letters in their
present-day forms is a complicated one, but the general pedigree is clear.
The Bengali alphabet is derived from au Eastern alphabet current in what
is now Eastern United Provinces, Eastern Central Provinces, Bihar,
Orissa, and Bengal and Assam, from the 6th century onwards. This Eastern
Alphabet is a variety of the Gupta script (400-550 A. C), which
is a sort of cursive development, through the intermediate Kusana
writing, of the primitive and monumental Brahmi, the mother of all the
national Indigin alphabets. In the early and later history of this Eastern
Alphabet, there was some influence of the script currt nt in other parts of
Northern India (except Kashmir) from the 8th century onwards, a script
equally derived from the Gupta Alphabet, which later became the Deva-
nagarl. This western North-Indian script, which may be called ' Proto-
Nagarl,' was characterised in the Gujarat-Rajasthan and Midland tracts,
and it seems to have spread into Eastern India and modified the local
alphabet ; and this might be noted in connection with what has been
said about the spread and influence of the Western (Sauraseni) Apa-
bhransa in Eastern India (Bihar, Bengal), at pp. 01, 113 ff. The earliest
graphic documents in Bengal are the Susunia Ebek Inscription, end of
the 4th century (see pp. 75-76), and the Gupta inscriptions, of the 5th
century. From the 8th century onwards, we have a fair number of
inscriptions in Bengal. It seems that there was in Bengal a cursive hand
EASTERN INDIAN ALPHABETS
225
which differed from the more formal and archaic inscriptional alphabet ;
the latter showing greater western influence. MSS. written in this
cursive form of the Eastern alphabet, dating from the 7th century, the
MSS. preserved in the temple of Horiuzi in Japan, have been found. This
cursive Eastern alphabet is the immediate source of (1) Bengali- Assamese,
(2) Maithill and (3) Oriya alphabets. (1) and (2) are practically identical :
almost all the forms in (2) are found in old MSS. written in (1). In
fact, Sanskrit MSS. in Maithill characters used to be read quite easily
by Bengali PamUts, to whom these characters were known as f^^tfe
«tirute = tirahutiya » letters (Tirahuti = Tirabhukti = Mithila), In
Magadha, the same alphabet was in use as in Mithila and Bengal, and
numbers of pre-Moslem MSS. written at Nalanda and Vikrama-Sil5 in
Magadha have been found preserved in Nepal. But the Moslem conquest
put an end to the indigenous learning of Magadha ; and in later times,
after the land had come under the influence of Hindostan, the cursive or
shott-hand form of the old Deva-nagarl style of the Indian alphabet
which prevailed in Northern and Western India (as has been said
before) from the 7th century, namely, the « Kaithi » script, came to
Magadha by way of the Bhojpuriya tract ; and this Kaithi alphabet has
held the ground till now. Kaithi because of its simplicity has spread
to Mithila as well, where only the Brahmans and other upper classes keep
up the old Maithill character. The latter has never been printed from
types; and Deva-nagari, strengthened by the spread of Hindi, and by
its special association with Sanskrit at the present day, is now employed
in printino^ Maithill. In Orissa, the old cursive alphabet of the East
changed as early as the 15th century into the Oriya alphabet as current
now, with its characteristic top-loops and its minute essential parts. The
peculiar form of the Oriya letters, and their deviation from the Bengali-
Maithill norm, is due primarily to the writing materials used in Orissa,
r/rr., palm -leaf and an iron stylus, whereas the reed pen and ink and paper
have kept up the angular shapes in Bengal and Mithila. It is probable
that the Oriya script has unconsciously followed the model of the
neighbouring Telugu alphabet, in which the absence of angular shapes is
29
226
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX E
a noticeable feature: the culture of Andhra or the Telugu-land has
influenced that of Orissa in many ways.
The inscriptions and other early documents give us valuable hints as
to contemporary habits of pronunciation. In the 7th century, the
characters, for «b» and « v » (=^, ^ of Deva-nagari) are confused, and
evidence is not wanting for their loose use in the 5th century. After
the 8th century, only one letter, that for « v » , is used for both, showing
that in the pronunciation of the eastern area, these two sounds had fallen
together; and from the state of things in the ^ Bihar! ' speeches, and in Oriya
and Bengali, it can be seen that in Magadhi Apabhransa of the 8th
century, and perhaps earlier still, all initial « v- » s of MIA. became « b- » ,
and medially only the « v » or « w » sound occurred, merely as a euphonic
glide. In later times, distinction between « b » and « v, w » was sought
to be indicated in Biharl and Assamese by means of diacritical marks on
the letters for « b » (Kaithi *4 = «b»,{( — «w»; Assamese ^ = « b » ,
and if = « w »; but in Maithill, ^ = «w»,^=«b»). Misspellings
of Sanskrit words, which are not infrequent, show vernacular pronunciation
of the former : e,g,y « ri » for « f > , indiscriminate use of « s, s, s » , use
of « ks » for « kh » , in one instance at least (Manahali Grant of
Madanapala-deva, c. 1118) — « liksita » for « likhita showing the « kkh »
pronunciation of « ks » in the 12th century : and we are thankful for
these mistakes. The occurrence of the anunasika (candra-bindu = * ),
as distinguished from the anusvara (°= Modern Bengali t), is an indication
of a nasal pronunciation in the eastern languages at least from the end
of the 11th century.
In Bengali, the spelling has been influenced by Sanskrit to a very great
extent during the 12th century. In Middle Bengali, too, this influence
was present, and it prevented a tradition and a system for the fadbkava
words from growing up. Scribes were careless, and they were careless
even with regard to the Sanskrit words. There was no uniformity, the
same word being written differently in the same page and even in the
same line. Under the tutelage of the Pandits well acquainted with
Sanskrit, whose influence was great at the beginning of the 19th century.
SPELLING OF TADBHAVAS : AKSARAS 'HI
when the modem literary style was established for prose (and when printing
was introduced), a rigid adherence to the correct orthography for Sanskrit
words naturally came in, and brought in a needed uniformity for tatmma
words, in the place of the chaos which reigned before. But the scholastic
tendency went beyond its legitimate area, and sought to model the spelling
of vernacular tadbliams on their Sanskrit prototypes and on theories of
orthography : e.g.y C^, ^t^, f^fJT, v/^^^^l « je, jaha, jini, jlita, v/j^^oa »
etc. came to be written with « y », instead of ^ * j » , because of the
Sanskrit « yad » and *\/ya»; « karya > kajja > kaja * was written
^»t^ « kaya > , « y » pronounced as « j » , and not * kaja as before ;
and the «t « n » of Sanskrit was restored to ?Ft«t = « kan^ < kanna
t= karna » , and was brought in unjustifiably to ^t%5 = ^Nt « rani <
ranni = rajnl » , etc., etc. The old group '51 <c oa » for < wa » , without
the intervening, unnecessary ? ("S^ * oya »), was given up as barbarous.
Some sort of system was attempted in this way : but in the matter of
•writing the tadbhavas, especially the verbal and other forms which
figure in the colloquial, Bengali orthography is still lamentably backward
and ununiform. The old spellings of the MSS. are of very great help in
tracing the history of the sounds, as they are frankly phonetic, when the
scribes were not troubled by the ghost of Sanskrit.
According to I\Iiddle Indian notions, which form the basis of the
mystical treatment of the aksaras in the Tantric works, the number of
primary letters or radical signs ( « matrkaksara » ) in Sanskrit, and fol-
lowing that, in the vernaculars, is 50, — IG vowels and 34 consonants.
In this enumeration, there is both scholastic theorising and popular
misconception. The former added to the list of vowels, although
it is not found in any OIA. word or form ( < 1 » is recognised by the
' Katantra '), to bring about symmetry ; and anusvara « n (th) » and visarga
« h » are classed under vowels — which may be justified. The latter is
probably responsible for the inclusion of ^ « ks » in the list of radical
characters. Inclusion of « ks » among simple consonants is as old as the
* Lalita-vistara ' (Chap. X), the romantic biography of Buddha in mixed
Sanskrit, which goes back to the 1st century after Christ. This may have
228
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX E
been due to the differentiation, in the written form, of this consonant group
from other consonant groups with « k » , aided by some modification in
its pronunciation in Sanskrit (which might have been that of a « kkh »,
or of « kkhy », or of the palatal stop and aspirate sounds of [ech]), A
modification of the pronunciation of the group « ks », in Sanskrit words,
from « k+s » [kj] to something else, in early MIA, times^ — to [kjl], in all
probability, — is at the basis o£ the Middle Bengali value of « ks » as « kkhy »
(in tatsama forms) ; and this is perhaps not unconnected with the
representation in the Khar5sthi alphabet of <c ch » when derived from
OlA, « ks » by a separate letter from that used for an original 01x4.. « eh »
(cf • A. M. Boyer, ^ Inscriptions de Miran/ JA., Mai-Juin, 1911, pp. 423-
430), In any case, the medieval Pandits of Bengal had some justification
for regarding ^ « (k)khy » = ^ « ks » as a special consonant, because of its
« y » element. The ligature ^ = * ju * which came to obtain the value of
« (g)gy » in medieval Sanskrit, ought to have been recognised as a separate
ahsara in MIA. or early NIA. times, in a similar way. In Early Bengali,
writers always speak of the * 34 consonants,' and a class of composition,
called C^tf%^ « Cautisa » ( = catustrinsatika), was very popular, in which
consonants in their order, from « k » to « ks » , would be used in successive
verses for alliteration or for the head word.
The Indian alphabetical principle of akmras^ i.e., of words being
divided into syllables which were not closed by a consonant, was a result
of the system o£ writing. This idea of aksaras for a long time dominated
the Bengali theory of versification. (See below, under Phonology : Accent.)
125. There has never been any attempt on a large scale to make the
Bengali language adopt a different kind of writing from the one in which
it was born, so to say. In the 18th century (and it may be earlier),
some Musalmans in Chittagong employed the Perso-Arabic script in
writing Bengali. A number of these Perso-Bengali MSS. have been
found (cf. MunshI Abdul Karim Sahitya-visarada, ' Pracin Baggala
Puthir Vivaran,' VSPd., Part I, No. ], MSS. No. 87, 99, 121, 211, 278,
for instance). But Musalmans in other parts of Bengal knew of no other
script for their mother-tongue than the national one, and consequently
BENGALI IN THE PERSO-ARABIC SCRIPT
229
the likelihood of the language being divided by the script has been
averted. The language of these Perso-Bengali MSS. is good Bengali,
with special Mohammedan religious and other terms. The spelling of
the Bengali and Sanskrit words is phonetic, so far as the Arabic script
would allow it, but Persian and Arabic words, naturally enough, follow
their original spellings. Through the courtesy of ]\Iunshl Abdul Karim,
I have been enabled to obtain specimens of this Perso -Arabic writing for
Bengali. They are highly interesting, and are valuable for East Bengali
dialectal phonology. A few specimens are given below.
From the ' Yoga-Kalandar.'
< ab6 ataS xak bad e eSri maqam »
(= ^sitS-t ^ ^f^ C5(t^t^(
^ ab^ at&s^ khak^ bad^ e cari mokam^ »)
Water^ Fire, Earthy Air : these are the four abodes :
« mon diyya Sunu kahi jar6 je'I nam »
(= ^ f^i ^f^ ^rt^ii
« m§n^ diya sun^ k&hi jara jei nam^ » )
Listen attentively^ I tell the name of each
AAAa/A/' ^ »
« tatate fere§ta ase *^azra^l pihri »
« t&tha-te pheresta ache azra'il pahari »)
There abides as toatch-man the Angel ^Azra^Jl:
A /* ^ ✓ A ^ h^y K ^
« bag,er akar §e'i dahraye murati »
« bagher^ akar^ sei dh&raye mur&ti »)
A tiger^s form is the figure he bears.
INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX E
« darja asa^e tarSje du^i sarban »
« d&r&ja acb&ye tarii e dui sr&b&na »)
Boon there are to it, — these two ears
From the 'Nasiyat-nama.'
« parabu ag-e Sari poti zauibek be§ »
« pr&bhu age sm&ri pati janibek^ bes^ » )
Thinking 1dm even before the Lord., knoiv the hvshand to he great,
A 4^4/^4^ 4 4^
yJ^S ^0 ^ ^jU ^
* p8ti ke Sebe [ = Sebiba] nSri Sahi duk kglgS »
(= *f%^ s^tftlft 5^ C^Il
« p&ti*ke sebiba nari sahi dukh^ kles^ »
A woman serves {should serve) her lord, enduring sorroio and j)ain^
/4 ^ * ^4/4/^
« kono stahan hStg §6wami zadi a^iSe ghor »
(= TT^ ^ ^it?:'!^!
« kondi sthan^ ha(i)te swam! j^di aise ghar^ » )
If the husband ivere to come home Jrom sometvherCj
*y y* ^4/4 4 ^4X
« §ab kaze teyaji narl age diba lar »
« 8&b^ kaje tC^ySgi narl age diba ]&r^ » )
Leaving all icorks. 0 Woman, you should run.
BENGALI IN THE PERSaARABIC SCRIPT
ttT* K^)^
« potlkS add8§i nari karile g-omon »
« p&tike uddesi narl k&rile g&m&n^ » )
Wie/i a tcoman ivalh towards her hisband,
« mSkkah uddSSi zSno ja^e hajl-9.6n »
« m&kka iiddesiya jSn& jay^ hajl-g&n^ »
(7^ h) ax if Uaj'is go towards Mecca.
« nafiil namaze [du'i] niyyat bande'e »
(= -^s^j^ ^ fi^f^ ^tro I
« n&ph&l^ namaje dui niy&t& bandh&ye * )
performs regularly the nafl {extraordinary prayers) and the
namaz {prescribed prayers) ;
✓ A ✓ « ^ ^ >
* hgn5 85m8 p8tl z8di [narlkS] ^SkS^ye*
( = 5fCT ] tf% ^f? srtttC^ v5t^C^ II
« hen& sime p&ti j&di narlke dak&ye » )
If the husband were to call the woman at such a time^
( ^sf^ •Ttft f^rC^^ tl [Perso-Bengali missing].
« n&maj^ eriya narl dibek^ utt&r^ »)
The tDoman will give a reply, leaving her ndmaz.
232 INTRODUCTION : APPENDIX E
From the ' Okst Rasul.'
« Jibra'll Sag^e (= Sange) g-eyse mirtu wadlpati »
(= fif^^ 'IC^ I )
jr^VA Jibra^il, the lord of the death (= 'Jzra^Jl) has gone to Muhammad :
« dexi zI^g.ya§ilento rasula mahamoti »
Seeing him, the high-sonled prophet ashed :
« kaha ba^I Jibra'il Sarup basan »
Tell wtf, brother Jilra^Tl, the true words :
« tSmar Sa^^atl (= Sangati) dexi wahl kanazan »
(= c^W^ Off^ ^ II )
?F^<? is that person I see in your company ?
Some lines have been given at length to show the nature of
the orthography. Spellings like ^^y^ « nissa'ey » for t5(*5? « niseiy^ »
certainly^ « puse » = ^fC^ « piiche » a^/-^, « sariya » = ^f%^1
« chariya » having left, « ba'I « bhai » brother, yij} « parabii »
= ^ « pr&bhu » master, cJJb « baikk8 » = ^t'!^ « baky* ^ indicate
PERSO-ARABIC BENGAM : ROMAN BENGALI 233
^44 «4
the typical East Bengal pronunciation ; and ci^iijtlUi^ « zig;g.ya§ilent6 » —
* * •
Middle Bengali f^r^tPlC^i"^ « jigg5^Ssilent& » asied (honorific), tA^ji
« pirtimbi » for ^jf^tft « pfthibi > give folk-pronunciations of tatsamas.
It would appear that in the spelling, there was not much of a rigorous
system which was followed, 5t « g » being represented by ^ * 9- » and
g *j ^ *3 * by bothj « z » and ^ « j », and ^ « kh » by 4^ « k-h » as well
as by ^ « X » — the latter, however, indicating the dialectal Chittagong
pronunciation. There was not much attention paid to the genius of the
Bengali language, in the adaptation of such a different alphabet as the
Perso- Arabic for it. But vowel quantity is ignored : and herein there is an
agreement with the habits of early and present-day Bengali : the signs zer
and pesh are used for ^ and ^ « e, 5 » ; and ^ , y are used for ^ ^, ^ ^
« i, I, u, u ». But on the whole, the system lacks consistency, and compared
with it, the orthography of Urdu is a scientific one. The Perso-Bengali
script of the Chittagong MSS. now only remains as a curiosity — the
outcome of a belief in the sanctity of an alphabet,
126. The Portuguese employed the Eoman alphabet in writing
Bengali books. We have evidence that Portuguese missionary activity
began in Bengal from the third quarter of the 16th century, and before 1599
a translation of a Christian tract and catechism was made by a Jesuit Padre
named Dominic Sosa, who * indevoured to learne the Bengalan language,'
and this work was taught to Christian children at school at Siripur
(* Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes/ Glasgow, 1905, Vol. X,
p. 205*). A Christian literature in Bengali, probably in the Roman eharae-
^ See J. J. A. Campos, * A History of the Portugnese m Benj^al/ Calcutta, 1919, pp.
100-101. Nikhil-Nfith Ray, in his ' Pratapaditya,' Calcutta, San 1313, has ^iven (pp.463 ff.)
the original Latin letter of 1599 from the Portuguese Jesuit missionary Francisco Femandes
to Nicolas Pimenta, Visitor of the Society of Jesus, narrating the work of the Portuguese
mission, including that of Sosa (de Souza), in Bengal, at Sri pur and elsewhere : cf. also
S. K. De in th« VSPdP., No, 3, pp. 180-181. (For the reference to the passage in
* Pnrchas,* I am indebte<l to Dr. S. N, Sen.)
30
234
INTRODUCTION: APPENDIX E
ter, thus seems to have grown up. Towards the end of the next century,
we have the mention of another work in Portuguese- Bengali. Two at least
of these Bengali works in the Roman character were printed, the Crepar
Xaxher Orthbhed (see p. 136), and the Tocalulario evi Idioma Bengalla
e Portvgnez (Lisbon, 1743), both by Padre Manoel da Assumpgam, and
both are in existence. (S. K. De, * History of Bengali Literature in the
19th Century, 1800-1825,' Calcutta University, 1919, pp. 69-76). The
Kogkani dialect of Goa was similarly written in the Roman character :
but Portuguese-Roman Bengali did not take root.
Nathaniel Brassey Halhed in his Bengali grammar (Hugli, 1778)
framed a scheme of Roman transliteration for Bengali on an English basis.
There are MSS. of French-Bengali vocabularies (1781-83) by Augustin
Aussant, the romanisation following the French values of the letters
(* Catalogue sommaire des Manuscrits indiens etc' par A, Cabaton, Bib.
Nat., Paris, 191:Z, pp. 106-107 ; S. K. Chatterji in the 'Bharatl' for
Jyaisrha 1330, pp. 136-137). Gilchrist's ' Oriental Fabulist ' (1803) gives
the fables of ^sop in several languages, including Bengali, in the Roman
character, the system of transliteration being on the basis of English. At
subsequent periods, in the 19th century and in the 20th, there have been
sporadic attempts at making the Roman alphabet come into current use
in Bengal (as well as in other parts of India), but so far they have not been
successful.
127. In the border districts of Bengal, a number of alphabets
allied to Bengali have been used to a small extent in writing the language,
through contact with peoples using these characters : e,g,, Oriya in
Midnapore, Deva-nagari and KaithI in the extreme west of Bengal, and
Maithill in the north (in the Siripuri}a dialect). In Sylhet, a kind of modi-
fied Deva-nagarl, called ^ Silet Nagari,' has a restricted use among the local
Musalmans, and this use of Nagarl in distant East Bengal, and among
Mohammedans, too, is explained as being the result of the influence of early
colonies of proselytising Moslems from Upper India who wrote their verna-
culars (Eastern and Western Hindi dialects) in Deva-nagarl — Persianised
Hindi (or Urdu) being not yet in the field— and taught it to the local con-
'SILET NAGARL' THE NATIVE BENGALI SCRIPT ^35
verts : a tradition in employing this alphabet was thus established and has
continued down to our times. Recently this alphabet has been used in
printing. (Padma-nath ^arma, * Silet Nao^arl/ VSPdP., 1:315, No, 1.)
In Chittagong, the Chakma dialect of Bengali, spoken by Bengalised
Maghs or Araeanese and other Tibeto-Burmans who are Buddhist by
faith, is writen in an alphabet which is a modification of the Khmer-Mon
(Burmese) system of writing, based ultimately on an ancient South Indian
alphabet (LSI., V, Part 1, pp. :3;U ff.).
The use of these various characters is a relic of the past, and the
prestige of the native alphabet of Bengali has never been seriously
assailed. ^ The language has become intimately associated with it, and
Bengali speakers, like people everywhere, consider the alphabet as part
of their language. It forms a great link with the past, with Prakrit,
with Sanskrit : the phonetic history and the story of the development
of the language are, howsoever imperfectly it may be, embodied in its
alphabet and orthography.
* While admitting and appreciating all the arguments in favour of the Indian system
of writing, I remain a believer in the Roman alphabet for all Indian languages, because
of the simplicity of the symbols of which it consists, because of its true alphabetical
nature is not subordinating the vowels, because of its manifold advantages in teaching,
and in printing, and because of its wide use in the civilised world. The Roman alphabet,
modified, supplemented and arranged according to the acieutitic scheme of the Indian one,
would be a desideratum for India But uhder the present conditions of the country, the
idea cannot be taken up in earnest now for popular acceptance Sentiments are stronger
than convenience, and the sentiment in favour of the national script, which is natural
enough among any people, here has something real to stand upon. The cause of the illiter-
acy of the masses is certainly not the so-cailed complicated nature of the Indian system of
writing, as some missionaries and others fondly imagine. The use of the Roman alphabet
in India will remain for a long time a matter of scientific and academic interest only.
There must be fifty years or more of bihteralism, ajtet- Uteracu the current uljjhabetn
has su^liciently spread among the nia^se>t before the romanisation idea can filter down
among the people from the more educated classes. But all that ia rather remote : and
abandoning the Roman alphabet as an impracticable thing for India at the present
moment, I would strongly advocate the unity of our country in the matter of script
through that truly national script of alMndia— the Deva-nSgarl, as the next best thing.
PHONOLOGY
PHONOLOGY
CHAPTER I
PHONETIC HISTORY OF INDO- ARYAN
Old Inbo-Aryan Sounds.
128. The OIA. Sound-system may be said to be represented by that
of the Vedic speech, and it was the following :
Vowels.
*
Back
Central
Front
Close (High)
u: u
i: i
Half-Close (High-Mid) ...
o:
(•)
e:
Half-Open (Low-Mid) ...
(? o: ?a)
(?s:)
Open (Low)
a: a
Diphthongs
a:u
a:I( = ? a:I)
[Vocalic]
i
240 PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER I
Consonants.
Glottal
Velar
Palatal
CacumiDal
(Retroflex)
Alveolar
Bilabial
Stops
k
S
c
J
t
t d
p
b
Aspirate Stops
kh
ch
th
th dB
ph
bfi
Nasals
n
n
m
Laterals
(1 Ifi)
1
Flapped
r
Fricatives
h R
/
s
(F)
Semi- vowels . . .
Ui)
V
u
(w)
The symbols in the tables above are those of the International
Phonetic Association. *
129. Of the above, it may be noted that —
[o: , e:], as in bane^ bane in Northern (Scottish) English, were pure
vowels, originating^ from earlier, pre-IA. short diphthongs [a% at] through
* Onr materials for the reconstmction of OIA. Phonetics are the following : (i)
Modem pronunciations in the various parts of India and Ceylon, which have preserred a
great deal of the old pronunciation through a line of uninterrupted tradition for some 3000
years j (ii) Ancient theory and practice, as in the SiksSs and Pratisakhyas, and in Sanskrit
srrammatical treatises, representing^ faithfully the actual state of things in late OIA. times ;
(iii) Kvidence of the Greek transcription of Indian words and names, and of Greek vocables
into Indian speech, throwing a flood of light on Indian Phonetics of the end of the 1st MIA.
and Transitional MIA. periods. (Chinese transcriptions, later than Greek, are practically of
no value; and those in Iranian and Kuchean, as well as Mon and Khmer, Siamese, Tibetan
and Burmese, Javanese and Malay, Mongol, and Arabic, are on rare occasions helpful
for medieval Indian pronunciations) : (ir) Kvidence from the phonological development
of MIA., and of the NIA. languages ; (v) Evidence from that of cognate IE. languages
like Avestan and Old Persian, Greek and Gothic, Church Slav and Latin : all these checked
by (v) the Principhss of General Phonetics, and phonetic development of Speech in general.
THE OLD INDO-ARYAN VOWELS
241
an intermediate stage of [o: , s:]. Ancient Indian grammarians were
fully conscious of this diphthon2jal origin of [o: , e:] , which were called
sandhyaksara * or combined syllables, [a + u, a + i] regularly became
[o: , e:] in Vedic and in Sanskrit ; but the relation of [o: , e:] with « av,
ay » , i.e., [aw, aj], or [au, ai], was quite patent, in groups like « sro-tar :
srav-as, e-ti : ay-ana » . It may be quite reasonably presumed that in
the earliest 01 A. period, [o: , e:] had the lower, more open sounds of
[o: , S:], like the sounds of Southern English atvCy ere ; and, at that period,
they might even have retained the original short diphthongal values of
[au, ai > ai ?] which obtained in Indo-Iranian.
[ a: ; a, a, 9] : the short ^ « a » originally had an open, « vivfta »,
sound, low back open [a], and the long « a » was the same sound
with long quantity, [a:]. But it is not impossible that the slightly close,
« samvfta », and withal back sound, traditionally = the 71 in Southern
Englisn 6ut, originated already in the early 01 A. period ; it certainly did,
at least dialectally, at the time of Paaini (oth century B.C. ), in the
North-western speech. In an unaccented position [a], or [a], seems to
have been pronounced as [a], like the a in English along^ as can be seen
from elision in sandhi ( « te alagkftah > te' lagkftah » ), and from cases
of aphseresis and syncope in early MIA., e.g., Pali « lagkara < alagkara,
numati < anumati, okka < *ukka < ^utka < "^ud'ka < udaka » (cf.
E. Miiller, ^ Pali Grammar,' London, 1884, § 7 ; W. Geiger, Pali Grammar
in the Grundriss der Indo-Ar. Phil. u. Altertumskunde, § 20),
[a: , a] were low back sounds ; and although the short «a » [a, a] has
been raised in most MIA., there has never been noticeable any tendency to
front it to [a] ^ : the typical NIA. representatives of the OIA. [a, a]
being all back vowels, e.g.y Northern Indian [a], Bengali [oj, and Marathi
[v], the last being an [o] with spread lips.
^ But possibly in the oUl Pracya speech, which changed OIA. '-as, -a^'to *-e/ [a] before
the visarga was fronted to [a, ae] before piissinjt into *o* : cf. the I A., change of Indo-Iranian
* »-az. ' to * -e- ' (' *mazdha- * > Skt, ' medhas/ Avestic * mazda- * ; * *azdhi * > Skt. *ddhi/
Arestic ' zdi,' etc.)
31
242
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER I
The long diphthongs [a:u, a:X ( = a:n)] had their first elements long in
the Vedic period, but later, immediately before the MIA. period, they seem
to have become short, and converged towards [au > o: , al > e:], to be
ultimately raer2:ed into original [o:, e:] in MIA. The quality of the « a »
vowel in ^ « ai » it may be presumed, was fronted from the back [a:] to the
front [a:] in connection with the palatal [i] forming the second element
of the diphthong. The medieval and modern Sanskrit values of these
diphthongs do not make the first element long.
130» As for the consonants, the glottal sound of [h] is the visarga^
which is voiceless as in English handy Jiapj^en^ occurring in OIA. only
finally after a vowel, and after the unvoiced stops in aspirates {[kb, th etc.]) ;
and [fi] is the fully voiced sound, the normal Indian ^ « h * , which is
found commonly in an intervocal position in English, in words like behind,
perhaps: [fi] is found in all positions except the final in OIA., and it
occurred also in the voiced aspirates ([gfi, dfi] etc.).
[k kh, g gfi] are well-known sounds; [g] is the velar nasal; [x],
the « jihva-mullya * sound, that of ch in German ach, occurred only as a
variant of [b] before [k] : < tatah kim » = [tatax kim] .
The palatal stops and aspirates [c eh, j jfi] were made with the front
of the tongue striking against the hard palate, above the teeth-ridge ;
there was very little of a spirant off- glide, and the sounds were rather
different from the NIA. (and MIA.) affricates with a pronounced sk or zh
element, into which they developed : they resembled ky, gtj^ or rather,
were more like fy^ dy sounds, than anything else ; and in early MIA., in
most of the dialects, *ty, dy » fell together with [c, j]. fji] is the French and
Italian ga. The palatal fricative [9] was originally pronounced, as its
frequent interchange with [k] and [c] would show, like the ch in Standard
German ich. Later, it developed, during the OIA. period, the sound of a
forward kind of a//, [/], such as is found in Bengali ; and this can be seen
from numerous eases of interchange with [s] in Vedic and Sanskrit; but in
most MIA., [9>J] was reduced to the dental [s].
The retroflex or cerebral sounds, [t th, d 4R, were produced by striking
the curled tongue-tip well against the dome or the highest point of the
THE OLD INDO-ARYAN CONSONANTS: 'R'
243
palatal arch. The retroflex sibilant, « s » [J*], an seems to have been
produced exactly in the same way. This would result in a sound approach*
ing the velar spirant, [x] ; and it seems in certain forms of OIA., the [x]
sound was actually the one employed for [J^, as we can infer from a medieval
pronunciation of [J] as [kh], which still obtains — [kh] being the nearest
Middle Indian approximation to a traditional [x]. Cf. [-s->*J', J'>x] in
Slav : «snuxa, synuxu» = Skt. « snusa, sunusu » etc. : compare also the dia-
lectal Pasto pronunciation of [j] or [J] as [x]. In the MIA. vernaculars, [j*]
fell together with [J] or [s]. The retroflex laterals [ 1, Ifi] seem to have
occurred dialeetally only, in the speech which formed the basis of the
Rig- Veda dialect ; they were from an original [d, dR] in intervocal posi-
tions. Sanskrit does not use the [1, Ifi], but Pali does,
[t th, d dfi], according to the evidence of the Tratisakhyas/ w^ere «danta-
muliya » or alveolar sounds (like t or d of English), and not interdental
(like the Italian sounds), which they are now. [n, 1] have always retained
their alveolar sounds. The vocalic [1], as in the second syllable in the
English word little (without its guttural quality), was an exceedingly rare
sound, and Vedie preserves it only in the root « kip » . [f] was an alveolar
sound : it is described in the ^ Rk-pratisakhya ' as being produced in the
« vartsa (= barsva) » ieeth-ridge region. It is also described as a cerebral
sound, owing probably to its influence in changing dentals to cerebrals in
certain forms of early MIA. Probably it was, as in NIA., a slightly rolled
alveolar sound, of about two flaps of the tongue initially, and mediallj^ a
sound of one flap only, [r] was also vocalic or syllabic, occurring both
long and short : ^, m [f : , f]. The ' Pratisakhyas ' describe the [f] as being
made up of a very short «a-f r + a», forming i + i + i = 1 mora \y = ara].
This gives a sound like the Avestan « ara » , an Iranian equivalent of lA.
[f] : it was evidently a sound of one flap of the tongue, when it was short
vocalic. When it was long, [f :], it was in all likelihood a fully trilled sound,
[f ] has been described as a guttural sound by the ' Rk-tantra-vyakarana ' :
perhaps it was due to the back sound of [a] figuring in it [^r^].
The bilabial sounds do not require any note, excepting [f], which is
the sound made in blowing out a candle, and is a very common phone in
244
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER I
NIA. speech. In OIA. it was found as a modification of [h] — the
« upadhmaniya » sound — before a [p] : « punah punah » = [punarpunah].
The semivowels were [i] and [u] : they preserved the vocalic character
well in the OIA. period ; but by the time of Panini, [u] became a
spirant, a denti-labial [v], in the speech which is treated in Panini's
grammar ; and a bilabial spirant value, [i?], quite a common lA. sound
of the present day, seems to have been present in late OIA. [i] became
a spirant, which developed into a frank -g^-sound, [5], in Early and
Transitional MIA.
The vowels in OIA. could be nasalised ; and the nasalisation was in a
peculiar way, by bringing in a nasal glide, « anusvara », after a pure
vowel: ^i^'«an (am), in (itb), un (um) » being [a^, i"*, u***], which
practically resulted in [oa, il, uu]. Long vowels under certain conditions
could be « aDunasika » or nasalised properly : ^\ ^f% = [maha: asi]; so
T^jff fe, ^V^*^*^ [ragmi:r iua, su:nu:r Iuuaniu:r ut] , (Cf. W. D, Whitney,
' Sanskrit Grammar,' §§ 209 ff, : also §§ 70 ff.) In the case of [f], it was
evidently a question of a simple nasalisation following the sonant [f],
the vowel basis of the nasalisation being an [i, u, e, a] : e,ff,, ^ =
[nf:*r abhi]. That the « anusvara » in OIA. was not a mere nasalisation,
but a nasal continuation of, or a nasal glide following a pure vowel, is
borne out by MIA., and also by the traditional pronunciations of
Sanskrit in different parts of India, which have altered ["] of OIA. to a
definite nasal [g, n, w] : e.^., OIA. [sa^'skfta, soaskfta], in Bengali
pronunciation [J'>g(o)Jkrito], Northern Indian [sAnskrit], Western Indian
[sA^skrul].
Changes of the OIA. Sounds in Middle Indo-Aryan.
13L The Sound-system of OIA. was modified to a great extent
during the First and the Transitional MIA. stages.
[p, f, 1] were dropped, pure and simple vowels taking their places.
[a:u, a:i] were altered to [or, e:], and the fortunes of these were joined to
those of the original [0:, e:]. A short [0, e] developed before double
consonants*
PALATAL AFFRICATES IN INDO-ARYAN
Among the consonants^ [h], the « visarga was dropped^ and also its
modifications, which, however, left traces ; e,^., « duhkha » = [duxkha],
whence Pali «dukkha »; « pnnah punah » = [punoF punah], whence Pali
« punappunam » etc. [J*, 9 > J] fell together with [s] in the Midland ; in
the East [JJ alone was retained ; and in the North-west, all the three
continued side by side till the Second MIA. stage.
The consonants of the palatal and alveolar groups came to acquire a
slightly more advanced articulation. The alveolars were possibly established
as interdentals during the Early MIA. period. By the end of the Second
MIA. period, the palatal stops had been advanced and modified into
palato-alveolar affricates, made either with the front, blade or the tip of
the tongue : [c, j] changing to [09, jj] [cf, or [tj, dj] ; and there was
a further advancing of these affricatised palatals in some forms of NIA.
to the dental affricates [ts, dz] and the dental sibilants [s, z].
MIA. Affricate Pkoxunciatiox of ihe Palatal Stops.
132. The affricate pronunciation of the palatal stops seems to have
been only dialectal in the Early MIA. period, and in all likelihood originated
lirst in the Pracya area. Greek transcriptions of Indian words
refer to the conditions obtaining in India mainly in the Transitional
MIA. period ; and from the Greek rendering of Indian « c, j »
by « s, z, ss, tz, ti > and « z, di » {< Candra-gupta = Sandrakuptos ; candana
= tsandanou ; Pailcalah = Passaloi [pdccjada: ?], Pazaloi [ pajgada: ?] ;
Castana=Tiastanos, Tiastanes ; UjjayinI, UjjenI=Oz^ne ; Yamuna >Jamuna
= Diamouna : cf. J. AYackernagel, ^Altindische Grammatik,' I, § 119), we
can conclude that the affricate value (denoted by « s, z, tz, ss *) and the
stop value (= « ti, di ») both obtained in Western and Northern India in
the centuries immediately after Christ. The indiscriminate use of « kh »
and « ch » after « i » in the Transitional MIA. (Midland dialect ?) equivalent
of Sanskrit «bhiksunl » — «bhikhuni-, bhichuni-* etc. at Bharhut and Sanchi
(cf. Jules Bloch, ' Langue Marathe,' p. 7), show in all probability a palatal
stop pronunciation of « ch » , not far removed from a « kh » made after
a palatal vowel. The name « Cita » ^ in a Buddhist inscription of the 2nd
£46
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER I
century A. C. from Kathiawar, if it really is an Indian transcription of
a Germanic (Gothic) name Hilda [xilda]^ would give us something like a
«ky » value for * c * (cf. Sten Konow, JKAS., 1912, pp. 379-385).
The use of the ligature « ky » for a palatalised « k » in some of the
BrShm! inscriptions of the East (as at Ealsi and Ramgarh) shows that in
some at least of the Eastern (and Midland ?) dialects, « c » had lost the
slop pronunciation and had become an affricate by the 3rd century B. C. ;
otherwise there would not have been any necessity for using a digraph
« ky » for a fronted « k » , mainly when the latter occurred after « i ».
Prakrit grammarians, from Vararuci downwards to Markandeya (17th
century), imply or mention a twofold pronunciation of the letters of the
« e » class in Second MIA. Grierson takes their statements to mean
that a palatal affricate pronunciation obtained in the MSgadhi and
Ardha-magadhi areas ( = [cf, tj]), and a dental one ([ts]) in the Maharastrl
and Saurasenl tracts ; and he holds that later, in the North Sauraseni area,
the clear, palatal sound [cf, tj] was revived, and it ousted the old dental
one of [ts], so that the latter does not obtain any longer in Western Hindi,
(^The Pronunciation of the Prakrit Palatals,' JRAS., 1913, pp. 391 fE.).
But it seems that the not very clear remarks of the Prakrit grammarians
may be taken quite in another way. Vararuci, our oldest Prakrit
grammarian, explicitly states that in Magadhi the palatals were pronounced
distinctly and pronounced in full (^ Prakrta-prakSSa,' XI, 5 : ^ ca-vargasya
spastata tath'oeearanah » ). Apparently there was another pronunciation
w^hich could be characterised as « a-spasta » or indistinct, and which evidently
obtained in Saurasenl and MaharS^tri : and such an indistinct pronuncia-
tion could not mean a dental affricate one, as Grierson is inclined to think,
but rather, an elided pronunciation, in Saurasenl and Maharastrl, as
Basanta-Kumar Chatterji has rightly contended (in noticing Grierson's
article in the VSPdP. for San 13£0 : ' Ca-varglya Varna-samuher Uecaran,'
esp. pp. 201-203). At the time of Vararuci, who described MIA. of the
second period, Maharastrl had already dropped its intervocal stops « k g,e],
t d », but Sauraseni and Magadhi retained them as voiced stops, and these
voiced stops were really fricatives in the Northern Indian dialects. (See
INTERVOCAL PALATALS IN MIA.
247
pp. 83-86.) A simple stop pronunciation of the palatal sounds is easier
to voice and to turn to an open sound, and thus elide it, than a compound
affricate one, well-advanced with a prominent [J] or [5] glide : [e > cj, tj*,
ts] is commonly retained, or at the worst simplified to [J], or to [s < ts] ;
but [c > J > J > zero], where [j] is an open sound, would be an easy
process. And according to the Prakrit grammarians, inter vocal « -c-, -j- »
in Magadhi are never elided, whereas they are elided in Maharastrl, same
as « -k-, -g-_, -t-, -d- » ; and in Sauraseni, apparently the unvoiced stop
« -e- » became voiced to « -j- » , and this derived « -j- » and the original
intervocal « -3- » both became open, i.e., the voiced spirant [j, 5], and were
elided : this can be seen from specimens of ^aurasenl in an old drama like
the * Mrcchakatika ' : e,g,^ « bh6ana=bhojana ; puijjanta = * pujiyyanta =
pujyamana; pua = puja ; vania = vanija; vaana = vacana ; raa (Magadhi
laja) = raja ; vaedu = vaeayatu ; moaissasi = mocayisyasi », etc. ; also
from Modern Western Hindi forms like « bain^ = vacana ; rain^ = rajani ;
gainda = gajendra ; bla = bija- ; sui = sucikS », etc. It seems genuine
Magadhi words in Bengali retain the intervocal « -c-, -j- >, ^.y., ^ft^
« pacil^ » = Sanskrit « pracira » ; « bijani >fan = « vyajanika » ;
but such words are exceedingly rare, and non-Magadhi forms with elided
« «c-, -j- », like « rai ^ mustard ^ « rajika », « rayal »= « rajan » are
largely found in Bengali. (See below, under Phonolog?/ : the Palatals in
Bengali.) In the North-western dialect, « -c-, both became spirantised,
as in ^urasenl, during the Transitional MIA. period ; and as can be seen
from Kharotthi documents, this spirant pronunciation in the North-western
speech was indicated by « y » : €,g.^ « ayaviya =. acarya ; viyaa = vijaya »
(see p. 84) ; « puyae = pujayai » (Taxila Vase Inscription, Ep. Ind., VIII,
p. '296); « suyi, suyi = suci ; goyari = gocare ; soyati=socante ; ya(y)eya
=5 yajeyya, yajeta; puyito = pujitah ; vayati = vrajati ; payeti = Pali
pacenti » (^ KharosthI Dharma-pada ' : see p. 86). The Asokan spelling
« majula (Kaisi), majula (Dhauli), majura (Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra)
= mayura- (cf. mora, Girnar) », showing « -j- » for « -y- » , implies the
presence of a fricative for the stop « -j- » in the .'3rd century B.C. Vararuci
does not give any rule for the treatment of «.e-, in Saurasenl : apparently
248
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER I
the rule for Maharastri (« pray 5 lopah » , II, held good here. For
Magadhi, Vararuei lays down the rule (XI, 4) that single « j » becomes
« y » both initially and intervocally : « yanadi = janati, viyale = vijala ».
This would imply a spirant pronunciation for « j » in Magadhi as well,
for there is ample evidence that « y » had a value like zh [j, g] during the
Transitional MIA. period (see §133). Hema-candra also notes « y » for
« j » (' Siddha-Hema-candra,' VIII, 4, 392). But initial « j » did never
become a spirant, any more than the other initial stops. Vararuei and
Hema-candra in this case are to be supplemented by Markandeya, who
apparently follows old authority when he says that in Magadhi « c, j »
have a « y » before them — « yc, yj » (« ca-ja-yor upari yas syat » :
XII, 21). The ligature « yc, yj » is undoubtedly a way of indicating a
*clear,^ palatal affricate pronunciation, with the spirant glide, here
represented by « y » , properly identified, but placed before the letters
denoting the original stop sounds. The affiricate pronunciation later came
in no doubt in SaurasenT. One can compare the device employed in the
Sarada alphabet to indicate the palatal affricates of Kasmiri, by « cy, jy »,
to which Grierson draws our attention, after the original « e, j » developed
the dental affricate values of « ts, dz » in that language (Grierson, JRAS.,
1913, p. 395).
To sum up : it would seem that the OIA, palatal stops kept their
stop pronunciation in the Midland and in the Western tracts of Aryavarta
at a time when these became pronounced affricates in the East. After
the I A. speech was well on the Second MIA. stage, when Vararuei wrote
his grammar, Maharastri and Sauraseni preserved, at least dialectally,
the old stop values initially, and medially they were dropped or were
reduced to a weak « y »-like sound; but in Magadhi (dialectally at least),
the clear affricates were heard, and to Vararuei as an easterner, this
affricate articulation appeared as being decidedly clear and well-enunciated
beside the stop palatals of the other areas with their uncertain acoustic
effect; and Magadhi affricates were not elided intervocally. But, from
the evidence of Greek transcriptions, the affricate sounds seem to have
developed^ dialectally probably^ in the ^auraseul and other Western areas
MIA. INTERVOCAL ' Y '
249
as well, in the Transitional MIA. stage ; and in the late MIA. period,
these became universal. Throuo^h the influence of the Midland speech,
forms with elided inter vocal palatal stops characterising Saurasenl (and
Ardha-magadhi) of the Transitional and Second MIA. stages were accepted
in the younger forms of Magadhi — Proto-Bengali etc. But the palatal
afEricate pronunciation of « e, j » had sjradually spread over all lA. ; and
under new conditions, the palatal affricates further were dentalised in some
of the NIA. dialects — Assamese, East Bengali, Southern Oriya, Marathi,
and dialectal Gujaratl.
133- The intervocal cerebrals « d, dh » were changed to « 1, Ih » in
the basic dialect of the Vedic speech. Pali also has this peculiaritv.
Sanskrit, except in the dialectal pronunciation followed in the South of
India, retains the « (J dh » sounds. In all Indian speech, single « -(J-, -dh- »
have become the so-called ^ cerebral r * — < r, rh » . This sound is made
by curling up the tip of the tongue and bringing it to the point of articula-
tion for [t d], and then quickly making the tongue to move forward and
strike against the teeth-ridge with the underneath side, and then lie flat.
This modification possibly came ia during the First MIA. period, if not
earlier : Greek transcriptions like « Larike = * Lada-, Lata- ; karuophullon
= * kadua-phala, katuka-phala ; Saraganos = * Sada-ganna, Sata-karni-
(cf . Hala < * Sa'Ja < * Sata < Sata-) », belonging to post-Christian times,
show evidently a « r » pronunciation of intervocal « d » .
?T < y », a semi-vowel in OIA., [i], became a pronounced fricative by
the 3rd century B.C. ; e.g., Asokan North-western Prakiit (Shahbazgarhi)
badaya= * badaza », for « *badasa=dvaJasa ». Epigraphieal evidence
from the Transitional MIA. period fully establishes the [3] pronunciation
of the letter for « y ». (Cf. ' Mathura Lion Pillar Inscription/ F. W.
Thomas, Ep. Ind., IX, pp. ff.) The « ^-a-sruti » of Jaina ortiiography
for Ardha-magadhi, found also in the epigraphieal remains of tlie Transi-
tional MIA. period, stands equally for some sort of spirant value of y »
(see p. 85). It was tiiis spirant value of « y » that apparently brought
about the creation of the ligature «ys » for « z » in the Brahmi alphabet,
to write the « z » sound in the (Iranian) Saka language from the 1st
250
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER I
century A. C. : < Ysamotika=Zainotika, Damaysada=Damazada » ; East
Iranian (in Brahml) «ysara = zara> tJiousand, « balysa = balza »
(originally =/;/7>^^). (Cf. H. Liiders, 'Die Sakas und die " nordarische "
Sprache/ Sitzungsberiehte der kcin preuss. Ak. der Wissen,, 1913, XXIII,
pp. 406 ff. ; cf. also E. Leumann, ' Zur nordarischen Spraehe u. Litteratur/
Strassburg^ 191:3.) In the KharosthI ' Dharma-pada/ « y » is also used for
the spirant representative of OIA. intervoeal « c, j » (<?.^., the examples
quoted at p. 247).
[i > j>j > 5 ] became the stop [j] or the affricate [jg, dg] in initial
positions in the Second MIA. period, and in this way fell together with the
original OIA. ^j* [j-, J- > Jg- ] : e.g., OIA. < yoga Early MIA.
« yoga Transitional and Second MIA. « joga=jo^, joa ». This
spirantised « y » changed also the j^roups « ty, dy » to « cc, jj »= [ce,
B > ccf, jjg] in the Midland and in the West during the First and
Transitional MJA. stages : [tl > tj > tQ > te > ee > ccf ; di > dj > dj
> B > JJ5> ddg (?)] ; but in the East, « ty, dy > had a differeot develop-
ment during the First MIA. period : « ty, dy > tiy, yy » respectively.
The bilabial semivowel ^ [u] seems to have developed different values
in Ihe different dialectal areas — a rounded-lip bilabial semivowel [u = w],
a spread-lip bilabial spirant [u], and a denti-labial spirant [v], — which one
cannot very well find out now. Greek transcriptions give for the MIA. ^
the following: (i) * ou (= u), o » : « Ouindion = Vindbya ; Soastes =
Suvastu; PeukeIaotis=:Pukk(h)alavati, Puskalavati; Imaos = Himava(n);
Deopalli = Devapalli ; (ii) * b » : « Bidaspes = * Vidasta,
Yitasta ; Bibasis = * Vivasa, Vipasa ; Erannoboas = Hiranya-vaha > ;
and (iii) * hu » , initially : « Hnphasis = Vipasa ». The characteristic
NIA. pronunciation is that of a bilabial spirant. In the Gujarat area,
from Girnar Asokan forms like < dv- > db-; tv > tp » beside « tm > tp »,
one can surmise that the ^ was a strong bilabial fricative in the First MIA.
period, which became a stop in the 3rd century B. C, and assimilated
the preceding dental to itself [du = dw > du > db > bb = Giijaratl
b, Sindhi b' ; tu = tw > ti5 > tF > tp > pp ; tm > tw > ti5 > tr >
tp > pp].
STOPS EXPLODED AND UNEXPLODED
251
Unexploded Stops in Consonant GRorps.
134. The afEricate pronunciation of the palatal stops, the change
of inter vocal « -tj- * * * > t.he spirantisation of « y » , which have
been noticed above, and the later change of the stops « k g, t d, p b »
to open consonants (noticed at pp. 8-i fE., also in § 132), came in only
gradually. The most important characteristic of MIA. is the assimilation
of dissimilar consonantal combinations into double consonants ; and this
characteristic primarily marks off MIA. from OIA. This change was due
mainly to the first consonant in a group of two stops like « -kt-^ -pt- >
being pronounced without explosion, so that it was reduced to a mere stop
or closure, and its position was shifted to that of the next stop : thus
« lip-ta, bhak-ta » became in late OIA. ^bha^ta, lip ta » [bfiak,ta, lip,ta] ,
which then became assimilated to « bhat ta, li^ta = bhatta, litta » .
Pinal stops, unvoiced, were similarly pronounced without explosion, as in
« vidyut, marut, parisat, dharmat, syat, dhik, manak » ; and the final
unexploded or implosive « t, k » were duly lost in MIA. : Pali « vijju,
maru, parisa, dhamraa, siya (assa), dhl, mina >. The ' Pratisakhyas ' have
noted this characteristic in (late) OIA. pronunciation (R. Gauthiot,
' La Fin de Mot en Indo-Europeen,' Paris, 1913, pp. 91-9:i). In the
NIA. languages, in consonant groups resulting from the dropping of
intervening vowels (as, for example, in Bengali ^^l^ « bapa-ke >
bupke » to the father, ^t^"© « thakite > thakte » to remain, HindostanI
« apa-ka > apka » of self, « sakata > sakta » is able), there is complete
explosion of the first stop, and this is helped by a consciousness, vague
it might be, of the fact that the forms consist of essential or radical
parts, and affixes. This method of fully articulating the first stop of
a group, except in the case of the same stop ' doubled,' now obtains in the
modern Indian pronunciation of Sanskrit and of falsa ma words in the
of vernaculars: e.g., « sak4i , ab-da > : but this is merely an extension of
the vernacular habit of pronunciation. The unexploded stops of late OIA.
thus brought in their train their complete assimilation in the next period.
This assimilation was accompanied by other simplifications in
connection with the li(|uids and nasals, and sibilants. Possibly a habit of
252
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER I
speech which preferred an open syllable to a closed one also manifested
itself. A great mass of lA. speakers, at the commencement of the MIA.
period (at least in the East, to start with) probably had lost the sense of
distinction between root and afBx. Thus what were « dhar/ma, sah/ya,
suk/ra, yaj/na, ak/si, sprs/ta > sprs/ta, sus/ka » in the speech -feeling
of the earlier generations in the OIA. period, became, after the speech had
spread among peoples of different tongues, « dha-rma > dha-mma,
sa-hya > sa-jjha, sa-kra > su-kka, ya-jna > ya-fina, a-ksi > a-kkhi
(a-cchi), * spu-sta * hpu-hta > phu-ttha, su-ska ^ su-hka > su-kkha » .
The principle of the Indian alphabetical system in having only open
syllables was apparently based on this sort of syllabic division.
Stops and Spirants in MIA.
135. Open or spirant pronunciation of the single OIA. stops « k g,t d,
p b » intervocally was established by the close of the Transitional MIA.
period. This has been described before (pp. 83 ff.)- After the assimilation of
compound consonants, this was undoubtedly the most important change in
the history of the lA, sounds. But owing to the NIA. languages having
largely replenished themselves by borrowings from Sanskrit (or Perso-
Arabic, as in the ease of Urdu) and by new formations, the full significance
and importance of this change in the history of lA. is not usually recognised.
(Cf. Jules Bloch, * Langue Marathe,' §§ 14, 81.) In Second and Late
MIA., intervocally there were no single stops, only single spirants and
double stops : and these spirants, too, were dropped from pronunciation,
quite early in a dialect like MabarastrX, and later in other dialects like
&urasenl and Magadhi ; and the elision had taken place in words inherited
from OIA. long before beginning of the NIA. period. The Indian
graphic system continued to employ the letters for the voiced stop sounds
of [g, d, b] (generally however, ^ « v > was used for the last) where the
corresponding open sounds or spirants were undoubtedly used in speech.
The epigraphieal evidence from the Transitional MIA. period, and the
traditions of Prakrit spelling, with their hesitancy in using < g,d, b (v) », or
omitting them, or substituting « y » f or them, coupled with our knowledge
INTERVOCAL STOPS AND ASPIRATES IN MIA.
253
of what has happened or is actually happening in other languages^
are enough to establish that. Conservatism in spelling is a common
thing in languages with a long history, and letters are retained even when
they have dropped from pronunciation. In Modern Spanish (Castilian),
« agua^ abogado » etc. are pronounced as [ aua, ar)09.aSo ], the latter
word even becoming [ ai?o^ao ]. The 01 A. « dyuta-, dviguna-, suka-, tapa,
hrdaya, dlpa-, §aba » passed into typical NIA. « jua, duna, su5, ta, hia,
dia, cha » through an intermediate MIA. stage « ju^a-, dig.una-, su^-,
ta'ba, hi^aa, drta-, cha'ba » : and this stage is that which was arrived at
during the Transitional MIA. period. The rules of Prakrit (Second
MIA.) grammar in this matter are inconsistent, and the examples in Prakrit
literature for dialects like Sauraseni and Magadhi are not always
reliable. Kven the very spirant sounds are not recognised by the Prakrit
grammarians : any more than a Modern Bengali grammarian would
ordinarily notice the under-artieulation of consonants which obtains in
Bengali (^.^., ^t^^TO grani-papa [fchakurdada] is frequently pronounced
[thag-urda^a], and is even reduced to ^t^^ ^T^'^ft [thau(r)d:a] . (Cf.
S. K. Chatterji, ' A Brief Sketch of Bengali Phonetics,' London, 19^1,
§ 31.) We can see, however, that in genuine tadbhava forms in all the
NIA. speeches, the single intervocal stops of OIA., « k, g; t, d ; p, b » ,
are not preserved. The intervocal palatal stops of OIA. « e, j » were likewise
elided in tadbhava words in some forms NIA., but were retained in others ;
and the intervocal cerebral stops « t, d » have in all NIA. been reduced to
« ^d- = r » Wherever a NIA. word agrees with its corresponding OIA.
(Sanskrit) form in retaining a stop, voiced or unvoiced, or an aspirate, such a
word is not a genuine, inherited tadbhava, OIA. stops in the body of a word
are as a rule preserved in NIA. only when they are preceded by a nasal,
and when they were doubled by assimilation in MIA. The intervocal
single aspirated stops of OIA., througli a similar process of spirantisation
in the stop element in Transitional MIA., became a mere aspiration in
Late MIA. and NIA. : e.y., «mukha > mugha > mug^ha > muha; laghu>
la^-hu > lahu; kathayati > katheti > kadhedi > kaShe^i > kahGi, kahe;
vadhu-> va^hu.> vahu, bahu; suphalika > *sebbaliga > ^se'bhali^ >
254
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER I
^sehalia > Middle Bengali siliall > New Bengali f»t^1% siuli ; gabhlra
> gafehira > gahlra etc. « eb, jh * are rare as intervoeal sounds ; and
« th, » normally became « -dh- = rh » in all late MIA. and NIA, In
MIA., an aspirate occurs in the body of a word only after its corresponding
stop or nasal (and in NIA. indbkatm forms, only after a long vowel, simple
or nasalised).
The state of things with regard to the stops and aspirates in Typical
MIA. of the Transitional and Second MIA. period, e.g,y in iSauraseni of
e, 200 A. C, was something like the following :
Initially only : « k- g-, c- j-, t- d-^ t- d-, p- b- ; h- ; kh- gh-, eh-
jh-, th- dh- , th- dh-, ph- bh- » .
Medially: * < , -y- (= [5]), -d- (= [r]),-b-, -1>-[i.] ; -h-; .kk(h>
.gg(h)., -ce(h)- -jj(h)., .tt(h)- -dd(h)-, .tt(h)- -dd(h)., .pp{h)-
.bb(h)-; -r)k(h)- r)g(h>, .nc(h)- .ni(h)., -nt(h)- -nd(h).,
-nt(h)- -nd(h)-, -mp(h)- -mb(h)-».
The double consonants of MIA. derived by assimilation continued
till NIA., — to be simplified to a single consonant, with compensatory
lengthening of preceding vowel : and this resultant single consonant of
NIA. has persisted generally.*
But in one dialect of MIA., the Ardha-magadhi of the Jains,
in texts which from their language apparently go back to the Transi-
tional MIA., we meet with a few cases of elision of the normal MIA.
double consonants — the group « tt » : e.g., « aj-a atta, atman ; paya =
patta, patra ; go^a = gotta, gotra ; r^ = ratrl (radi also, in Maharasfcrl) ;
sayarl = sattari, saptati ; eari = cattari, eatvari ; cayalisa, eallsa =
catvarinsat » etc. (Cf. Jules Bloch, ^Langue Marathe,' pp. 216-:217.)
This sort of elision of double « tt » is entirely against the spirit of MIA.
phonology, and the reasons for it are not known. Possibly a case like
« ral < radl » is to be referred to an 01 A. « * ra-ti », occurring side by
^ In certain forms of Bengali, however, we have a further elision of these resultant
single stops : e.g.j * thakkura, thakura,' Standard Colloquial Bengali * thaur ' beside
itfil * thakura' ; itH * than 'for itf?!^ ' fchSkurfliii/ ^ono m r^i ZatZ?/ ; 'vappa, bSpa ' father^
Chittftgong Bengali = ^t^ *bay.'
INTERVOCAL DOUBLE CONSONANTS
side with « ra-tris, ra-tri » ; « cari », for * ^cayari », found in all NIA., may
be from analogy of forms like « catur » > « caii » (cf . J. Bloch, ojt?. cif.) ;
but the early forms in most NIA. being « ciari » (see p. 106 : see also later,
under Morphology : the Numerals ), we may have to postulate the influence
of Middle Persian in Late MIA. — Pahlavl « cahar», Pazand «cih5r» (=New
Persian « cehar, car » ) possibly having something to do in the use of
« ciari » for « cattari » in Late MIA. and NIA. (cf. « sahassa » of Late
MIA., ousted by the Persian « hazar » ) ; « cayalisa » for « catvarinsat » is an
extension of this to the numerals for the 10-group ; and « sayari » for
« sattari » may well be on the analogy of* *ca}'ari, ciari » for « cattari » .
The other words remain obscure — « aya, paya, goya » Can it be that
« aya » is a blend of the tadbhava < atta > and a semi-lalsama « * atama >
* adama > * ayava » ?
There seem to have been some eases of simplification of double
consonants to a single one with compensatory lengthening, mainly of
sibilants, in Transitional and Second MIA.
136. Phonological development of MIA. from OIA. is a subject
apart, its study belonging properly to that of Pali and other Prakrits and
the Apabhransa. In the late MIA. period, some further modifications
of the OIA. Sound-system became prominent. The Transitional and
Second MIA. tendency to elide single intervocal stops of OIA. continued and
manifested itself in specifically late MIA. formations as well; single « -m- *
intervoeally became « -vr- > , which was reduced to a mere nasalisation of
* In Bengali, there are the words Wt(^) *da(o) ' chopper, hill ^ ' datra'; ^((^9) *g5(o)'
= 'gatra,' beside a regular tadhhavaj^\^ 'gata gatta ' =' gatra ' in Middle Bengali, and
an old semi'fatsamn * gatara * from * * gattara ' ; and * p6,' Oriya * pua/ beside ^
* puta ' = ' puta '< ' putta, patra.* The last form may have been influenced by ' pota,' which
would give-*poa, po' in NIA. ^1, ''It?!, * ga, g^o, gay, gaa ' may be an
analogical formation, ''after ' kaya ' =^ 'kaa* ; ^fl ' da' is explained by Grierson as being
from a form ' * dmta,* attested from Kasmirl : it is found in Hindi as ' daw, daQ,'
sickle^ and the occurrence in Skt. of the forms * dSti' sici7t', sr?/^?i^, 'data' mov/j, cm f o/T,
' datj*' moKing^ moiier shows that the source of the NIA. word is not ' datra/ bat rather
some form like *datr' (although the K61 word ' datrom ' ^ict/e, evidently an old Aryan
borrowing, would show that * dStra ' was quite a popular OIA, vocable).
256
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER I
the vowel in most cases in NIA. ; and this modification probahly appeared
sporadically quite early (cf. « yamiina = *yawuna » > Greek transcription
« lobares » ). Intervocal sibilants single or double became « h » in some
cases : a change also noticed in a few early instances (cf . « karsapana » =
« kahapana » in Pali) ; its origin and scope in MIA. is not known.
MIA. kept in close touch with Sanskrit, and especially in later times,
when it had the disadvantage of having a large number of homophones
through phonetic decay. Thus, ^ akSra, agara, acara » would all be reduced
to « aara » , « suta, suka » to « sua » ; and it was necessary to introduce
fresh blood, as it were, into the system of the speech, in the shape of new
words and forms. Tatsamas were being brought into MIA. from the time of
its differentiation as MIA. The phonetic changes which modified these new-
comers were to some extent different from those which characterised original
MIA. When in these tatsamas there was a nexus of a stop + liquid or
nasal, MIA. no longer went in for assimilation, which characterised its
phonetics in the formative period, but anaptyxis (viprakarsa), which is a
habit of pronunciation occasionally found in 01 A. (in the «svara-bhakti » of
the Vedic speech), came in : thus « dharma > dhamma > dhama » is a tad-
bhava, « dharma > dharama » is a semi-tatsama so «sarsapa > *sassapa >
sasava : sarisapa, sarisava > ; « varsa > vassa > vasa : varisa » ; « kp sua >
kanha : kasana » ; « ratna » ought to have a tadbhava « *ratta > *rata >
(ef. « sapatui > savatti, NIA. saut » ), but alreadv in Pali we find the
semi'tatsama « ratana ^ (Bengali « ratan^ » is not from this MIA.
form, which would have given only < radana > ra^aiia > raana > *rawana
> *rana > *r&n^ it is a new semi^tatsama ; but cf. « adarsika » >
sehii'tatsama in Early MIA, * *adarasika» [instead of the proper tadhhiva
« *adassika » which would have become "^^'^f? « "^asi » in Bengali] ;
« ^adarasika > *aarasia >'5it^f*t ar^sl »). Sanskrit words in MIA. also had
to conform to the phonetic habit of MIA. which would tolerate onlv double
stops in the middle of a word, and not single ones, as single ones would
be voiced and spirantised : thus « eka > ea » , as in Assamese « e-zan »
= « eka-jana » , iadbham ; « eka » , reintroduced in MIA., became
« ekka » , whence a Common NIA. « ek » .
MAGADHI APABHRAN.^A SOUND-SYSTEM
257
137, The phonetic system of the native (i.e., of the old fadhhava and
desi) element in Magadhi Apabhransa, the source of Bengali, was in all
likelihood the following :
Vowels.
Back
Front
Close
u: u
i: i
Half-Close
o: 0
e: e
Half-Open
D
Open
1 a:
1
Nasalised forms of the vowels also occurred.
C0NS02fANTS.
Glottal
Velar
Retroflex
Palatal
Palato-
alveolar
Inter-
dental
Bilabial
Stops
Aspirates . . .
kg
khgfi
t 4
th dR
t d
th dfi
P b
ph bfi
Affricates ...
Nasals
n
n
ni
Laterals
1
(M-)
1
Flapped
Fricatives , , .
Semi- vowels
B ,(?-^-)
i
1
i
i
-r-, -rfi-
r
j
1 (s
1
(-U-) w
33
258
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER I
About the sounds of the above system as reconstructed, the follow-
ing points are to be noted.
OIA. short « a » [a] seems to have been changed to the slightly higher
sound of [d], as in Southern English hot^ which in Middle Bengali (of
post-] 1th century times) became [o], the normal sound of the New
Bengali in Magadhi Apabhransa and in Old Bengali it was sufficiently
near [a:] to be interchangeable with it. In other words, « a » [d] in
Magadlji Apabhransa, Old Bengali and Early Middle Bengali was slightly
lower in articulation than the New Bengali <5f « a a> [o]. The New Bengali
sound is pronounced with the lips very slightly rounded, and this gives
it its definite quality as a distinct vowel from ^ « a » [a:, a] ; the
Magadhi Apabhransa and Old and Early Middle Bengali equivalent was
in all probability not rounded.
[g,^ ^, I?] possibly occurred for « g d b » in intervocal positions under
certain circumstances, [ji] occurred before [cj, jg], and ' doubly ^ in the
middle of a word [jiji = ji:] ; and possibly it was also the modificatioa of
[m > w] before palatal vowels, [n] seems to have existed in Mai^jadhl
Apabhransa, as can be seen from the evidence of Oriya and of Old and
dialectal Bengali, although it now no longer exists in Bengali- Assamese
and in ' Biharl.' It is not known for certain whether Mag, Ap. possessed
[1], which is now found only in Oriya, where it represents an OIA. or
MIA. single intervocal « 1 » : in all likelihood it did exist inter vocally.
Evidence of Bengali and Oriya would show that [r] was present in
the source-form of these speeches. Probably there was a restoration (or
rather importation) of [r] in Eastern Magadhi Apabhransa through
Sanskrit and Northern Indian influence. Genuine Magadhi forms would
be expected to show [1] for [r] of OIA. ; and that is what we find in an Old
Bengali word like « laeeha = laeha ( = rathya) » , as in Sarvftnanda's
glossary, in Middle Bengali c^f^, ^5 « lacha, naeh^t », and in a Modern
Bengali word like ^tft^ * pScil^ > = « pracira » . But [r]- words are
plentiful, even in common roots like ^ « kar « dh^r » etc. The
Central and Western Magadhan speeches in this matter are more uniform,
having a tendency to reduce all laterals and r-sounds to [r]. (See p. 96.)
MODIFICATIONS IN OLD BENGALI
259
Palatal « s » = [J] was the only inherited sibilant in Magadhi
Apabhrausa : but it is not unlikely that the dental [s] sound was also
present, among the masses of non-Aryan (KOl and Mon-Khmer) origin, and
among Upper Indian settlers within the Magadhan area ; but from the later
history of the Magadhan speech in its eastern branch, it may be seen
that there at least the proper Magadhi sound resisted all [s] influence, and
remained [J].
The semi- vowels [j, w] were glides to prevent hiatus, and were the
half-close vowels [e, o] used as consonants, which would be dropped or
brought in according to option. In transliteration, these « sruti » sounds
could be written « y, w » . The semi-vowels never occurred initially :
01 A. [i, uj in initial positions had become [.fg, b] in MagaJhl Apabhransa,
before its split into the Modern Magadhan speeches. OIA. [i] after
dental stops, in tatsama words, no longer palatalised the latter — « nitya »
[nittia] became [nitt(e)D], « vidya » [uidia:] became [biddea:], etc.
Old and Early Middle BencwVLi.
138, Some important changes ushered in the NL*\, period.
Excepting in the North-Western and Western (i.e , Eastern Panjabi, Lahndi
and Sindhi) areas, double consonants of MIA. were simplitied to a single
consonant, and there was compensation for this loss of quantity in the conso-
nant of the syllable (a ' double ' consonant group means only a ' long' conso-
nant) by lengthening the preceding vowel : e.g., « patra = patta > pata,
putra = putta > puta, camma = camma > cama, anya = anna > ana »
= [pat:a > pa:tD, put:a > puitn, cjam:a > cJa:mD, an:a > ainn]. Nasals
preceding stops or aspirates were first ' shortened ' and then ' dropped,'
compensation coming in by lengthening and nasalising the preceding
vowel: tf.^., «canda > cSla » [cjanida > tja:^»dn, cja:di)]. Final long vowels
were weakened, and assimilated to preceding vowels, ia most eases:
« radhika > rahia > rahl » . Euphonic glides of « y »• and « w » became
more prominent between « udvrtta » vowels, after the dropping of interven-
ing stops : <?.//., « vata > vada, va9a > vaa > bawa, baya [Laoi), baeo] =
^tS, l>ao, bae ». In later times, these glitles weakened and w^ere dropped.
260
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER I
In Bengali, a shifting of the stress system to the initial syllable
came in during the formative period : this led to the dropping of unstressed
long vowels in the middle of a word, and to lengthening of « a » to « a »
initially. The « a, a » sounds in their normal historical relation to each
other in Old and Middle Bengali may be thus indicated :
Magadhi Apabhransa short « a » [o] > Old Bengali [n] > Middle
Bengali [d, d, o:] ;
Mag. Ap, « awA » [dod] > Old Bengali [dod, o:] > Middle Bengali
[o:, 0, o] ;
Mag. Ap. « a » [d] before two consonants > Old Bengali [a:, a] >
Middle Bengali [a:, a] ;
Mag. Ap. initial « a- » [d] > Old Bengali [d, 'd] > Middle Bengali
[a:, a] ;
Mag. Ap. long [a:] > Old Bengali [a:, a] > Middle Bengali [a:, a],
through loss of stress [a > d = o].
The open [d] pronunciation of « a » probably became the partially
rounded [o] by the end of the Early Middle Bengali Period : [o] developed
a long quality, and interchange with [a:] was no longer in the nature of
things in Middle Bengali and New Bengali. The MIA. vowel [e:] in
initial syllables became open in Middle Bengali, [s:], and possibly also in Old
Bengali : of. « dekkhai > C^f^ dekha'i [de:khDi] > (Jff^^, [dskhoe,
dskhs] > (M"^, ' ^t^^ ' [dsekhe] ; ekka > eka [eikn] > [s:ko] > [^:k] :
and « ya » after a consonant, in tatsamas, became [ea:, sa:], later [se] in New
Bengali: « tyaga >» C^^t^ [tsargD, tsea:gD] > [teerg]. Post-consonantal
« -a » in tatsamas similarly became [oa: > on > o:] (see later, under ' the
Origin of the New Bengali Vowels : [o] ' ). In connection wjjh [i], in
Early Middle Bengali, the back « a » [a:, a] received a frontal articulation
[a:, a], which later became [e] in the Standard Colloquial (seep. 133;
also later, under ' Vowel Mutation,' and ' the Origin of New Bengali
Vowels: [e] ' ). [i] after a vowel grew weak, and there was epenthesis.
Nasalisation of the vowels was fully developed ; also vowel-harmony came
in quite early in the history of Bengali as a NIA. speech.
SOUNDS OF OLD BENGALI
2G1
The consonants remained much the same, but the spirant pronuncia-
tion of intervoeal voiced stops was no longer present, except in the case of
« -p- » which still obtained as [i?] occasionally in Middle Bengali ; and
« -k- » intervoeal was voiced sometimes in Middle Bengali ; « 1 » seems to
have been merged in to « 1 » in Old Benjj^ali ; but « n » probably continued,
at least dialecfcally, in Early Middle Bengali. [J] was once more reestab-
lished as the sole sibilant, althou<]^h it was written « s, s, s » . Intervoeal
«-h-» [fi] grew weak, and was often dropped; and there was in Late
Middle Bengali a tendency to drop aspiration of non-initial aspirate sto])s.
The semi-vowels as glides occurred only as [e, 6], and they were unknown
initially.
139. Below are given specimens of Old and Early Middle Bengali,
of the llth-l:3th and 14th centuries, with the reconstructed pronunciation
in phonetic transcription.
Old Bengali: Caryas 5,33.
The text in Bengali characters, as in Mm. H.P. Sastri's edition (see
pp. 110 ff.) is given, followed by an emended reading in transcription.
The length [:] of the vowels is not always sure, MIx\. cpiantity being all
changed in Bengali from the period of the formation of the language.
The metre is « Padakulaka » or « Caupai » , of couplets of 16 mone each,
rimed : and in Old Bengali, the pauses were after the Sth mora, dividing
the line into two halves, with i^troiig sentence stress at the beginning of
each, marked ["], and a secondary stress in each, as can be judged from
the Middle Bengali metre, ' Payar/ which seems to have developed out
of the Padakulaka. The verses were chanted, and the chant music or tune
accommodated all questions of quantity in individual syllables.
(Carya 5) : 5[tf^ CT5f ^tft I
[ '^bfiD(6)D-nD(e)i VofinnD gDmrbRirD-bege 'ba:Ri:]
The river of hving is deej), tcith great force it Jlows :
["du(6)ant6 '^fiikhilo | ''ma:jf5fie nn 'tha:fii:]
In {its) two ends {^sidesj is wire, in ike middle no bottom.
26£
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER I
[ ''dRamarthe '^a:tilD | "JaikDwD gDr'BD(6)i: ]
For the sake of Bharma^ Catila builds a bridge :
[ "parDgaml '1o:(6)d: | '^niibfiDrD tDr'D(e)i: ]
Meyi going across (can) cross with full reliance,
["pha(}:i(e)D C'phatrieD) 'mofiD-toru | ''pa:ti: JSor'D(e)i: ]
Havtng split; ( =:cut down) the tree of Ignorance y he joins the boards :
["a:dD(e)D 'dirfii tag?i | ''niibane f nibane:) kofi D(e)i]:
With the strong axe of Advaya ( = monism) he strikes {?) at Nirvana.
^tf^^ ^t^ c^tfti
["JakD^D-tD 'cfDrile: | "da:fiinx} | lawD ma: | 'fio:Ri:]
After having mounted on the bridge^ turn not to the right or the left,
[''ni(e)Dd:i (%ieDri:) 'bo;fii: | "du:rr> mo 'jgaiRi: ]
Bodhi ( = Supreme Knowledge) is near^ go not afar,
[j5D(e)i 1 "tumfie: f tum:e:) '1o(6)d fie: | "RoibD parD'gatml: ]
Jfy 0 {ye) rnen^ ye will be goers across^
["puccfh0 tu 'cfatilD {e)Dn|"ut:DrD 'Ja:^!:]
Ask thou ( = ye) Catila, the peerless Master,
(Carja 33): §t^^ C^Tf^ 5?tft ^wft*^
["ta:li>tD 'moiD.gfiDrD | ''nafii pBri(e)'e:Ji: }
On the high place (?) is my home^ there is no neighbour^
[''fia:ri.tD 'bfiato nafii | 'm:ti (e)a(e)'i:ji: ]
In {my) pot there is no rice^ (yet) daily I come in,
[ "bggigD Jog'/atrD | ''bx)rD fiili 'jfsa:(e)i:]
This cripple {this frog)y the ivorld^ too much waveri?ig {hopping) it goes.
EARLY MIDDLE BENGALI PRONUNCIATION 263
[ ''duiRilD 'du:dfiD ki I '^en:te ^haite ? ) Jam'a:(e)i: ]
Ike milk that is milked off^ does it go back into the teat?
[''bDlDdD bi(e)'a:(g)ilD 1 "gD(8)i(e)a: 'baiJsRe: ]
An ox has made a barren cow to bear :
["pi:ta: 'dufii(e)e: | ''ti:na: '/a:J5Re: ]
A pail(ftdl) is milked of three evenings {^three times a day),
[ Tgo- (TSe: je:) 'bu:dRi: 1 >: (Je:) dRoni 'bu:dRi: ]
The nude standing which is that (undersfandivg), indeed
is a praiseworthy nnderstandiiig,
[ 'T50: Jo: (Tse: JeO 'efona: \ ('7e:6i:) '/a:dRi: ]
He that is the thief ^ he indeed is the honest man,
[''niti niti 7i(S)a:la ] 7iRe Jdwd J5u'j5RD(8)i: ]
Bay to day the jackal fights with the lion,
[ ''4fien:dfiDnD 'pa:(e)erD | i^itD | ^irole: bu'j5RD(e)i: ]
{This) song of Bhendhana-pada one understands all alone.
It would be seen that in the above extracts, verbal forms like « garhayi,
tirayi, jayi, jujhayi » (where in ordinary speech the final affix « ai » probably
became a diphthong, x ai » to be changed into « -e » of later Middle Bengali )
had the euphonic «y» glide — [ej; which would come in when in verse
the affix would be pronounced as two syllables ; and for metric reasons,
the final « -i » would be lengthened whenever required.
Early Middle Bengali: ' SrI-Krsna-Kirttana' (See P. 128).
[n] seems to have been pronounced in the West Bengali of
this work. ^ « a » = [d] was perhaps not yet [0], but it is likely
the higher back vowel was pronoineed in groups like [di = 01], and in
other eases.
264
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTJER I
(Page 145) : fift I
[ "dodfiirD cfupDri ^Dwu|"iiar0 tire 'thuia ]
The basket of curds, hy Yamuna's hank having put down,
[MakD pare 'go(6)aHni | ''cjari pajo 'cfQi(fi)a]
The milkmaids raise a shout, having looked at four sides,
["bifianD (g)ariafi6 (e)etha | ''bsla: (g)a'pa:rD]
At dawn we have coine here, the period is long.
^c^T ^tt^ ^^rfc^ ^l^t?T ^t^ II
[''kDtD khnne 'jgaibi) amfiS | ''mothurarD 'paro]
In hoiv long a time shall toe go to Mathura^s strand ?
[''gfiQterD gf5ati(e)a:lD | ''kohi gsiD '/e: ]
The ghaut-keeper of this ghaut — tvhere is he gone ?
[ ''dr)dfiirD cfapari morD | '^parn kori 'de: ]
Bo take to the other side my basket of curds,
["iia(e)erD (g)antDre geli ] ''cfondrabDli (-ooli) 'raRi]
For the sake of a boat went CandrdvalJ Badhika,
[''tarD pacjhe 'arc J5DtD j '''go(o)alini 'JoRi]
Behind her, all the other ynilk-maid friends,
['^kotho durD 'gia dekhi(e)e | '^skn-kbani 'na(e)e ]
After going some distance, a boat is seen,
^ ^rtft ^ ^ ^ti) II
["/Dt:6orD fiD(e)i(e)a rafii j ''tare pajo 'f5a(e)e ]
Being quick, Badhika goes beside it.
^t^ ««ttH f^t^ ^t^ C^ttSTtf^lfr I
[''tarn thano 'gi(g)a bole | "radRa go(o)a'lini]
Going to its place (^near it), the Milkmaid Radha sap:
EARLY MIDDLE BENGALI PRONUNCIATION £66
^ ^ft^ C^t^ II
[''ksnfin mone 'parD RDibD | "^hotD na(6)D 'hhani]
" In what manner shall we cross ? the boat is small,
["ske(e)ske 'parD finia | "j5a(e)ibD lUD'thum]
Grossi7ig one by one, we shall go to Mathura,
['^jDmfia(e)i cjbrfiile na(6)D | "na JofiibD 'bfiora]
If all were io get into the boat, the weight will not be borne,
[7unD gfiati(e)alD na(o)D | ''^fQpa(e)ia 'gfiate]
Hear, 0 ghaut-keeper ! having brought your boat to the ghaut,
[''JomKa paro 'knrD J5ai(e)u | "mothurarD 'Rate]
Make us all crass over, let vs go to Mathura's mart.^^
[ ''radRaro bo^onD Juni ] "gRati(e)alD 'fiaje]
Having heard Badkas words, ihe ghaut-keeper smiles,
['^batjoli 'jire bondi | cJondLi'daJe]
Adoring BahaU icith his head, Candidasa sang,
(Page 294) : ^ ^t^ ^^tf^ ^^.^ ^ I
['^ke na baji 'ba(e)e borai | "kalini nni 'kule]
Who is it, 0 Grandmother, ihat play^ on the Jluteon the bank of the Kalindi river :
["ke pa baJi 'ba(6)e borai 1 "(6)e gothn go'kule]
Who is it indeed, 0 Grandmother, that plays on the fiuie among these
pastures and herds of kine /
[" akulD jD'rirD morn | '^b&(e)akulD 'mDno]
My body is all disordered, my mind is agitated,
'mo: I "aulallo ran'dfiDnn ]
At the sound of the jlute I disarranged my cooking domestic affairs),
34
266
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER I
[ '^ke na baji 'ba(e)e bDrai | '^J*e na konn 'j^cna]
JFAo is if indeed, O Grandmother, that plays on the Jtute, ivhat man indeed is he ?
^ <fl<£i firf^c^il I!
[''daji Rnia 'tarn pa(e)e | '^ni^bo (e)a'pDna]
Being his shme, at his feet I shall cast myself,
[ "ke na ba/i 'ba(e> bDrai | ''cfit:em Rn'ri/e ]
Who is it indeed, 0 Grandmother, that plays on the Jtnte in (his) heart's Joy ?
[ ''tarn pa(e)e 'br)ra(e)i mo | '^kDilo konx) 'doje]
At his feet, 0 Grandmother, tchat fault have I done
[ ''ciJSfi^rD J5fiD'rD(e)e morD | ''nD(e)DnevD 'pani ]
Without stint drop tears from my eyes :
tr% ^^tft ^t^l^^^l *f^t% II
[ "bajirn Jobode borai ] "fiarailo pD'rani ]
At the sound of the flute, 0 Grandmother, I have lost my life.
[ '^akulD kDrite kiba [ 'am:fiarD 'monD ]
Is it only to make my mind agitated,
[ '^baJ5a(e)e Ju'JbrD baji | '^nanderD nDn'dDOD ]
The son of Nanda plays on {his) melodious flute,
^tff ^tM ^t^ ^ ^f? ^r«' 1
[ ''pakhi nnfio 'tarD tha(e)I | ''uri pori 'j§a(6)6 ]
/ am not a bird, that I might fly and fall near him,
[''medfini bi'darD de(o)u \ lu'ka(6)6 ]
Let the earth open nj), that having gone in I may hide,
c^tt^ ^^tf^ ^T^i
[ "bDHD pore 'agD bBrai | "jSJ^gxJJSJ^ne 'jgani ]
Ti4(? forest burns, 0 Grandmother, everybody knoics it :
THE SOUND SYSTEM OF NEW BENGALI
^07
[ "'moiD mono 'pore J5§ufiD | '^kum(b)fiarerD 'poni ]
Bifi my It^art hnrmy like the 2Jott€r^s kiln.
[''antom Ju'kha(e)e moro | '^kanfio abRi'la/e ]
For the desire of Kr^na, my heart is dried np^
ftt^ 5^?fT^T I (^last line of preceding extract).
Late Middle Bengali and New Bengali.
140. In Middle Bengali of times post 14th century, certain other
phonetic changes came in (^.y., epenthesis), which have been touched upon
before (see p, 133). The development of one modern dialect in particular
can be taken up in discussing the history of Bengali : and the dialect
par excellence for that purpose is that of West Central Bengal (the Standard
Colloquial), The phonological history of this dialect through Middle and
Old Bengali has been attempted in the chapters that follow, side by side
with that of the literary speech ; and a survey of the phonetics of Late
Middle Bengali is hardly necessary here.
The sounds of New Bengali, in the Standard Dialect as spoken by the
educated people of Calcutta and West Central Bengal, have been described
in 'A Brief Sketch of Bengali Phonetics' (by S. K. Chatterji,
London, 19^1: originally in the BSOS., London, Vol. II, Parti;
specimens of dialectal Bengali in the phonetic script have been given in the
same journal, Vol, II, Part II. See also the LSI., V, I). Below are given
in tabular form the sounds of the Standard Colloquial.
Vowels.
Back Central j Front
268 PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER I
Consonants.
Glottal*
J
<D
Retroflex.
Palatal.
Palato-
Alveolar.
Alveolar.
Dental.
Denti-labial.
Bilabial.
Stop
k g i
t
td
t d
pb
Aspirate ...
j
kh gfi
th dn
th dn
ph bn
Affricate ...
cfh JgR
Nasal
D
m
Lateral
1
Flapped ...
r
r
Fricative ...
h fi
s z
f V
Semi-vowel
e
o
Of the above sounds, it may be noted that [o] is the sound of English
awe, occurring in Bengali both long and short, and [sej is very nearly that of
Southern English a in hat^ being somewhat lower than the English sound ;
and [a] is found only in foreign words not naturalised. There is a large
number of diphthongs, some 25, although the script recognises only 2 ; and
there are some triphthongs also.
The retroflex [t d] are no longer the cerebrals of 01 A. (such as
are still found in the Dravidian languages, and in Panjab! for instance
among NIA. speeches), but they have advanced forward considerably
towards the palato-alveolar region, so much so that to a Bengali there
is no difference between the so-called cerebrals of his language and the
t d oi English, alveolar sounds, [n, 1] when before the retroflex
DIALECTAL SOUNDS OP NEW BENGALI
269
sounds, have a retroflex colouring, and [n] is also slightly palatalised
before the palatal affricates, [s] is practically a variant of the [J] phonenae
under certain conditions ; and [z] occurs in foreign vocables, and, rarely,
as a modification of the native [^5(8)]. [f v, f 15] are commonly substi-
tuted for the aspirates [ph, bfi] of careful speakers, [h] is the sound
occurring in the unvoiced aspirates, and is found by itself, in a final position,
in interjections, [e, 6] occur only as intervoeal glides.
Length in vowels is not of signific importance, but the length (or
doubling) of consonants is important. The stress in predominantly initial,
and word-stress yields to sentence-stress, or to the dominant stress in the
sense-group.
The more important sounds of dialectal Bengali may be noted.
[&]: half-open front vowel, intermediate between [e] and [je] of
Standard Bengali, is found in the East Bengali dialects, as well as in the
Bengali of the extreme West (see p. 1^2).
[a] : low or open front vowel, like a in English man as pronounced
in the North of England : found in most Bengali dialects, but it cannot
be said to characterise the speech of Calcutta and the surrounding area,
where it is occasionally heard as subsidiary form of [a]: e.g.^ Dialectal
Bengali ^rf5T="^f??t [ka:l] yesterday , to-morrow ( besides ^\cf, [kai 1,
kail, kail], from Old Bengali ??tf^ [kali] ), and [ka:l] time, death :
but Calcutta Bengali, both the words = ^t^ [ka:l] ; Dialectal Bengali 'STt^,
'^"^j 'srt^S? [a:J5, a:dz, a:z ; a^ dz, aidz, aij§ ; aidz, aijg] to-day (from
Old Bengali ^tf^ [ajgi] ), but Calcutta Bengali ^t^ [a^fg].
[ts, dz] : dental affricates, which are the common East and North as
well as North Central Bengali equivalents of the Standard Bengali [cj, J5].
[z] is frequently found for [dz] \ and [cfh] becomes [s] outside the West
Bengal area.
[n] occurs in Bengali of the extreme West, but it is rather rare.
P] glottal stop = the AUf Hamzalt of Arabic, is found in some
forms of East Bengali for [R], in initial positions (see page 143).
A kind of bilabial [ f], in which the lips are much more widely
separated from each other than in the case of the Standard Bengali
270
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER I
[ph > K ], with the acoustic effect of [G] to the unaccustomed ear, is the
East Vagga equivalent of a single [p, ph] of Standard Bengali.
[x] : the velar fricative, unvoiced, is found for [k, kh] in East
Vagga, and in some forms of West Vagga as well.
[9-* 15] "'so occur in most forms of Bengali owing to the under-
articulation of intervocal stops, which is a common enough Bengali habit
(see ^ Brief Sketch of Bengali Phonetics,' § 31) ; and or [w]
is similarly found for intervocal [m].
Percentage of Fkkquency of New Bengali Sounds.
141. Standard Colloquial Bengali has thus the following sounds,
viewed historically, with reference to the language as a whole :
Seven vowel sounds : [ i, e, se, a, 0, o, u] ; and the rare foreign vowel
[a]. All these, except the last, are capable of nasalisation,
Eight stop sounds : [k g, t d, t d, p b] ;
Two affricates : [cj, j§] ;
Ten aspirates, stops and affricates : [kh gfi, cjh ^fi, th dfi, th dR, ph
bfi] ; (besides, the aspirated [rfi] is found, as well as [nfi, mfi, Ifi]) ;
Three nasals : [g, n, m] ;
One lateral : [1] ;
Two flapped sounds : [r, r] ;
Four fricatives : [h, fi, /, s] ; (the fricative sounds of [f v, v t>] and
[z] are not used by all speakers, and [ph, bfi] and [J5] respec-
tively for these would be quite normal).
Two semi-vowels : [e, 6J.
Whitney in his Sanskrit Grammar (§ 75) has given an average of
percentage of frequency of each sound in Sanskrit, which may be regarded
as holding good for OIA. in general. I have tried to find out the
comparative frequency of sounds for New Bengali, as in the colloquial
speech in the educated Calcutta pronunciation. Taking 0 passages^ from
' These 6 passages, presenting an aggregate of over 9,900 sounds, were from the follow-
ing works : from KfiU-Prasanna Simha's * Hutom PeracSr NaksS* (see p. 13o), over 4,600
sounds; Bankim-Chandra Chatterji's ' Kapdla-kundala,' some 1,200 sounds ; Madhusij dan
Datta*s ' Me^jhanSda-vadha K'Svya,' about 900 sounds ; Girish Chandra Ghosh's 'Bilwa-
PERCENTAGE OP FREQUENCY OF SOUNDS IN BENGALI 271
as many writers, I transcribed them phonetically, and counted up the
total numbers of sound;?, individually and collectively, and then worked out
the percentage. The results are given below : and for comparison with
Sanskrit (OIA.) , Whitney's figures are quoted side by side. The order is
that of the Indian alphabet. The Bengali diphthongs have been split up
and included under the simple vowels making them up. Long (or
the so-called ' double consonants have been computed as two consonants,
following general usage.
Bengali,
^ [d]— 6-63 ;
^ [a]— 11-^2
[i]-677
% ^ [u]— 3-08
^ [e]— 8-96;
[se]— 0*9
^ [o]— 7-8^ ;
[a] -0 03;
• n-0'o8.
Bengali.
^ [k]— 4-15,
5t [g]— 1-59,
[I)]— 0 59 ;
Vowels.
Sanskrit.
« a » [ a, A, a]— 19-78,
« a* [a:]— 8-19;
* i » [i]— 4-85, *i » [i:]— M9;
* u >^ [u]— 2-61, ^ u » [u:]— 0-73 ;
*r^[r]— 0-74,*V> [f:]_0-01,
[l]-0-01;
« e » [e:, ? S:]— 2-84 ; « 0 * [o:, ? o:]— 1'88 ;
«ai » [a:i, a:i] — 0"ol ; « au » [a:u] — 0*18;
* m, II * H— 0-63.
Consonants.
Sanskrit.
^ [kh]— 0-88, [k]— V99,
^ [gfi]--0-17, M-0-82,
[g]-0-2> ;
[kh]— 0-J3,
[ghl-0-15,
mangal,' a little less than 1,000 sounds; from Mm. Hara-PrasSd Ssstri's Prefcidential Address
to the Vangi\-a Sahitya Parisadj San 1321, about 1,000 sounds; and from among the
recent poems of Rabindra-n&th Tagore, some 1,200 sounds.
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER 1
14 An n^a 1 1
137,
f [cfh]-
—079,
[e]— 1-26,
[ch] — 0-17,
®, ^[JSl— 1-46,
—0-21 ;
[j]— 0-94,
[jB]— 0-01,
M— O H,
[th]-
-014,
[jl]— 0-35 ;
[tj— 0*26,
^ [4]-0'17,
5 [dti]-
-018,
[feh]— 006,
[4J-0-21,
^ [r]— 0-64,
? [rfi]-
-0 02 ;
[4fi]— 003,
[n]-l-03 J
^ [fc]— 3-83,
«t [th]-
-0-59,
[t]— 6-65,
tth]— 0-58,
W [dj— 2-51,
f [dB]-
-0-75,
[d]— 2-85,
[dfi]— 0-83,
«iP, «l. [n]—
[n]— 4-81 ;
4-97;
«,[p]_2-U, 5p [ph (f, p)]— 0-36, [p]— 2-46, [ph]-0 03,
^ [b]— 4-44, '5[bfi(v,D)]— 0-47, [b]— 0-46, [bfi]— 1-27,
3J [m]— 2-78 ; [m]— 4-34 ;
?[g]-l-06, ^[r]— 7-01, «y» [1, j]_4-25, [r]— 5-05,
51 [1]— 4-14, « [6]— [1]— 0-69, « V » [u, IV, o, vj—
0-09; 4-99;
"t, ^, ^ [j]— 3-64, f, >T [s]— 0-35, « s » [9, j]— 1-57, « s » [J ]— 1-45,
^ [fij— 1-40, : [h]— 2 02. [s]— 3-56, [Bj— 107,
« h » [b, X, f]— 1-31.
In the above comparative tables, certaia points are interesting, show>
ins the result of transformation from OIA. to NIA.
OIA. « S » became [a] as well as [a:, a] in Bengali through compensa-
tory lengthening in connection with the simplification of double consonants
groups), as well as [o] in New Bengali times : hence the decrease in « li »
[0] and the increase of ^ [a] and ^Q [o] sounds in Bengali, The large
percentage of [e] in the Standard Bengali Colloquial in due to the habit of
umlaut in that dialect, which has transformed many an [a] and [i] into [e].
FREQUENCY OF SOUNDS IN BENGALI & OIA. 278
In literary Bengali, the [e] would present a smaller figure. On the whole,
vowel sounds in New Bengali are slightly in excess o£ what the case was in
OIA. as presented by Sanskrit (46'17% and 44*15% respectively).
The excess o£ [k] and [kh] in Bengali is due partly to the doubling
of these sounds before « y, r, 1, v » in tatsama words ; and to some extent,
the increase of [kh] is due to the modifications of Sanskrit « ks ». [g]
has developed from OIA. [g, gg], as well as from annsvara : hence the
excess over Sanskrit.
The substantive verb-root « ach » is partly responsible for the per-
centage of frequency of the [c(*(h)] sound. The palatal affricates have been
largely due to the assimilation of the dentals with « y >. [cf(h)] and [/]
acoustically are the most prominent sounds of Bengali.
The excess in the cerebrals is noteworthy — and it is just what can
be expected from a descendant of the Magadhi form of MIA.
The dentals have kept close to the OIA. figures, but the decrease
of [t] is to be noticed, [t] was a common OIA. sound ; it has been dropped
in intervocal positions in NIA. (as, e.^,, in the present verbal forms in
« -ti », and the passive participle in « -ta ») ; and besides, it has been in
many cases cerebralised or palatalised. The [n] sound in Bengali has been
re-inforced by the cerebral and palatal nasals.
Bengali [ph] in many cases is due to the aspiration of [p] in connec-
tion with a sibilant, which took place in MIA. All initial « v- » s have
become [b] in Bengali, in tadbkavas, and intervoeally in tatsamas also :
hence the increase in [b]. The weakening of [bfi], one of the most
eharact-eristic sounds of OIA., to [R], is partly the reason of the decrease
of the sound in Bengali : we may note that « -bh- > figured in some common
inflections of the noun in OIA., which have been lost. The loss of final
« -m », so common in Sanskrit, and the transformation of intervocal « m »
to a mere nasalisation, has led to the decrease of that sound in Bengali,
The semivowels of OIA., [A = j] and [u = w], have been changed
respectively to [J5] and [b] when initial ; and in the interior of a word,
they have been either assimilated, or reduced to zero. Bengali started
afresh with its own semi- vowel glides [e, 5], which are optional intervocal
35
274
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER I
sounds only ; and hence this low percentage in Modern Bengali with its
large number of diphthongs not admitting a pronounced glide.
Some common suffixes of Modern Bengali — the plural and the genitive
— ^have < r > : this certainly has helped the high frequency of this sound
in the language. It will be seen that [r] is the most frequent consonant
sound in Bengali, as [t] is in Sanskrit, ([r, f , f combined, however, come
second in Sanskrit).
[1] was quite a popular sound in the dialects of the East; and the
Bengali verb has its simple past form, as well as a conjunctive indeclina-
able, with an [1] affix. These are the reasons of the discrepancy between
Sanskrit (representing OIA., of the West) and Bengali.
The sibilants have become curtailed to some extent, owing to their
assimilation in groups like « sc, st(h), sn, st(h), sp, sk, sp, sk » etc.
In Bengali, [/] ta.kes the place of [s] of Sanskrit, the [s] sound being
of rare occurrence; and [J*] is lost.
[S] shows a slight excess. But the weakening of intervoeal [kh gfi, th
dB, ph b6] to [S] in MIA., would make us expect a bigger figure
for this sound in Bengali. A great many intervoeal [S]s are dropped in
New Bengali.
[h] was lost in MIA., and the sound is of independent development
in Bengali where it occurs only finally in interjections.
The history of the development of the sounds of Modern Bengali
from OIA., is now proceeded with from the next Chapter.
CHAPTER II
PHONOLOGY OP THE NATIVE ELEMENT: VOWELS.
ACCENT SYSTEM AND ITS INFLUENCE ON VOWELS.
Stress Accent ik Indo-Aryan.
142- The MIA. vowel system was transformed into that of NIA.,
but there were certain losses, and changes in quality and quantity in NIA.,
which are remarkable ; thus, an 01 A. (Sanskrit) word like « utpatayati,
utpatayati » became in MIA. « uppateti, uppadedi, uppadei, uppadai* »,
which was transformed into New Bengali ^^'US > < upare,
> uparay, up^ray » : here we see the loss of the long medial vowel « a » of
OIA. Similarly, in OIA. word « bhratf-jaya » = ]ate MIA. « * bhau-jaa,
bhaujja > = Bengali > % bhauja > bhaj^ », we see the loss of
final and medial vowels in NIA. ; and in a case like Bengali « unun »
oz?(?«=OIA, « * usnapanika we see not only loss of final vowels, but also
change of « a > to « u ».
All these modifications were due in the first instance to the accent
system obtaining in the Aryan speech, specially during the transitional
stage between MIA. and NIA., and to the subsequent operation of special
phonetic habits which were developed in the various NIA. speeches
(e, y.. Vowel Harmony and Vowel Mutation or Umlaut in Bengali).
The kind of accent which was attended by the loss apparently o£
weak syllables, by concentrating on a particular syllable most of the
effort required io pronouncing the whole word and thus neglecting the
other ones, was undoubtedly an accent of foice, a respiratory accent, or
stress accent. This stress accent is often intimately connected with the
raising or lowering of the tone of voice, or pitch (cf. Daniel Jones, ' An
Outline of English Phonetics/ Leipzig, 192^, p. v) ; and in some cases,
stress, or pitch, or both, means increase in the length of the syllable. Stress
and pitch are both present in all languages, but each language has its
276
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER II
predilection one way or the other, either making stress the dominant
speech attribute, subordinating pitch or musical tone to it (as for instance
in English), or vice versa (as in the Old Greek). This pitch is with
reference to the syllable in individual words, — apart from intonation or
modulation of voice in connected speech, which is present in all languages
in a more or less pronounced way.
In the oldest form of lA., as preserved in the Rig and the other Vedas
and in the ' Brahmanas/ pitch or musical accent was the predominant one ;
and the ancient Indian grammarians in explaining accent in Vedic have
only thought of pitch or raising and lowering of the voice in the different
syllables (udatta, anudatta, svarita), and not stress. We have no indica-
tion as to how far the stress accent was present in OIA., or how strong
it was. But it has been assumed by some scholars (preeminently H. Jacobi)
that there developed in the lado- Aryan speech a pronounced stress accent,
in the closing centuries of the 1st millennium B.C. (i.e., in the First and
Transitional MIA. stages), which was distinct from the earlier, predo-
minantly musical, accent of OIA. ; and this stress usually was on the first
long syllable from the end of the word, and there was a secondary stress on
the first syllable. This new stress accent roughly corresponded in place
with that obtaining in classical Latin. (Cf. H. Jacobi, ' Ueber die Betonung
im klassichen Sanskrit und in den Prakrit-Spraehen/ ZDMG., XLYII, pp.
574-582.) In the medieval and modern pronunciation of Sanskrit, when
verses are simply read and not chanted to a set tune, it is this stress accent
that obtained and still obtains now (cf. G. Biihler, ^ Leitfaden fiir den Ele-
mentarcursus des Sanskrit,' Vienna, 1883; J. Wackernagel, ^ Altindische
Grammatik,' I, § 'Zo4; ; also the paper of H. Jacobi) ; and Grierson accepts
this view of the presence of a * Latin ' stress in Early MIA., which formed
the basis of the accent system of the NIA. speeches (G. A. Grierson,
* On the Stress Accent in the Modern Indo-Aryan Vernaculars,' JRAS.,
1895, pp. 139 ff.)- Against Jacobi's view is PischePs, who differentiated
between the various MIA. dialects in their accent systems, and
thought that certain dialects (like Maharastri, Ardha-magadhi, Jaina
Magadhi, poetic Apabhransa, and poetic Jaina SaurasenI — in short,
STRESS-ACCENT IN INDO-ARYAN
277
dialects originating in the South-western lA. area^ or employed, as in the
case of Ardha-magadhi and Jaina ^auraseni, by people of the South-west)
preserved the Vedic (01 A.) accent, at least with regard to the place
where it occurred in the word ; but other dialects of MIA. (like ^auraseni,
Magadhi, Dhakki [^fakki, a North Panjab speech ; see p. 88] ) developed
the new arrangement of stress which is preserved in classical Sanskrit.
This theory of Pischel's, of two systems of accentuation prevailing in
MIA., is supported and developed by R. L. Turner, who notes the difference
between Gujarat! and Marathi (the former having a definite stress which
differs in acoustic effect considerably from the absence or weakness of
any stress in Marathi), and seeks to establish that the original Indo-European
accent as preserved in OIA. (Vedic), did not change its place, although it
became a stress from pitch, and was carried on in Marathi, a descendant of
Maharastri, but it was the new stress system of MIA. (Saurasgni etc.) that
was continued into Gujarati and the rest. (R. Pischel, ' Grammatik der
Prakrit-Sprachen,' § 46 ; R. L. Turner, ^ The Indo-Germanic Accent in
Marathi,' J RAS.,191G, pp. 250-251.) Jules B loch is sceptical about the
speculations as to the presence of a stress accent in MIA., and does not
think that the NIA. speeches possess a stress either, and believes that the
rhythm in NIA. is mainly quantitative ; but he admits that accent is not a
stable phenomenon in speech, and that in India the Aryan speech, in its
development in the various parts of the country at different times,
underwent different modifications with regard to the accent, through
contact with different non-Aryan tongues which have given place to it
(J. Bloch, ' Langue Marathe,' §§ 32, -36 ; 'V Accent d' Intensite,' in the
Bhanijarkar Comm. Volume, pp. 359-364).
The question of accent (stress accent) in I A. is indeed a complicated
one, and the absence of sure evidence in this matter for OIA. and MIA.
leaves room only for a hypothesis about its existence in the earlier phases
of lA. In NIA., a stress or expiratory accent does exist, at least in some
forms of NIA., e,g,y Standard Bengali, HindostanI, Sinhalese ; and my
impression is that it is found in all forms of NIA., although it is frequently
associated with length. This side of NIA, phonetics, however, has
278
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER II
not been fully enquired into. The loss of unstressed vowels, iniHal, medial
and final, in a breath group of a single word or a group of words, as we
can see from most languages, is generally the result of a strong expiratory
stress.^ Witness the development of the Romance languages from Latin,
witness eases of contraction like English ['bo^sn] from bat + sveinn » ,
['hAzif] from < hus-wif » , Parisian French [tit'msiii] = « petite mere » ,
Bengali C^f^^ ['derk(h)o] wooden lamp-siand from « *diwa-rakh-ua (= dipa-
raksa + uka-) » , Hindostani [dub'la:] from « dubbala-, durbala- » , ['pja:r]
from « piya-ara, priya-kara » ; witness also cases in Bengali like (TRC^^
['nejgejsa] for ^ « niya asis giya ja ^ ^ go mid get, do (lit.
having taken, come, having gone, go).
In OIA., the loss of unstressed syllables is found, but is rather rare :
« anu vartisye > an-vartisye »; « su-varna > svarna » ; « janu-f bila
>j4m-bila » ; « sn-nu-ma*; > su-n-mas » ; « sQnara > ^siinra > *suadra>
sundara'> ; « *avis > vis » bird, cf. Latin « auis » ; « tila-pinja>til-pinja > ;
Vedic « tman > atman » : etc. (A. A. Macdonell, ' Vedic Grammar,' § 18 ;
the article by Jacobi in the ZDMG., XL VII ; J. Wackernagel, ' Altindisehe
Grammatik/ I, § 63). Cases are on the increase in MIA., as in Pali and
the Prakrits of the Second MIA. stage ; as well as weakening of unaccented
syllables : e.g., Pali « jaggati <* jagrati <* jagarati < jagarti ^, *dhita
<duhita », « daka < udaka > ; « kinati < krinati », ^ kahapana=karsS-
pana » ; < danim=idanlm » ; Prakrit (Ardha-magadbi) « lau = alabu » ,
« rahatta = araghatta » , « sauakha-pada > * sanakh^pada > sanapphaya »,
« katta < kal^ttra < kalatra » , « poppbala < pug^phala = pugaphala » ;
« utkhata = ukkh&a > ; < sShayya = sahij ja » ; « surabhi > *surbhi > subbhi » .
« dhilla < sidhila=sithila » ; sirisa < sirlsa » ; « posaha= upavasatha » ;
« hau <ahakam, aham » ; * okkhala, ukkhala = *udkha]a= udukhala », cf.
Bengali ^^J^T « ukh^li » etc., etc. The presence of a strong stress accent in
» Cases of loss of a syllable as a result of low pitch are found, but are extremely
limited : e.jr,, London English [i^tju, kjn] for a conventional thank you ['dseT^kju], where the
high pitch in which the second syllable is pronounced makes the preceding one almost
inaudible, although normally it is the stressed syllable in this sense group. Here pitch ia
more powerful than stress.
ACCENT IN OLD BENGALI
879
MIA., a new development in the Aryan speech which was brought in after
the decay of the old tone, at least iu the Northern Indian plains, can
thus be very well assumed.
Accent in Old Bengali.
143. The general lines of NIA. vowel phonology^ as a phenomenon
connected with stress, have been laid down by Grierson On the Stress
Accent in the Modern Indo-Aryan Vernaculars,' JRAS., 1895 ; also of.
R. L. Turner, ' The Indo^Gerraanie Accent in Marafchi,' JRAS., 1916).
The Northern lA. languages, Western Hindi, Eastern Hindi, RajastbanI
Gujarati, Sindhi, Panjabi (Eastern and Western), Bhojpuriya, ]Maithill,
and Magahl, seem in the main to agree with the stress system which
characterised all Aryan speech, except perhaps in the South-west (the
Marathi area). The stress system of Modern Bengali, however, presents
a striking contrast with other NIA, speeches. All Bengali dialects,
however, cannot be said to possess a uniform system of stressing : the
accent habits of the various dialectal areas have not been studied, and
only some general remarks can be made about the Standard Colloquial
Speech. Iu this form of Bengali, the stress is dominantly initial; and
word-stress surrenders itself entirely to sentence stress, the initial syllable of
the first important word in a sense-group having the stress, and the other
words losing their stress if they possess it when isolated. Learned ^^anskrit
words not fully naturalised, however, frequently retain a non-initial stress,
which is generally on the first long syllable or closed syllable from the end.
(S. K. Chatterji, 'Bengali Phonetics,' ojo. § 58.) The main point
of difference between pan-IA. accent and the Bengali Standard Dialect
accent therefore consists in this : Bengali accent is initial, and a Bengali
phrase, or breath-group, or sense-group, has only one stress, an initial one.
The history of Assamese and Oriya, the sister-speeches of Bengali, in this
matter is not known ; but Oriya iu the 15th century seemed to possess a
non-initial stress, on the ante-penultimate syllable (cf. p. 107); and in
Modern Oriya, the stress is not initial, unlike that of Standard Bengali.
Early Assamese seems also to have possessed a non-initial stress like
»
280 PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER II
Oriya (see p» 94), but the actual conditions have not been studied ; but it
seems that in Modern Assamese, although we lind plenty of initial stresS;
the general speech habit is not such as we meet with in Standard Bengali,
in favoaring a dominant initial stress^ verbal and phrasal.
Non-initial stress is now found in some of the dialectal forms of
Bengali, in the dialects of the extreme West, and it seems also
in the Western Vagga dialects. As it frequently happens, stress is
confounded with length and with pitch. This matter, however, has not
been investigated at all, and opinion cannot be safely given about any
form of Bengali except the Standard Colloquial. But a strong initial phrase
stress seems to be present in most forms of Bengali. This might he due
to a recent influence of the West Central Dialect, the dialect joar excellence
for initial stress. But judging from the general trend of pan-Bengali
phonology, it seems that a strong non-initial stress was prevalent all over
Bengal, in the formative period of the language, and gave to Bengali as a
whole some of its distinctive features in vowel phonetics. The rule of the
short antepenultimate in Maithill (Grierson, ' Mai t hill Grammar ASB.,
pp. 16 ff.), or a similar shortening of long vowels through lack of stress
in Western Hindi (cf. S. H. Kellogg, ' Hindi Grammar^,' § 84; see also
before, p. 160), turning a borrowed Persian word like « jan-war » animal
to « janSwar » in HindostanI, is a phonetic habit more or less common
to most forms of NIA,, which has been inherited by NIA. from MIA.
But this has been discarded by Bengali entix'ely. The oldest Bengali,
judging from forms actually preserved, was only in partial agreement with
its sister and cousin speeches by not wholly doing away with the vowel and
stress system inherited from MIA.
In fact, it seems" that during the formative period of Bengali, there
were two systems of accent which were both current in the language, —
(1) the pan-Indian system, which by preference placed the stress on a long
penultimate, and (2) the peculiarly Bengali system, which sought to bring
all stress to the head of the word. Examples of the first system are
furnished by the following forms of names from the inscriptions : « H&4^-
gSgga » = ^tft+tt'T *Ha4i+gSgga= Had^ika-gagga » (see p. 183);
TWO SYSTEMS OF STRESS IN BENGALI 281
« Laccha-vada (p. 185) = ^Lacha-va^a » for « ^ Lacha-vada » , which
would give a New Bengali ^^rf^ « *Nach^ra » (cf . « gh3fca = ghatta »,
with simplification of MIA. double stops, in the same inscription) ; « Jau-
galla < ^Jaii-galla » (p. 185) ; « Ambayilla » for « *Ambayilla » (p. 186),
compare « Khandayilla » in the same inscription ; « Nica-dahara » for
* *Niea- > (p. 187) j * Citadi- » f or * Cita- * (p. 187) ; « Atha- » in a
compound form, for « atha- » (p. 188) : compare « Sata-kopa » at p. 183.
One can compare also the form « kana-motika » for « *kana-raodia » (p. 180):
here « kana » evidently is for a MIA. « karma- = karnaka » ^^/^c?; and
the simplification of the double consonant, with compensatory lengthening
weakened to short quantity, is remarkable for the early date of this
inscription. In the Carya-padas, there are a number of forms showing,
from the arrangement of vowels, the normal NIA. stress : it is quite likely
that from the fact of the MS. of the Caryas having been written in Nepal,
the characteristic stress and quantity of Northern NIA. have insinuated
themselves in these cases. Still, the following forms are noteworthy:
« avacagavana (Carya 7 : agamanaka-gamana-. New Bengali '^rW^'tW
anagona) ; Shariu (19, 26 : = aharitam) ; bh3,t5ra (30 : *bhartara=bhartf) ;
kala (21 : kala-) ; apane, apana (22 : appana- = atman) ; adha-rati (2, 22 :
ardha>addha, adha + rati) ; bapa (32 : bapa<vappa, vapra /fl^>5^r) ; g§,via
(33: gavi-); mai aharila pania (35: maya-feoa *aharita+ila panlya-) ;
patavala oar (38 : patra>patta, pata-hpala) ; hatha (41 = hatha-, hasta-) ;
^asa (16 : semi-tat samai^2A2LVQ3i>) ; samaya (40 : =sS>mayati enters : but of.
samaya, in 33)» ; etc., etc. From Sarvananda's ^ Tika-sarvasva ' (see p. 109),
we can note ^ pagara » (prakara) : in New Bengali, this word has preserved
the short in the initial syllable — "^^tt^ < ^ga^i^ * diicA ; «S<mba4{^
(amrata) ; sgi)krama = sa(g)kama (sagkrama) ; jhampana = jhapana
Itfier (= yapya-yana, New Bengali ^'T^tf5( « jhapan^) » . With the above
forms, showing in general a stress scheme ^ ^ or «w_£^w_/w or
^ jL^ ^,or V v^Wj we can compare the following, from Old Bengali as
well :« Kaliya (p, 181) ; Kana-dvlpika (p. 181); Kafca-baeha, Sata-kopa,
Bhata-pada (p. 183) ; Santi-vada (also Santi-vada) (p. 184) ; Kanti-jogga,
Ghasa-sambhoga Bhatta-( = Bhata-)vada (p. 186) ; Khandayilla, Valla-hitta
36
282
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER II
p. 186) ; Barayl-pada, Vira-katthi (p. 188) ; Sagkara-pasa (p. 18S) ; Bagha-
pokhira (p. 188). In Sarvananda we have also the following ; « basa-hara »
(=vasa-gfha) = Middle and New Bengah' < basar^ » chcmber to
which a ivedded couple retire (a non-initial stress would have given a New
Bengali « "^basar^ ») ; « kalaja, kaleja » (kaleya) , e£. Western Hindi
« kaleja » borrowed into Bengali as ^^^1, ^f^^ < kaleja, kalija* ; «kahara»
(karagfha, *kEr^hara) ; « dadha-kaka » = New Bengali Wt^^t^ « dar^-kak^ »
jackdaw I and « eamatbi » (carma-yasti). The Caryas give us « Kamaru
(Carya 2 : Kamarupa), sagkama =sakaw'a (5 : sagkrama) = New Bengali
^'tC^1 « sako » bridge; < kacchi (8 : kaechika) ; eanda-kantl (31 : eandra-
kanti); Jalandhari (36 : c£. W, Hindi Jalandhari); pandiacaye (36 : pandita-
carya); pania (4:3 : panlya-) ; basasi (15 : vasasi) ; hSu (10^ 18, :20, 25 :
*hau, ahakaih = aham) ; kama-eaiidali (18 : karma-eandalika) j ahara (21 :
ahara-) ; balaga (26 : balS,gra == kesS-gra) etc., etc.
From the above instances, it might be inferred that there were two
systems of stress in Old Bengali, and also in pre- Bengali, and neither of
these could be said to have been finally triumphant, to the entire exclusion
or suppression of the other, during the Old Bengali period. But the initial
stress had the victory ultimately, and by the end of the Early Middle
Bengali period, it is very likely that it was active in West Central Bengali
and in most Bengali dialects, thus giving to Modern Bengali words their
typical forms. The following examples will illustrate the case :
Middle Bengali
Embara, amara :
parisi :
tamuli :
i.khara :
kum§,ra :
pakhale, pakhale :
Old Bengali
« &mbSda, *ambada (amrataka) :
« padiylsl (prativesin) ;
4c *tamboIi, "^taboli (tambulika) :
« "^akhada (aksa-vataka) :
« *kumha(a?)da (kusmanda-) :
« *pakh41ai (praksalayati) :
« Campa-hitti » (as in inscriptions, a village name)
a mrnawe.
In Old Bengali, forms with initial stress seem also to have occurred
side by side with those quoted above. In the Early Middle Bengali of
New Bengali
am^ra »
% par's! »
^T^^^ t^m'lx »
^t^l akh^ra ».
kum^ra ».
^^t^ pakhale
« CampSbi »
INITIAL STRESS IN OLD BENGALI
283
the '^ri-Krsna.Klrttana/ there are indications that initial stress obtained :
e,g,j the initial « a » [d] occurs as « a » [a:, a] in this work — a tendency,
although controlled by taimma forms, which has persisted even at the
present day : e.g,^ ^5it^f«[ « abudhi » (abuddhi) , ^spf^^ « asukha » (a-) ,
« anala > , ^^^[^sf « anumati > , "^^^t^ « anupama » (anupama) , 'srt^^
« alaka », etc., etc. j also in tadbhavas — * Aihana » (Abhimanyu),
« aara » (apara) ; cf. also < aiha » (avidhava). Compare also ^t^t^
« bakhana » (vyakhyana : Hindi bakhan) ; ^4t^^ « kanthoala » (cf , Old
Bengali « kanta-bhala » [Sarvananda], = New Bengali #t^t^ « kathal^) *
jack-fi'ifit ; ^t^tf^ « Kanhani » (Krsna : cf. W. Hindi Kanhai, Kanhaiya),
New Bengali « KSnai » ; « palae » ( = palae : palayate) ; ^t^t^^l
<c bajae » (vadya-f -apayati); Tf^t^ « barhae » (vardbapayati); ^^Tf^ «badh5e»
(bandhapayati : of. Carya 31 , bandhavae) ; ^^IT^^ « pathae » (prasthapayati) ;
^rWcfl « sam(b)ae » (samayati) ; etc., etc. Middle and Modern Bengali forms
with long vowel in initial syllables demonstrate sufficiently that of the two
systems of accentuation which can be noticed to exist side by side in Old
Bengali (and possibly also in Magadhi Apabhransa as spoken in Bengal,
during the closing centuries of the MIA. period), the system which may be
called pan-Indian, preferring the accent on a long syllable from the end,
had to yield to that which was peculiarly of Bengal.
It may be presumed that the agreement in matters of stress with the
sister-speeches of Northern India was a point which characterised the Proto-
Bengali speech (as well as Magadhi Prakrit, as brought by settlers from
Bihar and Upper India who introduced the Aryan speech into Bengal), and
that the initial stress habit was the Indigenous one which was imposed upon
the language as it became the speech of the masses, who were originally
of non-Aryan race and language. It may be that the two sj-stems of
accentuation at tirst characterised class dialects : Sarvananda in his glossary
makes a passing reference to « nicokti » or ruhjar speech , apparently in
contrast to a respectable dialect. The initial stress might originally have
characterised the speech of the lower classes, — at least in certain districts.
It is quite possible that even in the pre-Bengali period, the initial stress had
already become established, but in writing the words of the language,
284
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER II
the earlier tradition came out in the spelling. But in any ease, it can be
legitimately assumed that the indigenous habit got the better of the Upper
Indian one, originally belonging to the Aryan language, and shaped the
forms of Bengali. These two cross influences, together with the fact of
dialects, have helped to deprive Bengali of a regularity in its phonology.
The languages which were replaced by the Magadhi Apabhransa in Bengal
were Dravidian, Kol and Mon-Khmer (Austro-Asiafcie), and Tibeto-Burman.
It has been presumed that in Primitive Dravidian, the accent was on the
initial or root syllable (K. V. Sabbayya, lAnt., 1909, p. 161) ; the Tibeto-
Burman (Bodo) is said to have a strong initial phrase stress (cf. J. D.
Anderson, ' Accent and Prosody in Bengali,' JRAS., 1913, pp. 857 ff.) ;
and as for Austro- Asiatic, nothing definite seems to have been established.
Accent and VisnsiFiCATioN in Bkngali.
Okigin of the Bengali Syllabic Metres.
144. Nothing is known about sentence stress in OIA, and MIA.
The position of the pitch accent of OIA. with reference to the sentence,
however, is partly known (A. A. Maedonell, * Vedic Grammar,^ §§ 109,
110, 111). The sentence accent of Old Bengali — the West Bengali dialect
from which the modern Standard Colloquial is derived, at least — can possibly
be guessed from the development of Bengali verse. Old Bengali (and
also Eastern Magadhan) verse had a special course of its own, differentiating
itself from that of Central and Western Magadbi versification (and from
that of other lA. speeches), by substituting a syllabic cadence for one
on a moric basis. Late MIA. and Early NIA. possessed the matra
or moric rhythm in verse, in which each half or quarter of a couplet
consisted of a fixed number of instants distributed among long or short
syllables of which the number was immaterial. The Upper Indian tnatra
metres were apparently introduced into Bengali and into other Eastern
Magadhan dialects during their formative period, as a literary imposition,
but they were never nativalised in the East, — in Bengali, Assamese and
Oriya. In the loth and 16th centuries, Hindi and Maithili influences
revived the Western (Apabhransa) traditions in versification in Bengalii
THE ' PAYAR * METRE
285
Assamese and Oriya, but these local speeches, which had by this time found
themselves metrically, as it were, refused to take up the maira-rrffa metres;
and the }?iatra metre had to use the artificial Braja-buli dialect, with its
Maithill basis, as its vehicle in the East. There seems to have been present
a system of indio^enous versification, based on Proto- and Pre-Bengali
speech rhythm, and possibly non- Aryan in ori2:in^ in Bengal, of which we
have no knowledge, but which apparently altered the general character of
Eastern prosody. Bengali-Assamese and OriyS developed some common
metres, which may be an inheritauee from the Eastern Magadhan
Apabhransa : the * Payar ' metre (Bengali « pliyar^ », Assamese
« pad&, p§,yar§t, pliwargL », Oriya « p§,yara »), which is entirely syllabic,
in its purest form. This metre takes the place of the 'Doha' and the
' Caupai ' of Northern India in popularity. The ' Payar * is a rimed couplet
of two lines, each consisting of 14 syllables; and there is a pause
after the eighth syllable. The «aeiou» vowels o£ common lA,, and
vowels which were long by position (i. e., when they occurred before
two consonants), did not have any prominence over the short « a e ji o u »
in the line, and neither did the diphthongs. This sort of levelling
in verse implies the loss of vowel quantity as a significant element
in speech. We have also to consider that verses in Old and Middle
Bengali, Assamese and Oriya (and even at the present day in these
languages), were chanted, and the tune made an adjustment of irregularities
in the shape of absence of or excess over the requisite number of syllables.
In the Payar as used by Bengali-Assamese and Oriya during their oldest
periods, we cannot tell for certain how far the stress accent played a part*
In the Payar as read or chanted now in Bengali, there is a stress on the
first syllable of each line, generally followed by a stress on the fifth syllable,
and then comes the pause after the eighth syllable, the second part of the
line commencing with the stressed ninth syllable, and the thirteenth also has
a stress, which is quite strong, as it is frequently accompanied by length.
Examples from the ' Sr!-Kfsna-Kirttana ' have been given at pp. 250-254.
This stress system is a noteworthy thing in the Bengali Payar : and
although in the Modern Bengali Payar, or in the Bengali blank verse based
286
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER II
on the Payar, the stress arrangement becomes much more varied, the basis
commonly remains as follows :
xxxx I xxxx||xxxx I XX II
In Assamese and Oriya , too, the arrangement of the Payar is exactly
as in Bengali, the imuse being after the eighth syllable, and the thirteenth
is always a strong syllable, but the stresses on the other syllables —
namely, on the first, fifth and ninth, are not so strong as in Bengali ; but
nevertheless, some sort of stress does exist on the first and the ninth, which
can be easily distinguished when the Assamese and the Oriya Payar are
chanted : and the great point common to the Bengali Payar and those of
Assamese and Oriya lies in the division of the line into two parts of 8 + 6
syllables respectively, and in the thirteenth being a syllable which is
stressed or made long, i.e., in some way or other made more prominent
than the rest. Specimens of Oriya and Assamese Payar are given below.
Oriya : « sadhu-j&na- | mane sunft || ek&-m&n& | kari ||
bicitra de | uja tula || kahibi bis ( tari || ....
kaha maha- | muni mote t| se apurba j lila [|
ke kem&nte | J^gannatha- || deujlb tu | llla || »
Listen tcith one hite7it, ye good peo^jle :
/ ^liall describe in detail ihe wondrons Raising of the Temple ....
Tell 7ne, great sage, that marvellous gest :
Who raised the Temple of Jagannatha, and hov), (From the ' Deuja-tola *
or ' Sri-ksetr&-mahatmya,'' Contai edition, p. 3).
Assamese : « bihane ba | jaiJa kheri || khelaibara ( tare ||
bhai gaila bi | yala puta || ebho naila | ghare ||
J&munara | tire tire || phire N&ndSr- | jaya ||
bhaila ace | tana s^ti || Kfsniik§. | n§-paya || »
He went out at daivn to play his games :
It has become afternoon^ yet {my) son has not come home.
The wife of is and a wanders aloyig ihe banks of the Yammia :
The good toife became senseless 7iot having fomid Krsna, (From the * Cora-
dhara NSfc ' of Madhava-deva, edited by Banl-kanta Kakati, p. 8,)
THE 16 MORIC METRE IN EARLY BENGAL
287
It is quite possible that the Payar metre wheu it was formed did not
have the stresses which characterise it now — it was only a question of
quantity. But the total disregard of Common I A, quantity is surprising.
In the 14th century Early ^Middle Bengali of the ' SrI-Kf sna-Klrttana/
in the 15t:h century remains of Assamese, and in the 16th century specimens
of Oriya, the Payar is in a perfectly developed form. \Ve have evidence
of literary culture and of song-craft and verse-making in Bengal in the
10th.l2th centuries. The Payar can only be expected to be a 1 Ith
century development of a metre in use in vernacular j)oetry of the I0th-l*2th
centuries. In the specimens of Old Bengali as in the Caryas, we have no
Payar, but we find that a 10 morie metre is quite popular. In its pauses, it
agrees with the Payar, and often in the number of its syllables too, 14.
This we can see also from the songs of the ^ Glta-govinda.^ This 16 morie
metre is the ^ Padakulaka/ which evidently was introduced into Bengal during
the late MIA. period. It has become the ' Caupal ' of Northern India, from
the Panjab and Gujarat to Bihar. (Cf. ' Pr'akfta-Paiggala,' pp. 223-2£4 ;
Kellogg^s * Hindi Grammar p. 578.) All sorts of arrangements for the
16 nwrae were possible ; but the type which was preferred in Bengal was the
one in which each line of the couplet was divided into four feet of 4 /^/or<tt'
each, which could be arranged in one of the following ways — (i) « ^ ^ ^ ^
(ii) - -J (iii) . ^ ^ ^ (iv) ^ - , (v) ^ - , the second scheme being
preferred in the fourth foot. There was usually a pause after the second
foot (i.e., after the 8th instant). The bulk of the Caryas are in this metre
(see pp. 2oO-:Z51). It may be that here there was the influence of a 15
morie metre, arranged into four jnuhi^ of 8 and 7 instants, in the fixing
of the pause in the 16 morie one. In Old Bengali, however, the 01 A. and
MIA, quantity is lost, and vowels which historically ought to be long are
pronounced short. A common type of Padakulaka, which thus seems to
have been specially liked in Bengal, and in the Eastern Magarlhan area,
is this :
I — —II- — - 1--II
Jaya^deva had a fine ear for music, and in writing his jjffdus (whether
in the vernacular, i.e.. Old Bengali, or in Western Apabhraiisa, or in
288
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER II
Sanskrit — see pp. 125-126), which were unquestionably meant in the first
instance for a Bengali audience, he frequently arranges his 16 moric lines
according to the above scheme : e,g.^
« viharati Haririha | sarasa-vasante |t » (Song 3, refrain) ;
« rase Harimiha | vihita-vilasam {|
smarali niano mama | kfta-parihasam ||
(= ?* sumarai* mana mama ( kJa-parihasaih ||)*(Song 5, refrain) ;
« sarasa-masrnamapi | malayaja-pai)kam ||
paiyati visamiva | vapusi sasai|kam ||2j{
svasita-pavanamanu | pama-parinaham |
madana-dahanamiva ( vahati sadaham ||3|| » etc., etc. (Song 9);
« pasyati disi disi | rahasi bhavantam |
tadadhara-madhura-ma | dhuni pibantam
« madhu-rlpurahamiti | bhavana-sila » etc. (Song "^2);
^ dalita-kusuma-dara- j vilulita-kesa ||1||...
mukharita-rasana-ja | ghana-gati-lola ||4||...
srama-jala-kana-bhara- | subhaga-sarira | 7 | » (Song 14);
« janayasi manasi ki | miti guru-kbedam ||6|| » (Song lb).
The arrangement, ^ ^ v v | « « ^ v |j v ^ ^ | - - |! , as in most
of the lines quoted above, gives a perfect Payar of 14 syllables, with a
strong thirteenth syllable. Couplets in the vernacular or Apabhransa were
known as <:pada» in Old Bengali, as we can see from the Sanskrit commen-
tary to the Caryas. The syllabic metre which arose out of the morie
< padas » ^ came to be called « payara » or « pawara » (= padSkara) in
Bengali-Assamese and Oriya, and the old term also continued to be applied
to this new form of couplet (cf . Assamese « pada »).
* The connection between the syllabic Payar and the moric metre of the * Gita.govinda'
was suggested long ago by Rama.gati Nyaya-ratna in his work on the Bengali Language
and Literature (see page 187), p. 37. Bat this connection has been disputed by some (e.g.,
SasSnka Mohan Sen, in the * Fravasi ' for A§5dha, 1321, p. 267).
SENSE GROUPS AND STRESSED METRE
'289
Versification in Bent.ali : Stressed Metre.
145. The tendency to divide the line into sense or breath groups oJ:
four instants (which became four syllables, normally, as in the Payar metre,
as developed out of the 16 moric Padakulaka), is a noteworthy one, and it
savours of an initial sentence stress such as characterises New Bengali.
There is another common Eastern Magadhan metre, the « tripadi » or
« laeari, leeharl ( < rathya) », which is also on this basis of four instanced
or four syllabled breath-groups. Specimens of it we find as early as the
12th century, in the ^ Gita-govinda/
« rati-sukha- | sare |t gatamabhi ( saro
madana*ma | nohara- |1 vesam » |1 (Song li) ;
« samudita- \ madane 1| ramani- 1 vadane 1|
cumbana- | valita || dhare 1| » (Song 15).
Also lines like « vadasi yadi ( kificidapi [ danta-ruci- | kaumudi ||
harati dara- | timiramati- | ghoram || > (Song 19),
would seem to be based on the principle of breath groups detached
from each other by initial stress ; and such lines, the quantity apart, would
be perfectly natural in Bengali. The speech habit of Bengali in dividing
the sentence into a number of convenient sense or breath groups of about
equal length, with a dominant initial stress ; is responsible for the develop-
ment of the stressed metres of Bengali. The syllabic principle o£ a fixed
number of aJcm-aa no doubt came into operation, but the general history
of Bengali versification implies the presence of a strong initial phrase stress
in the language. The theory of akmras, however, became rigid, and
influenced all versification in formal literature in Late Middle Bengali times,
and prevented the principle of stress in metre from being recognised for a
lono- time. The habit of chanting verses also was res2)onsible for this to
some extent.
In Bengali, at the present day, three different systems of versification
obtain.* These are : (1) the « matra-vrtta or the old moric metre : this
» The most systematic study of Bengali versification, hitherto published, is by Prabodh-
Chandra Sen, in a recent series of articles to the ' Fravasi ' (Fausa, Magha, Fhalguna and
37
290
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER II
remaiDS more as an exotic versification, the popularity o£ the Vaisnava
lyrics in Braja-buli having familiarised the people with It. In it, all
diphthongs and closed syllables or syllables followed by two consonants,
are lon^. {'Z) The « aksara-vrtta » , or syllabic metre, which started from a
fixed number of aksaras or syllables, but the elision of vowels in these
aisaras brings about a decrease of syllables, which is compensated by
lengthening the syllable preceding the vowel elided, and by a rhythmic
adjustment of the line ; and the fixed number of ak-saras can be increased
by adding fresh aksaras with quiescent vowels. It thus can be described
as being in principle a moric metre ; but it diffeis from the proper moric
metre in not necessarily increasing the quantity of a vowel or a syllable,
because it is a diphthong or because it is followed by two consonants.
Thus, in moric lines like the following —
(71 ^t^i I II m\z^ I li 1 II
[ lolate I J50eD-tika || pra/uno- | fia:r gole || cfole re | birr cfole ||
/e kara | nofie kara || jgekhane | bfioiroba || rud:ro | Jikha jgale ||]
Mark of victor?/ ou his^hrou\ ivreafk of floicers oti his neck, he goes, oJi^
the hero goes ;
That primi is not a j)rison tchere the terrible flame of Eudra flashes
(from Kazi Nazrul Islam),
each foot consists of 3f4 = 7 morae («a, I, u, e, 5» of Sanskrit as a
rule not having length, except in lines frankly on the Sanskrit, Prakrit or
Brajabuli model), and the diphthong [oi] and the closed vowels in [fia:r,
bi:r, rud:ro=ruddro] are equivalent to 2 hiorae. Or in lines like ►
Caitra, 1329 San, and Vaiaakha, 1330 [- 1922-23]), which clearly distinguishes between
the three types of metre in Bengali, and classifies them on a scientific basis. Some of
the examples quoted above are from Mr. Sen's articles. The most suggestive papers of
Rabindra-nath Tagore (in the ' Sabuj Pattra* for Jjai^tha and Sravana, 1321, and Caitra
1324), and of the late Satyondra^Xath Datta (the article ^Chanda-Sarasvati ' in the 'Bharati '
for Vaisakha, I32o) are other important contributions in this line ; as also the articles by
gasanka- Mohan Sen C BSngftla Chanda,' in the 'Pravasi' for A^adha, 1321) and Bijay-
Chandra Mazumdar (' Ba&gSla Chanda/ * Pravasi ' for Agiahayana, 1322).
^MATRA' AND 'AKSARA' METRE
291
"^c^n ^t?r I ^ft «rt^ 1 | fk^ ?
[ logt^Ri (S)e J JinidBure || proloSe:r | nritre ||
ogo kQ:r [ tori dfia:e 1| ni:rbRi:k | cit:e ? || ]
Sefti^ff/ at navghi the Ocean ^ in its da/ice of desfn^efiofi,
ir/iOJie Loat It is, ohy that speeds on, feurlesft in niind / (from Kazi
Nazrnl Islam),
each foot except the last has four morae, the diphthongs and the closed
syllables being long. A certain amount of stressino^ is inevitable, as New
Bengali has strong stresses, but that is not absolutely necessary. But in
* aksara-vftta » lines like —
c5f»r I f^Tt?-f^^tt5f I
[ dfiire dRire JindRu-mukhe | titi os:ru-nire |1
cfole jobe, puri de:j(<dejo) j bi/a:d (<bijado)-ninade || ]
SI owl foirards the Sea, vetted vAilt tears,
They march, filling the land v'ifh the sound of latnentaiiom (from the
' Meghanada-vadha ' of ^ladhusudan Datta),
there is no question of quantity as the basis of versification, but of a
rhythm which holds itself within the limits of 14 syllables or instants ; and
in counting these instants, fjindfiu] and [os:ru] are as much two instants
as [dRire] and [titi], and the rhythm requires the lengthening of [de:J] and
[bija:d] to make up for the loss of final [o] which counted as a syllable.
And, similarly, lines like
[ durdanto pandit:o-purno || duJ:ad:Ro JidiRanto]
A most diffindt doctrine^ filed ivith teiribh scholar,^hip (an example
given by Rabindra-nath),
and
[ kanone kuju:m (kujumo) koli || Jokoli phutilo ]
/// the woods, the fower-huds all hare burst open (Madan-Mohan
Tarkftlagkara)
29£
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER II
are equally regarded as good Payar lines, of the same value.
(3) The third type of metre is the stressed one, « svara-vrtta », as it has
been happily named. The pivot of this metre is stress : a line divides itself
into a number of feet, in which the quantity or the number of individual
syllables is of secondary importance, although the whole foot takes up a
certain length, and each foot has one stress, mostly initially, and only one.
The preponderance of closed syllables in the eclloquial, i.e., in the actual,
living Bengali, which alone is suitable for this metre, gives it a force and a
swing which is totally absent in the other metres which are based on the
tamer movement of Early Middle Bengali (which did not, from the fact of
final and medial vowels being not as yet dropped, have closed syllables,
except in Sanskrit tafmmas). Thus, for example, —
['jamneke tui j 'bfioe korecfhi/l [j'pecfhon tore | 'gfiirbe, ||
'emni ki tui | 'bfiag:o-fiara ? || 'cfhirbe badfion | 'cffilrbe ||]
Thou art afraid of tJie front I and the rear icill surrovnd thee !
Art thou so hicile-^s ? {Thy) londs tcill Ireak, {sure) they will break
(Rablndra-nath),
where we have this arrangement :
t f f f
XXXX I XXXXjjxXXX 1 XX ||.
This is on the basis of the Payar, only the verse has abandoned itself
to the stress as the dominant principle, and the division of the line into
breath groups forming the feet is essential ; whereas in the syllabic Payar,
the first eight syllables may be arranged without bringing in a break after
the 4th ; the stress on the 5th can be done away with ; and the number
of syllables (or instants) for the whole line must not exceed 14. In the
common syllabic Payar, the whole line can be looked upon as one unit.
But not so in the stressed metre. The foot is more or less a self-suflScient
item there, as it confines the sense : e.g.,
[ 'mukto-benir | 'gogga jgethae || 'mukti bitore | 'rogge, ||
' SYARA ' METRE IN BENGALI
293
^tr^ I ^fw?ii I ^mi tfftn I II
'amra bagali | 'baj kori Jei || 'borodo tirthe | 'bogge. ||
'bagRer jogge | 'j5ud:fio koria ||^'(e)amra baojia | '(e)acfhi. ||
'^k Rate mora j 'mogere rukhecfhi, jj 'mogolere (e)ar j 'Rate, |1
'cfad-protaper | 'fiukume fiothite || 'fioecfhe dil:i- | 'nathe. || ]
jr/w the Gujigea of the freed plaits {le,, iriih it,s numerous branches,
irhich is ihe freni^g of the trihuinries received in Upper India)
sjjreuds salvation in merrjj gh'e^
We Bengalis live in that loon-giving, hoi// land of Bengal ..^
Waging tear viih the tiger ire remain alive
With one hand ve hare cheeked the Magh {Jraca?iese), with the other
the Moghal ;
The Lord of Delhi had to fall bark at the command of Cand and Pratap.
(From SatySndra-Nath Datta).
In the above extract, where there are more than four syllables in
the foot, they are pronounced very quick, some of them beino* almost
slurred. The remark of the ^ Prakfta-Paiggala,^ that two or three syllables
when quickly uttered are to be taken as one (Bib. Ind. edition, p. 11),
is to be recalled.
On the whole, however, the stressed metre prefers feet of four svllables.
New Bengali has recognised this metre, and its possibilities are immeose,
as has been seen from experiment. It certainly originated in early Bengali
speech rhythm : in all probability, in the Old Bengali period. But the
practice of chanting verses, and the theory of aJimras, as has been said
before, prevented it from coming to its own. Old Bengali of the Caryas
preferred feet of four instants, as we have seen before : and to read
these feet with initial stress, as in the lines quoted at pp. will not
be to go counter to the rhythm. AVe have also seen that initial stress
was asserting itself in words in Old Bengali. Lines from Middle Bengali,
294
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER II
like the following, seem to be equally of the « aksara-vrtta » when chanted
and of the « svara-vftta » when read like normal prose :
^tft ^t*^ I ^li C5l II I II
[ 'konD Jukhe | 'kcgjo torn || 'mukhe (g)uthe | 'Ba/n ? ||
'naRi JSano | '(e)ebe t5: || '(e)apDnar£) j 'najjo || ]
Through vhai joi/y 0 Kamsrt, fhere riaes a smile on thy face ?
Thon (lost not Tcnow now of Ihine own clestrnctmi, (SKK., p. 'i) ;
^5rt-%^ I wt^^^l II w^^^ I 5t?r I
^tf^-^t^ I ^ m\ II ^f%^ ^ I ^t^ II
sft^-^f^ I ff^ II srt^^ <i» I ^1 I ^
[ 'goijga-tire | 'dQra(e)i(e)a [| 'c^oturdige j 'ca(e)e ('cJaRe) ||
'rat:rikal(o) | 'fioib (6)oj5Ra || 'Jutilo to | 'tha(e)e ||
'mali JSati | 'cfhilo purbe || 'maloncfo (e)e | 'khana ||]
Standing on the hank of the Ganges, he looked at the four sides.
It lecame night time ; the Ojha {sichola) , ' clerk ') f^lej^t there...
Formerly, peojple of the gardene/s caste vsed to lire, and here [ivas)
a flower-^garden, (From Kfttivasa^ 15th century: VSP., I, p.
889).
In the above cases, of course, too many open syllables make the
cadence tame and weak beside that of the New Bengali lines quoted
immediately before. Instances like the above are extremely frequent in
Middle Bengali, which undoubtedly possessed the stressed metre. Ths loss
of final, and frequently of intervocal vowels, in bringing about which the
initial stress system had some hand, gave to the Bengali language a
greater number of strong or closed syllables, and the stressed metre obtained
a greater scope. (This loss is treated in the next section.) It continued
to be freely employed in a mass of popular literature, in proverbs, in
riddles, in charms, in ritualistic and other verse current among tbe women,
in poetic contests in which the conversational style was supreme, — in fact,
everywhere in Bengali — except in formal poems on classic or religious
themes, which used the « aksara-vftta » , and in the Vaisnava poems
in Braja-buli, which preferred the « matra-vrtta
ELISION OF THE PINAL 'A'
295
From all that has been said above, in §§ 144' and 145, the conclusion
may be drawn that initial phrase stress, to which the stress in individual
words was subordinated, characterised one form of Old Bengali, or East
Magadhan Apabhransa, as much as did initial stress in individual words.
Breath groups of four syllables were preferred in it. The moric metre of
Northern India had to yield to a metre based on this grouping or dissection
of a line into bits or breath -groups of fixed length, bearing a dominant
head-stress. The Modern Stixndard Colloquial^ and the Middle Bengali
literary language, which are both based on West Central Bengali, show
these characteristics. And it is quite likely that the source form of the
Payar metre (and the stressed metre) was in this Pre-Bengali or Old Bengali
dialect of West Bengal, and thence it spread into Orissa and Assam. In
these last two tracts, initial stress was not the rule, and the development of
a stressed metre (the presence of which can be postulated in Old Bengali
from Early Middle Bengali examples) consequently did not take place there.
Metrical and other Evidence for the Diiopping of Final
AND Medial Vowels ix Middle Bengali.
146. In later Bengali, the Payar continued as a 14-syllabled metre,
when it was regular. But from the loth century onwards, we notice
irregularities — Payar lines showing occasionally less than 14, and frequently
more syllables, or akmras — 15, 16, 17 or 18. When the number was less
than 14 (as it is at times in the ^KK. : see pp. :264, tiSo etc.), there would
be dwelling upon a suitable syllable for a sufficiently long period to make
up for the wanting syllable ; and when there were more syllables than 14,
as in post-14th century Bengali, the extra ones were dropped by the
elision of final and medial vowels. This elision was certainly present
already in the spoken language of the 15th century: and it was un-
doubtedly the result of a strong stress on the initial syllable.
In the 14th century Bengali of the ^KK., we find Payar couplets
with more than 14 akwas, but these extra akmras consist entirely of the
vowels « i, u » forming only the weak finals of diphthongs. A ease like
the following, however, is exceptional in the ^KK. :
296
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER II
« tahar& bathe I b&ibe k&nsft(snrer& bi|oa§e || »
From his hamh there loill be the destructio^i of the demon Kaihsa,
would appear irregular — to the eje ; but really it is not so — -the word
^5t?t^ « 1ahar& » unquestionably being pronounced in reading and chanting
as < tar§ » — « tar& hathe I haibe kansa'surer& bi/nase || » .
Final syllables were not as yet dropped in the 14th century. Rimes
like the following are conclusive that the Knal « -a » was pronounced in
the J 4th century in nouns and adjectives as in verbs : c,g,^
p. 24 — <c bhala always ending in « » = [o] : C^t^t^ * go»l& » ;
p. 42— Cfl^ < lekha k^ra ^ (<k&r&hS,) : ^t^^ « ba^ali hkrk » ;
p. 50 — « kanh§, kana * Krsna : iftR « dana » ;
p. 51 — 5W « eapa » (< capaha) prea.s ! : Tf-gf^f « santapa » ;
p. 84— 9f5ft?f^ « g&dadh&r& > : * parihara* (>-h§,rah&) abandon ! ;
p. 90 — « suna » (< suriab&) ^^//r / : 'srff^s^ « a1iggan& » ;
p. 95 — cTt^ « laja basa » it a ahame : ^^^p[ « dudha-bas& »
of milk ;
p. 254— ff^ « dh&ra » AoW / : « bhit&ra » 2e;/^/^/H.
The final « -a » was thus retained in the pronunciation in the 14th
century as much as the long « a » [or] derived from earlier * -awa, -aha »
(see p. 260). But finally and medially, the epenthetic as well as the original
« i » (as well as « u ») bad become weak, and formed a diphthong with a
preceding « a, a so that the two ak^^aras, « ai, Si, ayi, ayi » would form a
diphthong « ai, ai ». The ^^.s/zm principle was thus modified in this way in
14th century Bengali : e.g., in the SKK.,
* bhage pune aji tora \ pail5 d&rasana » (p. 10),
Throvrjh luck and through merit today J hare obtained tht/ sight:
we have 15 akmras, but « pailo » = * paMS » is a word of two syllables.
« ayara manayibo (= maaaibS) kari | asesa jugati » (p. 1:5),
And I ahull make {Jier) consent, ming no end of device.
• ' AKSARA.' METRE AND ELISION OP ^-A-, -A' 297
« akarane, ala radha, | nindasi (= nind&is) kfsna kala» (p. 93),
For no reason, 0 jRad/ia, dost blame dart Krsna.
C^^ 5I^:^5 Ftf? C^^ ^t^fita tr% II
« hera, bhala mate cahi | neha, kanhani (= -ai), bSsi » (p. 331),
Look, Kanhai, ask for {t^f/)Jlide in good grace.
See also page 265, last line of Bengali text, and p, 266, line 17.
Barring the above cases of apparent irregularity, 14th century Payar
is quite regular, as the final and medial vowels remain. But from the
next century, we find remarkable breaches of the rule of the 14 ahmras.
For instance, in Krttivasa's ' Ram&yana, Uttara-kanda ' (in the VSPd.
edition based on a MS. of 1 580), we have lines like the following :
Uttara Kanda, p. 31b :
"^m, '^V^ ^tt^^ ^tf^ ^t^ tt^l I (18 akmras)
« bhaiera bale bhaiera dhane nahi bhai bSta »
There is no sharing , 0 brother, iii a brother^ forces and a brother's v:ealth.
This was evidently pronounced as
[ 'bfia(e)er ('bRaero ?) bole | 'bRa(e)er ('bfiaero ?) dBone || 'nafii
bfia(e)i I 'bata ||].
Ibid., p. 30b :
^ C^W^ ^t^*t ?psrtWt^ II (17 aUaras)
[^othir Cj5othir3?) tore | 'lomar ('tomar^ ?) bape H'koirlo konisa 'da:a |i ]
For whose sake your father ymde a gft of his daughter.
Ibid, p. 30b :
^ «ITf%^1 (?rt'St? Tf^ I (16 aksaras)
[ 'dure thaikSa | 'proRosto irkubere nwae | 'matha ||]
Remainliig afar, Prahasta bowed his head to Kuhera,
Ibid., p. 43a :
^t^^ ^t^t^ C^t^^ C^^^ ^tc5 1 (18 aUaras)
[ 'rabon-rajgar | 'jana topor H'baner tejse | 'kate ||]
lie cut the corslet avd the helmet of king Havana ivith the force of {his) arrows.
From other Middle Bengali works :
38
298
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER II
Vijaya-gupta's * Padma-puraoa/ (end of the 1 5th century : VSP., I,
p. 191) :
cmM ^trt^ % ^f^ II (16 aksaras)
['fiinduani | 'fioilo raijjgo jl'tomar kijer | 'ka:jg ('kajgo) \\
'psada pa(e)ik | 'jgoto acfhe || '/igrfiro kori | 'Jaijg ('jajgo) |1]
li kas become the regime of Hinchium, what business have yon noio ?
All the footmen and soldiers that le, get ready quick,
-Karana-Nandi's ^ Mahabharata ' : beginning of the 16th century
(VSPd. edition, based on MS. of 1663)—
p. 72a— ft^ ^f^^ I c^R:^ t2t5^ II (17 akmras)
[ 'krijter nondon | 'bir rujilo j] 'jgeReno propcfoD^o ||]
The herOy the son of Krsna, angered, so fierce,
p. 83a— ^1 1tf?[^ Wtft^ ^TC«t 5ITf^C^ v5t^^ I (16 aksaras)
[ 'na paribo | 'kodacjito |1 'bane mairte [ 'tako ||]
Shall never he ahle to kill him with an arrow,
' MayaDamatlr Gan/ i7th century (Dacca SPd. edition) :
p. 9— ^^t£l 9t ^^sfl CTf^ ! (16 aksaras)
5ft^ -^i^rm ^^rf^ ll (17 aksaras)
['odunae bole | 'boin go: || 'podima Jdn['dor(D) |1
'jat ka(e)iter | 'budifii (e)amar || 'dfiore:r bfii'tor(o)|i]
Aduna says, *0 sister, beautiful Padvna, the icit of seven clerks {Kayasthas)
is within my body?
Examples like the above can be culled by the hundred from Middle
Bengali literature. They show that the earlier MB. poets were guided not
by the eye, but by the ear* If in a tatsama word, a vowel with two
consonants after it did not make any difference, for metrical purposes, then
it was recognised in the 15th century, after the medial and final vowels
had dropped off from pronunciation, the same thing could happen in
tadbhava words : ^ « kfsn& » and « n&nd& » were two aksaras of
equal value in metre, and so could be ^C^?r « kfsner^ » and « ntod^n^ > ,
with quiescent « -a » . But with the later poets, during the 16th-18th
and 19th centuries, the magic word aksaras seemed to have exerted an inllu-
ELIDED 'A' AND EAKLY ROMAN TRANSCRIPTIONS 299
ence, and the system of writing was brought to bear upon the versification :
aksara was taken in its wrong sense of a written character, the syllabic
value of which might be zero, and not of a syllable. As a result, the
tendency grew not to allow too many akmras with mute « -S. = -?l j and
to avoid the diphthongal use of the vowel ^ « -i » , which became in late
Middle Bengali orthography the J = « -y » subscript : ^^^T h&i'l& » was =
^ « halya = hai-l§. » ; « paila » obtained = -s^t^ « paly& = pal-l§. » ;
^pfV^I « k&riya » having done — ^^Jl « k^rya = klii-ra » ; ^'W^ janaibS, »
7 = ^t^t^J « janabyi = ja-nal-b§. » etc., which made a
line to appear to the eye as one of 14 aksaras or letters, and 14 only. This
cannot be said to have been detrimental to the Payar, this attempt to make
it rigid and to avoid too many diphthongs and closed syllables in the line.
But the undue influence of the graphic system disguised the true nature
of Bengali versification, and prevented au early recognition of the stress
principle in orthodox literature.
Prom a study of Middle Bengali versification, therefore, it can be seen
that the dropping of the final « -a », and of the medial vowels (under certain
circumstances) was well established from the 15th century.
147. Another evidence for the dropping of the final « -a » , and
occasionally of the medial « -a- is the early Roman transcription of Bengal
names in European works and maps dating from the middle of the 16th
century. Thus, for instance, Joao de Barros (middle of the 16th century)
in his * Da Asia ^ has given some Bengal names, and we find the following in
the Lisbon edition of 1777 ff. : in the map of Bengal in that work, IV, 9,
p. 451, we have « Fatiabas = Fateh-abaS, -abaz ; Betor = Bet&r^ ;
Bernagar = B§,r^-nagargt ( = Varaha-nagara ?) ; Mandaram= Sffft^*!
Mandarlin^ ; Noldii = ^^^ft N&l^-di (< Nala-dvlpa) ; Nazirpur = Nazir-
pur », — place names showing loss of final « -a » in the 16th century : at
p. 454, we have « Caor », which is ^® ^ « Kawur^ ( <kaw*aru<kama-rupa) >
(cf. Map 2 in * Delle Navigatione e ^iaggi raccolte da M. Gio. Battista
Ramusio, etc.,^ Vol. I, Venice, 1606). Compare these with « Gouro = C^tt^
Gaur& », a word showing retention of final « -a » in pronunciation, in De
Barros' map. Forms like ^ Comotah = K5m&ta » ; « Cospetir,
300
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER II
Gaspatii = g&3&-pi,ti » ; « Noropatii = 5rW*i% N&rapati » ; « Pipili-
patam = f*t^ Pip(i)li- in De Barros, show that internal unstressed
vowels were not yet dropped in all cases in 16th century Bengali: ef. in
Ralph Fitch (1583-91 : ' Purehas/ X, pp. 181 fE.) : < Couche=c^t5 Koe^;
Suckel CouDse=t9^ (^IP) ctt5 Suk&I^ KSe^; Satagam = Sat?l.ga;
Serre-pore=^^ Sri-pur ; Bacola « Bakala », which indicate similar
conditions.
The loss of medial vowels can only have been due to strong initial
stress in Middle Bengali. In this respect, Bengali was in advance of its
sister lA. speeches : Western Hindi, for instance, kept its final vowels
(« -u, -a, -JL * ) as late as the 17th century, and Oriya does it even now,
preserving a ' Middle NIA.' stage, whereas Bengali shed off the final « -a »,
which formed by far the most common final vowel, by the middle of the
15th century.
The initial stress of Bengali in individual words has given us
contracted forms of common tadhliava words which are rather removed from
those of Hindostani, which may be said to preserve the NIA. norm : €,g.^
Bengali C^Wl, ^C^Tft, * bonai, bunoi, bunui » = Hindostani * bah^fnoi ^
(bhaginl-pati) ; dialectal Bengali « nayer^ » father's family {of a
married woman) = Hindostani « naihar^t > (jnati-grha) ; « kas^tl »
touc/istone = Hind. < kasaufcl » (karsa-pattika) ; ?[t^FI « rakhal^t » herdsman
— Hind, « rakh^wal^ » (raksa-pala) ; ^ « p&re » 07i = Hind.
« pahirai » (paridhiyate) ; 5^1 < caka * = Hind. « cak?twa » (cakravaka) ;
*t^^1 « p^y^la ^ Jirst = llind. « pahila » (pratha + iHa-) ; etc., etc.
The changes of 01 A. vowels to MIA. in the formation of Bengali
are discussed in the following chapter.
CHAPTER III
PHONOLOGY OF THE NATIVE ELEMENT : VOWELS
[A] OIA. AND MIA. Vowels in Bengali
[I] Final Vowels
148. Final vowels of OIA. were continued down to Late MIA. and
Early NIA. times. The long final vowels « -a, -I, -u», however, were shortened
to < -a, -A, -u » , and « -e, -o » w^ere weakened and shortened to « -J, -u > in
late MIA. (Apabbrausa), and these shortened vowels « -i, -u » fell
together with original short < -a, -i, -il » . All NIA. inherited these short
vowels, but in later times in Bengali, during the Middle Bengali period,
they were all dropped, or assimilated : except « -i, -u » where they were
preceded by vowels of a different quality.
The anusvara which followed a final vowel in Late MIA. was possibly a
very weak nasalisation, which did not in any way affect it in its develop-
ment into NIA.
(1) OIA., > MIA.
[a] OIA. « -a » .
149. OIA. <-a*> MIA. « .^»>0B., eMB. « .a = -&-»>NB.«
or zero, Examples : ^^rf^ « at^ », MB, « ath§, * (attha, asta-) ; %
« ab^<abh4 » cloud (abhra), cf . Standard Coll. « ab^-cha * hazy ;
^'t^ «am4, Sb4* (amba, amra) ; <*1^ « ek^ » (MIA. 5^5. 6kka < eka) ;
#t^*t « kakan^ * (kagkana) ; « kam^ » (karma) ; ^ « kuth^ *
(kustha) ; + « kur^ » (k5dha, < *kobha < *kottha = kustha) ;
^ « gach^ » ^/^^ (gaccha) ; « gham^ » svnshine^ sweat (gharma) ;
&t? ^ cSd^ » (eandra) ; fB^^ « cin^ » (cihna) ; ^5f « chad^ » (chanda) ;
^t^ * * (j^dya) ; OB. « jam^ » (jamma, janma) ; ^5t^
« tat^ » (tapta) ; C^^ « tel^ » (tella, taila) ; MB. ^ « than^ » (sthana) ;
^ « dat^ » (danta) ; ^ « pat& > (patra) ; ^^^l, * baulft, bol^ »
302
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER III
(baiila, mukula) ; ft^T « bls^ » (eMIA. [Pali] visam, OIA. ^vinsat =
vinsati : e£. trinsat, etc.) ; ^rf^ « majh^l » (madhya) ; « h&w&n^,
b§,5n^ » J^2»<7 (bhavana) ; « hst^ » , MB. « hath& » (hasta); etc., etc.
Examples are quite common.
Loss of final « -a » by assimilation with a preceding vowel (see also
post^ § 172, ' Vowels in Contact *) :
(i) MIA. « -aa » : normally, this becomes a single * » in Bengali,
pronounced [o] or [o]. Unelided final ^ « » in tadhhava words and
forms, commonly pronounced [ o ], comes from a MB. « -i » [o:] derived
from an earlier group like « = &wd,, d,b§. » : the phonetic change here is
really that of contraction, the nature of which is not seen at once. »|' *s&»
(saa, sata) ; ^' « j& « measure of length (jaa, yava) ; ^ « e^l& » you walk
< MB. « c&l&h& » (= OIA. calatha) ; « terS, » < OB. « "^^teraha^
(teraha, trayodasa) ; Wt^, « dan&, dano * ^Ao*^, spirit <OB. « *danaT*xi »
(OIA. danava) ; ^t«T, ^tt^ « bhal&, bhalo » < MB. bhalA (bhalla^a,
bhallaS, = bhadraka) ; etc.
(ii) MIA. « -aS, » becomes « -a ». Late MIA. « -aa » , from OIA.
« -ak& » etc. (i.e,, « S + consonant +S »), gave OB. « -5 » , NB. « -a » , as a
common affix : also « -aha > -aa > in 1MB., through loss of « h > : e,g,j
« ojha » (uvaj jhaa, upadhyaya) ; « k§.ra » (kataha) ; ^ « gha »
wotmdy sore (ghaa, ghata) ; ^ « cha » (saba) ; « -ja » (jata) ; nSI « ta »
(tapa) ; sfl « na » (nava = nau) ; ^f^il « p&la » (*palawa, prabala) ; ^1 « pa »
(pada), also « pao < MB. pawa » ; ^ « ba » , also Tf^, « bae, bao
<*bSya, ^bawa» (vata) ; f%(1, MB. sts. «biya, bibha* (vivaha);
« ek^ » (ekka, eka), but « eka » (^ekkaka = OIA. "^ekaka,
ef. ekakin) ; ^t^T, ^5f| « kal&, kalo » (kalaa, kslaka), but ^t^l « kala »
the tdack one (* = kalaa, ^kalaka) ; OB. « ta » his (taha, tasya) j etc,
(iii) MIA. « -ia, -la» became « -i » in OB. = « -i, -i » in NB. : MB. ^tf^,
NB. % « agi, ag» («*aggia = ^agnika » \ the feminine gender for this
word in Hindi etc. is a proof that it is not from MIA. « aggi » = OIA. nomi-
native « agnih ») ; ^rt^f% < ar^ti » (aratrika) ; OB., MB. ^rflf « k&ri,
kari » (MIA. karia, OIA, *-karya = >kf-t^ya == kftva) ; MB. ^?ttt«kati»,
cf . Assamese * kati » (karttika), the name of the month, now ousted by the
OIA, FINAL VOWELS IN BENGALI : ' A ' 303
ts, form ; ft, R * ghl, ghi » (ghia, ghfta) ; MB. "^f^ « muti » = NB. ^
for (?ltf% < moti » through Hindostani influence (mottia, mauktika) j
eMB. Hs. « avasi » (*avasiya, *avasia = avasya) j etc., ete.
The OIA. passive participle in ^ -ita * , = MIA. « -ia », similarly
became « .i > -i » in Bengali : see under Morphology : * the Past Base/
The common NIA. adjectival affix indicating connection, « -I is derived in
this way from OIA. 4s -lya, -ika » : c£. the non-feminine forms 'tt^^, ^Tt^,
'^rt'S^ « pSe&i^ sat&i, at§,'i » etc., from ^'^paucamika, *saptamika, %stamika »
(and not from the feminine « pancami, saptami, astami » etc.) .
(iv) MIA. « -ua, -ua » became « -u » in OB. = « -u » in NB., in some
cases turned into an epenthetic vowel : also MB. « -uha > -ua * : e.g.^ OB.
^T'Rf « kamarn, ka^aru » , MB. ^jvgw * kagur^ = kaiSv-ur » (Kama-rupa);
« goru » cattle (go-rupa) ; MB. ^\ « chamu » (*ehammuha,
sanmukha) ; nebu » (nimbnka) ; mu > (muLa, mukha) ; etc.
(v) MIA. « -ea > OB. * -e(w/y)a » > NB. «-e » ; also MB. « -eha
> -ea » : C?f « de » a surname (deva) ; MB. « de » (deha).
The affix for the instrumental, ciT, c£l « -1, -e », can be considered here ;
only the loss of « » took place in MIA. of the Third Period : e.g.y OIA.
* hastena »> Magadhi MIA. « hatthena », Apabhransa « hatthem, hatthe »
>0B. « hath§, bathe »>NB. ^t^^ « hate ». In ^ * mui^ tui » 7, f^o?/,
from OB. and MB. « mone, moye, mog, ^moi, mal, muiii ; tone, toyg, toe,
*t6I, tal, tuni * etc. (= ^may^ena, tvay'ena, i,e., mayS, tvaya-l-ena), the
influence of the «-y-» in the OIA. and the MIA. compounded form
helped to alter the voealism of these words to « -i ».
(vi) MIA. « -oa » > OB. « -owa » NB. « -o » : (7(1 « jo » (joa, yoga) j
cf. dl « rS » (r6\^a, roma).
Final ^ « -a » in latsafnas,
Tatsama and Sa7ni4atsavia words as a rule drop the final 'Sf « -S, » : e.g,^
« d&r(&)s&n^ > ; « rat&n^ » ; ^ nayan^ » ; ^ig^, « ph&tik^ »
(sphatika) ; ^ft^ « &dhir^ » ; « par&s§l » (sparsa) ; 9f?rt^ « garas^l »
(grasa) ; etc., etc.
304
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER III
But in the case of tss, and stss.y there are certain exeeptions^ when
the final « -a » is retained in pronunciation, and these may be noted :
(i) Bengali Phonetics does not allow two consonants to end a word :
there must be, in the absence of an anaptyctie vowel, a final vowel, to
prop up the consonants, as it were : e,//., ^ « purba » (purva), or
« pur&b^ » ; 5^ « c&ndr& » or 5^ « candar^ » ; « bir&tw& » [birotio]
(viratva) ; < sktjh > [jot:o, E. Beng. joit:o] ; < nyayy^ * [^^^^JJ5^] y
^ « surya > [Jurjgo] ; « bijn& > [big:3] ; « hhush » [Rog/o] ;
« duhkha > ; i2(?t « pra^na » ; ^'^ « dbarmli » ; etc., etc.
(ii) < -a » after « -h- », in a final syllable, is retained : C^^ « snehib »
(beside ^M. C^?^ « nei ») ; (?f^ « deba » (cf. MB. ti/i, « de ») ; ^^t? « bibaha »
(^5//. biya >) ; ^^i$f^ « &nugi&hlb » ; ftciT? « bidroha » ; etc., etc.
(iii) Adjectives :
(a) the ts, < -ta, -ita » affix retains the « -S, » : ^^^f^^, i^^^
^^J^j ^Jt^iJt^ « pulltkita, gltSr, g^t&, nktk, li,nudit&, byakhyata », etc., etc.
The « -ta » forms, when used as nouns, drop the « -a » : 5?^, f^ft^,
t^rf*^ * g^^?'^ mMgt, bihit^, niscit^ », etc., etc. ; and a few adjectives which
are commonly used also drop « -Jl » optionally : e,^., ^f^, ^tfe, ^f#^
* c&lit?l, garhit?l, b^rjit^ » etc. ; cf . ^ft'^ « palit& », adjective, but « palit4
a surname,
(b) the ^5. affix « -ya » retains the vowel : OT,
« srey4 (= sreyas), peylb, deya, bidheya » , etc.
(c) the affixes « -tara, -tam& ».
(d) the ts. forms in ^ « -rha = -dha ».
(iv) 7i. words, which are not naturalised, as a rule can be pronounced
with final « -a » ; the tendency would be to drop the « -a », but usage differs.
The following cases are noteworthy. Words of two syllables with « f, ai,
au > in the first syllable, keep the « -a » as ts. forms : ^"f, ^«|, ^5f, ^n©?!,
^•PT, Csi^, C^«f * bf ?&, krs&, tf mrga, taila, saila, manng,, ^§.una » : (but
note the mni-tatsama forms — more heard in pronunciation than seen in
writing— ^^y, sj^s^, « sa-il^t, t4-il?l, m&-un^, g&-un^ »). Words
ending in « -na » optionally retain the « -a » : Clt®f, 5*t, « dron&,
br&n&, gana, r&nli » .
OIA. IN BENGALI
305
The retention of the final « -a » , or otherwise, depends upon the extent
to which the ts, word has become naturalised; e,g,^ < naga » hill, ST?
« naba » nine^ veiv, < sama » , *f5f « sama » 5 ^ « yuba » youths « mama »
etc, retain the vowel. Ta, words occurring in a compound as its first
part as a rule do not drop the vowel : (?.^., « raua-mukh6< -mukha »
facing^ going to the fight ; ^ffC^^l « pada-seba » ; « jana-tantra » ;
^ft^ft^T « dana-blr^ » ; ft^^^ « cikura-bhar^ » ; ^l?Rt€t * bhara-bahl » ;
etc. : the dropping or retention of the « -a » is, however, determined by
the rhythmic consideration of the whole line.
The rules (i) and (ii) for ts. words also obtain in foreign words : e.g,,
Persian « mard » man > ^<^^ « marad » or « marda, madda » ;
« §ah » iiug > »f1 « sa > or »rt? « saha » ; English doi? > « baksa » ,
iuc/i > ^f?|s « inci etc.
[b] OIA. « -a
150. OIA. « -a »>MIA. « -a » (« -a» in nominative, « -a » in oblique),
IMIA. « -a » > OB., eMB. « -a» > NB. « » , i.e., zero. Examples :
« as^ » (asa) ; J ^ « uk^ » (ulka) ; J vs^T < os^ » dew (avasya) ; ^ « kal^ »
mac/line (kala) j « kttu^ » wa^/ (kantha) ; ^ « khat^ » (khatva) ;
« khel^ » (khela) ; ^ttsf, 5rt';§, 5ft°s < gag(g)^ > river (gagga) ; MB. ^
« gima = glwa » (gilva) ; f^R * ghin?l > (ghfna) ; « jag?l » (jaggha) ; fe^,
^«jib^, jibh^ » (jibbha, jihva) ; * tiyas^ » (trsa, trsna + pipasa) ;
« dbar^ » ^rf^6? (dbara) ; « nath^ » nose ring (nasta), possibly an old
borrowing, ultimately from a Panjab dialect, in post NIA, times in Bengali ;
5Wf « nan&d?t > (nananda); fsi^, tff , * nind^t, nid?l » (ninda, nidda, nidra) ;
« parakh^ » (pariksa) ; * pach^ » (paccba, pasca, paseat) ;
« piyasgt » (pipa^a) ; ^tt^ « pan^ » as in ^HfTtC^ « ama-pane » towards me,
looking at me^ recognising me (panna, prajfia [?]) j * pha,n4 » (phana)
^ « bat^l »(vatta, varta) ; ^'R « ban^^ » (vanya) ; ^ * bijh§t * (vandhya) ; ^
MB. « bhas^ » (bhasa) ; « bhlkh^l » (bhiksS) ; « bhukh^,
* Cf. 'SrtC^ ^1 C5f5 ^ 11 ' je ach© bauijh, se dey samjh '—Let her who is childlesB
(in the family) light the evening lamp,
39
306
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER III
bhukh^ » (bubhuksa) ; « ^oaj^ » as in ^ « maj?l-kath^ » /5<?ar^ of
timber (majja); 5(1^ « mal^ » , mainly in compounds (mala) ; "R^ « mich^ »,
cf. ftt^C^ « mieh^-kaune » = f^^-^^finil « michgl-kahaniya » liar (mithya);
M B. "55?^^ « mud^-ri » (mudrS) ; (A^ « mel^l » (mela) ; « rar^ »
(randa) ; ^1 « la » /i/c (laba, laksa) ] MB. ^tWj ^t^ « lacha, nach^ » (rathya) ;
* laj^ » (lajja) ; s^t^, ^Tt^ « lal^, nal?l » (lala) ; ^t^^ « lalas^ » (lalasa) :
»tt«T « ^al^ » ill compounds, ^t€t*tt^ « hati-sal^ » elepJuuit-stable : ef.
C5)t^t^ « go-hal^ » cow-pen (sala) ; f»t«T « sil^ » (sila) j C*f^ « sej?l » (sayya) ;
* saj^ » (sajja) ; ^''t^ * sljh^l » (sandhya) ; 3Tt^, ^»tt^ « sadh^ = sa- »
(sraddha) : see p. 190; < ssin^^ » f/esture, as in « hat^-san^ »
gesture with the handy also ^^-^t^ « hat^-chan^ » (sanna, sanjna) ;
« h§.lud^ » (haridra) ; etc.
The plural affix of 01 A, « -a, -a » nouns, « -ah » , in cMIA. « -a » ,
was similarly reduced to « -a » in Apabhransa, and lost its force in OB, ;
e,g., < desah > desa > desa ; vartah > vatta > vatta > bata » . New
plural forms had to be built up for the nominative with the help of the
genitive and instrumental plural, as well as by adding nouns of multitude,
as a result.
In the OIA. affixes « -anam, -esam > , which became « -ana(m), -esaib,
^-esaih, -eham » in the MIA. period, there was pre-Apabhransa weakening
of « -a- » to « -a » ; « *tanam » , occurring beside « tesam » , gave early
MIA. « tanam, tana » and <^ tesam, ^tesam » , Late MIA. « tana, tana,
teha » , whence the NIA. forms — Bengali % v©t^ « tan^ » hi8 (honorific, <
lJi€ir\ vol- « ti- » = oblique of honorific singular 3rd personal pronoun, (3t,
f^t < teha, tiha » he (honorific, < thcif) ; xAssaraese « teo » he (honorific) ;
Oriya « ta(ha)n- » = oblique of 3rd pers., plural > honorific singular;
Maithill « tan-i-k » his (honorific), Magahi and Bhojpuriya « tinh » =
oblique of 3rd personal pronoun plural; Awadhi «ten(h)-», 3rd person
plural obi. ; HinddstanI « tin- », 3rd pers. pi. obi. ; etc., etc.
Tatsffwa words do not drop the OIA. « -a » vowel, and in many
cases, the is, forms occur side by side with the tLhs,^ like C^, C^l ; f*t^,
f»N etc., quoted above. sis. like C^^ « rekh^l » (rekha), or :?t^ « slm^ »
(slma), drops its « -a » .
LOSS OF ^A^ BY ASSIMILATION: ^-I,
307
Cases of loss o£ OIA. final « -a » by assimilation (see later also, under
' Vowels in Contact :
(i) OIA. « -a, -a+eons. + -a » > Late MIA. « -aa -aa, -aa, -aa, -a» >
OB, « -aa, -awa, -a, -awa » > NB. « -a, » : ^£l« « eo », from « ai§, » = MB.
« aiha » (avidhava) ; ^ « ma », t 5ft« « mao » < OB. « mawa » (maa,
mata) ; »tq1 « s^]a» (salaka) ; in NB. « bhaj^ », MB. « bbauja »,
the loss of the final « -a » had taken place before the Apabhransa stage
(bhratf-jaya > bhau-jaa, ^bhaujja > *bhaujja > OB. « -bhaujSL); so
« salaj^ » (syalaka-jaya) ; etc.
(ii) OIA. « -ika » > MIA. <ia, -ia * > OB. « -I » > NB. *.T, -i > . Ex-
amples : ^f%, ^1%, 'Sft^ « aji, ayi, ai » f/randmother (aryika) ; ^tf^^ « kahinl »
(*kathinika) ; NB. ft « ghl » OB. (Sarvananda) « ghiwi » ,
(*ghrtika) ; g1% « curi » (^coria, caurya + ika); ^f^ « churi » (ksurika) ;
J C^fif « ebeli » y^?^/ (^cha^-alia, "^chagalika) ; ^^N^t « jurl » ^^i^V (%oktrika) ;
« barl » (vatika) ; « ball » s^rw^? ('^balika=baluka) ; « mai*, m&i »
^a^f/^r (madika) ; STf^t « mati » (mf ttika) ; « ruti » (rotika) ;
« luri, nuri » (*lodhia < ^lothia = "^lofcthika, ^lostika) ; OB. « seji = sejl »
(*sayyika) ; etc. Examples illustrating this dropping of OIA. <c-a»in
feminine forms in « -ika » are very numerous, and this « -ika » > « -ia » >
« -I * gave the most common femiiyne and diminutive afiix of all NIA.,
taking the place of the OIA. feminine affixes « -a » and « -i ». The vowel
was originally long, « -ia = [is] becoming [i:] ; it remains long in most
NIA., e Hindostani, but in Bengali^ absence of stress made it short, even
from the OB. period.
(iii) OIA. « -ukg, -upa > etc. > NIA. « -u, -u » : see below, § 17:2,
under ^ Vowels in Contact.'
OIA. * -i, -I » .
151. (i) OIA. <c -1, -i » > Late MIA. <c -i * > OB. « i » > (MB.
epenthetic « i ») >NB. zero, in the Standard Dialect^ when occurring after
a consonant.
Examples : « ath » (%gkhi, akkhi, aksi) ; ^ « ae » flume (*afiei,
aeci, areis) ; ^5rtf%, ^ ^, ^sptW « aji, aij, j, aj » (MIA. ^ajjirii = adya) ; so
308
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER III
^tpT, ^rf^ « kali, kail, kai 1, kal » (MIA. kalliih = kalya) ; ^t^, ^t5>
« gat, gath » , X ^ftt^, ^'^^ « gSit, gait » (ganthi, granthi) ; ?ttf^, Mtt^
« gab(h)in » «7V>5 ^o?^?^^ (garbhini) ; 5tf^, 5^, Ft^ « cari, cair, cair, car »
(ciari = cattail, catvari) ; « chfic » (*chunci, ^sunci, suci): also ^5 «sue » ;
«3ut » convenience, advisability (yukti) ; ^^^f, ^g^, « dain, 4*^n, »
(dakini) ; \5t^ « tal > (tall) ; nST^ « tat » (tantri) ; for * tin » (tinni,
trini); * tltul >, OB. (Carya 2) * tentall » (^tintali = tintidi) ; ^
« pat », MB- « pati » (panti, pagkti) ; ^t^^ « parul », OB « ])arali » (see p.
186) (patall) j C^^H c^3?t^^^ « beyan, behain* (*vaiv5hinl) ; C^t^, J^^,
< bon, bun, b&in, buin », cf. Oriya ^bhaiinl » (bhagini); « bhit »
(bhitti) ; ^ <c muth » (musti) ; ^t^^ « rat, rait », OB., « rati » (ratri) ;
« ras » (i) zodiacal sign ; //ecr/j, ^/^7^5, (ii) bridle (in this sense probably
influenced by the Perso-Arabic « ras » ) (ra^i ; ^rassi = ra^mi) ;
« lahiir » ?d?ar^ (lahari) ; ^t^fe « sat, sait » (sasthi) ; 7f<^ « sat » as in 5f^3[1
« sat-ma » step-mother (savatti, sapatnl) ; 7f^^ « sattar » (saptati) ;
« sidh » breaking through a tcall (^sindhi, sandhi) ; etc., etc. The 01 A.
feminine forms in « -inl » , as in the instances given above, would become
« -in » in NIA., with the dropping of final « -i » , but in Bengali there was
from MB. times an influence of the full ts. form.
In a number of sts, words as well, the final « -i, -I » is lost ; e.g.y
X * ad, aid » (adi) ; % « jat, jait » (jati) j « jut *
as in C5U^W ^ e5kher^ jut » sight of the eye (^juti, jyotis) ; %
« jugit » device < OB. sts. « *jugiti » (yukti) ; f^ff^S « pint » , MB.
f^ftf^ « piriti » (priti) ; « murat » (murti); « rlt(i) ; etc. ; but
cf. f^lS = ftIS « dithi » (dfsti), with « -i » preserved, which remains an
archaic, poetic (MB.) word. But ts. words keep the final « -i, I ».
(ii) OIA. « -1, -I » > MIA. ^ -1, -I » > OB. « -i » , retained, when it
occurred after a vowel in OB. and MB. ; e.^., « kai", k&i oafish (kavayi) ;
^ « ch&i, chili » thatchy thatched cabin of a boat (chadis) ; ^fTl^ « jamai,
jaWSi » {*jamati = OIA. jamatf) ; « n&i> n&i » (i) (also =
« n&bbai »), (ii) % river, (lii) ?2^2i? or young heifer : (navati ; nadi; navT,
navika) ; « da'i, dlii » , MB. iff^ « d&(h)i * (dadhi) ; « barii* »
(vardhakin) ; ^ < bhai (*bhati = OIA. bhratf) ; « s&'i, sai », MB.
^•1,1^ IN OLD AND MIDDLE BENGAII
509
« sk{h)\ » (sakhi) ; also in the word « -pati > -pai', -vai > in compounds, e.f/,,
« dalai, dalui snrnahic (dalapati), ?Wft * nandai > (nanandf-pati),
C^t^ « bonai » (bhagini-pati : see p. 300) ; OB. and eMB. C^t^, ^t,
« bolai, karai, cala'i » etc., verbs of 3rd person singular, where the final « -i »
remained, — to be assimilated with the « -a- » preceding to « », OIA.
instrumental plural « -bbis », MIA. « -hi », and the locative « ■^-dhi> -hi »,
reduced to « -i » in Proto-Beugali, also underwent assimilation, but in some
cases it is found in MA. : e.g,, ^fif, « ami, tumi », OB. ♦amhe, tumhe»,
Oriya « ambhe, tumbhe » ( = %mhahi, '^tumhahi [or -ehi] : asmabhis, yusma-
bhis). This « -(h) i » affix seems to have attached itself to the genitive
plural form, in forming the new nominative (honoritic) of pronouns, etc. :
see under ^ Declension of the Noun,' and under * Pronouns.' In « asl >
(asiti), there is assimilation of « -i » with preceding < -1- » in the MIA.
form « asii ».
In MB. « sundhi » = « sugandhi » , the « -i » is probably for
« -ika » , with assimilation of final « -a » as under § 14-9, p, 30:2 : ^^=^^
« sundh! » < « *sondhi »<« ^suwandhl, *suandhi » *sugandhika » : cf.
NB. C^"t^ < sSdha » = « s§dh- + -a * foetid (= sugandha-) ; « nani » is
from « navanita » rather than « navani ». In the eMB. of the f^KK., we
have ts, and sts,^ as well as tbh, words, like « Snumati, akhl (= aksi), atl
(ati), arati (a-rati^, abudhi, gatl, girl, tuti (stuti), thiti (sthiti), dadhi
(dadhi), dhuni (dhvani), nidhi, patT, piti (pagkti), bih! (vidhi), buddhi
(buddhi), bhakati (bhakti), mani, mati, muni, yugati (yukti), yutl=3utl
(jyotis), rati, saggati, sandhi, sidhi (siddhi), harl » , with long « i » : this
lengthening is possibly a reminiscence in orthography of a stage in OB.,
when original <c -i » from OIA. « -I, i » was tending to be lost, and the
presence of a large number of words in « -i », from « -ika, -ika » etc., served
to make the long « -I » the more common form of the « i » sound in a final
position.
Words and forms in OB. with original « -i » (i.e., final « -i » derived
from Magadhi Apabhransa) in many cases fell together with the « -a »
words. The nominative form in « -i », which seems to have characterised
MSgadhi Apabhransa, has entirely dropped out of Bengali, as well as the
310
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER III
Iceative aflSx in « -i » < OIA. « -e oeeasionally found in OB. : e,^,, Gary a
36 : « pakhi » = « pakse ». See § 153.
(3) OIA. * -u, -u »
152. (i) OIA. * -u, -u * > MIA. * -u, -u > , Late MIA. « -u » >
OB. « -u » > MB. epenthetic « -u, -i > NB. zero, ivhen occurring after
a consonant. Cases also occur, where « u » has become « -a ». Examples :
^N, ^t^^ * akh, aukh » (*akkhu<*aksu = iksu) ; '^t*!, * a^, ais
(ansu) ; « khos » < c khaus », OB. (Sarv^inanda) « khasu » ^V^?/^
(^khaehu, kaeehu) j c&t5 « cSc » < « eauc » (caficu) ; ^t^i * jam >
(jambu) ; vlt^ « tat (tantu) ; Tt? * dad » <Pft^ « daud » (daddu, dadru) ;
< pas » fl5>$^5 (pansu) ; « phag > (phalgu); OB., MB. ^j? ^ baha »
(bahu) ; C^ft^ « moeh » (mhaechu, sraasru) ; TtH, ^t^ « feas, sas » in compounds
(svasru) ; « sa, gaha » merchant (sadhu) ; f^^S « hig » (higgu) ; etc.,
etc. In words also, « -u » is frequently dropped : ?ft^, J
«dhat, dhait, dhaut » (dbatu) ; Pf^t^ « dayal » (dayalu) ; etc.
7i. words preserve the final « -u, -u ».
(ii) OB. <c -u » is retained in NB., when in OB. and MB., the « -u »
was immediately preceded by a vowel : e.g, % also 'srf^ « au, ai » (au,
ayus) ; ^ < jaii, jaii » (jatu) ; 5lt^, « jau » (yavagu) ; « jhau »
(jhabu ; also jhabu-ka) ; « bau, bau », MB. ^ ba(h)u >, OB. « bahu »
(vadhu) ; J « bau * (vayu) ; 5f^, « mau, mau MB. « ma(h)u *
(madhu) ; ^ « lau » (alabu) ; etc. The affix * -u » for the imperative 3rd
person, = 4: -tu * of OIA., remained in OB. and MB. ; but in MB. it was
lengthened by a « -k^ » , and became medial, and was dropped after a
vowel : e,g., MB. Cff^, ^t^, <xt^, ^ ^ *deu, jau, b5u, karu, calu »
beside * deu-k^, jau-k^, hou-k?t, karu-k^, calu-k^ » = NB. or fiff, ^it^
or C?T^ {iM) or C?tf « diuk?l, dik^l ; jauk^, jak^l ; houk?t, hok^ » and
« karuk^, caluk^ »,
Some exceptional cases : % ^ kau » (kaka) is through vocalisation
of a MB. * kawa < kaa » ; * p^r^su » = OB. * parasu » = OIA.
* para-svah » : * -su » represents a IVIagadhi « * suve (cf. Pah* * suve
in Mag. Ap. ^ * suvi » , which ought to give an OB. * * sui », which is
IN MB., NB.: OIA., MIA.
311
not found isolated in NIA. ; * su » in « par^su is » probably due to the
reduction of the expected final « -i » to « -a », giving a Mag. A p. form
« *suva » , which was normally simplified to « su, su ». MB.
« pahu, pahu » (prabhu) is not found in NB., where it would occur as
« * pliu, pau » : the nasalised form is noteworthy ; « badhu » friend,
lover (bandhu-ka) ; « kharu » bracelet, ^ff^^ « garu » pitcher, « chatu
« taku c|t^^ * laru ^t^, tt^, tT^ * (h)it(h)u > = OB. « andu (?)
knecy seem to show assimilation of « -a coming respectively from MIA.
« kha4(Jua, gaddua, sattua=saktu-ka, takkua = takru-ka, lafj{;ua, *an(Ju-a ?
(but of. asthl-vant- knee) » : cf. §149, (iv).
Words like the following — tbhs, dudhu » (dugdha), T5(^ « mitu »
friend in affectionate address (mitra), « ub(h)u » (urdhva) ; stss. like
^ « dhuttu » (dhurta) ; tss, like « dustu » (dusta), have an « -u » afiix,
derived ultimately from « -u-ka >. (See under Morphology : * Formative
Affixes.') The literary influence of the Western Apabhransa brought in a
number of « -u » forms into Bengali ; and in the 16th century MB., the
« -u » affix also sought to enter into Bengali through Braja-buli and through
Braj-bhakha (see p. 103); e.g., forms like OB. (Caryas) « kiu, ahariu, tasu »
etc. (p. 115), MB. 51^, « jaehu, tachu », « majhu » to me, of me,
« ajh^ru » < lagu *fured, etc. But this Western « -u » < MIA.
(Sauraseni, Mahai-astri) « -6 » did not take root in Bengali.
(4) OIA., MIA. « -e »
153. OIA. * -ah, -am, -e» > MIA. (Magadhi) « -e * >Magadhi Ap.
« *-i »> OB. (?) < -i », but mostly reduced to * -a » > eMB. « -a » > NB,
« » or zero.
The Magadhi affix for the nom. sing, and for the loc. sing, of « -a » nouns
would come under this : « dovah > deve > *devi > OB *de\Vi » ; ^ deve
> deve > *devi > OB. *dewi » ; but in OB., the « -i » for the locative is
occasionally found, but that for the nominative is almost entirely lost, relics
possibly only being found in a few forms (which are discussed under
Morphology : * The Noun : Inflections, Nominative '). The representative of
« *devi » in OB. is « "^dewa » = MB. Cf * de», For the locative, the « -e,-e»
312
tHONOLOGT : CHAPTER III
affix ousted the old * -i » ; this new « -g, -e » of OB. being from « -aM,
-ahi ; al, ai » of Late MIA. (See under Morphology : * Inflections :
Locative.') The following cases, among otbere, show loss of 01 A. » >
Early NIA. « -i » in the locative : ^^f-^ffry « as-pas > aroinul (^asi-pasi : asre
parsve : cf. Jules Bloeh, ' Langue Marathe,' p. 57) ; « par the other
side (*pari, pSre) ; 'I^T * par » after (^pari, pare) ; ^?r-^?r « gh4r-gh&r »
in every home (*ghari ghari, gfhe gfhe) ; etc, etc.
OIA., MIA. -c -0 > was extremely rare in Magadhi, and we have no
sure case in Bengali. The Oriya ablative affix « -u » probably represents
the MIA. « -to » = OIA. ablative «-tas». «-o» does not occur in the base
form of any OIA. word, any more than « -e ».
154. The above in general show the apocope of final vowels in Bengali.
In many cases, however, ^5. forms with the final vowels have been reintro-
duced, or made to influence the ihh, ones, by restoring the final vowels — the
unmodified thh^. being found as archaic words in poetry : e.g.y « asa >,
beside « as^ » ; spt^l « mala », beside sit^l « mal^ » ; f^^l « micha » for
« mich^ », influenced by « mithya » ; so « maj a », but cf . OB. « maa »
=«mawa » ; « chSya », frequently pronounced as ^tQ^I «chawa», shows
imperfect influence of the learned form < chaja on a thh. without the
final < -a » and with the euphonic « w » — OB. « cbaa, ehawa», NB. « chawa,
chaoa » ; < bSjha », see, p. 305 (vandhya) ; here however, there may be
the NIA. « -5 » affix, cf. ^"t^l « sSca^^ from * sac » (satya) ; « Mtha »
(kantha) ; etc. The eases of restitution for « -i, -u », e.g. ^ « muthi » for "5^
« muth », are in the nature of reversion to archaic forms, and MB. epenthesis
of « -i, -u » prevents it to a great extent : and the language here prefers
the full forms, rather than palpably false forms.
[II] Vowels in Initial Syllables.
155. These have generally been preserved in Bengali. So long as
the stress was on non-initial syllables, in Apabhrarisa and in Old Bengali,
there remained the likelihood of an original initial long syllable being
shortened, or of a short syllable being dropped. Instances of such
weakening of original long syllables in Bengali have been given in § 143 :
LOSS OP INITIAL VOWELS
313
and dropping of initial vowels through absence of stress is not unknown
to MIA. (see pp. 241, £78). Bengali has inherited a few words which
underwent this aphjeresis in the MIA. period : e.g,^
(i) « a- » : f^1% « tisi > Unseed ("^atisi, atasi), « a- » dropped in the
OIA. or eMIA. period ; so MB. f^^ « pindh^ » (api-nah, api-naddha) ; f^^t^T^
C^fflt^T « hilan^, helan^ > to lean (? abhilagna)^ aphferesis in the IMIA.
period ; « ritha » soap-nut (arista-) ; « bhij » to rnoistefi (abhyaiij) ;
f%^^ > C^^t^ « bl^'jay, bhejav » doses the door (? abhyajyate) ;
« bhitar^ > (abhyantara) ; OB. for ^ « hau<hau » {hakam, ahakam =
aham), aphseresis in Early MIA. ; f|c^, c^c^ «hile, hele» leans (abhilagati ?
abhillyate ?), a Late MIA. ease ; « lau » (alabu) ; and ^s^^ « s§,wargt »
horseman, an eMIA. borrowing from Old Persian ^ asa-bari » = Skt. « asva
+ bhf later strengthened by the New Persian « suwar ».
« a- » : inherited forms with loss of initial of « a- » not found.
(ii) Loss of initial « i- » is not seen in any word in Bengali : in the
word « dhil^, (Jhila » , generally connected with « "^sithila =
sithila < *srtb-ila however, there seems to be loss of an initial syllable
with < -i- ».
(iii) Aphseresis of « u- » : « rjumur^ » (udumbara) ; ^^C^, t^^f,
« baise, baise, base » (avaisai, upavisati), a Late MIA. case ; +^5?^
«panai» (upanah-), aphseresis in eMIA.
(iv) « e-, 0- » : no case in Bengali, except « reri » (eran^ika).
A few cases of Bengali apharesis are also found : OB. « antare »,
eMB. 'STt^^ « antare » : NB. *«C^ « tare » /(>r of (dative post-
position) ; NB. « jabal^ » (aja-pala) ; NB. T5«1 « ehila » %oas^ beside ^tf^
« achil& * ; MB. ffC^s ehite » J(9 for ^Ttf^C^ « aehite » (aech, ach) ; MB.
fifft, « sia, sia » for ^PRI, -^1 « asiya, -ina » having come (a-vis) ; NB.
« dhar^ » Ioan<i MB. ^^ft^ «iidhara » (uddhara) ; NB. sts, < par^ »
(upari) ; NB. C^^T « hena », MB. « ehena » 50 AX^' (through
analogy of C^^(<C^C^ « ken&, kehenii », (?R<(?[C5^ « jena, jehena »).
(1) Initial « a- », and «-a- » in Initial Syllables.
156, (i) Initial * a- ».
40
S14
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER III
OIA. and MIA. « a- » followed by a single consonant, seems to have
become ^ a- » in eMB., through initial stress : e.g.^ '^it^ « aj^¥^
ajull»a foolish hoy flwrZ^^W (*ajU'.<rju-) ; 'Brflt c Esi ^ ef . Oriya c §,si »
(asiti) ; "^TtW * ar^ » < eMB. « aara » (avara, apara) ; « al^ta »
(alakta-) ; i£|^Q « eo » < MB. ^spf^ « aihi » (avidhava) ; « Ayan^ » <
MB. ^t^?*( * Aihana » (Abhimanyu) ; ^5?r « asurfi, » (asura) ; 'sjt^^
« aUs^ » (alasa) ; MB. ^tf'I'^l « amia » (amf ta-) ; etc. In the Early MB.
of the SkK., is, words almost invariably show « a- » for « a- » : '^it^pfsff
« anamati », ^srff^ « ati », < apara », ^^3?t^ * apaman^, ^ft^
« adhipati ^^t^ « ab&tar& », « aUpa » * adhln& »,
^t*l^t^ « ap&radh& 'Sftt^^Fft^ « abhisSr& », etc., etc. The privative affix
« a- » became « a- » in MB. in thlis,^ sfss., and tss, ; 5^*. ^STf^t^, NB.
« abhagi, abagi » (abhagya+ika) ; "^^^ « abudhi,
abuddhiya » /<?o/ ; *«rr?^ « asukh& > ; ^t^^ « asabh& » ; «rf^5 « abh&y& » ;
« amul& » ^JA. (amulya); NB. ^gf^f * aluni » for « aloni » (alavanika)j
^fTfsrl^ « asamanli » uneven. The MB. intensive prefix <« a- » equally became
« a- » : « aghora » ( = ghora), ^C^'itl « abretha » (vrtha), ^^^il^
« akumari » (kumarl), ^^5^ > arftgga » coloured (ragga-), ^f^ff^ §chidir& »
vicious (chidra ?), etc., etc. In eMB., through an increasing influence
of Sanskrit forms, this « a- » fell into disfavour, and « a- » became
supreme in ts, words ; and some fbAs. also took up « a- », But here and
there we have the « a- » forms lingering in NB., commonly in pronunciation,
and at times in orthography as well : e.p,, in addition to the fM. words
given before, we find « abi,stba » plight, distress (avastha), I'spfl
«ast&» eight, J^^ft « abagi » (abhagya+-i), ^^Tt^C??) « arandha(n^) »
* no cooUng ^ (a feast-day when people eat things prepared on the previous
day) (arandhana), ^Ib^l, ''ItsfT^, ^1bW<^l « ac§mba, ae&mbit^, ac&m^ka »
suddenly {J-, ef. HindostanI acambha); ^"^1 « asp&dda » (*&spS,ddha =
spardha), 'srtC^^K^ « aste-by^iste » (asta-vyasta), etc.
The initial « a- » of Persian loan-words similarly became « a- » :
« &zaa (&?55n)> ^STf^^ ajan » call to prayer ; « &mlr > ^spfft^ amir » prince,
dignitary ; « S,nar > ^Tf^Tf^ anar » pomegranate ; « &waz > ^«ft^,
gwaj, abaj » jokm^? ; et<;., etc,
SHORT ^A' + SINGLE CONSONANT 315
157' (ii) Consonant + « a » + consonant.
The « -a- » in this case remains « a=a » in Bengali : e,g,^
« k&ila » as in C^f^ « k&ila goru » (kapila-) ; ^ « kar^ »
(*>a«) bracelet (kata) ; ^^^1 « karua » (katuka-) ; ^f^t « kanui » (kaphoni-) ;
« kare » (karai^ karoti) ; « kahe » (kathayati) ; « khan^ta »
(khanitra-) ; « g^rur^ » (garuda) j ^«1t% « galasi » (gala-pasika) ;
« ghar^ » (ghara, gfha) ; « eale » (ealati) ; « jau, j^u » (jatu) ;
W{ « jan^ » (jana) ; W\ « jalgt » (jala) ; ^v5 « jhar^ » (of. jhatika) ; « t&Ie»
(talati) ; « dar^ » (dara) ; MB, « tar^ » (tata) ; « thal^- »
(sthala) ; ?ft, ^ « d&i, dai » (dadhi) ; « dal^ » (dala) ; « dh§,r^ » <5{?Jj^,
(*dhata, dhf ta) ; ^ « n&Y, n&i »^ as in ^t|^ « n&i bachur^ » Z^^^/^r
calf (navika) ; s^^if « D&nlid^ » (nanandf ) ; « piita » (pavitra-) ; MB,
^f^^l « p&rieha » (praliksaka-) ^ 'tC^ « pare » (patati) ; ^C^=:^^C^ « par(h)e »
(pathati) ; « pay la » j^V^^ (pratha + ila) ; « payar^ » (padakara) ;
*t?[^ « par^su » (paraSvah) ; ^ « pala » (^palava, pravala-) ; ^ « ph^l^ »
(pbala) ; ^Rt^ « phalar^ » (phalahara) ; « bS,u, bliu » (vadhu) ;
« ban^ » (vana) ; « bahin » (bhagini) ; ^ « bhar^ » a simiame (bhata,
bhfta) ; sf^, c^'t « mau, mau » (madhu) ; « mare » (^marati, mriyate) ;
'^TfcT « mayal^ » a large snake (mahakala) ; 5[*tt^ « masan^ » (smasana) ;
« m&ra» (*mata-, mfta) ; ?R « rlbs^ » (rasa) ; ^TTt^i « rasEngt » ingredienU hi
working metals (rasayana) ; *t^1 « Sara » (sarava) ; MB. *t*t1 « s^sa » (sasa-) ;
« sahe » (sahate) ; « halud^ » (haridra) ; etc., etc.
The following cases, and a few others, at first sight look irregular, but
they seem to be from « a » forms : e.g. ^l«i<p| « hal^ka » (ISghu : laghava,
*lahaa, *halaa f kka) ; *f"t^ « sli » (sami : *samika) ; and ^ft^ « baniya »
(vanij : vanija-), probably extra-Magadhi in IMIA.
Perso-Arabic words also retain the « -3,- » : « kam » little (kam) ;
« khikb^r » (xabar) ; « g&j^I * ^ poeniy a hind of composiiio)i
in rerse (gazal) ; ^^t^ « jaban » speed/ , word (zaban) ; 5?^t^ « nii^ms,]*' praj/ers
(namaz) ; l^M « rlipha * settlement (raf^a), etc. HindostanI pronunciation
of « & » as [a], however, frequently influences the « -a- » > « -a- » in
becoming the frank « a » in Bengali, especially in recent admissions from
the Persian.
316
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER III
158. (iii) OIA. and MIA. « a * ia initial syllables, followed by two
consonants.
In words which were originally of two syllables, or three or more
syllables with a weak or short penultimate or second syllable, « -a- » is
lengthened to « -a- » and one o£ the consonants is dropped ; and if it is
a case of nasal + consonant, the nasal is reduced to a mere nasalisation of
the lengthened « -a- », and the following consonant too is often reduced to
its corresponding nasal. E,f/., « ak^ » (agka) ] « akhargl »
(aksara) ; « ikh(i) » (*agkhi, akkhi, aksi) J « agi > (agi, aggia,
agni-) ; «3c» (*anci, arcis) ; ^rf^:^ « aehe» (acehai, OIA. %cchati) ;
« a j » (ajjirfa, adya) ; ^rt§ « at^ » (asta) ; <athi» sfone of f mil (asthi-) ;
^^It^ « at^ > (antra) ; « kakan^ » (kagkana) ; « kaeh^ » (kaksa) ;
^I^R « kSdan^ » (krandana) ; •* kSdhgt » (skandlia) ; « kan^ »
(karna) ; « kam^ » (karma) ; J^^^ < khajiir^ » (kharjura) ; ^§ « khat^ »
(khatva) ; ^ « khar^ » (khanda) ; « khaja » a sweetmeat (khadya-) ;
« gadha » (gaddaha-, gardabha-); MB. 9ft^Sf « gaie » (garjati) ; 5|tft « gali »
ai?/^^ (garha-) ; ^ « gham^ » ^^i^^a;? (gharma) ; 5t^q « caul^ » , MB. v5t^,
#t^^ « taula, tarula » (tan(Jula) ; « cak^» (cakra) ; 5t^, «catar^,
eatal^ » (catvara) ^ < cSd^ » (candra) ; Ft*l1 « eapa » (campaka-) ;
« ch^i^ » roi/ (chatra) ; < ehad^ » style^fasJiion (chanda) ; ^"t^l « jftta »
(yantra-) ; ^ « jam ^ (jambu) ; MB. « taje » (tarjati) ; ^^tW « take *
(tarkayati); ^ i^X.^ ^ heat (tapta) ; «tat^» (tanta, tantra) j ^
« tham^ » (stambha) ; f|«t « dap^ » (darpa) ; ift^f « dam^ » j»nc(? (dramya,
Greek drakhme) ; STf^F « naee » (naccai, nftyati) ; <Tt^ < pakh^ » Bide
(paksa) ; ^Tt^% « palag, palagka » (pallagka, paryagka) ; « baj^ »
(vajifa) ; ^t^, * barai*, barui » (vardhakin) ; ^ « bhala » (bhadra-) ;
« makar^ » (markata) ; * slkh^ » (sagkha) ; *ft*f * sSs^ »
stanc€yfleshi/ part of fruit (^samsa, ^saSsa = sasya) etc., etc.
In words of more than two syllables, the « -a- » in initial syllables,
although followed by two consonants in MIA. (one of which is dropped in
NIA.), remains as « -a- » without being lengthened to « -a- », when a
following syllable, the penultimate or the ante-penultimate generally, was
a strong one (i.e., long, or stressed, or both). This seems to have been
MIA. SHORT 'A' BEFORE TWO CONSONANTS 317
due to the Magadhi Apabhransa habit of stressing^ before initial stress
asserted itself in Bengali : and OB. fornas like « andhara (andha-kara),
baggala (Carya 49 : vaggala), bhatara (Carya 20 : bhartr, "^bhattara),
kapasa (Carja 50 : kappasa, karpasa), kanthabhala (Sarvanauda, = *kantha-
hala^ "^kanta-ala), bandhavai (Carya 'Z'Z : ^bandhapayati), santara (Carya o7 :
santara), bakhana- (Carya 37 : bakkhana = vyakhyana), sagkrama (Sarva-
nanda : sagkrama), ambada (Sarv&nanda : amrata), Atha-paga (grant of
\ isvarupa-sena, see p. 188 : asta-) » etc., show «a» for an expected «a »
through something like the law of the weak ante-penultimate obtaining in
some form of Bengali in the OB. period. (See anfc, pp. 2S0-82.) MB.
also shows, in words like ^t^Tf^ « p^ikhale : pakhule » (praskhalayati),
^t^, ^t^t^ « pal^y? r^l^y * (palSj ati)j a hesitancy between the « a » and
the « -a- ». In NB., the initial stress has made the « -a- » before a
simplified double consonant group an « -a- » as a regular thing, no matter if
a succeeding syllable was strong : (?./7., ^^t^ < ftdhar^ », « OB. andhara »
(andha-kara) ; ^t^tft * katari » (kartarika), of. Hind. « k atari » ; ^T^t^,
« kakal(i) » 7ca{-^f, spine (kagkalika) ; ^T^W « bhatar^ > (bhartr-), cf.
Hind. « bhatar #t&t^ « kltal^ » jackfndi (kantala), cf. Hind, ^^katar » ;
*rt^t^ « pathay » (patthavei, prasthapayati); ^^T^H « sajay *, ]MB. ^^;£i « sltjae »
(*sajjapayati) ; ^t^tft « kachari » office (kaeea-haria, krtya-grha-) cf.
Hind. < kac-hari » ; ^tM^ * khaniar^ » ham (khambhara, skambhagara) ;
^rt^»t^ « sabhar^ » n idace-ncune (sabhyagara) ; ^It^^fS, beside ^R^lfe
« gab^rat^i, g§,b- » UnieUioood (garbbagara-kasfcha) ; ^t^t^ « bakhan^ »
(vyakhyana) ; etc., etc. OB. also shows this sort of lengthening : this has
been discussed before. In certain cases, however, in NB., we find no
lengthening : possibly these are relics from the age when dialectally
in West Bengal the non-initial stress cnm absence of lengthening obtained :
tf.^. « 3&kh&n^ » idiea (jakkhana, yat-ksaria) : so ns^J? * takhan^ »
then (tat-ksana), « kakhanat » wlien ! (kakkliana, ^kat-ksana) ; ^^t^
« j^injal^ » (janjala) ; d^, ?ff^ * dakhin^ » south (dakkhina, daksina),
but cf . the ihh. « dahin^ > ; the numerals '^^^ « panora, panara »
(paiinaraha, pailcadasa), ^"^^ « sateia, satara * (sattaraha, saptadasa),
but cf . '«rt^f « athara » (attharaha, astadasa) ; ^1fe*t * pacisgl (^paficawisa,
318
PHONOLOGT : CHAPTER III
panca-vinSati) but e£. * satas^ » (satt5wlsa, sapta-vinsati), Oriya
« sataisa etc.
Words with the < -a, -i (<ika) » affix at the end, serving to modify the
original form in a special manner (or even when employed pleonastieally),
seem to have been stressed on the « a » in Magadhi Apabhransa, as can be
surmised from the evidence of Orija and other Magadhan (see anle,
pp, 94, 06, 280). OB. also shows words without lengthening of « a » before
a simplified consonant group of MIA., through this stress on the final
syllable : e.^., « hatha (Carya 41 : hattha-), bapa (Carya S'l : bappa-), caka
(Carya 14 : eakka-), pakha (Carya 4 : pakkha-) », etc. : of. Oriya « raja,
caka, gaeha », etc. In MB., these forms with short < -a- » were reduced
to those with the normal «-a-», though here and there the « -a- » forms have
survived : W^U * cak^la, cakal^ » slice, beside Ft^^l « cak^la »
district (eakra-) ; « khapgtra », beside < khap^ra » sherd^ tile (khar-
para-) ; ^5fHl « badh^na » pitcher with spout (vardhana-) ; « klisi » line^
nnder-lining (kar^ika) ; etc.
Absence of compensatory lengthening of « a » to < a », after the loss of
one of two following consonants, is a phonological puzzle, which is found in a
number of words (apart from the eases noted above, where we have the ques-
tion of stress) in Bengali, as well as in other NIA. languages like the other
Magadhan speeches, and Eastern Hindi, Western Hindi, RajasthanI and
Gujarat!, and Marathi. All these languages normally drop one consonant in
a MIA. double consonant group, and lengthen the preceding vowel ; or nasa-
lise and lengthen the vowel, and in this way assimilate the nasal in a MIA.
group of nasal + consonant. Thus, the normal development is along this line :
« garva : ^ft^ cf , NB. ^^t^ « gabana » vaunt ; « adya : ^f^, '^t^
aj(i) » ; « sarpa : sap^ > ; etc. But cases like ^ « kacu > (kacvi) ;
« khi,l^ » apot/iecarfs mortar (khalla) ; ^ « th^k » be at standstill^ beside
«t thak » (stabh-ka) ; ^ « ch&k^ » chess-board (sat-ka) ; « nath^ »
nose-ring (nasta) ; MB. •{^ « natha » beside NB. 5rf§<?Tt^ « nat(h)^» (nasta) j
^fe « v/bat » remain (cf. Bhojpuriya « bar », from « va^t, vart=.vrt ») ;
« ^/lakh » 7iotice, see (laks) ; « r^ti > a minute weight with the red gunja
herry (raktika) ; « sabgt » (sarva) ; etc., appear irregular. Some of the
ABSENCE OP COMPENSATORY LENGTHENING 319
above instances can be explained as being due to the literary influence o£
^ Prakrit^ in the Early NIA. period {e.g. «-y/th§,k » influenced by « th^Lk-
ka « nathit » by « natfcha »), or as being forms borrowed from other
NIA. (^.^., ^fe « rati > > Hind. « ratti 5{«t « nath^ » <Hind. « nath —
the Hind, forms themselves beicg based on, or influenced by, Panjabi ones,
Panjabi being a NIA. speech not showing simplification of double consonants
with accompanying vowel length) ; or again, as in the ease of the word
« sab^ » = « sabba, sarva there is in all likelihood the influence of the
stress. Thus, « sabba* would mostly come in composition in MIA., in forms
like « sabba-jana, sabba-kaja, sabba-desa, sabba-lo(k)a, sabba-manussa,
sabba-maharaja », etc., etc. ; and in such compounds, the initial syllable
would lack the stress in Common MIA., so that the word « sabba » could
be shortened to « saba- » in compound forms like these even before the
NIA. stage, and passed on to NIA. as « saba », — a wide employ of the
word as the head-word of plural-indicating compounds preventing a
normal < *saba < sabba » from developing in NIA. The form « saba »
is found in all Aryan India, from the Afghan frontier to Assam, and
«*sab3< ^ is unknown : and the frequent nse of « sabh3» », also occurring
as « samhS., sama », side by side with « sab^ » all over the NIA. area, indicates
the influence of the is, « sabha » assemll^, mass, in making « sabba > saba »
preserve the « sa- > and not change it to « sa- » in Early NIA. But still,
a number of forms with « a » do present a difficulty ; e.g. « vartatS >
vattati > battai > bate » for « *bate » « bat » remain is a defective
verb in Bengali : cf. ^^t^ « bate ^pounds, crushes {as spices for cooJcing) —
« vartayati, vatteti, battei > : can it be due to a sort of sense of relationship
between the causative ^tcfe « bate » with « a » and the neuter form, on the
analogy of Ftl^ « cale » causes to move : « c^le » tvallxs, ^ttU? « pare » fells :
*fC^ < pare falls etc. [for which see Morphology : ^ the Verb, Hoots '] — that
the « a » vowel was brought into « bate » for « "^bate » ?) ; < l&khe »
(laksate), etc. (Cf. J. Bloch, ' Langue Marathe,' p. 65).
•« a » after MIA. « p-, b-, m- » , labial sounds, is found as « o » in
Bengali, in C*tW«1 « pohala ef. OB, « pohaili » (pahaa-illa-, prabhata-) ;
MB. C^fW^ * p3ara, powara > (pavala, prabala) ; MB, c^«i « pi3n& »
320
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER III
(pana); C^t^t^ « boal^ » (bawala^ vadala) ; MB. c^rf^ etc. « mona » for
OB. « mal » (may^ena) ; 0\V^^ « m5ral^ * head-man (mandala ; or muha-da-
la = mukha-?) ; and a few others.
Monosyllabic words in NB. (Standard Colloquial) frequently prefer [o]
for « -a-»: this tendency may have been very old in Bengali : e.g., ^
« bd>n^ » [bo:n] (vana) ; 3R « m&n^ » [mo:n] (manas) ; « jan^ » [jgo-'^]
(jana) ; ?R « dhlin^ » [dfio:n] (dhana). Generally these words are closed
with a nasal, but we have « ran^ » [I'^'^i]^ iiot [ro:n] (rana) ; cf.
« bal^ » [bD:l] (bala), 5f\s « mat^ » [mo:t] (mata), etc.
(2) Initial « a- », and « -a- » in Initial Syllables.
159. (i) 01 A. « a » before a single consonant in an initial syllable
has normally remained « a » in Bengali : e.g., ^t^^ « aila > (ayata + ila) ;
^srt^Z^T « aise » (avisati) ; ^spf^s^, « aul^, alu ef . ^^^^Tt^* 5lu-thalu »
dishevelled (akula); '^srf^^f^ « aus^, asu » rainy'SeaB07i rice-crop (generally
connected with is. « asu » ^/^/c^^, but seemingly from < a-^/vrs- ») ; ^^^1
« >Y/a6ja » 67a"f<? (avrj-) ; ^t^§1 * ^aota » t^f/r (a-vartt-) ; « kai »
(kvatha) ; sts, f ^?t^ * kag^, kaua » (kaka); ?Pt5 « kac?l,
kac^ » (kaca) ; ^tW© « kayet^ » (kayastha) ; ^t^^l « kalo » W^re^ (kala-) ;
^Tt^ « khai » (khata-) ; ^Tf^ « khae » (khadati) ; ^ « ga » (grama) ; ^1 « gha »
50;-^, How (ghata) ; ^Tt^ « gbanl » oil-mill (cf. « ghranaka », Siyadoni
Inscription, Lalitpur, U, P., Ep. Ind. I, p. 169 ff.) ; ^ « ehar^ »
(ksara) ; « jage » (*jaggai, jagartti) ; ^ « jhar^ » (^Z^sv, jhata) ;
< thai » (sthaman) ; ^1 « ta » (tapa) j < tal » (tali) ; tftf^^^
« darim^ » (dadimba) ; Vfl^ « dano » (danava) ; ?rt^ « dhae » (dhavati) ; STl
« na » expletive (nama) ; ^ « na » boat (nava=nau) ; tl «pa» (pada) ;
« pare » (patayati)j « pani » (paniya) ; « pare » is able (parayati) ;
^1 « ba » (vata) ; ^t^^«1 > C^^^^ « baigana > bagun^, begun^ »
(vatiggana) j MB. ^t£i «bae » (vadayati) ; « bhai» (bhratr) ; \»t^ «bhae»
(bhavayati) ; :r1, Jsitt « ma, mai » (mata, matr) ; s^*. srtC^ « mape »
(mapayati : or /M. < « mappati < mapyate » measured > measures [?]) ;
^1 « ra » (rava) ; ^tt, ^tft « ra(h)i » (radhika) ; ^t^ < rai »(rajika) ; <rrt
It ray » (rajan) ; ^t^^ « r^ut » (? raja-putra ; ? 5^^, < raja-duta) ; MB.
OIA. ^A* + TWO CONSONANTS
321
« raul4 » (raja-kula) ; « sai » (svamin); Jrt^t * sari » (satika) ; »tt^1 « sala »
(syala-) ; ^^*{ « sawan^ > (sravana) ; ^-tm * sawalgt > (syamala) ; MB. %vQ,
^ « sao » (sapa) ; ^TtM « sajar^ » (sagara) ; ^\C^, « nahe, nae »
(nhai, snati) ; « hane » strikes (hanayati) ; etc.^ etc.
In Late MIA., « 5 » of OIA, before one consonant became weakened
to a » through absence of stress : cases are found in OB., MB., and NB. :
e.g., sis, « akasa » (Carya 50 : akasa), « *batasa », cf. Oriya < batasa »
(vata-) ; J^?tW «bayar^ » (vata-) ; sis. < pagar^ * (prakara) ; ^^Tf^^f^
« b&nar&sl » (varanasiya) ; > « tbaili > th&li » (sthalika) ;
^^^1 > « jhar^k(h)a » lattice (jalakkha-, jaUiksa-, ? jala-gavaksa) ,
ef. Hindi « jharokha MB. ^^'^c^ « raja-puta » (raja-putra), NB. Wt^'^
« raj^-put^ » ; * jamai » (jamatr) might have been « *jamal »
in Old Bengali, dialeetally. Evidence of OB, and NB. forms, however,
shows that the « a » in long words also remained as « a » (or was restored
back from « a » to « a >) through initial stress, primary or secondary : e.g.,
« basai^ » < OB. « basa-hara » (vasa-grha) ; + sJtC^^ « nayergl >
(jnati-gf ba) ; OB. « kabara » (kara-gfha), etc. (see pp. 281, 282).
160. (ii) OIA. « a » before two consonants.
The chancre was to « a » in MIA., and this « a » followed the fortunes
of OIA a » > MIA. « a » before double consonants in Bengali. E.g,,
^«rt?f1 « ada » (ardra-ka-) ; ^t^ < am^, Ibgl > (amba, amra) ;
« kaj^ » (kajja, karya) : i\IB. ^ff^ « kSti » (kanti, kanti) ; ft^1 * kl^ra »
(kansa-, kansya-) ; ^t? « jar^ » t'^^^f^ (j^dda, jadya) ; ^t^, % tama,
tSba » (tamba-, tamra-) ; ^T^ * bagh^ » (baggha, vyaghra) ; ^tC^ « baje »
(bajjai, vadyate) ; « bat^ » (varta) ; * ^as^ » (*pissa, parsva) ;
^t\*? « bamun » (bamhana, brahmana) ; "^t^ « bhar^ » (bhayda, bhanda) ;
srf^sr « magge » ^z^X'^ (maggei, ^maggei = margayati) ; * nla:^^,
mSs§t » (mansa, mansa) ; « lasgl * (^lassa, lasya) ; « sath^ » ?67*/J>^,
company (sattha, sartha) ; « has^ » (hassa, hasya) ; etc.
Occurrence of OIA. « a »<MIA. «a» as «a», after loss of a consonant,
is also found in OB. : e.g., « kapasa (Carya 50 : karpasa), bakharia- (Carya
37 : vyakhyana) ; ambada (SarvS-uanda : ararata) », etc. In NB. we have
« a » : « kapas^ » , ^\^^ « bakhan^ », « am^tra ».
•41
S2i
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER III
161. In connection with a nasal, Bengali « a » in initial syllables,
when followed by « 5 » in the next syllable, has a tendency to be advanced
from its ordinary back value of [a] to a frontal [a], which becomes a frank
[ae] or [§], in both standard and dialectal Bengali. The colloquial of
Calcutta is specially noticeable for this. Rt/., ^\^^ [kakal, kaekal] sj)inal
cord, waist (kagkala); ft^^l [katal, ksetal] jaci fruU (kmtkh) ; ^t^rtl^
[ka/ari, klljari] (kansya-karika) ; for *&*t^ * taka < tika > [taka,
tseka] rupee (taijka-) : cf. South-eastern Bengali cOT^rt « teya > for [tseka] ;
I'W^ [pakal, piekal] ajis/i (pagk^la) ; [baka, bseka] (bagka, vakra) ;
^*t^ [bfiata, bfiseta] a ball (^bhanta-) ; [Jakha, /alkha] conch-bracelet
(sagkha-) ; Jft^t^ [jagat, jaerjat] friend (sagga-) ; etc., etc. This change of
[a] to [se] is frequently indicated in spelling by C « -e- » or Jl « -ya » (c^^l,
« bika, byaka »).
162. The difference in quality between « a > and « a », which was
existent from Late OIA. (as [a, d] and [a:]), and became further prominent
in MB., when « a » = [a, d] became [o], has been instrumental in keeping
« & » and « a » distinct from each other in Bengali ; and this distinction of
« a » from « a » by quality enables us to form some idea of the « a, a »
in relation to each other in OB. But in the case of the « i » and « u »
vowels, there has never been any difference — at any rate, any remarkable
difference — ^between the qualities of their long and short forms. Length
of vowels early became immaterial in Bengali, so that a historically long
or short syllable no longer could retain its proper spelling when scribes
were careless in their writing. In addition to these root causes, there
was the influence of Sanskrit orthography in unsettling the proper indication
of length in writing. Bengali spelling thus from OB, times has been
most unsatisfactory in the matter of length for « i » and « u » , and is
not at all a sure guide to the early pronunciation. For the expected ^^'ftlS
« dithi » (ditthi, dfsti), < cln^ » (cihna), « nithur^ » (nisthura),
*^ « tin* (tinni, tri-), « jujhe» (yudhyati), *^U«ut&re» (uttarati),
« dukh^ » (dukkha, duhkha) etc., we find fiffi « dithi » , f^;? « cin »,
fJ?^ «nlthur^», « tin » , ^ « jujhe », J « ut&re » . Words
like « ista » > O « ^7 It », « bhitti » > « bhit », « suska- » >
OIA. AND MIA. a, I' IN INITIAL SYLLABLES 323
« sukha etc., are not written with the long vowel — unlike the case of
original « a » under similar cireumstances, for which we have normally
« a » in Bengali — because quantity does not matter at all in Bengali speech,
and because the Sanskrit prototypes on which the spelling is mainly
modelled have short vowels ; cf. « dighi » = (dirghika), =^^1 « suta »
(sutra-), where the long vowels are on the model of the Sanskrit prototypes.
Maithill, A wad hi, HindostanT and Gujarat I, etc. are much more careful,
and this carefulness is due to the very nature of their phonetic character in
which length of vowels is an important thing.
Old spellings in M^>S., and modern spelling and pronunciation both
may ignore vowel length for « i » and « u » , but it may be surmised that
in OB., and in Mag. Ap., the line of development of « i » « u » (as well as
of « e, o ») was similar, as in the ease of <t a, a » : i.e., long « I, u » occurred
in the oldest Bengali before a simplified consonant group, although there
was weakening of « I, u » to « i, u » through absence of stress.
In MB. and NB., the rules of Vowel Harmony modified [i,u] sounds
to [e, o] : this is discussed later. There is a certain amount of interchange
of [i, u] in root (i,e., initial) syllables in some ^/^s^ and . forms, for
which see below, under * Origin of the NB. Vowels : [i] , [u].'
(3) Initial « i-, \- », and * -i- » in Initial Syllables.
163. (i) OIA. and MIA. * i, I> in initial syllables, followed by one
consonant, retained its quality in Bengali. Following the Bengali habit
of length, monosyllables have the vowel long, and polysyllables short. The
quantity is ignored in writing.
f^, #t ^ ki, ki » (kirn, kim) ; « kine » (klnai', krinati ) ;
« kil^ » fisticuff (kila) ; J^^t « kira » (kf ta-) ; * khln^ » (kslna) ; ^
« khir^ > (ksira) ; M l^. f^H « g\mk, giwa > (griva ) ; * gile » (gilati);
% ft « gin » (ghia, ghrta) ; f^ji^^ ^ ghin^ » (ghiija, ghrna) ; fm\ « etna*-
Chinese (cina-) ; OB. f^^tH^ * cirayita » (Sarvananda), NB. f^^ll^, fe^^
« cirata, cireta » (kirata-tikta-) ; ^ « ji =► (jiva) ; ft « jhl » (dhita, duhita) ;
MB. f^^>ft, +T^^vlt « tiari > tiuri » oven {ivitk three lumps for the pot)
(trivf t-ika) ; Xf^^p\ « tiyas^ * (trsa + pipasa) ; « thir^ » (sthira) ;
324
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER III
CS^fl < tiraeha, ter^eha » (^tiraeeh-, tiryac-) ; *f^^^, CTf^tt « *di&tl,
deuti » (dipa-varttika) ; fwM^tt > C«m*mtl, a»t^t^ « dijasalai, dejas(&)lai,
des^lai > (dipa-salaka-, ^-Salakika) ; CJitJii^ **dia-rakhua > der?lkho> (dlpa-
raksa-); ]Vf?t^, * diyali, deali> (dlpavall-) ; fw^ * dil& » (OIA.
dita-) ; MB. m^^myhr^ > (nikata) ; fi^^t^l * nirala » (niralaya-); fi^ < nisi »
(*nislha, nisitha) ; fi?^ « nisnti » (nisupta-); *f?l?t^, C^?^1^ <*nihai, nehai »
anvii (*nidhapika) ; f^W\Z^, c^^tC^ « *nihare, nebare » (nibhalayati) ; MB.
f^^l *piya* (priya-); Tmp\ <pnal^* (priyala) ; f^twt, C^^tt, ^ft
* piyarl, peyarT, pyarl » (priya-karika) ; *fr^flt, f*!^^ « *pi&]i, piuli »
(pita-la-) ; t f^H « ])iye > (pibati) ; ^f^^% f^f^t « *piusl, pisi > (pitf-
svasrika) ; f^^^ * pise » (^pisati, pinasti) ; * pindhe, pidhe »
(apinaddha-) ; MB. Ufk * bihi » (vidhi) ; ff^l c bira » joac/t^i^, m7 (vita-) ;
t « sir^ » (siras) ; f»r^ « sithan^ * from *?^^^rt^T « ^sir^-thana > Aead of
the led (siras-sthana) ; ^f»f^, ff^^, fi(^^ < ^sih4ra, si(y)ar^ » (sikhara) ;
f»M * sil^ > (sila) ; f»f5[t^ * siyal^ > (siala, Sf gala) ; < slye » (sivati) :
^"f^ ^ siti » (slmantika) ; f^^, f^^it^T * bile, hilan > (abhi Vll» abhi Vlag ?),
see p. 813 ; %1 « hiya » (hiaa-, brdaya-) ; etc.
(ii) « i » of MIA. followed by two consonants < « i, i, f =► in OIA.
t§ * it^, It^ » (*inta-, *intha-, itt(h)a-=ista-ka) ; MB. < ichila »
(icchita.ila) ; « Idur^ > (indura) ; ^•^ft^j, ^"cjf^l ^ idara, idera *
2cell (indrdgara-) ; * 1%$^, (M^ <c ^kineua, keeo > eartA-morm (cf .
kificu-la-ka) ; ^ cikan^ » /?2<?, ^>^/?2 (eikvana) ; ^^ < cin^ » (cihna) ;
ft^T * cil^ » (cilia) ; ^flFt^T, cSFf^T * *eieana, cgeana > (*cicca-, ^einca, cf .
clt-kara) ; « ehit^ » t'/^///^^ (ksipta + eitra) ; f|c^ « chire > ^^'ar*
(chindati) ; f^^ « jibb^ * (jibbha, jibva) ; §1^, ft^ * dhit(h)?t > (Whittha,
dhrsta) ; * tin > (tinrii, trini) ; MB. itf^, vfj^^ * tikh^, tikkhi »
(tiksna-) ; f^Jf * tis^ » in f f^^i « chMtis^t » etc. (tririsat), restricted by the sts,
f%f^«t « tiris^ » ; MB. frtS * ditbi » (ditthi, dfSti) ; MB. ft^ * dlgh&l^ »
(dirgha-la) ; f^^p\ < nikas^ » (niskasa) ; « nithur^ » (nistbura) ; MB.
fH^v5 « nibar- >pm/i (nir-vrt) ; fir^tf * nibay > (nirvapayati) ; f^R « nim^l »
(nimba) : MB. « nicbani » (nirmanchanika) ; f^iif^ * niday^l » (nirdaya) ;
MB.f5?«fm « nisas^ » (nihsvasa) ; MB. I^T^Tt^ * nisan& » ';/;wszc (nihsvana) ;
* PAJt^^ » (pinjati) ; * piehlil^ » (pieehala) ; MB. f^vg^i «"pig&l^ »
OIA. AND MIA. ai, tj' IN INITIAL SYLLABLES 325
(piggala) ; - ^pipalgt, pipul^ > (pippali) ; « pith?t * (pittha,
Pfstha); <pit}ia» ca^^e (pistaka) ; f^l^^ « pital^ > (pittala);
*bibhal^» (bibbhala, vihvala) ; f^f1 < bicha » (vraca^, cf. vfseika) ;
f^fW * biehana » (vicehadana-) ; f^^rH < bit^la > uplj/, vicious {rlest
vitth^h- polMuff) ; f^^|f% * binati (vinnattia, vijfiaptika) ; * bhikh^l *
(bhiksa); ^ <rbhin^» (bhinna) ; f^^ ^ bhil^ » (bhilla-) ; * bhlm^-
rul^ » for *T>^^c^ ^bbig-rul^ > hornet (bbrgga-rola) ; * mise * (misriyate);
f5P*ftl misae » (misrapayati) ; t[T^, « rlsg » (risyati) ; *f^5?^, c^sfg
* *Iigg^t§„ legg^t^ > (ligcra-patta) ; * sika » (sikya-) j ft^l, fif§l
* sit(h)a » /m, r/r^^.^ (sista-) ; fiT\^ * sMur^ > (sindura) ; * sidha »
(siddha-) ; * l.ig > (liiggu) ; tt^, ct^t^ * hltal^, hetal^ » (hintala) ;
etc., etc.
(4) « u, u » Initial, and in Initial Syllables,
164. (i) « u, u > followed by one consonant remain « u » in NB.,
except where altered to « 5 » by Vowel Harmony. The NB. « u » is long in
monosyllables, ^nt^ * upas^ » sh. (upavasa) ; MB. ^^ii « ue » (udeti) ;
§f5?J[ « unis^ » (una-vinsa); OB., MB, ^^tft * uari » adorned palace or
pavilion, as in ^-^ft, ^^W^ bar^.u5rr, barwarl » fe^siivity in a
pavilion erected hy public uthseription : of. ^^f\ ov Q^^, place-^natiie in
Dacca district {\ip2Lk^v2i, -ika) ; « urut^, urat^ » (*uru-vant-
— uru: cf, urv-asthl-vaut- t/ii(//i and knee \ or? ViX\x-^%\k)\ thigh^hone)
tt^^ f C5 ^ kiieiya, kuce » a fish, like the eel (kucika) ; « kul^ »
(kuk) MB. C^m, C*Tft^ * kuwara, kowar^, koil^ar^t » (kumSra) ;
< kua » (kupa-) ; ^W, « khur^ » (ksura) ; ^ « gu (= gu) »
(gutha); ^^1 «gua» (guvaka); gc^, « euse » cu^e, cose » (cusati) :
t^F * cbfie » (suci) ; clt'Sf « ehae, chSy > (MIA. ehuvai = spfsati) ; ^
* jua » (dyuta.) ; ^t, « jui » (yntbika) ; ^^1 ^ tula » e(?2f^<?7/ (tula-);
*tu:.^, tfl:^* (tusa) ; ^f^^ * turit^ » (^uranta: -^tvar-ant-) ;
^ dhua * (dhruva-) ; ^ « dhune » (dhunai, dhunoti) ; « pui »
(putika); ^ * pure » btirm (putati); *|^t^ « puranS » (pmatana-) ; ^
« pure » (piirayati) ; ^ * phnre » (spbutati) ; bhukh^ » (bubhuksa) ;
326
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER III
ft < bhfti » (bhumi) ; c^sft < bhoma > < *bhuma » (as iu Early Assamese)
ejfelasA (%huva, *bhruva, bhru) ; C®tmft * bhujali, bhojali » (bhuja-
pala-) ; « mu » (mukha) ; ^^1 « mula » (mula-) ; « sua » ^^«^fn7
(suka-) ; « sune » (sunai, srnoti) ; ^ su&r^ (sukara, su-); etc., etc.
(li) OIA. « u, u » before two consonants = MIA. « u » > Bengali
« u, u» : « uk^ » (ulka) ; «ukhare » (ukkhadei, utkhatayati) ;
« ug&re » (udgarayati) ; ^ « ftca » (*unea, ucea-) ; ^Srt^ « ujay » (ud-yati) ;
« "jar^ » t reeless, icaste (?iid-jhata) ; « uthe » (ut-stha-) ; « ure »
(udijei, uddayate = uddiyate); t^^f * ud^ » (udra) ; « uth&l^ » overflow
(utsthala) ; « un^ » (urna) j ^t^, * unan(l) > oven (^usnapanika) ;
« um4r?l » (unmarda) ; ^1 « ubha » (ubbha-, urdhva-) ; « umay »
shunmers (usmayate) ; « ul§,se » (ullasati) ; ^^v5l « kuk(u)ra »
(kukkuta-) ; <ickumar§t» (kumbha-kara) ; * kumlr^* (kumbhira) ;
^fe « kuci » bristle, hard broom (kureiku); « kueki » (kune-);
« kum^tra » (kusm&nda) ; ^ * kiid^ » aflotver (kuuda) ; ^ « kude »
(kurdati) j < kuja » (kubja-) ; ^1 « khura » (khulla = ksudra + tata) ;
^ « khud » broken iice (ksiidra) j ^^fST « giiehana » arranged (guceha-) ;
^^tfe « guj^rat^ » (gurjara-tra, Beng. -t- < rastra) ; g^sf « cume »
(cumbati) ; « cuk^l > mistake, fall (cukka, cyut-kf ) : « eun^ ^
(curna) ; ^1 « jhuna » o/rZ, dried-up coco-mit (? jurna-) ; « ehutar§t »
(*sutra-kara=sutra-dhara) ; OB. p (Carva 9) > ^v© « cliudha > chnt?l »
impiirity, the touch of which is pollution (? ksubdha : infl. of -v/ehu- touch) ;
W^t * jujhe » (yudhyate) ; ^§ « tute » (trufcyati) ; « dumur^ »
(udumbara) ; ^(.^ « dube » ^iVzyi'* {de'sl budd.ai) ; « (Jhure » sf^Z**
dhundhai) ; ^f^ « tumi » (MIA. tnmhe) ; « tutija, tute»
(tuttha-) ; ^"f^?1, €vi( « dudiya, dude » quarrelsome (*dunda-, dvandva-) ; ^^f
« dudh^ » (dugdha) ; ^;^\ « dhut(h)ura » (dhustura-) ; « pur^ »
(pundra); OB. C'ttf^ « pukhur(i), pokhiri > (puskarini,
puskirini in the ' Divy^vadana ') ; « puehe » (pucchai, prcchati) ; ^
« put^ » (putra) ; MB. ^^{^ « punima » (purnima) ; « pub^ » (purva) ;
« phute » iwr5/« (spbutyate) ; « bujhe » (budhyati) ; ^ * bura »
(buddha-, vfddha) ; \^ < budgi » (*bundu, bindu) ; « mug^ » (mudga) ;
M B. ^Jfft * mud&n » ring (mudra) ; ^^1 « mutha » (musta-) ; MB.
MIA. 'E, E, O, IN INITIAL SYLLABLES
an
* rutha » (rusta-) ; « sukha » (suska-) ; « sur^ » (suntja) ;
§uth^ » (sunthi) ; MB. ^ ^ snn^ » (Sunya) ; etc., etc.
01 A. « i, u, u * occurred as « e, 6 » in MIA., before two consonants :
the reason for this lowerins: of the hio^h vowels of 01 A. is not clear
(see Pisehel, ' Gramm. der Prakrit-sprachen, §§ liO, 122, 1£5). NIA.
retains the <c e, 5 » vowels in some words inherited from MIA. In Bengali,
instances are C^^ « bel^ » (bella, bilva) ; C^^W « hetha » (ettha, ittha) ; OB.
C^*^ « benU » (Carya 33: = bSti ?) (veiit^, for *vinta = vrnta) ; C^t^
* k§kh^ » ("^kogkha : ef . kuksi) ; OH^I « gocha » (goccha, for guccha =
*gfp-sa) ; ctff * chSda » (*ehenda-, chidr.i) ; « t^tnl » (tentali, tintitjl
desJ) ; (M^ < mor^ » head of street, (?) GRt^ « mor§,lj)t » head-wan, chief
(see p. 320) (monda, munda) ; MB. C^t^j « potha » ^oo/l' (potthaa,
pustaka); OB. C*ttf^f^ « pokhiri » (*p6kkhira-, puskara-) ; MB.
« mola» (molla, mulya) ; cf. also MB. C^^ « kher^ » (khedda = *khi4da,
kiddia=krlda) ; OB. ^^t^1 « tabola » (tambolla : tambula).
(5) MIA. « e, e ; o, 6 »,
165, MIA. « e, e » and « o, 6 » < OIA. « e, 5i, ay » and « o, an, av »,
remain in Bengali, except where they are modified in post-Bengali times by
Umlaut or Vowel-Harmony. From Early Middle Bengali times, it would
seem that « e » in initial syllables, with a low position, became the open « e»
= [s] ; this occurs in New Bengali as [s] or as [se] . It is possible that
« o » similarly tended to become the open « o » = [o], but in New Bengali
this is not a noticeable feature, although in the Bengali of the extreme
West this broad pronunciation is at limes heard.
(i) OIA. «e» before one consonant > MIA. «e» > Bengali « e »
[e, s, se] : e,g., ifl « e » this (ea, etad) ; til^^ « egar5. » (Late MIA. « egaraha »,
for « earaha » = OIA. « ekadasa » : « e^^a » a Late MIA. stu, from « eka »)
J <£15|fif « ej(w)&rl » (eka-jvara-) ; C^^at^ « keyari » Serf (kedarika) ;
C^, « keu < keho » (*kevo, *kevi, ^ke'pi = kah api) ; « kheya »
ferry (ksepa-) ; C^t « khei » thread wound round (ksepa) ; « khel^ »
(khela) ; Co^ « cela » [cfsela] (celaka) ; « ceri » (cetika) ; « che »
(cheda) ; ckvo, « chgce, sece > (^seneayati, secayati) ; MB. C^f * de »
328
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER III
(deha, deva); CW«^ « deor » [daeor] (devara) ; MB. Cf^ « deya » ^ky^ cloud
(deva-) ; CW^f^ > Cf^^ « dewaliya > deule ^pauper (deva-kulika-) ; MB.
Cf^^l « dehara » (deva-grha-) ; « dey » (^deti = dati, dadati); ■^C^rsnft
> C«f^^ « *dewari > deuri » (cf. Skt. dehali) ; MB. OTtf^iRt * deyasini »
priestess (deva-vasini) ; C*(^>(?tt * neha> nei » (sneha) ; CT^^I « neueha <
*newlicha » (nepathya-) ; c*{5l « peea » (pecaka) ; C'l'?! « pSra » (petaka) ;
« bhera » (*mheda-, *meha-da-, mesa-) ; CS^\ « bhela » (bhelaka) ; MB.
C^? « reha » (rekha) ; ct^^ « heyali » rzVW/^ (hemalika) ; ^ft « sSoti »
Jlower (sevanti) ; etc., etc.
(ii) 01 A. « e » before two consonants > MIA. « e » before two
consonants > Old Betio^ali <e» before single consonant = NB. «e»;
[e, s, 3e]. Also MIA. formations, sts, or desl^ or otherwise, with « e »
before two consonants.
Examples : « ek^ » (MIA. 3^5. ekka) ; cil^ « et& » (MIA.
ettia-); iSil^ « ebe » (MIA. emba-) ; c£)^ri, C^^ll « (h)etba * (MIA.
ettha-) ; C^\5 « khet^ » (ksetra) ; MB. C^vSjl «gerua» (MIA. '^gendii-) ;
C^l « jetha » (jyestha-tata) ; (?fC^ * dekbe » (dekkhai, df ks-) ; C^^^S « ner^ » .
(rf^s? lenda); C^T'® « net^t » /we c^o/A (netra); MB. C^PT « pem^ » (pemma,
preman); C*f^«T>C^C^ « pele, phele » ca^/s, throws down (pellai, prerayati) ;
« pet^ > (desi petta) ; « beta » son ( betta- < ? vetra- : of. vansa
family) ; C^n© « beb^ » (vetra) ; « bera » (vedha, veddha, vettha,
vesta-) ; C*t^, C*tW « ^ej^ » (sej ja, sayya) ; Ct^ « sel^ * (sella, salya) ;
« §eth^ » (setthi, sresthin) ; cfg « h§t^ » (hettha = ? ^dhistat ;
Sanskritisation, in the ^ Maha-vastu/ hesta) ; etc.
(iii) OIA. * ai =^ > MIA. « e, e » > Old Bengali « e » > NB. « e »
[e, s, se] ; also OIA. « -ay- » > MIA. « e, e » > Bengali « e » . C^?l^^
« gerua » (*gairuka) ; MB. « cewana » (eaitanya) ; C\5 «te» in
compounds (tray-) ; C^cf « tel^ » (tella, taila) ; MB. « beja » (vaidya) ;
C^^, C^t^ * behai, beyai » (vaivahika) : c^^PlI « seyala > (saivala-) ^etc.
DesJ words like CU?r * dher^ » ?;2M6'A (cf. MIA. desi daharl, Beng.
4ahar^ deep), CI? ^ « dhekl » husking machine, « dh§r§,s^ > a vegetable^
' ^fl^/y'^ fingers^'' « dhgri » aw ear-ornament , « dhekar^ » belching,
C5^1 « dheka » a etc., are of uncertain origin.
MIA. ' 0, O ' IN INITIAL SYLLABLES 329
(6) MIA. -5, o».
166, (i) 01 A « 0 » before one consonant remains in Bengali i e.g,^
MB. C^^, < koila, kuila » (kokila-) ; « kol§l » (kroda) ; C^«l
<c kon^ » (kona) ; C^t^t * koea > (kosa-) ; C^^srf^ « goala » (gopala-) ;
« goru » (go-rupa) ; C^^t^ « gosli » (gosvamin) ; c^t^ <c ghora » (ghota-,
; C^l, (Til * jo » opporlnniti/y chalice (yoga) ; (Tltft^ « joay » S7ij)plied
(yogayate); C^t^ « tore » (trotayati) ; C^tC^ « tole » (tolayati) ; C^^l
« thora* (stoka + -da-) ; C^ff^l «dola » (dola-) ; Jcft^l « pola» (p5ta-Ia-) ;
^ pos^ » (posa) ; CW\^ « phora » (sphota-) ; MB. (TTI « mo » (moha) ; C^Tf^l
« moa > (modaka-) ; CTt^l « moea > plautairi (moca in Pali : rf5«7) ; cfl <: rS »
(roman^ lorn an) ; C^t^ « rdy » (ropayati) ; MB. C^ft^i^ « sohe » (sobhate) ;
CTt^ « sol& * (sodasa) ; C^fsl « fcQta » (sonta-, srotas) ; etc.
(ii) OIA. « 0 » before two consonants > MIA. « o » before two
consonants > Bengali « o » : e./7., MB. « oth^» (ottha, ostha) ; (TFtSt^
« kotal^ » (kotta-pala. kostha-pala) ; C^t^ < k5l^ » iT^^, non- Aryan people
(MIA. kolla) ; C^t^l * khOpa » (MIA. khompa- < ?) ; C^v5 < ggr^ *
fie^hy navel ; a non-Aryan tribe (MIA. dehi gonda) ; « g<^th^ *
(gostha) ; (fH^ « gotat » (gotra) ; « ghol^ (MIA. ghoUa ==
ghurna- ? ) ; C^^- « gOph^ » (*g6mpba, gumpha) ; C^fW « gopha »
cai?^ (*goppha-, gumpha < ? ) ; C^t® « jot^ * (yoktra) j C^^^ « jog^ra »
shellfish (MIA. "^joijga-da-, de'si, as in OB,); C^Wf^ « j6na-ki» moon^
lights as in Assamese, = fire-fiy in Bengali (jonha-, jyotsna) ; C^l^
« topar^ » helmet, hridegroom^s tinsel croivn (MIA. "^toppa-ra- : dehi) ; (75t^
« dom^ » (domba) ; Oit^ < dh5l^ » ^/-mz/z (MIA. dholla- : desi) ; C^^ifl, C*it^
> 'J^t « potha, potbi > puthi » (potthaa < *postaka, Skt. pustaka,
pustika) ; C^t^ « bora » a snake (bodfa-) ; « jot^ » (yotra) ; (T?rt«f
« lodh^ » (lodhra) ; etc.
(iii) OIxA. « au-_, av-, av-, uv- » before single and double consonants;
also OIA. groups « -am-, -up-», etc.> <-av-, uv- »,> Late jVIIA. * o-, uv- »
before single consonant, « o » before two consonants > Bengali « o » ; ^j^.,
« ojba » (ojjba, uvajjbaa, upadhyaya) ; « or(b)^n^ » (oddbana,
*6veddlhana, ava-vestana) ; « os^ » ^/(?;r (*ossa, avasya) ; «fv5?(1, ^f^^l
* oriya > uriya » (odfjiya-, audrlya-) ; C^t5, C^t5 « kSc^l, koc^ » a iYor/>i
42
330
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER 111
Bengal tribe (*kawoca: c£. Sanskritisations kuvaca^ kamboja) ; C^^l «g<5ra »
(gaura-) ; C5t^ * corgt » (eaura) ; C^cfj « chOe » (MIA. cbuvai =sprsati-) ;
C^t^ < chSc^ » (*soncaj sauca) ; C^t^ « thoy » (thavei, sthapayati) ; CVft^l
« dona » leaf-cvp (damanaka-) ; C^^l * dhoba » (Y/dhav ; -b-< ?) ; C»fl, C«l1>
C^t^l « no, lo,loha» (lauha-) ; c^f^l « sona » (suvarna-) ; C^t^W * sohag^ »
hishauds^ love (saubbagya) ; MB, C^t^, «J^>^^^ * lon^, lun^, nun^ (lavana) » ;
C'Tl, C^t « mo, to » (mama, tava) ; C^tl < soy » (siivai, svapiti) ; C^l « poa »
i (pavaa, *pabag.a, pada-ka) ; etc., etc.
Cases of interchange between « i » and « G » and betvveen « u » and
« 5 » , which characterise Bengali phonology, are treated later, under Vowel
Harmony.
[Ill] Vowels in the Interior of AVords.
(1) Vowels not in Contact in MIx\.
167. Elision of vowels in the middle of words through absence of
stress occurs sporadically vi the earlier forms of lA. Examples have been
adduced at p. 278. Elision of whole syllables by haplology sometimes cccur
in OIA.: e,g, Vedie « tuvira(va)van, ii(adb)adhvai, ma(dhu)-dugdha,
sirsa-(sa)kti », etc. (Cf. Macdonell, ' Vedic Grammar for Students,^ p. 10.)
But a regular tendency to drop unstressed vowels in the interior of words
manifested itself only as late as the 15th century in Bengali, as we have seen
before (pp. 295 flf.). It would be seen that the preference wliieh Bengali
has developed for words of two syllables, or morae, is responsible for the loss
of a medial vowel : this loss commonly takes place when a primitive word
(primitive so far as Bengali is concerned) is extended by the addition of an
« -a» or « -I » affix. This is the dimetristic or bimorie (dvi-rnatrika) principle
operating on length in Bengali words (see ' Bengali Phonetics,' § 55).
Loss of vowels in the interior of words through lack of stress, in MB.
and NB. :—
(i) Loss of OIA., MIA. «-a-»: e,(/., <5rf5tc|t^ « ag^lae » guards
(argalayati) ; "^ife^^, ^§f^J! « at^t(r)is^ » (asta-trinsat) ; « or^na »
veil (ava-vestaua-) ; ^f^^^f « unis^» (una-viiisati) ;^?r5l1, « kar^na, kanna*
LOSS OF INTERIOR ' -A- ' IN BENGALI 331
(karana-), and similar eases of the verbal noun in « -ana- », like
* dh&r^na » (dharana-), ^ « k&l?lna, k&lla» coquetry (kalana-), ^-Vf^U
* kad^na, kanna » (krandana), etc., etc. ; « kath^ra . Inmder
(kastha + da-); ^^jft « kal^mi > (kalambika); ^spil « gumf sa» (? grlsma-) ;
CTt^^tt^ « ghorf garl » (ghota-*gaddika) ; fB^^l, ims\ « eit(l.)&l^ » a fish
(cittabala, citra-pbala) ; rmt^I « tSk^-S5¥ » mint (tagka-sala) ; m
* gadba » (gaddaba-, gardabha-) ; 'fiT^'I for -i!^ « pay^-t(r)is^ » (panna-
tifisa, panca4riusat) ; « badh^na » zni/'fr-y;*/? (vardbana-) ; ^If^t « bad^la»
rains (vardala-) ; M\f\ « pasatl » < <= *panf san », ef. Hindi « pansSrl*
(panya-salika) ; «1 < i??F^ * D&run^ < n&runl * (*naha-haranl&, nakha-
haranika) ; S(l?r1 « may^ra - (madaka-) ; Wl « mayna >^ (madana-) ;
*r^Wl <= bhim^-rula, *bhig^-rula > (bhfgga-rola) ; f7?'<!|l « sitba <
*^lwanta- - (simauta-) ; ^^ft « s&k^rl > leavings of meal, refuse
(*sagkatika) ; fi«tt5? « sitban^ » < « *sir?l-than& » ^«a</ 0/ ie-J (siras+
sthana); « bhasur!]l » < « *bhai-svasura > hislamVs elder-lrollier
(bbratr-'sv-asura) ; CT^C^tl « der^kho > < « *dia-rakh-ua » (dlpa-raksa-) ;
sts. « kad^ma » a sweet-meat (kadamba-) ; ^ltf^tf«l « gbat^kali »
profession of a mateh-mater (sts. ghataka f 5la-) ; * ehik^lra » (*chak-
ka4a-, sakata-) ; CT^J^H < megb^la » (megba-la-) ; and in recent polysynthetic
expressions like ' ' * seddiu ^ so many ilnjs, ( = eta dio^), « jaddin »
4-0 long ( = jata din^), ^<(fi( « takh^ni * immediately ( = t^kb&D^I, + i) , etc.
In the aflBx « -tavya- », giving tbe future (and verbal noun) affix of
Bengali, * -ib&- », there is loss of « - a - » : ^f%^ « kariba » (k^ribba,
karilbbl, *karitavya, kartavya) ; fff^ « diba » (*diabba, *ditavya = datavya) ;
6f^^ * caliba » (*caliabba, ealitavya, of. cartavya) ; « niba » (*niabba,
netavya), etc., etc. This loss of course, is of Vowels in Contact (q.v.), and
is pre-Bengali. Also in the past and adjectival affix - -ila - < *^-(i)ta-
+ -ila - : ^f^^ - sutila » (*suttilla, sutta-iUa, supta+ila) ; llf^?) « pakilfc »
(*pakkilla-, pakka-illa, pakva + ila-); etc.
(ii) OIA., MIA. «-a-»: loss in Bengali, in Late MB. and NB.
times: W1 * Skh^rS » (aksa-vata-) ; ^ag^'S- (aggSra-) ;
^t^^ - 'ikbare, ukb^r^iS » from < «khar&6 >
(utkbatavati) ; so ^'iC^, ^^^5 « upare, up^traS » (uti.atayati) ; OB.
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER III
« kahara ^ (kara-grha) ; « kum^ra » (kusmauda-) ; Calcutta Bengali
« gay^la » = C^t^t^W goala » (gopala-) ; ^t^^fe « gab^rat^ » (garbha-
gara-kastha) ; ^5f^ « bag(g)^la » (vaggala-) ; etc. Cf. Standard Colloquial
forms of names, with implication of contempt, like ^t\^l « rakh^tla »
from < rakhal^ » a personal name { :=raksa-pala-), C^f^l * gopla » sis. ( =
gopala-) ; etc. ; and ' C^T'^t^S ^ « kojjacci, » = c^^ ^^C^^ « kotha jaitecha »
xohere are yon going (7^\V^ «kottheke» = C^t^ll <^tfV^l « kotha thakiya »
/>o/w ?r/^^r^ etc., etc.
Unstressed original « -a- > and « -a- > -a- », when flanked before or after,
or on both sides, by a high vowel (preferably an « -i »), are changed to « -u- »
in Late MB, and NB. The intermediate stage of this change was
an [o] sound : [o > o > u]. This is due to Vowel Harmony which
characterises Bengali phonology : see next chapter.
(iii) 01 A., MIA. < -)[-, . Between consonants, the « i » vowel in
the interior of a word in Bengali is reduced to « a as it is found in MB.
and NB. orthography, and it is no 3^ dropped in NB. Possibly in Late MB.
the elision of the « i » vowel characterised the pronunciation ; although the
orthography, by not using the virama in the place of the elided or quiescent « i»,
suggests the presence of, and, it seems, even helped to bring in, an « a = & »
pronunciation. Examples : « kutni > baicd (kufctinl) ; ^^jjsl < khanta »
(khanitra-) j « ghar(§,)ni », OB. « gharini » (grhini) ; FMt, ^TW^
« eldni < cadini » moonlight (*candrinika) ; « parakh^ »,
« par^kha » (parlksa, parlks-) ; « pay^tla, *pahl§, p&hala, pahila »
(pahilla-, pratha+ila-) ; ^ « pare » from MB. « p&rhe, p&hre =
pahire, parihe * (^parihai, paridhlyate) ; ^"^^ « pars! » from MB. '5^ff%%,
*t^% « parisi, p^rasi », OB. « padiyesi » (prativesin) ; <^c*t « p§,r^se »
serves foody OB. « *pariyesai » (parivesayati ; cf. Hindi parosai) ; <1t^
« panta » watery (pani, pSnlya-) ; f^^^^l « plpra » MB. f«t^^1 « plplra
OB. « *pimplrla » (also « pimpada », as in Sarvananda) (cf. Skt. pipllika)
« bar(&)si » (badisa-) ; p^^l « minsa » felloic, man {in co?itempi)
< « ^minisa, munisa cf. « raunis^ » day-labourer (Asokan Prakrit
munisa = mani}sya) ; Tffif^ « s&rsa, s&risa [/ori/a] (sarisava-, sarsapa-) ;
5/.*. form like c*f^^^ « petni > (pretini) ; colloquial forms of names,
ELISION OF ' -I-, -U-, -U- '
333
contemptuous, like I^t"^, « bipne, r^ske, pbatke » etc. (vipina
+ iya, sphatika + iya, rasika-fiya) ; etc., etc.
In NB. compounds also : ft^-^Nsl « cirun-dltl » comh-tooihed
from « cirun! » ( = *cirawani) comb ; « pan-ph&l^ » for 1t^-^^
« panl-phalli > ?^^rt/^^r chednut ; '^^t^-C^^^f « pan-kauri » a water-bird (panI4-
k&uri, cf. kukuda, kukkuta-) ; ^H-Sft^ « pakh-mai^ » a hinUkiller (paksl +
mSra-) ; ^ft^^t^ « gar-an^, gara\Van^ » etc.; C^fw^^
« se-dine » o/« rf^^ > colloquially ' [iidue], etc. Intervocal « -i-
after « -a-, -a », is the most common Bengali vowel to have been dropped in
the development of NB. from MB. The vowel « i » wherever possible under-
went epentbesis in MB. ; and the epenthetic « i » was weakened and dropped
in West Bengali^ altering the quality of the contiguous vowels, although
this epenthetic « i » , full or weakened, still remains in East and North
Bengali. (See under ' Epentbesis.')
There is loss of « -i- » in the formation of the past and adjectives base
-^^ « -il& > of Bengali : and this loss is pre-Bengali : €,g,^ « c&lil& »
("^calilla-, *ca]ia-illa-, calita + ila-) ; ^tf^5=| « auila » (*anilla-, cf. iVrdha-
naagadhi anilliya ; *ania«illa-, anita + ila); ^t?^ « rakhila » (rakkhilla-,
rakkhia-illa-, raksita + ila) ; etc., etc. (See later, * Vowels in Contact.')
(iv) OIA. and MIA. « -u-, -ii- ». Between consonants, this vowel
behaved like « i » in Bengali — although the « a » pronunciation of « -u- >
is not so common. Examples : ^5rf5f§t « agta, aijti » ring (aggustha-) ;
"^^^ « aksi > jiole-hook for gathering fruit (agkusika); ^*5-^<Tt^ « uc-
k&pall > high brotved (term of abuse among women), cf. ^5' « ucu » high ; 'f^fS\
« kukra » (kukkuta-) ; ^^tt, « kurml, kurmi » a caste (kutumbin) ;
it^*? « tliakr§,n » honoured ladij (MIA. ^fchakkurani) ; « babla »
acflc/a (barbula-) ; MB. * nihur- » return (ni-glmt) is found as fJT^^
« nih§,r- » ; similarly, ^Tf^, « bahur-, bah&r- » r(?/57^r« (vi-5-ghut) ; f^^^
« bij(a)Il » from f^^^ « bijull » (vijju>, vidyut-) ; famih'ar forms of names,
like ' '«<?,Ccl1 ' [orlo] for « &tula + ua » , etc. Cases of loss of
* -u- », however, are not so common as that of « i ».
Through epentbesis also « -u- » is lost. In Late MB., and in most
Bengali dialects, this epenthetic « -u- » became « i and fell together with it.
334
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER III
(v) MIA. •« -e- » , from various sources in 01 A., is rarely lost in early
Bengali. It is weakened to « i » in some cases, when followed by « i » in
the next syllable, and to « a ». 01 A, « akhetika » (< ?) = 0B. «aherl »
Jinnier ; MIA. « amhehi, tumhehi » > Bengal ^tf^f, « ami, tum! » ;
OIA. « prativesin » >MIA. «*padivesi »>0B. ^parlavesl » in MS.
= «*pariyesl» > MB. «parisi» > NB. *t^^ «parsi»; OIA. « parivesayati »
> Late MIA. « *pariwesei, -ai » > OB. « "^parij^esai, "^paravesai » > MB,
*^f^^^, « parise, "^parase » > NB. -s^fTC*! « parase » ; OB. « bahenci »>
NB. * b^Ici « a fruit ] OIA. » bahetaka(?)(cf. Pischel, ^ Grammatik der
Pkt.-Spraeben,* §11'J) >MIA. *bahe(Jaa- »>0B. « baheda, bahada* (Sarvft-
nanda) > MB. < biih&ra », NB. «b&yra » [boera] ; OIA. « kara-
vella, *karavella- » > Late MIA. « karavella »>NB. ^C^ffTl, 4^?n « karela,
k&r(a)la » a vegetable ; 5^*. 1^ « slinda »>0B., MB. « "^sandaha » (sandeha) ;
etc. Cf. Bengali ^t^«11 « adhla » « half 2^i^<^€^ Hindustan i « adhela » .
The MIA. form in « -e- » for the causative is lost to Bengali, having
followed the simple verb form : OIA. « calayati >, > Late MIA. « calei* »
>« *calai » > Beng. 5tC^ « eale >; MIA. « kaiapayati = karayati »>Late
MIA. < karavei, karavai »> B. ^^t^ « karae »; etc.
In NB., following the bimorie principle, « -e- » is commonly dropped
in familiar forms of names, like ^Varendra-* > ^^^si « b&rengt » : ^^js^l
« b&rna « Ganesa- » : 5fcf »fl « gansa », « Naresa- » : 5?"^ « narsa », etc,
(vi) MIA. « -0- , -o- », from various sources : loss rare in Bengali.
MIA. « tarab5la » > NB. ^51^ « tamll » (tambulika) \ "^Jt^^ < ^C^ttt
« aluni < *alonI », occasionally « alni » (*alonia, alavanika) ; NB. Vft^l^l
« damra », ef. OB. « damboda » (Sarvananda) (daraya-) \ ^C^t^, "^C^t^^ ^^^1
« parol^ parol^, par(a)la » (patola-) ; etc, Cf. NB. ^t^l < ^rl + C^5l
« gameha < ga + mocha » ioicely lit. hody-wiper.
Like « -a-, -a- > -a- » of Bengali flanked by high vowels, « -o- » in
the interior of a word becomes « -u- » : this is treated under Vowel
Harmony,
168. Interior vowels remain in Bengali when they occur (through
loss of original MIA. or OB. final vowel) in the last syllable of the word
in NB., and are closed by a consonant,
DETENTION OF ' -A- '
335
(i) « -a- » : '^(m « aeal?l » (aneala) ; '^^f*!, ^*t^ * asath^, asath^ »
(asvattha) ; < ujal^ * (ujjvala) ; ft^R * Mdan^ ^ (krandana) ) ; C^^fe,
C^^^ * keat^, keot^ [kieot] » (kevatta, kaivarta) ; ^tt^^ * garal^ > (gaddala) ;
"^Xm « gtiajal?^, ghayOlat * (gbata-la) ; * earan^ » (cavana) ;
^H^^, ^T^5| «ebaan^, chaon^ » (ehadana) ; ^t^f^ « chadan^ » (^ebandana) ;
#5?^^ ;^^S5^ « jian^, jion ^ (jivaua) ; TJt^^? < dbakan^ » (^dbakkanaV^tbag) ;
« tatalc^ » (tapta-la) ; C^f^^, Cff«^ * dear^, dOor^ [dieor] * (dcvara) ;
srfW <cnayaiv^» (nagara) ; f^W ^nij^r^* (nikata) ; Cf?^, C^TQ^, C^^W
« neach-, neoch-, ncucb- > (nOvaccba, uepatbya) ; ^t^^ « pSjar^ »
(panjara) ; f^5^ * pichal^ * (piecba-la) ; f^^q * pitaU^ * (pittala< plta-la) ;
<c pboran<lt » (sphotana) ; tt^ * badbangt » (bandhana) ; ^t^^f < lala^Jji »
(lalasa); »tT^^ < sabal^ » (sarvala) ; « sayar^, sa) er^ » (sagara) ;
^^5? « haaii^, haon^ > being (*ahana<v/as ? bbavaiia?) ; etc., etc.
In a few words, « -a- * occurs as « -i- » : the reason of this change
is not clear : ^\^^\ < ag(g)inri besides ^g(g)angL » (aggana) ;
<3c kachim^ * (^kacchi^a, *kaechiva, ^ka^sipa < kasyapa > kacc-
hapa);Itf^5J ^ chatim^ ^ MB. ^tfe^H, ItlV^^ ^ chatiana, cbam-
yana, » (chattavanna, chattivanna [Vararuci, II, 41] sapta-parna) ;
OB, < pokhira- (puskara, puskarini, also puskirini, as in the ' Divyava-
daiia ') ; ^ pharig(g)^ * grass^/wpj)er (MIA. phadigga, *patigga,
patagga) ; etc.
In the present participle affix -anta- ^ < f ^, tc^ -ita (itJji), ite »
we have a regular change of - -a- - to « -i- - in Bengali : e.g , ^F!^ calit- >
(ealenta, ealanta) ; ^tt^ - jait- - (ja-euta, 3aanta = yant-) ; ^tt^s
<khm-> (khaenta, khaanta, khadant-) ; « invito ^ndch (turanta,
*turenta, *tvaraut-), etc. It is not unlikely that here there is the influence
of the past and future bases in <^ -il-, -ib- The :5rd persons plural affix
< -anti - became in MB. « -ent& , now < -en^ » in NB. :
* k&ren^ » < « karenta » (karanti, kurvanti) : it is a case of Umlaut
in Early MB. Change of * -a- =^ to < -o- through influence of a « -w- *
glide, is found in a few instances given above. This, and cases of change
of < -a- to * -u- from this « -o- through influence of a high vowel
c i, u » in the word, are treated under Vowel Harmony : see later. ^ -a- »
336
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER III
becomes « e » in Bengali through contact with the « y » glide : a few
examples can be found above.
In certain cases, « -a- » occurs as « -a- both before one consonant
and two consonants of MIA. : e.r/,, ^Wt^ « karat^ < *kara-vata » (MIA.
« kara-vatta », OIA. <k kara-patra » ; cf . MarSthl, Gujarat! <c karvat », Hindi,
« karaut, karot ») ; « clirai » ftparrotc, beside WS^^ < « e&rui <
"carai* (cataka, *catakika) ; MB. ^^t^ <c nayan^ » (cavana) ; MB. ^ff^?
« bajan^ » (bayana, vadana) ; J ^^t^ « sayal^ » (sakala) ; MB. 1\5t^,
<Kpara(ha) » (pataba). Instances are not very many.
(ii) « -a- », = MIA. « -a-, » : ^5»t^ « anaj^ » (annajja, annfidya) ;
OB. < acaya «^ (acayya, ac-arya) ; « ujae » (ud-yati) ; c£i5rt^ « egara »
(ekadasa) ; ^^1 « karai, kara » (kataha) ; C^^t^ * keyari » (kedarika) ;
^^It^l < kapas^ » (karpasa) ; C^^^ « gohal^ » (gosala) ; C^W^I « goals »
(gopala-); 5t^^ * caral^ » (can'ala) ; ft^t^l « cir5ta OB. « cirayita »
(kirata-tikta-) ; (?f«fH « de-dhau?l » (deva-dhanya) j Ci?^t « nehai »
(*nidhapika) ; MB. f^^tm * nihale ^ (nibbalayati) ; MB. fi^^t^ « nisan^ »
(nihsvaiia) : MB. fsT-Ttf nisas^t » (nihsvasa) ; « pleall » «
verse composition (pancalika) ; « pay^tthan^ » (pada-sthaoa) ; ^W^?
^>St^ « bag(g)ali » (vaggalika) ; ^Nt^ « bakhan^ j> (vyakhyana) ; C^^t^
<c beral^ » (vidala) ; f^^t^ « bihan^ * (vibhana) ; MB. csf^j^ « mehar^ *
(*mayalaya, mahalaya ; mahagara ?) ; « masan^ > (smasana) ; C^M*^
« joan^ » (yamana, yamaoika) ; ^'t^l^ « sitar^ » (santara) ; f^t^t^ « sithan^ »
(siras-sthana) ; f-t^fq « siyal^ » (% gala) j C^It^^t * sohag^ » (saubhagya) ;
Ct\5t^ « hetal^ » (hintala) j etc., etc.
(lii) OIA « -i-, MB. ^f^f^ « asina » (asvina) ; ^tf^^j
« athir&, athir^ » (asthira) ; « ai's^ » [aijj (amisa) ; ^tf^l^f^
« alipan^ » decorative designs j)aiuted on the floor with rice-paste (alinapana);
"^tft^ * ahir^ » (abhlra) ; ^tf^^ « kahini » ("^kathinika) ; « kumir^ »
(kumbhira) ; MB. ^f«nft^ « kaniyara » (karnikara) ; % ffft^ « gahlr^ »
(gabhira); ^Tff^^, ^f^^j « gab(h)ia » (garbhini) ; 5fk"f <ccfi.llis^»
(catvarinsat) ; 5tR^ « cidini * (^candrinifca) ; v^^T « tls^ » in A"^^ * battis^t »
etc., OB. «batisa» (-trinsat) ; srtHt^ « jamir^ » (jambira) ; v5tff»f,
ifff3[5l « 4^hio?t, dahiti^ », also « d&khingt » (daksina) \ Jftf^s^
^.U-, -tJ-; -E.; -O-' IN MEDIAL SYLLABLES 337
« darim^ \5tf^f dalitn^ » (dSdimba) ; « natin » (^naptrini) ;
'ttft^T « plcll^ » (pracira) ; MB. "^f^^ « paricha » (pratlksaka) ; ^f^,
C^f^, « bahita, bo-, bu.» (vahitra) (see p. 319, bottom) ; MB. ^tf^Rt^
« banijara > (vanijya-kara) ; ?trai> C^C^ « baniya, bene » (vanija-) ; Ttft^
« bahir^ » (bahira, bahir) ; MB. ^^^^ « madira » (mandira) ; ?f^«t * baring »
(harina); ^f?n(t^ « hariyal^ » (harita, harit + ala); etc., etc. Cf. also MB.
^ i > in passive forms, from MIA. « -i- » : ^1%^^ « kariye » (karia'i,
kriyate) ; ^ti^^ * kabiye » (kattiai, krtyate) ; C?ff^^ « dekhie » (dekkhiai,
^drksyatc = dfsyate) ; etc.
^iv) OIA. « -ii-, -u- » : ^t^*it « Skusl » (agkusa-) ; « 5kur?l »
(agkuva) ; t^^^ « Idur^ » (indura) ; MB. "^t^^ « kapura » (karpura) ;
« kukui^ » (kukkura); X ^t^^j C^^^ « khajurgl, kiiejm*^ » (kharjura) ;
« garur^ » (garuda) ; « caudhuri » // title (caturdhurika) ;
« 3&rul^ » (jatula) : MB. ^$1^^ « tarul^ » (tandula) ; MB. Wt^^ « dadur^ »
(dardura) ; Oft^S « dochut^ » /'^^'o piecea of dothy ilJiotl and cJiadar (dvi-
sutra) : MB. "^Tf^ « pahuna » (praghurna) ; f^^if « uiUmr^ » (nisthura) ;
fsf^^ « nisut^ » (nisiipta) ; « b&huri » (vadhuti) ; « badbuli »
(bandhuka-) ; « bhaSur?l » (bhratr + svasura) ; sff^^ « manus^t »
(manusya) ; 5(^ft « mauri » < 3^^^ ^ mahurl » (madburika) ; MB. "^X^
« ratul^ » (^raktula) ; lt^< « raut^ » (raja-piitra) ; »tt^^ « sasuri *
(§vasru-f tl-) ; fif^^f « sldur^ » (sindura) ; MB. «c sSpura » (samputa-) ;
fi^^ « hig(g)ul^ » (higgula) ; C^^^ <c neur^ » (nupura) ; etc.
(v) MIA. « -e- »j from various sources in OIA. (« e, ai » etc.) : cil^
<-er^ » genifdre affix (kera<MIx\. ds, %aira<karya) ; ^5^^, 'SIICU^ « adhel^,
adhel^ » plentiful (*a4dha-ella, adhja + ila) ; OB. « aherl » (akhetika) ;
MB. ^cW*t « udes^ » (uddesa) ; OB. « uekh- » MB. s^?. * upekhS, »
(upeksa); ^«f*f « ganes^ » ; OB. « sabeana » (Carya -26 : samvedana); etc.
(vi) MIA « -o- from various sources in OIA. « -o- », occurs as « -u- »
through Vowel Harmony. %^^t^ « Skor^ » (agkot[h]a) ; < *?Pl«ltf^
« k4nui < *k§,noui » (kaphoni) ; MB. ^ICfT^ « amola », NB. ^^^t « amul& »
(amolla^ amulya) ^ MB. « biehoha » (viksobha) ; MB. fi^r^T^ « bilola »
(hillola); OB. « kincohi » (Sarvftnanda), NB. c#gt, « keoui, k?co »
Garth-worm (cf. kifieulifca) ; %^t^l « sajou » armour (-amyoga-) ; etc.
4:3
338
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER III
(2) Vowels in Contact.
169. OIA,, at least ia prose, did not allow hiatus, and vowel groups
except the diphthongs « ai, au » were unknown to it. In MIA. of the
Transitional, Second and Third periods, with the loss of the single intervocal
stops, OIA. separated vowels became MIA. vowels in contact {iidvrHa,
uddkrta or kesa vowels : c£. Pischel, § 1 64), except where a glide sound, « y »
or « v (w) », intervened. In Late MIA. (Apabhransa) and Early NIA.,
there was a threefold treatment of the OFA. vowels brought into entire
or partial contact (i.e. contact with intervening « y, w > glide) by
the elision of stops. (Cf. J. Bloch, ' Langue Marat he,^ § 58 fiE.) The
three kinds of treatment were —
[a] the retention of the original OIA. vowels as separate vowels, by
inserting a euphonic « y » or « w » ;
[b] the udvrtta vowels were turned into diphthongs ;
[c] they were contracted into a single vowel.
[a] Insertion of Euphonic Glides.
170. Insertion of glides was brought in (at least in some dialects like
Ardha-magadhi, to judge from the « ya-sruti » in spelling) at a period
when the spirant pronunciation of the original intervocal stops was dying
out, but was not entirely dead. (See before, pp. 85, 252.) At that stage,
when its memory was not lost^ there was a consciousness in the speaker that
there was a consonant between the vowels, even when it existed no more ;
and the time taken up by the original stop, or its later spirant modification,
in pronouncing the whole word, was now utilised in passing from one vowel
to another. This sort of deliberation, so to say, between the resultant
detached vowels, when the tongue position changed from one vowel to
another, resulted as a matter of course in the production of intermediate
vocalic sounds, or glides. In a rapid passing from one vowel to another,
the glides would not be audible ; but during the Transitional and Second
MIA. stages, the effect of the historical presence of the old intervening
stop was still in force in the IA. speech, and the glides were quite audible
VOCALIC GLIDES IN PLACE OF ELIDED STOPS
339
sounds^ taking the place of the original consonants. The glides were very
short vowels ; and whether they tended to be a front or back sound depended
on the character of the preceding or following original vowels. In this
matter, there was no reference to OTA. and Early MIA. : * -p- > -v- »
becoming « » , and then « -y- » , through influence of preceding vowel ;
also an original « v » : « dlpa- > diva > di^a >NIA. dij^» ; «§vi§ati
> awisai > NIA. a;^ise » (see p. 123). In the Transitional MIA. stage,
and also in the Second MIA. stage, there was undoubtedly some difficulty
felt in representing the glides when they were heard. The letters ? and ^
could not very well be used, since at that time they had spirant values [g, j]
and [v, r>]. The «ya-sruti » in inscriptional Prakrit of the Transitional
MIA. stage is in all likelihood for a spirant pronunciation, which was
traditionally carried on in the later Jaina Ardha-magadhi orthography (see
pp. 83-85). The use of g, ?f on a large scale for the vocalic glides could
come in only in the Second and Late MIA. stages, after the complete passing
away from the Aryan speech of the spirant articulation of stops and
of the original semi- vowels ; for then only could qti ^ he free to represent the
semi-vowel sounds of « y, ❖ » once more. Second MIA. (* Prakrit *
and Apabhransa) orthography normally does not indicate the glides,
although they certainly occurred between the vowels, as can be seen
from NIA. pronunciation and spelling, and phonology. Here the old
tradition was strong in the orthography. The orthography with <f>9
favoured by the Jainas, seems to have some influence. The use of i
for the glide sounds seems to have gained in favour from the
Apabhransa stage, and in the Early NIA. period : but usage
differs in the different NIA. languages; and spelling is a very capricious
thing in the Indian literary lano:uages based on the vernaculars. Typical
examples of NIA. glides can be given from Western Hindi : OIA.
« sukara » > MIA. « sugara, sugara, su(w)ara »> Hindi ^j^, ^ « suwar » ;
OIA. M dlpa- » > MIA. « diba-, dll5a-, di(w/;^)a. > > Hindi fijin » di^ » ;
OIA. « katara » > MIA. «kadara, kaSara, ka(y)ara » > Hindi ^rnjt
« ka;^ar OIA. « rajan, mja- » > MIA. « raja » [ratio], < i-a(5'/w)a » >
Hindi m (m) * ray (raw) » ; OIA. « sucika » > MIA. * *sujiga, suji^
340
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER III
su(t)^(t)* > Hindi %i * sul » = *^ or [surKi:] or [su:ui:] ; OIA.
« bheda » > MIA. « bhe^a, bhe(w)a » > Old Hindi v[^ « bhewa »; etc.
Forms with the glides were also inherited by OB. from the Magadhi
Apabhransa. But as seen from the Early MB. of the ^KK., they were
mostly diphthongised, or contracted, by the beginning or middle of the 14th
century at the latest. This is treated in the next two sections. The glide
sounds in Bengali were, normally, the half close vowels [e, o] ; see pp. 257,
259, 209. They were represented by (y = e), ^ (w = 6) in Old Bengali,
and Pre- Bengali as well; and frequently they were unrepresented in
orthography : e,//.^ OB, « badiya » (SarvAnanda)=.NB. ^tff^), « badiya,
bede > snake-charmer ; « mahaa, mahua » (ibid.) for *niahawa, mahuwa »
= NB. « mS-hua » (madhuka-) ; Pt^^ « piwai » (Carya 6), of. MB.
* piye » (piai, pibati) j « avanagavanS » (Carya 7 : agamana-gamana-) ;
« niyaddi (Carya 5), iiiadi (Carya 7) » , MB. « lA^hxh, > (niada,
nikata) ; « dewi (= deyi?) » riming with « hoi (= hdwl, hoyi) » (Carya
17) ; « chewa, bhewa » (CaryS 45) (ehea, bhea= eheda bheda) ; etc. The
use of ^ for the « » glide, however, quickly became obsolete in
Bengali writing. ^ was used for the sound of « b » , initially or in the
interior of words ; ^ was used for « j » ; and « y » was left free for one
of the glide sounds. Instead of devising a new letter exclusively for the
« ^ * glide, as Assamese, and Maithill, and Kaithi, did (see p. 226),
Middle Bengali either left unnoticed the « w » glide, the same thing thai
Oriya did, or employed the letter ^ « y ». It seems that a confusion
between ^ and ^ as letters for the intervocal « y, w » glides occurred in
OB. orthography itself : < ave§! » (Carya ;33), for instance, stands for
« ^ayisi » whence MB. NB. '^rt^fif, « aisi, a?i (= -si) » (avisami) :
cf. the old Tibetan transcription « ayisa » (p. 12.*3, ante^. The use of
the letter ^ = ?i « y » for the « w » glide, as much as for the proper « y
IS of extremely common occurrence in MB. and NB. ; eg. 'Slt^^^ 'STf^
« aj'&rft, a&rii = *aw&r4 » , NJ, "srf^ « ar^ » , cf. Assamese « aru < '**'5urijt »
(avara, apara); MB. « t§ruy§,r& = t§.ru\vara » (SKK. : =taru-vara) ;
3ff^=>rf5[^ <c sathuya, sathua = pathuwa » companion^ NB. OT^, X
It setho, sajtha » (satha -f -ua ; s5rtha-) ; ^ = ^ « dhuj^a, dhua =
THE LETTERS % ^, ? FOR THE INTERVOCAL GLIDE 341
dhuwa » refrain (dhruva-) ; dt^ = C'^t^ « m5;^a, moa = mo^a » (modaka-) ;
etc. In later Middle Bengali^ the letter >8 « o » was often tised : e.g. 3^1,
^^^1, ^1 « haya, hiia, haoa = ha\Va » heingy been ; ^t^, ^t^^l, ^t^l
« kbaya, thaa, khaoa = khS^^-a » eatttig, eaten, Bengali orthography in
Late MB. and NB. times looked upon with disfavour the juxta position of
vowels, as Sanskrit did not allow it : hence spellings like ^"srl,
^t^l, fell into disfavour with the Pandits, and especially a spelling
like ^<5l where the vowel ^ 4: o » was treated like a consonant, with
the « matra » vowel added to it. The use of ^ (?) on a large scale as a letter
avoiding hiatus was thus fully established in the standard form of Bengali,
from Late MB. times : thu?, ^1, ^% Further ^ ( ? ) had become
a colourless letter, a mere vowel-carrier, in MB, It is thus we have the
establishment of the group ^S^i « oy » for the simple sound of « w » before
« a, e » in NB. In Late MB. and NB,, after iutervocal ^ « -h- » had become
quiescent, a vowel glide came in between two vowels, but the \ continued to
be written ; and the letter ^ ^ h » came to be used occasionally to indicate the
glide sounds in other words, where it historically ought not to come. Occa-
sionally this resulted in a « h- » pronunciation being established : thus, Ben-
gali ^t^t^ « bahanna », also pronounced < baanna » (dvapaileasat), but Oriya
« bab&nSi Maithill, W. Hindi, GujaratI « bawan Marathi « bavanna »,
Panjabi < bawafgah » ; f^^, C^t « Bihula, Behula », for « Bi(w/y>ul5 >
=: Skt. « Vipula », the name of the heroine of the Manasa legend*
In ordinary NB, pronunciation, there is not much of a deliberation,
or slow enunciation, and the « y, w » glide is not ordinarily an audible
sound, except between low vowels (e, o, a). There has been thus a
tendency towards diphthongisation and contraction, — words h*ke MB. f*f^
« si-y-u-l& » being reduced to [jial, Jial], and Q^^, STt^ [/e:I, and Tt5^,
5rt^?f « sa-j^-a-ra, sa-^V-^l-^§> » [/ag^ro, jaooro] to '^[IXM [Jaer, Jaer] or to [Jaor,
/aor], and * su-w-lb-ra * f/uooiD] to c^t^ [Juor, /o;r], etc.
(NB. may be said, however, to prefer the « y * = [§] glide). Thus vowels
which were detached from each other in OB., and in Early MB., by the
glide sounds representing the old stops of OIA., have become vowels in
contact in Late MB., suffering from loss of glide, and have become
342
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER III
diphthongs in NB. Only in final syllables, in final positions in some archaic
fortes, and in the altered quality of the connected vowels (as well as in
slow and deliberate pronunciation), that traces of the Late MIA. glides are
found in Bengali. The original OIA. « -v- » has fallen together with the
glides, frequently altering its character to ^f* from « ^ », as noted before.
(i) « » glide in Bengali :
C^^ft * kej^arl » (kedarika) ; « keya > (ketaka-), cf . c^^l « ke8ra»,
also in Hindi, and in Maratbl ; « kheya » (ksepa-) ; MB.
* bi^&ll NB. Standard Coll. * biull < ^bioll, *bi&li » cleaned
pulse (vidalita); t ^t?^1 ch5y?lra » (chaa-^a-, chaya) ; #ta ^jl^-e*
(jivati) ; (Jf^ ^ defsk » cloud (deva-) ; MB. ^ ^ bay » (vata) ; « ma^
(m§t5); ^t^ « ra^ »^ (laja)— an early borrowing from North India? cf.
MagadhlPkt. «laja»; JftW ^sa^-ftr^l* (sagara) ; MB. ff^ ^kuj'ila*,
NB. t ^crt «kuila» (kokila); fm\f\ * piyari NB. -pfJtft ^pyari =
[paeri] > (priya-karika) ; MB. fel « hiya » (hiaa-, hfdaya-) ; ^fcw ^kh&^-er^*
(khadira) ; MB. ^ « u;fe=:uii'e ? » (udeti) ; * b&yan^ > (vadana) ;
« roy < rowe » (ropayati) ; « k&ila », also diphthongised to « kW-la »,
< « *kayila » a ^/ac/fc or /lei/er (kapila-) ; « bais^ < *b5^i§a »
(dvavinsati) ; MB. "«rt^5 « aic^ » < « ayicca » a surname (aditya) ; etc.
(ii) « > glide in Beugali, commonly written ? : c^e^ « kegra <
*kewada » (keta.+ da-) ; cTW « mowa » (modaka-) ; ft^^r « chaon^<cha*an& »
(chadana); fj^^ for ^ * chawa := Skt, chaya *(ebaya > chaS- > chan-S-) ;
^ *dhuwa» (dhruva-); ^ * kuwa > (kupa-); C^fW *dhowa» (dhoa-,
dhSuta-) ; « cliS^al » (saba+ala) ; MB. ft>8 « chao » (saba) ; MB.
m « bag < OB. *bawa > (vata) ; MB. 3rt« ^ mag <0B. *maifra » (mata) ;
MB. »|t^, X n t« « sag, sSg » (sapa) ; also ^srf^ < aul^ » < « ^awula »
(akula) ; « baula * < « *bawula > (vatula) ; ^Jt^<^ « raiit^ » <
**raTiruta* (rSja-putra) ; MB. 5Jt^> <«maulanl» < ^ ^mawu- »
(matulan!) ; etc., etc.
[b] Diphthongisation of Vowels in Contact.
171. Diphthongisation and contraction of con tact- vowels went
band in hand in the few eases where they are found in the earlier sta<^
BIPHTHONGISATION IN LATE MIA. AND OB. 348
of MIA., before the wholesale dropping of intervoeal "stops. This dipb-
thongisation, of course, is of vowels of different quality, and not the simple
assimilation of similar vowels. As early as the 3rd century B.C., we have
in the As5ka inscriptions forms like « thaira- » (sthavira), « traid^sa »
(trayodasa), < mora < ^maura, ^maiira » (mayura) (Girnar), and « tedasa »
(trayodasa), « ujeni » (ujjayini) > etc. (Dhauli). These changes, however,
are of the character which changed OIA. « ai, au, aya, ava » to « e, o
In cases like Second MIA.«keIa» (^kaila, ^kaila, ^kadiIa = kadala)=NIA.
(Hindi) « kela *, « co- » < « cau, caii » (catur-), « ihera » (thaira, *tha*ira,
*thavira, sthavira), « bora » Bengali tC^^ * bor?l » (*baura, *ba\ira, *badura
=badara), etc., similarly there was diphthongisation before contraction took
place. (Cf. Pischel, ' Grammatik der Pkt. Sprachen,' § 166.)
In the development of Bengali, we see that dipthongisation on
a large scale took place from eaily times. Diphthongisation of the
«a+i» and «a+u» vowels in contact occurred to a certain extent in
OB. and in Magadhi Apabhransa, as spellings like « jau » = « jaii »
(jatu : see p. 185), « nai » = ? « nai, nal » (naJl : p. 185), « cau » =
« caii * (catur- : p. 185) in the inscriptions, and like sfs. « jaii v ana *
(yauvana), beside « jautuka » (yautuka), and « tiiloe » (trailokya-) for
«*taYl6e» in the MS. of the Caryas, would show. So in forms like
« gaa-illa,* gaja-illa » > J^fT, *gai-l&, gel& », cf. *Biharl' « gail »
(gata + ila-), « kaya-illa* > kai-li » MB. ^t%9f * k&r-ila » is a new
formation (kjija+ila-), « maya-illa * » > « mai-l& » (mfta+ila-) (or
« gaa-i'IIa » > « ga-ailla > ga-ella », whence « gaela » ; so « kaela », which
occurs also in OB.) ; * *cha3^ala- > *chai-la- », cf. MB. Cff^ « cheli poat
(chagala, *chagalika), « *chayana-> *chai-na- *>NB. «chena» caseim
(chagana), « ^payatthana > *pai-thana » > MB. « paithana » foot of
bed (padasthana), we find the presence of a diphthongisation in Magadhi
Apabhransa or Old Bengali. The alphabet had letters only for the
diphthongs « ai, au »; possibly the speech actually had other diphthongs,
* These have restricted the genuine Mfigadhi forms ' kada, xxiaija, gada,*<OM Mfigadhi
* kata, ma^, *gata* ( = * kfta, mrta, gata ' — the last by analogy), which have been noticed
by Vararaci (XI, 15) : Bengali W^t ' ka^r ma^S ' are fonnd ; ^ * gad.' occurs in the SKK.
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER III
like « euj ou, au, ai, iu etc., which could be represented only as « e-u, o-u,
a-u, a-i, i-u by means of two separate vowels. Final «-ai»of verbs (calati
<calai) became a diphthongal vowel (calai), probably during the 13th
century in Bengali^ to be simplified to the simple vowel « e » (eale) in the
14th century; and a form like « khai » similarly became a diphthong
« kbai », to be reduced to « kbay » in Late MB. and NB.
Examples of Diphthongisation in Bengali.
In addition to vowels brought together by loss of 01 A. stops, the
loss of intervocal « -h- » of MB. has given rise to new contact vowels,
which have been diphthongised in NB.
MIA. « ai, awi », OB., eMB. * ahi »,>MB. NB. ai, hi, e >,
also ^ « Ik » in some cases : <^cf| « kaVla, kaila » darl:^ d'.y,, ^|cTl
(kapila) ; ^«kai » af.^/i (kavayi) * kai, k&i» loh^re (MB. kahi = MIA.
kahi, 01 A. "^ka-dhi) ; OB. «*kaiharia »>MB.C^C^^ «kehena», C^f * kenha »
>NB. « kena » ? ; ^< khai » (kliadika) ; ^ « cai » (cavika); ^W,
5^ « ch&i » (chadis) ; « jai, j4i * (yavika) ; ^ « thai » ^fe^j///, 4f?/^o;?^
of water (*staghika) ; « dai » (dahi, dadhi) ; 5?^, « n&i » (i)
TheT\ cf. < Nai-hatI » a ioivii (nadi) ; {\\) a heifer (navika) ; (iii)
ninety (navati); MB. ^J?\, NB. ^ paise, pase » (pravisati);
« paita » ^//m?^? (pavitra-) ; ^1^1, « paitha » mnsotiry
steps at the base of huililing (pratistha-) ; -^t:s\ « baise, base »
(*baisVi, upavisati) ; « bhais^ » as in the adjective bi^, « bhaisa,
bhaysa » (mhaisa, cf. Pali mahirisa = mahisa) ; ^ « sai » (sabi, sakhi) ; etc.
MIA. «au, awu» > OB. « au » > MB., NB. « au, 5 also OB.,
MB. « ahu » > NB. « iiu, o » : ^C^Tt^ « k&noj^ » (kanaiija, kannaiijja,
fcanya-kubja) ; C^t^ « k5n^ » < eMB. c^t«l « kona » (kauna, kaiiua = kah+
punah) ; C5\, C5t < cau-, co- » (caii-, catur-) ; < jau » (jaii, jatu) ; c^\^
«paucha», MB. -^I^^^l « pahdeha » ^///7> (MIA. *pahufica, pahucc[h]a, =
OIA. ^pra-bhuccha, IE. ^pro + bheu + -sko- [?]) ; ^ <bau» (vadhu) ;
< mau-cak^ » Jiouei/comb (madhu-cakra) ; MB, «rauda » NB. CWt?,
* rod^, raid^ » (MIA. raudda, vaixdra) ; »r^5], c*ft^ »f^q *s4u]^, sail^t
sol^» fish (sakulaj; MB. ctl <-li5» in verb forms, 1st person = OB.
« *hau, hiu » (ahakaiii, ahara) ; etc.
DlPHTHONGiSATION & CONTRACTION 345
Late MIA. « aya, ava » in some cases became « ai^ hn » in Sengali^
apparently through «samprasarana » by dropping of the ^ -a- » in the
syllable « -ya, -va» : e.f/., ^^^t*^ * paithana* (*payatthana, padasthana) ; MB.
(SKK.) c^^t^t *b&uharl » ^?a/^^/^^^?r-^;^-/^^^^?, tci/e (^bavaharl < vyavaharika
female slave) ; MB. (ISKK.) (?|\^?t « ra&uhari elsewhere « mohari, moh&rl »
a ^'27^^ of Jtiite (*mawa-hara-, maa = mada- [?]) ; «diiur^ » (^dau-d[a,
*dava-da, drava-da) ; MB. sU. C^^T « nS.utuni», NB. C^T>|5(, « notun^ »
(nava-) ; etc.
The other diphthongs which originated in the eMB. period were
« ai » and « au from earlier « ai, aii ». There was also diphthongisation
by epenthesis. Eg., '^\^U\ <aise» (avisati) ; ?1T^1 «Daiya», NB.
*neye» (navika-) ; ^t^i?I1 «au]a», NB. « elo » dishevelled (aiila,
akula) ; « kaua » (kaka-H-uka-) ; MB, "STt^t^ « maulSni »
(maulani, matulani) ; « rait » < « rati » (ratri) ; Tt^^, ^t^^
*sautha, saitha » < ^Tt^ « sathua » , NB. C^^1 «seth5» co7npanio)i
(sartha > satha-fuka-), etc. Diphthongs with the high vowels «i, u»
forming the second part, like « iu, ui, ei, eu may have originated early
in the MB. period; the diphthongs ending in low vowels, excepting «ae,
a6»j in words like ^ «bae» (baya, vata), »ft^ «sao» (sawa, sapa),
where we have vocalisation of «y^ w»^ came in Late MB. and in NB.
The change of MB. « -a- » to «-o- > -u- » give rise to a number
of diphthongs in MB. and NB. (See later, under * Epenthesis/ ' Vowel
Harmony/ and ' Origin of the New Bengali Diphthongs.')
[c] Contraction of Vowels in Contact.
172. Cases of MIA. contraction of « udvftta » vowels, where they
were < a > followed by « i » or « u », have been noted in §171, in examples
like « kela, teraha, bora, mora etc. Contraction of « udvf tta » vowels
by assimilation is quite a common phenomenon in Second and Late MIA.
(cf. Pischel, §§ 165 fE.) ; and Bengali inherited a number of these MIA.
contracted forms : OB. « khai » (kbaai, khadati) ; MB. 5ft^ « dhae »
(dhaai, dhavati); ^t^^ « paik&, pai'k^ > (« paaikka », sts. < « padatika » ;
but more probably a Persian borrowiug) ; ^t^t^ « Idhar^ » (andha-ara,
846
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER 111
andha-kara) ; OB, * tasala » (Carya 13 :=« *kasala, *kansala » ? : cf. MIA.
« kansala- » = « kansya-tala ») ; '^1^% « raut^l » (raautta, lautta^raja-putra) ;
C5f^ « deul^ » (deula, devakula)^ etc.
But in a large number of cases, the « udvftta » vowels were not
contracted by assimilation in MIA. They were generally retained as
distinct syllables in Magadhi Apabhransa and in OB., being preserved
by the glide « w » or « y » which came in. The contraction habit, however,
had manifested itself in ]MagadhT Apabhransa ; it was not uncommon in
OB., and seems to have been widely operative in Bengali in the liith
century, during the transition from OB. to MB. ; and it had finished its
work by the end of the 14th century.
(i) The group « aa (a\Va) > of Late !M1A. and OB. This was
contracted to a long « a » [o:] sound, which may be represented in trans-
literation by the symbol « a ». (See p. 2G0.) The aspirate, « h », between
vowels was dropped in MB., and the group became « khh > aa >, which
also was contracted to « a >. OlA. « ama » > Late MIA., OB. < awa »
similarly became [5:] in MB., and this was lepresented by ^ « a The
« a » fell together with original * a = ft » in Late MB. In final positions,
this « a » optionally has the [o] pronunciation, in the Standard Colloquial,
the same as original single « -a=a » (as in is. and other forms).
« aa, awa > a > a » in the initial syllable. Examples : MB.
* 4thant&rli beside MB., NB, ^^?rt^^, "^m^ < athantar^, athant&r^l »
dad plight (awathantara, avasthantara) ; ^^11 * kala » vhiutaia- (kala, kawala-,
kaala- = kadala-) ; « kai » a jhh ("^kai, kavayl) ; ^^5l « kara» coivry shell
(kara, kawara, kavadda-, kaparda-) ; MB. ^ « gana » way (gawaija,
ga^na=gamana); OB. « gina » = [go:nD] (Carya 35 :<gawaca, gaana=
gagana); 5^ « cak^ » (*eavakka = catuska) ; 5^ « car^ » ^/iz;? (*cawa4a =
*capata, cf. capefca) ; ^St « eati < cati » inn, serai (OB. cavati = name
of village: pp. 67, 18:^, 185) ; ^ «ja» measiue (*jawa, ^ava) ; MB. ^f?!, NB.
« dhil&, dhala » (dhavala-) ; ^ « na » (nava) ; sis. 5{?Rr « n&dh&r^ » plump^
biiisom (navadhara) 5T^«t « nagun^ » ' nine-fold' a BrahmaiCs mcred thread
(nava-guna) ; * nai » (navati) ; Jj'cw * nadlya, node » Nadif/a ciiy
(nava-dvlpa-) ; « nani » (nani, navanita) ; sis. « lagg& » ('agg^
' AA ' IN BENGALI
847
lavagga) ; »f « §a » (sata) ; MB. ^\ « sit, sita », cf. ^^5r| « s&t-ma » *^^je?-
moiher (savatti, sapatni) ; ^*C*t « sape » (sawappei, samarpayati) ; etc.
Cf . also ^ « p4r^ » (pahara, prahara) ; ^ « * wA^a^ (^gahama,
*gadhama, *gandhama ? = godhuma) j #1^ « n&h »=^ + *^5 « naH-Y/*&h-»
as in ^l^, « n&hile, nahibe », etc., negative forms of the verb l[
*hk^ to be (na + \/as) ; etc.
« aa, awa, ai^a, aha > a > 5 » in interior and final syllables. MB.
^t^^ « aihA » (avihaa, avid ha va) ; ^t^^ « athar^ » (atiharaha, astadasa) ;
^•T5PH « un^neas^ » beside ^^^t^H « un&paneas^ » (una-paneasat) ;
« uni-nlii * (una-navati) « kadi>kad6 » (^kadawa, kardama), beside
« kada » ; tfl^tl^ « egar§, » (egaraha, ekadasa) ; C^^?T « gokal^ »
(go-kavala) ; NB. .9/^,^. S^^t « c&kkatt! » a mrname (eakravartin) ; C5lW, C^t''?
« codd§», eaudda » (caiiddaha, caturdasa) ; MB. ^^fe « j^jati » horoscojie
(jayawattia, jata-patrika) ; C^^ « ter^ » (teraha, troyodaSa) ; Vfg^ <
« d&lui <d&lai » a surname (dalawai, dalapati) ; 5f«t^l « d&S&ra » (daSahara) ;
Tt^T, ?tWl « dan&>dano » (danava) ; s^^cj, « n&run(l) » (*nahabarani,
nakha-barana-) ; « pa]a>palo » ponitded four from the roots of a
plant (pallava); t(^t^ « purana » (puratana) ; « p§.Dera »,
« piin&r& » (pannarahaj pafica-dasa) ; ^?[t»R « p&las^n^ » i^lace-name (palasa-
vana) ; Tf^ « barS. » (laraba, dvadaga) ; ^fT^ « bas&r^ » (basa-hara, vasa-
gfha) ; « bara» (buddbaa^ vrddhaka) ; «bha]a » (bhallaa, bhadraka);
^Tf^l « man^ » in Haijong Dialect (manava) ; MB. Sun ya Purana ^) sts,
^5^1^ = C^f'Jt^ « bb^gatl = bhogati » (bhogavati) ; \»^5f| « bhar&sa »
reliance, trust (bhara-vasa-) ; sft^^j « maslira » hionthly stipend (masa-hara-) ;
^T^^»f « mandaran^ » j)! ace- name (mandara-vana) ; ^pfcj^ « malanca »
garden (malawanca, raala-mafica) ; < « rasui < "^rasal » cooking
(rasavati kitchen) ; cjt5?& « lag(g)at^ » (^laggaVvatta, liggapatta) ; ^ftc^l
« sSka>sSko » im/^e (sagkawa, sagkrama) ; c^t^ « sola * (solaha, sodasa) ;
^!(:^?r^ « saterfi,, sat&ra » (sattaraha, saptadasa) ; sts. ^^], C^^^
« hinastha > hen&st(h)a » (hina-avastha) ; sts. « ap^ca » (*&p&c&&,
apacaya) ; etc., etc.
In verb forms: e.g,, indicative and imperative 2nd person plural > NB.
2nd person singular or plural, indicative and imperative: OIA. « -ata,
848
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER III
-atha > MIA. *-aa, -aha > OB., eMB. -aa,.aba, -a>NB. -o, -o > : e.g.,
NB. « kar& » < MB. « Hrk, Hrkhh > (Skt. kuruta, kurutha);
Ff^^Q, « c&lio, colo > you will go (precative future) < MB.
« c&liba » (calihaha, ealisyatha) ; « khao » < MB, « khah& »
(khaaha=khadatha); in the past and future bases « -lU, -ib& » , as
contrasted with the North Bengali and Bihari forms without the final « -a» :
e.g., sfim « c&Iil& » (*calillaa, calita + ila + ka), « k&riba» (*karibbaa,
kartavya-ka) ; in the past habitual or conditional ^ « -it& » : ^filvg « c&lit& *
(calanta + ka) ; and in verbal nouns or passive adjectives in ^srf^f, ^CTl
« -an&, -ano » : ^^T^ « k&ran&, kfi,rano » (OIA. -apana-ka, -mana-ka).
« aa > 4 » is the rule in Bengali. But in a few cases, we find « &u »
instead of < i » : the « &u » development seems to be exotic, and is due
to the influence of the Western dialects : e.g., C?F^ « k&uri », beside ^J^,
« k&ra, k&rl » (kaparda-) ; c^\^ « saup- », beside « sap- »^ (samarp-) ;
« cauk-, » beside 5^^, 5\S^ « c&m&k-, ca\irak-, *cak- » a/^ir^/^
(camakka-) ; « diur » r?m may be an old form in Bengali, through
« samprasarana », of which a few eases are known (see p. 345), but it
may as well be a borrowing from the West, the genuine native Bengali
root for running being, as in Oriya, «(1 « dhS » (dhav).
The final « -a » of OIA. and MIA. drops in Bengali. It is final « -Sa »
which is retained as « 6 » in NB. Where in NB, we have « -a » finally,
the Late MIA. form does not seem to have ended in two syllables with short
« -&& but unquestionably there was a long « -a ». MIA. « kala » Hack can
give only « *kal^ » in NB. But we have ordinarily ^t^=^rf^ « kSl&
=kalo », and ^rf^ « kala* ; and we have « kal^l », with elided final ^ »,
possibly in a compound form like ^tq-T^?rl * kal§t-gira » ' black
and blue ' {mark of a blow). The first can come only from a basis like « kala,
kalawa, kalaa = OIA. kala-ka », with the pleonastic « -ka » aflSx; the « -a» in
the form ^?rl < kala » is an afiix giving a definite force, =^7/^ black one ; and
this can only be from some affix like * -a-ka » , with a definiteness that came
to be associated with ^ -a * : cf. C^t^ * ghora-ta » hme4haUbig-one-ihat
horse ; but C^t^ « ghora-tl » horse4hat4iUle~one =: i^>}tf ^ wze^ >im<?.
(See page 302.) The ^ -5 » noqns ^nd verbal adjectives pf Bengali a»d
NIA. FORMS IN '-A-^ BENGALI ^AA, AA, AA ' 349
other NIA. are probably to be referred to oblique (genitive) forms of Late
MIA. and Early NIA, Where the original nominative affixes were lost,
in some forms of NIA,, it is this oblique in « -S » that took its place. E,g.y
Skt. « ghotakah » = Saurafc;eni nominative <c ghoiJa5 »>Sauraseni Apabhransa
nominative « ghodaii », whence Braj-bhakha «ghorau», Kanaujt «ghoro»,
etc. ; the nominative forms apparently fell into disuse in Panjabl and in the
dialects which form the basis of Hindostan!, where we have now « ghora »
for the nominative, which is in all probability the old genitive singular
« ghoda(h)a < ghodaassa < ghotakasya » (or ? dative singular « *ghodaaa
< ghdtakaya >) ; just as in the nominative plural form the original affix
was lost, and the instrumental plural or the genitive plural took its
place : (?.^., W. Hindl« ghore, ghoran » etc. = « *gho4aahi, ^ghodaana » =
« ^ghotakebhis, gh5takanam >, The same seems to have been the case with
many NB. « -a » nouns. (See later, under Morphology : ^ the Noun.^)
(ii) The groups « aa, a&, aa », with intervening glide « » or « »
in Late MIA. and OB., became « a » in eMB. : ^it^ « ar^ », also eMB. "srMi^
« 2kwhrh » (avara^ apara) ; NB. tif^tf^ * §sani »<*^5ftf ^tf^ ^ Slsanl » (^ayrisa-
wau!=amisa + panlya) ; « ar^l » aicry^ slant (? avarta) (but ^^efe « aot »
stir {milky ete,)= « a + \/vart- ») ; ^*?t^1 «Idgra» n big mil (indr^gSra-) ;
^=?ft^ « indas^ » place-name (indr&vasa) ; sis. ^^(^ « upas^ » (upavasa);
OB., MB. ^^srfft, ^?fft « uarl, oarl i^ pavilion (upakarika) ; « karat^ »
saw (*karawatS,, "^kara-patS,, kara-patra ; cf . karavSla) ; C^tfej^ « kotalgl »
(koUa-ala, kotta-pala) ; so « gS-yali » a class of Brahmans from Gaya
(gaya-palika), ^t^t^ « rakhal^ » herdsman < MB. ^t^W^ * rakh&-al& *
(raksha-pala), ^^T^ « bhujall » a short suord (bhuja-palika : ef . kara-vala),
5It^t^ « matal^ » (« matta -I- ala » ? ; but ef. Hind. matwala »,
Beng. poetic sftl^SW^I « matwara » = « matta-pala-»), etc.; « g&lasi »
(gala-pasika) ; C^t^ « goari » place-name (gopa-vatika) ; 5^1 « c&ka »
(cakravaka) ; f^^t^ « eirata », OB. (Sarv^nanda) « cirayita » (kirata-tikta) ;
^1 « ta » (tapa) ; MB. f^ft « disarl » pilot (disawarl, disa + karin) : CWt?t^
^ ^^^x^ ^ singers in chorus (dhruva-kSra) ; MB. «(t^ « dhai » (dhavati)j
^ts, ;(t^t*l * naran^ » (narayana) ; « pa6 » (*pr§pati = prapnoti) ; nlfet^H
«patat&n^ » dech^ wooden boards on flooring (*p5t&-pat&n&=:patta + pattana) ;
350
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER III
'It^ « para » (parada) ; sts, 0\^f^ « praeittir^ also tSTtft^ « pracit^ »
(« *prayacittira » for * *prayascittira « *prayacitta » = « prayaseitta ») ;
^iftf « bidhag » (*bandhavai, *bandhapayati) ; « r&san?I » (rasayana) ;
etc. See also §149 (ii), p. 30-2, and §150(i), p. 307.
A large number of disguised compounds in « ar^ » ?= « agara,
akara » come under this : e.^., ^fS^^ « bharar^ » (bhanddgara), ^^Tt^
« kumi^^ » (kumbha-kSra), etc.
Cf. also Persian words like ^f»r « baradd& > fixed (bar-Svard), ^WftW
« umedar » applicant (*umeda-v3r = umed-var), etc.
When, however, « -a » in a group « -ia, -aa » occurs as a special affix,
as in ^Tt^ « h4a, khaS there is no contraction in MB. and NB.,
and the « w » glide comes in : ^^fl, ^'S^l « h&wa, khawa >, etc.
(iii) The Late MIA. groups « a'i, au » : see also ant€y under
* Diphthongisation.'
ai » > « e », occasionally « i in MB. : e^g.^ the affix for the verb 8rd
person, tij « -e » (-ai, -ati) ; MB. « ehena », NB. 0^ « hen&» (*aihana-,
MIA. aYsana-) ; ef . OB. « gharahi », NB. ^ « gh&re » (gfha + '^-dhi) ;
OB. «amhe, tumhe », MB., NB. ^fif, ^fij «ami, tumi » (*amhahi, *tumhahi
=a8mftbhiSj yusmabhis) ; etc.
« aii » > « u » : CJf^ « deul^ » (MIA. deula, deva-kula) ;
< c&l-u-k » imperative 3rd person, MB. ^ « c&l-u », OB. « calaii »
(calatu) ; cf . MIA. « ahu », also affix for imperative 2nd person = OB, « -u » ;
« chSdu = cha^dahu » (CarjS 50) ; « mShut^ » mahout (^mahaiita^
*mabawatta, mahamatra) ; etc.
(iv) The Ijate MIA. groups « ae, ao » > « ai, i, e ; au, o » :
OB. « mal MB. NB. ^jfip, ^ « muni=mul, mui » (^maena, mayg +
-ena); 80«tai»>^| « tui » (^taena, tvaya+-ena); OB. « kaela », beside
MB. « kfiilft » (*kaella, *kailla<'^kaya-i]la) ; (75l « to » then (taii, tao,
tado, tatah), a non-Magadhi form possibly.
(v) Late MIA. « ai, aii » remain in OB., eMB.; in NB., they are
contracted to « a » or e except when occurring finally : e,g.^ NB. ^TttT,
X^s^ « ase, ese », MB. « ais&i » (avisati) ; cf. also NB. Tt^,
« bar^t, ber^ » < 1MB. ^t^, « bair^l, bair^ » (bahira, bahir) ; NB,
^Ae, Ao'; groups with a., i-»
351
« elo » (i) ca?}ie (=aila, ^Ylla, ayata + ila), (ii) ^ij«^tf?;^W(?rf=MB. ^Tt^,
^iN « aiila, alia » (akula-) ; NB. « khak ^, MB. « khaii-ki *
(khaii, khadatu) ; etc. Finally : ^ « gai » (gavi) ; ^Tf^l^ « ar^ > (*a441i^I>
*a44h2fcia, ardhatf tiya) ; «1t^ « lau » (alabu) ; etc.
For the Late MB. > NB. contraction of « &i > &i, oi » in West
Central Bengali, in connection with Epenthesis, see § 186.
(vi) Late MIA. « ae > is a very rare group in the interior o£ a word.
Finally, OB. eMB. « ae > becomes the diphthong [ae] in NB. : ^^t^
« k&raS » causes io do (kd,rae, klbravei). The group « ao » became « au » in
MB., contracted to «a» in NB., in «pgkhaj^ MB.
« pakhaju > standing for<*^t^t^ * *pakbaiij& » (*pakbaoj^i, ^pakkhaojja,
paksatodya), now generally ousted by ^^ftt^ « pakhwaj^ from Hindos-
tanl « pakh-waj » ( = paksa-vadya).
(vii) « u, n, Ii, il » became «I»=«i»inNB. : e.g., f#^, ftvSl < eirS,
cira » Jiattenecl rice (ciida-, ciyida-, civida-, cipita-) ; 'srf^ « asi » (asii,
aSiti) ; ft « ghi > hrainSy OB. « ghiwi » (^arv&nanda) ("^ghiia, *ghf tika) ; ^f?^
« e&li » 7 «dra/A ("^calil, ^caliwi, *calimi, calami = calami) ; * jii » / lire
■'^jlwii^, ■•^jivami^jivami) ; « di]& » (*di-illa-, *dia-illa-, dita=:
datta + ila-) ; f^^^ « nila > (^nl-illa-, *nia-illa-, nita + ila-) ; « khail^ »
(*khai-illa-, ^khaia-illa-, khadita+ila-) ; Cf. MB. ^tt * k^ri, call »
(? ^ *karii, *calii = ^karihi, *calihi », imperatives in « -hi ») ; etc.
(viii) Late ML\. « ia, la » had a three-fold development in Bengali :
(a, b) In initial syllables, generally = « e » : t£l^ « eta > (ettia, *iatt-,
iyat-) i MB. 5/5. C^sjl « khema » (*khiama, *khyama=ksamu) ; eMB. f^^^
* ti&ja > , NB. C^^ « tej^ » (^tiajja < *tiijja = tftlya) ; sfs. c^5( « uem^l »
(niama, niyama) ; sis. « betha » (^biatha, vyatha) ; C'f^ < MB. Cf^
« der^<derha » (diad(}ha, dvyardha) ; sfs. C^^?r « bebhav^ » (*bi&b&hara,
vyavahara) ; MB. tbh. C^^tf^^ « behariba» zi?z7/ eynploy (viabara-, vyavahara) ;
MB. (M^ « beb&tha » (*bi&batha, vyavastha); Of^t| «des^lai» (*dia§alaia,
dlpa-salakika) ; etc. So « siti » is probably from « *sgti » by Vowel
Harmony (*sianti < ^slwantia, slmanta-). But cf. « ji&n^,
jlon^ » (jivana), f»f^^, f»f^^<MB. f»f^ * si&r^, si6r^<sihaia » (sikhara).
« -ia- > in the middle of a word remained in eMB.; but when followed
352
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER 111
by aa it became « io > iu » in 1MB. and NB., through Vowel
Harmony, which see.
(c) Final m -ia » became « i > » : see § 149 (i), § 150 (ii). OB. «lha »
> MB. « ia > > « i », as in % « si » a aurname (?^«lha = sinha; or <
siva?). MB. « -i(h)a preeative imperative aflSx, is contracted to
«o » : 5f9i? > ^''XH « c&riha>c6l6 », ^f^>C^^1 « rakhiha>rekho » ; but
after a vowel in causatives there is no contraction : e.g,, ^t^ttt? > ^Tff^^
« rakhaiha > rakhio; cf. f^^ > <c diha > dio ».
Final « ia » , strengthened by the pleonastic affix * a » in OB., became
« i^^ » , in the Bengali indeclinable in « -iya », to be modified to « e »,
with accompanying umlaut, in NB. : e,g,, lat^f « gge »<MB. ^TPTl1 « Ssiya »,
"STf^f^ « aisiya » (MIA. avisia + a, avisya) ; so ^'i:?r « kore » <
« kariya » (MIA. karia + a, ^-karya) ; etc.
(ix) « uii, uu (uu, uu) » became « u » in OB., « u » in NB. : e.g., ^
« duna » (*duuna-, dviguna-) 5 ^ « duli » (*duulia, dukulika) ; etc.
(x) « ua, ua » occur as « u » in Bengali : OB. <« uarl » MB. ^^tft « uarl »
* (*uaarl, upakarika pavilion) ; OB. « kamaru » (karaa-rupa) ; « goru »
(^gorua, gorupa) ; ^1 « dhuna » (dhupana-) ; « bachur^ < baeharu >
(vatsa-rupa) ; « bSdhu-li » a /oK7tfr (bandhuka-) ; « sSjaru »
(^sajja-H-rua, sayya-rupa, salya-rupa); MB. =5% * sundhi » (*suandhia,
sugandhika); C^t^ « joal^ »< « juala » (yuga + ala); OB. < tu »►
(*tuva, tuam = tvam); etc. See § U9 (iv), § 150 (iii). Possibly, in
forms representing OIA. feminine « -rupa, -uka » etc., = Late MIA. « v&
we have assimilation of « u » + consonant + « a ».
(xi) « ea > became « e » : « cheni » chisel (cheanT, chedanika) ;
MB. * de » (deva, deha) ; cf. MB. (m^\ * dehara » temple (dea-hara-,
deva-grha-); C^s? « ben^ child-birth, travail (*beana, vedana ?) ; but we have
« ea > ewa » in CUTQ^ « deor » [daeor] (devara), C^«^ « keorS » [kseora]
(keta-ka.). See §149(v), p. 303.
(xii) Late MIA. « ei » in final positions is reduced to « e » in the verb
of the 3rd person : e.g., tf^ftf « bSdhag » (bandhavei, *bandhapayati) ; to
« ii, i » through Vowel Harmony, in the verb of the 1st person, in some roots
like <?f « de » — C^f^ > fjf^^ < dei, dii, di » / give ; etc.
OIA. 'R' IN TADBHAVA WORDS
« eu » became « iu » by Vowel Harmony, and « iu » is contracted to
e.ff,, NB. « dik » , MB. fff^^, CW^(^) « diuk^, deu(k&) > (deu <
*detu = dadatu),
(xiii) « oa » is contracted to o '^rfc^l « alo » (aloka) ; « dho6 »
(■^dhovai, dhavayati) ; « thora » (stoka + -da) ; CTt^ * roe » (*r6vai,
rovei : ropayati) ; CTt9 < ^C^^ « soe < *soi » (?*s6vai, svaplti) ; MB. C^t£l
« hoe » (*hoai, bhavati) ; cf. ^TtCSfl « byamo » (vyamoha). See § 149 (vi).
(xiv) « oi » is found as « o » in the MB. word *C^rt^ « » , spelt
as « y&sl = josi » in the * Mayanamatir Gan ^ (Dacca SPd. edition,
p. 25). The contraction of « oi, 6u » belongs to 1MB. and NB. phonology :
see next chapter.
[B] Treatment of OIA.. « f »
[I] « f » IN Tadbhava Words.
173. OIA, « f » as a sonant disappeared in MIA. Prakritisms in Vedic
like « vikata, sithira » are, for example, on the basis of an « ar, ra » or
« ir, ri * pronunciation of « f ». In Late OIA. at least, « f » undoubtedly
had developed other pronunciations, beside that of the proper sonant « f
and « «r« », namely * ra ar, re er, ri ir, ru ur ». See p. 243, ante, (Cf . Vidhu-
sekhar Sastri, * Baglay Uecaran ' in the ^ PravasI ' for Vaisakha, 1318;
* R-kara-tattva,' VSPdP., 13;i4, pp. 183-185). These pronunciations of « f »
are of course quite distinct from the ablaut grades of Primitive Indo-
European, * er or, er, or » or « el 81, el, ol », which are found in OIA. forms
like « bhar-a-ti, bhar-a-s » etc. ; they are merely Indian vernacular modifica-
tions of the original Indo-European zero grade, or « f , 1 » . Forms like MIA.
« ghara < *garha = gf ha, ghata < ghrata = ghf ta, geha < "^greha, ^gerha = gf ha,
v8Dta<*vrenta, *vernta=vrnta, amia<*amrita = amfta, rukkha<*vrukkha
=Vfksa » sufficiently indicate the manifold pronunciation of « f » in Late
OIA. The lines along which OIA. <f» was modified in the various
dialect-areas are not known. It can be surmised from the As5ka inscrip-
tions that in the Early MIA. period, the dialects of the North-west normally
changed « f » into « ri, ur » (the « ur » occurring after labials), in which
45
354
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER III
the « r * element was retained ; that the dialect of the South-west (Girnar)
turned it to < a » ; and the North-eastern dialect made it « i, u » (the latter
before labials), without the « r » , but eerebralising a following dental ^
(cf. Truman Miehelson, 'Inter-relation of the Dialects of the 14 Rock
Edicts/ JAOS,, 1909, pp, 77ff. ; Jules Bloch, ^ Langue Marathe,' § 31).
The « i » treatment seems also to have been favoured in the Midland, as in
the North-east. But even in the Early MIA. of the Asoka inscriptions, we
find that there is no regularity of the change which OIA. < f » underwent
in a particular dialectal area, North-western, or South-western, or North-
eastern (cf. Jules Bloeh, op, ciL, p. 47). The North-eastern speech of
Asoka shows, in addition to « i, u », « a » also, in words like « kata,
viyapata, vithata, mata- » (kfta, vyappta, vistfta, mpta) ; forms in « a »
like « kada, mada » are also noted by Vararuei for Magadhi of the Second
MIA. period (see p. 343, footnote). It seems that intermingling of dialects
early in the history of MIA. overlaid any original tendencies or prefer-
ences for special vowels in the different dialect areas ; and judging from
the way in which « r > in tss. and sfss. was pronounced in Middle Bengali (see
§ 174), it can also very well be assumed that the i, u, a, e » treatments of
« f » all obtained side by side in the same area, in the transitional stage
from OIA. to MIA. So far as the tbi, words in NIA. are concerned, no
sure line of isogloss is possible in this matter.
It will be seen that quite a number of MIA. forms, showing modifica-
tion of OIA. « f were adopted into Classical Sanskrit.
(I) OIA. «f » > «a» in MIA, This, either through compensatory
lengthening, or through stress, became « a » in some cases in Bengali,
^rt^ m aj^ » in ^srt^^t * ajali » afoolkh girl (aju-, f ju) ; I^Sf^ « aj>bujh?t »
^ Indo-Earopean group of ' 1 ' + denfcal occurs as a single cerebral sound in OIA., as in
Vedic, but ' r, r ' + dental remains a combination of two sounds. The eastern dialect
(MSgadhi) lias only ' 1,' and no ' r' : is it that ' r, r ' + dental was also a case of * 1 * + dental
in this dialect, so that this * Prakritism ' in changing a dental to a cerebral was really an
extension of the old habit which characterised OIA. in general ? See later, under
Consonants : * the Cerebrals.'
OIA. ' R ' > BENGALI ^ A(A), I, U ' 853
simpleton (%ju-bujjha-, r ju-budhy-) ; ^^ft « kachari » (kaeeaharia, krtya-
grha-) ; « kanlij kan-u, kan-ai » (Kanha, Krsna); OB.
sts, « kasana » ("^krasana, krsna) ; « kar^ > bracelet, ring (kata, krta) ;
^ « gh&r^ » (^garlia, grha) ; ^*f5 « ghSt?t » ^^-^^V/i y///<7<^''-' (^g^ianta,
*gliatta, ghrsta), beside < gb^t^ * ; ^IB. * tar& » (tata, trta) ; ^f?>?r5
« dar(h)a > (dadha, drdha), beside OB. « didha » ; ^T? * dh^r^ » (*dbata,
dbrta) ; « dhara, dhari » r/^o^^X' (dhata, dhatl = dhrta-) ; « n&r^i »
a caste (nata, OIA. nrtu ^Za/^(^.?>0 j ^1^ ^ nae^ * (nacea, nrtya) ; s^^l « m&ra »
(r(?;7J.5f(? (raata, mrta) ; ^Tftt « mati » (^mattia, mfttika) ; ft§ « bStgt » ^<?«^
(■^vanta, vfnta), beside « bota »; * bar^ > r/^^ banyan tree ; a coil of
roj^e (vata, vrta) ; ^ « bhar^ » soldier, servant > a surname (bhata, bhrta) ;
« sarak^ * street (*sada-, *sata = srta) ; also in forms like MB.
« kaila, » (kaj^a-illa, maj'a-illa = kfta, mfta), see p, 34:5,
which are not Okl Magadhi, but later importations or formations in Late
Magadhl.
(->) « f » > « i » in Bengali. ^T^l^d « amiya » (amia-, amfta-) ;
MB. ^^ * gidha ^ (giddha, gfdhra) ; ^, ^ * ghi » (ghia, gbf ta) ;
* ghin^ » (gljfna) ; ft^>ft§ * dhifc(h)?^ * (dhittha, dhr§ta) ; MB. « tin& »
(trna) ; « tiyaja NB. C^^ tej?t (« *tiajja, *tii]ja, trtiya » ; change
of « yu » to * j » not Bengali— this is a AVestern form) ; MB. Q^j;^, NB.
4cte(he)n&» < « ^taihana » (taisana, ^tadisana, tadf sana) ; OB.
* disai > (dissai, dj-syate) ; MB. f^fl « dithi * (dfsti) ; OB, * didha > (df dha) ;
f^^ * pith^ > (pittha, pfstha) ; f^^l « bieha » (vrsca-, cf. vrscika) ; T^^,
^ V^m^ « bhim^-rul^, bhiij- ^ (bhrgga-rola) ; f^l^ < mitha > (mittha-,
mista=mrsta); f^X <^ sig » (^fg?a) ; f^tSl < siga » /y/^z/^/J^?^ (srgga-) i
OB. *sithi=slthi» (sf sti) ; f*f^^ * sikal^ > (srgkhala, srgka-); fflt^l
« siyal^ » (srgala) ; f^?}1 « hiya ^ (hiaa-, hrdaya); etc.
(:3) « r » > « u OB. « uju », Chittagong dial. « ujja » (rju) ;
* ghat^ * '^^/rnwy (^ghurita, %hutta=ghrsta) ; '^X^, ^ aus^, »
(avfsa), see p. 320 ; *f#fr>M * *piusi>pisl *sit^^>m^ * ^mausl>
masi » (pitr-, matf-, + svasr-) ; MB. 'nt^^ * pans a » (pravrsa); * puehe »
(pucchai, prcchati) ; ^ > 1^ * bur(h)a » (vrddha-) ; * bhuna,
bhuni * fried (-bhunna-, ^bhrj-na-) ; OB., MB. « rukh4 » (vfksa) ;
356
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER III
tSW « sune » (^sunai, sf noti) ; ^ « phute » hirsts (phuttai, Sanskrit sphut
<0IA. *sphft) ; etc.
(4) « f » > « e » : OB. « benta », also Middle Oriya as in Purl
Inscription of 1470 (^venta, vfnta) ; cf. Oriya * y/ghen » ^a>t^ (Y/gfh-n-).
(5) * f » > « o » : C^t^l « bOfca » stem of flotcer (*vonta, vfnta).
[II] « f » IN Tatsamas and Semi-tatsamas in Bengali.
174. The above are instances of 01 A. > MIA. > NIA. change of
« f » in Bengali. The Bengali alphabet possesses ^ « f » as a letter of the
alphabet^ and its common pronunciation is f?f « r + i » . This « ri » value
for « f » is found all over Northern India ; but in the South, including the
Oriya and Marathi tracts, the pronunciation is « ru » . The « ri »
pronunciation in NB. is only one out of the various traditional pronuncia-
tions of the letter « j- » in MB., — viz.^ « ri ir, re er, r& ir, ro or » (but never
« ru, ur — and some of these are still current. The name of the letter
m is « ri * , and the other varieties of vowel used in the pronunciation
of words in « f » are now giving place to « i » , in educated speech. This
« ri » pronunciation is a very old one, and frequently in the inscriptions,
back to the oldest ones, there is interchange between « f » and « ri ».
Confusions like « pfya » for « priya » , * alankrita » for * alagkf ta » ,
«5fdhara »=«srldhara», « srhatta » = « srihatfca », «risikesa hf:slke§a »,
as in the early Bengal inscriptions, testify that « ri » was the recognised
value for « f » in the Late MIA. period in Bengal. The Tibetans obtained
the Indian alphabet by way of Khotan (A. P. R. Hoernle, ' MS. Remains
etc. from Central Asia,' Introduction), but they were subjected to influences
from Bengal from the 7 th century onwards, and the Tibetan way of writing
« f, I » of Sanskrit by * r + i, 1 + i » is doubtless based on an Old Bengali
pronunciation.
In Early Oriya, the pronunciation of « f » was as in Bengali, but
from the loth century onwards it became « ru » , probably through Telu<'u
influence. Upper India knows of no other forms than « ri » , or « ir »
by metathesis, as can also be seen from early sts, forms in Western Hindi
and Eastern Hindi: e.g., < ritu (j-tu), trisna (tfsna), mrittu (mftyu), kisSn
POST-CONSONANTAL 'B, R' IN MIDDLE BENGALI 357
(kfsana), krisna (kf sna) , birdba (vfddha), nirpa (nfpa)^ mirdagga (infdagga)^
hirdaja (hfdaya), rikhikesa (hrslkesa) », etc.
Iq MB. documents, and in the old-fashioned spelling in the early
19th centary papers and printed works (which still obtains in places
removed from the standardising influence of schools), forms like W^, CfS
« ghr&t&, ghret§» > , ;g5t ^ mrhgk * , « pr&th&k » , ^C^t^ « Pfyoj&na »,
fsl^tt^ « srigal& « amr§.t& fjl^f « nirp& », T^f*t«t « kripin& » (kf pana),
^ « graha » (gfha), «t^C^ « p&hf te » for ^^flf^vo « p&rite » 2«?^ar, etc., etc.
are quite common. The ' Crepar Xaxtrer Orthbhed ' (see pp.136, 23-i)
similarly writes « crepa, oraert, ghirua, hirdoe, prothoqhe ( = pp thak-),
mirtica, prothibe (= pfthivi), bretha (= vftha) » etc. In MB* « f » in
tit. and sts, words fell together with original « -r& » and « -ri And « r&, ri,
re, ro, &r, ir, er, or » are interchangeable in Bengali when they occur after a
consonant. The « r » is frequently assimilated with the following consonant
in folk pronunciation. "Sf^^^ « ampta » is thus pronounced as [omrito, omirto,
omroto, omorto, omroto, omorto, amreto, omerto ; omotto, omotto, ometto] ;
<2t«tt'f « pranama » as [pronam, pornam, prenam, pernam ; ponnam^ pennam} ;
« prabodha » as [probodfi, porbodR, prebodB, perbodfi ; pebod] ; so
<2fft^ « pradipa » becomes [prodip, pridip, predip, pordip, perdip], and even
f^f«R, f^t%H [pidim, piddim] through intermediate stages like * « pridlp& >
« pidlw&, pidi^& » and <c pirdlpi > piddiwik, piddi^& » ; <£tv|% < prabhfti >
commonly becomes [p(r)ibfiiti, pirbfiiti] ; the ordinary pronunciation of
« kr&me » is [kreme, kerme] ; « vrata » is normally turned to [borto,
berto; botto, betto], and «nimantrana» and t5t? « graha » have
given the sfss. « nem&nt&nn& » and C^ill < gero » through Middle
Bengali pronunciations like « *nim&nt&rn& » and * *gerh& ». This inter-
change of post-consonantal groups of vowel +« r », or their metathesis, has
turned « tlr^hut^ » (tlrabhukti) to f^^^S « trihut^ » in Benoali.
Foreign words are equally affected : <*.^., Portuguese « egreja » church gives
Bengali f^t^ « girja » beside « grja=grija », and the Persian « mlrzS >^
prince occurs as « mf ja=nirija » beside « mirja ».
In the dialectal Bengali of Chittagong, « f » becomes « iri » : cf.
« girit (ghfta), biria (vfsa) etc.
358
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER III
The general practice in NB. orthography is to treat t(i •« f » as a
compound letter, « r + i » . A word like « abf tifc » is normally pro-
nounced [abrito], when the fact that the ^ « r » in this ts, is a vowel is
remembered ; but commonly in pronunciation the « b » is ^ doubled/ as in
Bengali a consonant before a «r» or «1» is always doubled : <?.^.,
[abbrito]. ^ is commonly used^ because of the convenient shape of
its subscribed form, , to denote the group « ri » in foreign names, instead
of the complicated group of subscribed « r + I^ i » ( T , ) : '^(^
« bften » for fefesf « briten » Britain, ^jl « khrst^ » for f^^ (properly
*^?^) * khrlsta, khrista (khrista) » CArist ; even ^I^C^^ « pfbhi-kaunsel »
for fc?tfe- « pribhi- » Priv?/ Council, ^TOt^ « krrainal » Criminaly
« kf ket » Cricket, etc. : we have even ^ft^^ « ysibar^ » for receiver, and
Baijkim Chandra writes %^ « r4 * for the English name Eeid. ^ « r »
does not occur in Bengali outside the alphabet. It is an unfamiliar letter,
and frequently the long vowel is wrongly employed in writing for « f ».
> « J » is only a letter in the alphabet, pronounced « li » , and it does not
figure in Bengali.
[C] Nasausatiox of Vowels in MIA. and NIA.
[I] Final « Anusvara ».
175. The * anusvara » and * anunasika » of OIA. both meant
nasalisatioa of vowels (see p. 244). OIA. « anunasika > vowels are not
preserved in MIA. « Anusvara » could not occur before stops and aspirates,
which had only corresponding nasals, « g, n, n, n, m * , before them in
OIA.; « anusvara » occurred before « y, r, 1, v, s, s, s, h » only. Final « -m »
became the « anusvara » in MIA. ; and original « anusvara » remained.
OIA. «c -m » > Early and Second MIA. « -m » became a frank nasalisation
of the preceding vowel in the Late MIA. period (Apabhransa), and this
final nasalisation still survives in Gujarat! and Marathl ordinarily, when
in MIA. we have groups like « -aam, -aiim, -i/lam, -u/uaih », etc. ; e.g.,
Gujarat! « karvu » (*kariavvaiim, kartavya-kam), « ghanii » (ghanaum,
ghanakam), *pehlu» (pahillaiiih, pratha-ila-kam), ^ hii » (hau, hauih=:=
NASALISATION IN NIA. FROM ANUSVARA
359
ahakam, aham), « su » (saudi, sakam), « s5 » (saiiih, satam), < §si < ^asl »
(asiim, aslfci), « nevu » (navairii, navati), etc. : Maratbi « sS * (sayarii,
satam)^ « karnS » (karana;^aiii, karanakam), « mot! » (m8ttiaih, manktikam),
« tal§ » (talayarfa, tatakam), « bl » (biaih, bijam), « taru > sJiip (taruarn,
tarukam), « nibft » (nimbuam, nimbukam), « pakbru » (pakkha-ruam,
paksa-rupam), etc., etc. Western Hindi (Braj-bhakba) has also cases of
this survival of the final nasal of OIA. : e,g,^ « haii » / (ahakarii), « maranau,
maribau » (marana-kam, maritavya-kam), etc. This final nasalisation is
not preserved in other NIA. A case like OB. 'chSu = hau», found
also in MB. as the verbal affix for the Tst person, ctl < -bS », seeros
to be a survival from the Magadhi Apabhransa (or through nasa-
lisation of intervocal « w » ? E.g., < aham > ahakaih > "^haam >^ha\va >
*hawa> hail ») ; and -t « -ha » in f^f, « tiha, jiha, iha », etc.,
honorific forms of pronouns, which is from OIA. « -esam » > MIA,
« -ehaib is due to the analogy of the other genitive plural aflSx « -ana »
from « -anam * = « -anam » (see p. 306). The final « anusvara » may be
said to have been lost to Bengali. As for the « anusvara » in the interior
of words, before the semivowels, liquids and sibilants, and the aspirate
« h », it was dropped in many cases in MIA. itself ; but where it occurred in
MIA., before the sibilants for example, it behaved like a class nasal before
its corresponding stop or aspirate, and has generally been continued down
in all NIA. : as a nasalisation of the preceding vowel, which is lengthened
by way of compensation (e.g., « hSs^ » = * haiisa » , « mSs^ » = « mansa »
etc.), or as the dental nasal « n » in the North-western Indian speeches which
do not simplify double consonants (e.g., Panjabi « bans »), or again as a
separate nasal syllable in a language like Oriya which does not wholly
nasalise the class consonants (e,g., Oriya « bausli bSn§^)» = « vanaa » : ef. the
NB, pronunciation of « anusvara » in ^m.= [g, go], from MB, [w, w^o]).
[II] Class Nasals and Inteiiior « Anusvara* of MIA.
(1) MIA. Nasals inherited from OIA.
176. In its development from OIA. and MIA. to NIA., « anusvSra »
thus fell in line with the class nasals before their corresponding stops and
^60
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER III
aspirates. MIA. of the Second period possessed intervoeallj either double
stops (or stop + its aspirate), or nasal + stop or aspii-ate (seep. 254). The
vowel preceding such a group of double stops, or nasal 4- stop or aspirate, was
always a short one in MIA. The Aryan dialects entered the NIA. stage
throughout the greater part of India when the double stops (with or
without aspiration) were simplified, and there was compensatory lengthen-
ing generally. This has been described before (p. 359). In the case of
groups with the nasal, the nasal as an independent sound was lost in NIA.,
and compensation for this loss came in by both lengthening and nasalising
the preceding vowel : the line of change has been indicated at p. 259.
Before the final absorption of the nasal into the preceding vowel, there
would be a stage when it was pronounced very short : « agka > [agka,
•i>gkD] > [o'^ko, a-^kn, a^jko] >^t^ « ak^ » [c^:k]. This ' reduced ' nasal
can be expressed by a small « g, n m » etc., written above the line [v, n,™].
Such short or reduced nasals are found elsewhere : in Sinhalese, for instance,
in its tbA, element (cf. W. Geiger, * Litteratur and Spraehe der Sinhalesen,'
§17). A similar stage of reduced nasals undoubtedly obtained in lA. in the
mainland, probably during the Late MIA. period, and certainly during the
transitional period between MIA. and NIA. In Oriya, among the
Magadhan speeches, the vowels have not been nasalised to the entire
absorption of the original nasals, which may be said to obtain as reduced
sounds : tf.y., Oriya [ka^idona] weeping (krandana-), [danto] (danta),
xm [pas^^] (panca), etc. = Bengali #Rl > ^ [kadna > kanna], tf^
[da:t], 'tt^ [pa:cf]; in Oriya, the nasal is fully uttered in Sanskrit words
like « danta » < « ^dam », « pailea-janya etc., but it is not at all so
prominent in the tbh. words, which, besides, have the vowel nasalised. It
seems that in OB. and in e^IB., dialectally undoubtedly, the reduced nasals
obtained : although the use of the ^ « candra-bindu » , which is found in
inscriptions in the mystic syllable « 8 » (now pronounced indifferently [org]
or [o:m]) is an early evidence that the full nasalisation of vowels came in
in Proto- and Old Bengali speech (see p. 226). The Carya MS. spellings
Kke « chanda, bandha, tentali, kandha, sSgkama, taggi, panca, 4^mbt,
bfaaTi4ara » etc. may be taken to show that the reduced nasals were the
NASALISATION & REBUCED NASALS
361
rule in OB. So, too, Sarvananda^s spellings « kineohi (NB. C#^Fl k§co^ Skt.
kinculaka), sigkala (=srgkhala), vahenei a fruit{== NB. ^ ft balcl),
bandhull (NB. badhull = bandhuka) », etc., would be equally indica-
tive of the reduced nasal. But the Caryas show full nasalisation of
original class nasals and of « anusvara » by means of the « candra-bindu »
as well. Apart from the fully nasalised vowel in the affixes like* -S, -i », we
have spellings with the « candra-bindu » like the following : < h§u (ahakam),
mJsa (mansa), Isu (ansa), uca (*ui'ica- = ucca-), hadi = harl, not *handl
(-bhanda-), bijhe (vafijha, vandhya), sajhe (sanjha, sandhya), baddhi = bSdhi
(eS'^5.< vandhya) » ; and Sarvananda has « jhampana » ( = yapya-yana), with
« anusvara » for the expected « candra-bindu », rather than « *jhampana »
with « -mp- » : cf. « pimpada, dambotja », with « m » and not with
« anusvara ». The complete absorption of the nasal thus belongs to the OB.
period, although it also seems that the reduced nasal still held the field in OB.
The orthography in this matter, employing the class nasals after the
lengthened vowel, however^ may be archaic only, without reference to the
actual pronunciation. In the eMB. of the i§KK., from the spellings of
words it would seem an analogous state obtained. The spelling here,
too, might be only archaic. Thus we have « agga > (agga) ; but
< Icala » (ancala), 4 times, beside ^f?^ « Snc&l& », 11 times ; ^spNitft
« andhari » (andha-karika) ; « kagkana * (kagkana), but #t5(1)
« kSca(a) » unripe ; #t^^ « karhara » helmsman beside ^t*!rt^ « kandhara »
(=karna-dhara); #tit « kati, -i » beside « kanti » ; ^t'f
« kad- > (Y/krand), once, beside * kand- », 1 1 times ; « kSpa »
(kamp.), twice, besides « kamp^ 5 times ; kasa » thrice, beside
^^»r « kansa » ( = Kansa), 10 times; so FT? < eSda » (eandra), 4 times,
beside M^Ff « canda » 14 times. In the Standard Colloquial and in West
Bengali generally, in North Bengali and Assamese, we have no longer any
reduced nasals, only nasalised vowels. But in certain tracts in the East
Bengali area, we have still traces of the full nasal, mainly in connexion
with the voiced consonants followed by a vowel ; and vocal nasalisation is
frequently absent. Thus, we have [tsa;d], beside [tja^der, tsa^der] =Ft?,
ItC?^, West Bengali [^a:d, cjader] : we have even [tja:n < tsand] j [ba:d,
46
«
36^
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER III
banda] ^r^[ba:d(fi), bad(fi)a] ; [bolnd-] =^^[b5dfiu] (bandhu); [pa^te,
pa:^]='Tr5[pa:cf]; [jHcr Jarr] =^t^ [Ja:r] (sanda) ; [Jantsa] = m5l [/acfa]
(satya-); [dumbur] = > [dumurj (dumbura < udumbura); etc.
But the persistent retention of the nasals as distinctly audible sounds, albeit
reduced, does not mark East Bengali pronunciation in the same way that
it does that of Oriya. OB. and eMB., as in the Caryas and the SKK., may
be taken to represent a mingling of dialects, showing both reduction and
complete absorption of the nasals ; or, what is equally likely, the spelling
with the full nasals is merely an archaic thing, and is not a proper
key to the pronunciation which had already become nasal. The influence
of Skt. tss. in orthography, which is always conservative, is to be taken
into consideration in discussing the OB. and eMB. conditions in this
matter.
177. Below are given instances of nasalisation of vowels in Bengali
through class nasals and « auusvara » occurring with consonants in 01 A.
As Bengali vowels normally are more or less nasalised when preceded or
followed by a nasal, the « anusvara » becomes superfluous, and is often not
used in writing.
(i) Unvoiced stops and aspirates preceded by class nasals : the vowel
is nasalised (after being lengthened), and the stop or the aspirate remains.
« ak^ » {^^^^) I * kik&n^ » (kagkana) ; « plk^l »
(pagka) ; « sSkha » (sagkba-) ; ^ « pac^ » (paiica) ; ^TtFl ="^51' t5l « maea
= mSca » (manca-) ; >f t5, « sSc^, chac^ * (sanca) ; « p3cb- » wipe
(pra + unch) ; ^f&«bat^ » (*vanta, vfnta) ; « g^th » (gaufchi, granthi) ;
rsTi « suth * (sunthi) ; « tftt » (tantu) ; ^ « dit^ > (danta) ; ^ffe « piti »
(panti < pagkti); « kath^ » (kantha) ; «kSp» (kamp-) ;
« capa » (campaka-) ; C^t^ < g§ph^ » (gumpha) ; etc.
Sibilants with preceding « anusvara » remain, with the « anusvara »
nasalising the preceding vowel : e.ff,, '^H « Is^ > fibre (ausu) ; #tTl * kasa »
bell-metal (kansya) ; #Wft « kasari » (kansya-karin), bat ef. Oriya tbh,
< k&nsa, k^nsari » [koT/Ja, ko^Jari] ; -ffH « pas^ » ashes (parisu), cf. Oriya
« pSus& » ; ^t*t « bls^ » (vansa), cf. Oriya « bSusa 5}t^=:3ft5f < mas^ —
mis^ » (mausa), cf . Oriya « rnaus^ » ; ff^ « has^ » (hansa).
TREATMENT OF *N + G' IN BENGALI
363
OIA, « aDusvSra » follownng the high vowel « i » is lost in <c vinsati»>
MB. « viga, *visa »> Bengali « bis^ », -*f « -(i)s^ » in compositioD :
t£J^ « ekus^ » (ekavinsati), ^tf^ « bais^ » (dvavinsati) ; so -f^^r, -f%% 5/^5,
f^f^ « tis^, tis^, tiris^ » (trinsat); 5^W^ « c^llis^ » (catvarifisat), etc.
(li) Class nasals with voiced consonants, and « anusvara » with
« b, y, V
(a) « -g^- » of MIA., from OIA., became * '^vg- > with reduced
nasal in Proto-Bengali, and possibly also in OB. In the NB. Standard
Colloquial, « -gg- or rather, « "''g », is assimilated to a full [ g ], written
5f, ^ (finally only) « gg, g, n(m) », although the OB. and eMB. condition,
with the stop sound « g *, is preserved intervocally in some parts of East
Bengal. L\g,y "^ii^^h ^tf^^t « ag(g)ina * (aggana-) ; ^^ft^stsf,
« abhag > (abhyagga) ; 5tt5f, « gagg&=ga«g^ > gag = g»g *
(gagga) ; words like ft^f^, f&\Sff, ft^ft * cig?lri * pratv7i, lobster
(eigga-ta«; cf. Hind, jhigga), Ft^Stft, « cagari, eag^ra etc., basket
(OB. ^caggeda, Carya 10), ^t^fl, « caga » in good sj^irits eagga),
CM'?1 « jt^g^tra » (OB. jogga4a), « daglis^ » 5;?6^/2r, etc.;
^5rT5T, m^t^ * jag(g)Sl?' * ^^y'f"^ (jaggala) ; ^SfT^, ^T^t^ * bftggala > bagal^,
bagal^ » (vaggala), but East Bengali often [ba^gal] N»t^ *bhag > hemp
(bhagga) ; ^R^, « bhag(g)e » /^r^'a^* (<bhagga), but ef, '^t^ « bhag- ♦
in the ^KK , at least 26 times, against ^Sf « bhagg- » = [bfia'?g-], l i times ;
^fsfl, ^T^l « rag(g)a » red (ragga-) ; ^t^S, « rag * ^tw ; also in
^t^fe«1 « rag-cita » (ragga-citra-) ; but cf. sis, ^^S, « r^g » colour;
« l^gga, lag » (lavag^^a.) ; Rsf, f^f^S, * sig ftsfl, f«tv&1 * sig(g)a »
(Sfgga-); OB. « sagga ^^[Ja'/ga] (Carya 10), found in NB. Jrr^<<, m«T^
*sag(g)5t», in the Calcutta dialect ^«t^ [jSgat] (see p. 3;i2) ^ fiiend
(sagga + -vant-), has given place to the is. ^rsr, ^1% * ^^agg^, sag(g)e »
in NB. The group « gg » of OIA. and MIA. thus normally becomes « g »
in NB. (with nasalisation of preceding vowel generally not expressed in
writing). But eMB. spellings like ^"t^ « bbSg- and Carva spellings like
^Iaga» (= laga = *naga < *nagga < nagga = nagna), to rime
with >rt^ * sagga > ( = ? saga <sagga, cf. NB. :F(5ttt sagai < ^sagal nnwny
irregular marriage among certain lower castes)^ in Gary a 10, and «maga»
364
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER III
( = « niaga >, MIA. « ^inagga<niagga = marga » — ef, also the OB. spelling
artsf « niagga » in Caryas 8, 13, 14) to rime with ft^fl « saijga = sSga »
(writted in MS,), as in Carya 8, would establish the normal trans-
formation o£ « -gg- » of OIA, to « •ijg, *'g » in OB. The assimilation was
thus a thing of MB, and NB. times ; and similar though later assimilation
of « "nd » « ^mb » to "-n, "m » are found in NB.
Tatsama words retain « -gg- » in full, inter vocally ; when closing a
syllable, and in 5^*. forms, there is assimilation : e.g., *j&Bg&'?' * forest^
^^^^ « jaggule » < ^f^?1 « jaggal-iya » belonging to the fared, but ^5rji1,
^^^1 « 3&g?tla > viJd ; 5[5f«^ « magg&l?t », but si^^^l, « m&ggla » as a con-
tracted proper name ; etc.
OIA. « -ggh- » became « "'»?gh » in OB., and with the dropping of the
aspiration, the group fell together with the Bengali modification of « -gg- » :
^t^, ^\\ < jag » (jaggha) ; f^^sfjof^f f^f * sig^ni>sik^ni » (sigghana-) ; and
the word « saggha », which would give in NB. a form *^ts « *sag », seems
to have merged into ^t^T « s^gga » < « sagga ».
OIA. « -nh- » in the word « sinha » lost its nasalisation in Early MIA.
— «£ siha > : the MIA. form possibly subsists in the NB. surname ^
« si, si » (see p. f3o3), originally forming part of personal names, like most
non-Brahman surnames in Bengal. In the sts. fif^f^, fJf^f^t « sigg(h)i » we
have the normal change of « -nh- » to « g2:(h) ».
(b) « -nj- » becomes « " j » in NB., doubtless through a stage of
« ^^j » : <?.^-5 '^t^^l « Sj^la » (afijali-) ; « gija » (ganja-, ganjika) ;
*Tt^ * pSji » (panjika) ; « ptj&r^ » (panjara) ; T^n\ ^ plj^rS »
(piiijara) ; ^*t^ ^bhaj^l » folding of cloth^ paper ek\ (bhanj). The Maithili
change of « nj » to « fin > fi », as in « ailu, anu< anju »=« "^ansu » (asru),
is unknown to Bengali.
« -njh- » of MIA. became « *'jh » in Bengali : ^*t^ « jhajh^ »
strong flavour ) huge cpnbals (ef. jhanjha) ; « bajha » (vanjha, vandhya);
^*T^ * sajh^ » (sanjha, sandhya).
OIA. ^ anusvara » + y » became « -fij- > in MIA., and the Bengali
development was « * j » : tC^^ « sSjoa > armottr, corslet (sanjoa-, samyoga- :
cf. Hind, sanjowaa, sanjona arrange).
'N + P(H), N + DMN BENGALI
365
(c) « -nd- » > « *'r » iu Bengali : >^VS «arua>§re» lidUcalf
(anda-|- uka-) ; slang « Sr^, » [^f] testicles (anda) ; J « klr^ »
arrow (klnda) ; ^f\5 « khar^ » imlasses, «ift^ « khira » sacrificial s%vord
(khan da) ; « gSp^ * fl^^^^y navel (see aJe^*?, p. 67), ^/i^ Gonds {desi
gonda) ; Ft^^ « earal^ » (eandala) ; ^US « dure * (ehindati) ; tt^, vs't^
4e dar^, dar^ » deVr^* ^j^/'c?/* (danda) ; ^t^>C^ ^ nlrgt>ner^ » [naerr]
(landa, lenda, des7) ; « pir^ » /^/^^^?, ungainly ^ ugly (panda eunuch) y
« pur^ » sngar-caney a caste (punda, pundlra) ; « phSr^ » breadth
{of a pot generally) (ef. phanda Z-^/Zy) ; f^^Hl « pira » ivocden hoard, plinth
(f?es^ ? = pinda : ef. HiadI p§r tree^ vrksa-pinda in the * Mahavastu ') ; ^"t^
« bhar^ > (bhanda) ; ^ = * *mura, raura » (munda-) ; ^'t^ « rlr^ »
(randla) ; « siir^ » (sunda) ; « s5r^ » (sanfja) ; ^t^t^ « s5r§sl »
(^saiidausia, sandatisika) ; tt^ « hSrl » < (« -hancja- < -bfaan4a- », in
compounds).
In a few cases, we have « a » for « -nd- » — through an early assimilation
of « nd » to « nn » : «rt^1, «rtf^ « khan^, khana, khani » piece ^ article
{determinative word), place (=khanda-); cf. Oriya « khand[& » piece, part,
fragment, a single one^ « khandi ^ pot'Sherd\ Bengali t^^^l « pto&-khana »
= Oriya « piytr&-kh&n4& * ^/^^ /tf^/f/, lit. ^/i^ letter-piece, ' 07ie jjiece letter ' ;
« bana » jo<9?ii.s {desl ban4a-), ef. Oriya < b&n4a ». In both the cases, forms
with the normal « "^r » occur — though « khar^ » has got another meaning
(see above). The < -n- » forms may be due to the influence of similar words
— tf.^., « sthSna » > «*t«^ « than^ » ^Za{?<?, rectangular piece {determinative) ;
and « ban^ » arrow, Cf. Hind. •« ganna » spgar-cane^* iksu-gan^a- » as in
the * Mahavastu.'
« -ndh- » of MIA. > « » in NB., with loss of aspiration: fvs
«dhure^ seeks {dm dhundhai) ; MB. ft^ft * kararl » helmman, MB.
^t*tFt^ « kandhara * (^kanna-dhara-, karna-dhara-).
(d) OIA. < -nd- » > Beng, «*d- »: « idur^ > (indura) ; t'ft^'ll
idara » (indrdgara) ; « kSd- » (krand) ; 5if6\ C%^1 « kgd^ra » (kendra-).;
FtW « cad^ » (candra) ; « ehad^l » (ehanda) ; ?[tf « bud^ » (*bundu =
bindu) \ MB. 5^5. nf^T^ « madir& » (mandira) ; fif^ « sidiir^t » (sindura) j
?f ^ « siid^rl » a tree, vnich vsed for fire-wood (sundara-) ; sts, c#tW^=
366
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER III
« kod&l^ < kadala » (kandala < -y/krand) ; ?rtT^ « bSdar^ » monhey, from
Hindostani « bandar » (vanara) ; etc. Cf. Persian borrowings like ft^
« dda > subscription ; ftfl> C^*Wl « rada, rSda » carj)€nter^s plane ; ^[tft « bSdl »
slave-tooman ; Ct^ « hidu, hSdu » = « eandah ; rand+a; bandah + I;
Hindu, hendo»; and cf. an English borrowing like ^'t^C^«1 « jadreN « general,
hig person^ big (slang), from « general », through « ^janrel, *jandrel =
Hind. « jandral ».
In dialectal and standard Bengali there are a few instances of assimila-
tion of « nd » > « *d » to « *n, n » : e.g., ^t^l « kanna < kSdna*
(krandana-); ean^ » [tsa:n] =« cad^ » (eandra) ; ^5fC\s > #t;oC^,
^t^t'S < kSdte > kitte, kante from #tfe^ « kSdite > to weep (krand-) ;
similarly with « ndh », which is found as « n » in ^f^fC^ > ^?[Cvo, ^tl^»
TT^TCS < badhite > badte, batte, bante » to bind (bandh) ; etc.
« ndh » becomes « ~d(h) » : 'sftf^f « Idhi > ilusf'Storm (andhika) ; 'sft^ft^f
« adhar^ » (andhakara) ; « kadh^ » (skandha) ; sts, 5f^f1- « gadha- »
(gandha-) ; ^\^\ ^ dhldha » dotiht, paradox (dhandha) ; ?rf?f « bidh^ »
a a dam (bandha) ; ^''t'f * phad^ » net, a blend of « phfts& » (= pasa)
and « bandha » (?) ; (?f t«ft « sSdha > (sugandha-) ; etc.
(e) OIA, « -mb-, -mr- » > MIA. « -mb- ». The fortunes of « -mb- »
were similar to those of « -gg- » : there has been uniformly an assimilation
of the stop element, and the nasal generally has survived : although the
« '*'b » treatment is found occasionally. Examples : ^srfsj « am^ » (MIA.
amba < *ambra, amra) ; OB. « kamali » a viarCs name (Kambalika=
Kambalambara-pada) ; « cuma » (cumba-) ; WfJ « jam » (jambu) ;
« dim^ » (dimba) ; ^PT^ « tamli » a caste (tambulika) ; sts^ ^Jf^f « kadam^ »
(kadamba) ; »tt^^ « samuk^ » (*sambukka, sambu-ka) ; f^pf « sim^ » (simba) ;
f^r^jl « Simula > (simbali = salmall) \ MB. (1§KK.) ^ samundha », sts.^
once, beside « s&mb&ndhlk 11 times; % ^fsr^, « sam&ndhi,
sumundi » hr other (sambandhin) ; etc.
We find as early as in the Asukan inscriptions (of the eastern area)
a form showing the « mb > mm » treatment, like « lummini = lummini »
for « lumbinl » (at i27<?«2«-dei). But we have absence of assimilation in
« tambapamni, amba », at Delhi and Kalsi, the dialects of which are
^M+B(H), M+H, Jil+V IN BENGALI
367
on an eastern basis. The « mb » > « ""b » treatment seems to have
characterised Old Bengali — at least, in West and West Central Bengal :
the Eastern Radha dialect is a dialect showing « *b »; also Oriya;
« ab^ » (amba, amra), cf. Oriya « amba » [clnibo] ; #t^1 « taba » (tamba-,
tamra), cf . Oriya « t§,mba » [to ^ba] ; ^rf^- « nab- = nib- »i M B. « nambS,- »
ffeC down = Literary Bengali ^Tt^ « nam- », East Bengali % « lam-
(namma-, nam-); C^^ « nebu=neba beside C51^« lebu » (nimbuka) ; MB.
'TW^j ^^t^, beside ^Kt^ « samay, samb(h)ay » enierSy cf , OB. arsPt^ « samai »
€Hters{<y. samSyati); OB. (Carya -28) «tabr)Ia» (tambula-) ; OB. « damboda »
(Sarv&nanda: Skt. damya-)=NB. Vft5|\5l « damra* ox ; MB. ^t^^, ^t#^
beside ^rt^^ « jamb(h)ir§,, jamira » (jambira). Cf. the MB. name (W.
Bengal) ^t^^, ^1^^ « hamb(h)ira » < Perso-Arabic « amir ».
OIA. « -mbh- » > « mbh > in OB., MB., also « nih, mm » in MB. >
NB. « m without nasalisation of preceding vowel : « kumar^ »
(*kumhar&, kurabhara = kumbha-kara) ; ^ kumlr^ » (kumLhim) ;
« khamar^ » iarw (? skambh^gara), cf. MB. "^t^, « khamb(h)a » (skam-
bha-) ; « tbam^ » (stambha) ; ^it^rt^cl < samale » holds, saves
(sambhalayati, sambharayati) ; etc.
Also MIA. « mh » from various sources in OIA. : ^?{^ « kum^ra »
(kumhanda, kusm&nda) ; ^t?^ « bamun^ » (brahmana), cf. * Bihari ^
«bSbhan » (*babbhanaj bambhana<bamhana<brahmana) ; ^f5( « ami,
tumi » (amba-, tumha- = asma-, yusma-) etc.
OLl. « anusvara » + « v » became « mb » so far as NIA. was concerned,
at least in Northern and Eastern India : e.g., dss, ^^tW * kimba,
sambad^ beside the proper f^^^l^ « kiihva, samvada » ; cf. MB.
(SKK.) sts. ^yprf? « samaJa » (samvada) j NB. sis. 7^ « sambar- » arrange,
fiavour witli spkes (sam-vr) ; etc.
(f) Where two nasals of MIA. are reduced to one, there is nonasali-
sation of the vowel (except such as comes in through its being followed bya
nasal), and an « a » is changed to « a » : e.g., < an^ » (anna, any a) ; ^t*!
* kan^ » (kanna, karna) j MB. ^t^, « kanha, kan^t », NB. M% « kan-u »
(*kanna, kanha, kfsiia) : « cam^ » (camma, carma) ; « sona »
(senna-, suvarna) ; MB. « sana » (sannaha) ; etc.
368
3PH0N0L0GY: CHAPTER III
(2) 'Spontaneous Nasalisation ' in MIA. and NIA. Onomatopoetics.
178. The above are cases where the nasalisation in Bengali corres-
ponds to, or is based on, a nasal or « anusvara » in OIA. But there are
cases in Bengali and other NIA. in which thli, words show nasalisation where
there is no nasal in the corresponding; OIA. form, as in Sanskrit : ^.y., Bengali
+tt^ « has- Hindi « has », but OIA. <sj^^^- » ; Hindi « saca » ( = satya-),
« nld » (nidra), < sap » (sarpa) ; Marathl « kasav», beside « kasav » (kacehapa);
Hindi, Marathl « asu » (asra) ; etc. These are cases of the so-called
* spontaneous nasalisation ' in NIA. It seems there was an old tendency in
Indo- Aryan, imposed upon it, it may be, by the non- Aryan speeches, towards
articulating through both the mouth and the nose, and thus bringing in a
nasalisation. This seems to have resulted also in a nasal after-glide of the
vowel, an « anusvara », which was normally altered to a full class nasal
corresponding to the stop sound which might follow : but the « anusvara «
was retained before the sibilants and other open consonants. Prakrit
spelling preserves the < anusvara » in most cases. This nasalising habit
goes back certainly to Late OIA. and Early MIA. times : e.g., a Pali form
like « mahinsa » (mahisa), = Hindi « bhaIs<*mhaiQsa » ; and a ease like Skt.
« karkata » crah and « kankata » armour (cf . Bengali #^^^51 < kSk^ra » crah \
compare Latin « cancer » and Greek « karkinos » cmd), which seem to be
allied, would show that it was found in OIA. But it was prominent, as can
be seen from the extant remains, from the Second MIA. Period. Second MIA.
had forms like « vaijka ( = vakkaj vakra), dansana ( = dassana, darsana),
jampaY (=]appai, jalpati), phansa (phassa, sparsa), paijkhi ( = pakkhi,
paksin), etc. (see Pischel, §§74, 86). This kind of spontaneous nasalisation
was a characteristic thing in Second MIA. phonology ; and lUyi words seem
to have a special preference for alternative forms with the intrusive
« anusvara » or nasal. The NIA, words with nasalised vowels can in most
cases be referred to MIA. forms with intrusive nasal : and for such cases,
where the extant remains in MIA. (Pali, Prakrit, Apabhran§a) do not
furnish us with forms showing this spontaneous nasalisation, we have to
go to MIA. hypothetical forms. (G. A. Grierson, * Spontaneous Nasalisation
in the Indo-Aryan Languages,' JBAS., pp. SSI fE.) Spontaneous
' SPONTANEOUS NASALISATION '
369
nasalisation is therefore not a NIA. phenomenon : for the NIA, forms given
above, we have to postulate Second MIA. forms like « *hansa- (=■ hassa,
hasya), ^sanea ( = saeca, sat} a), *ninda ( = nidda, nidra), *sampa ( = sappa,
sarpa), "^kaachava (^kacchava, kacehapa), *ansu (=assu, asru) », etc., in
the analogy of existing nasalised forms. And it would be seen that the
nasal occurs in double consonant groups generally. As Grierson has
shown, in many cases the MIA. nasal or < anusvara » is not transformed
into the nasalisation of the vowel in NIA., but remains as a pure nasal,
or as what may be called a reduced nasal — the rhythm of the sentence
commonly determining the matter.
So far as NIA. is concerned, these forms with spontaneous nasalisation
are of the same category as those which show original OIA. or historical
nasalisation, being equally inherited from MIA. All NIA. do not entirely
agree in details, although all share in the results of this general principle
or preference of MIA. : words with spontaneous nasalisation occur in one
NIA. speech, say, Western Hindi, but are absent in another, say, Bengali,
and vice versa : (?.^., Bengali has ft^ « sap?l », ^ « pa » ^tC? « chare > from
« sappa, paa, cha4(J- whereas Hind! shows « sap, paii^, chare » from
^ *sampa, *pawa, "^chand » of MIA., and Bengali ^% < k&th^,
k&yeth^ » from « ^kawattha, ^kaj^attha, kaittha » (kapittha) can be
compared with Marafchi « kavarh » (*kavantha) : conversely, Bengali has
*(f«tt « puthi » (*ponthia) beside Hindi etc. « p5thl » (potthia),
« kudd,n^ » jumping beside Hindi « kudna », etc.
Examples in Bengali: « akh » (*agkhi, akkhi=aksi);
« akhar^ » beside '^^^ « akhlir^ » (*agkhara, akkhara=aksara) ;
«ic» (*anei, acci=arcis); ^tt^ « Sthi » stogie //'««^ (*anthi, atthi =
asthi) ; beside « It^, i0 » (*inta, itta < *ittha=ista) ; ^
« ucu, uca » {*unea, ucca) ; ^ « iit^, ut^ » (^unta, utta < "^uttha
= ustra) ; #t^l « kak^ra » (^kagkada-, kakkada = karkata : cf. kaijkata
armour) ; #f$^ « kSkur » (*kagkodia, kakkodia = karkotika) ;
« kSkh^ » (*kagkha, kakklia = kaksa) ; ^v5l « kiik(u)ra » (*kugkuda-,
kukkuda = kukkuta) ; C#t^ « kokh » (*kogkha, kokkha, cf. kuksi) ; ^
« kuja » (*kunja-, kujja, khujja = kubja) ; kude » jionjn (*kundai,
47
370
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER 111
kuddai' = kurdati) ; f^^ « ghls- » , ^ghgs- » , ^ * ghat- =► , f^^
«ghIt-», ^& «gbut-» (^ghinsa-, *ghanta, *ghinta, *ghunta=*ghissa,
gbatt[h]a, ghitt[hja, ghutt[h]a = v/gbrs-, ghr^^fca) ; St^ ^ C2^he » scrapes
(cancbai, cacchai, ^tacchai = taksati) ; « c§ca- > s/io?a (-ciilca-, *cicca,
cf . cit-kara) ; 6 f5 « cuei » (^cunca- ?, cf. cucuka) ; c|C^ « chSce »
(*chencai ? *sencayati, secayati) ; ct?l « cheda » (^ehecda-, cbidda = chidra) ;
« chut^ » (^ebunta, *cbutta, *sutta = sutra) ; c|t^ « cb§e »
(*ehuiDvai, ebuvai = sprsati) ; * cb5c^ » ("^chonea, *soca = sauca) ;
^Vt^ * jbajhara » (*jhafijbara, jhajjhara = jharjbara) ; « dbefc(h)a »
(*4henta, dbittba = dhfsta) ; ^"f^^ll « tutiyS » (-^tuntha-, Skt. tuttba) ;
« tus^ » (*tunsa ?, tusa) ; ^^•\, « n«g(g)a * i^^^^g^'y nagga=
nagna) ; MB. f^, « ninda, nida » (*ninda, nidda = nidra) ;
« pScilgt » (*pancila?=:praeira) ; « piit(^Oi * ^ /-^'^^ (^po^t^^i? potfcbi,
prosthi) ; ^ftf « puthi », beside ^f«^ « putbi > (^ponthia, potthia=:pustika) ;
fpf^ « plp^ra > (*pimpada-, "^pimpida-, ^pippi/ada, cf. pipilika) ; ^^5,
eft? « pa(h)uch- > ^^r/7?T (^pahunca, *pahuceha, OIA. *pra-bhu-ccba :
see p. 344)j « p?ra » (*penda-, peda=petaka) ; ^fFF « phaki »
(*pbagkia, cf . pbakkika) ; « phSsgt » (pbansa = pasa) ; ^t^^
« batula » hullet^ pellet (*bantula, vattula = v^artula) ; sftt ^ mag »
(^magga, magga=naarga) ; 5rfj!;5f = SftC'S, beside ^XC^ « mag (g)e, mage »
(*mai]geV, maggei = niargayati) ; »ft*f « sisgt » (*sansa, *sassa = sasya) ;
ypt^^t^ « eajaru », also C^^^tiP « s§jaru » porcttpine (*sailja-, sajja-,
*senja-, sejja- = salya- + rupa) ; jft^ « sSea » (*sanca-, saeca = satya) ; ft^
beside « bSs-, bas- » (*harisa-, bassa, hasya) ; ft^ « bak^ » (*bai)ka,
hakka) ; ct^ « b§t^ » (*bent[b]a, bettba=*adhistat) ; etc.
Of the Bengali dialects, that of Radba, especially West Ba^ha, has
a great fondness for nasalisation, and this tendency is noticeable from
the 14th century (^KK.). The conjunctive participle aflSx ^ « -iya »
is particularly noticeable as being always nasalised in West Eacjba, into
^^1, ^^1, t^lj etc.=* ij'S », and this nasalisation still subsists. It is
especially absent or weak in East Bengal.
In cases like ^ cuei », C^t5 « eh6e^ », « eh§ee « cbuc >
etc., noticed above, as well as #t5 « klc^ » (kaca), c^5l « p§ca » (pecaka),
THE NASAL IN BENGALI ONOMATOPOETICS 371
where we have a single « c » in 01 A., the nasalisation may be specially
Bengali, being only a carrying on of the MIA. phonetic peculiarity in
NIA. ; so also in forms like « v^cu » leak (cyav), and ctl * * touch
(MIA. chuv-), « j^ii * (j^hl, yuthi), and in words showing nasalisation
of MIA. vowels in contact, or of a form like ^ ^ « tfisa », with one
. . . ^ *
consonant only. Or it may be through nasalisation in OB. of the «w » glide
into « w » : cf. « chuvaT, *chuwai, *chuwai, NB. ehSy », NB. shows some
cases of spontaneous nasalisation in foreign loan-words as well : €,g,^ ^*»f
< hiis » semeB < Persian « ho§ », \ « hiika » < Perso- Arabic « huqqah »,
« p§pe » < Portuguese « papaia tt^^t^^ « haspatal » < English
« hospital etc.
179. Onomatopoetics are a characteristic class of words in NIA.
which have nasalised vowels. Most NIA. onomatopoetic forms go back
to MIA., they are of indigenous developmenb (see ante^ p. 175), and as
a rule they cannot be traced to OIA. In the few that are found in Vedic,
nasals do not form any conspicuous element (cf. Whitney, ^ Sanskrit
Grammar/ §1091a, §L1S5). Cf. NB. cS5l « eSca » shout, OIA. « ciceika »
a bird. The MIA. equivalents of Bengali onomatopoetics are not always
found, but the principle of formation is the same. Nafsalisation in NB.
onomatopoetics prefers the [£b] = earlier [e] sound ; e.g., « k&t-k&t
but #Jt^frt^ [kset ksefc] ; « tuk-tuk », but ^''rf^&'jtf [tsek tgek] .
(See references at p. 175, for lists of onomatopoetics in Bengali etc., and
their significance.)
180. Nasalisation is a noteworthy thing in NL\. phonology, but,
nevertheless, there are cases showing the dropping of an original OIA. nasal.
In origin such elision is undoubtedly dialectal, like the preservation of the
* spontaneous nasalisation ' of ML\. As has been said before, nasalisation
is left unnoticed in Bengali orthography when there is a pure nasal in the
preceding or following syllable : Vi^ « maca » (manca), « mathau^ »
(manthana), ^T^vf « nan^d^ > (nanandr) etc. are nofc cases of loss of nasalisa-
tion. Loss of OIA. nasalisation figured in MIA. itself in a few words
which have been inherited by NL\.. : e,g,, OIA. « vinsati, tria§at, sinha » >
MIA. « visa, tisa, siha » > NIA. « bis (vis), tis, si*. Examples from
37a
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER III
Bengali are ^fft^t, ^Tt^^l « alipana, alpana » (alimpana-) ; f%| « kiehu »
(e£. kificid) ; ^q^t « kulajl » (kula-panji) ; ffet^ « ehatak^ » ef. Hind.
« cha?tk » (*sat-tHgka) ; fef?Pl « taka » beside « *fclka»>jcfe*^ «teya»
(t«gka-) ; M B. « tit& » tvet (x/tim) ; ?rp5l « dara » (^dan4ha<danstra) ;
MB. fR5 « y^nich » (nirmanch) ; ^t^^ « pal^kl » beside *1T^^, nt«15f, ^tt^tt
« palagk/ga, pal&ij » (*pallagkia, "^paryagkika) ; «pod^» a caste
(fpundra) ; « bh^yaa » (a-T?/.) (Pali mahinsa-, mahisa) ; f^^^ « bhitlbr^ >
(abhyantara) ; « \/bhij » (abhyafij-) ; « rerl » (eranda-) ;
« sik&l^ beside OB. « sigkala » (srijkhala, srgka) ; ^^fft
« s&k^ri », s&g^ri » leavings ofmeal^ beside ^^f? «sak^fi » (sagkata-) ; MB.
'It^H, C^5t^ « sacan^, seean^ » haivk (saneana) ; etc. The loss of the nasal
in the present participle aiBx -it- » from < -ant- in the locative affix
C« «te» from « *anta-dhi>'^antahi », in the dative post-position < tare*
from * antar-e is specially Bengali, i.e., originated in the NIA. period.
[Ill] Nasalisation through Intervocal ' -m-/ ^ -n-.'
181. There are two other cases of nasalisation in NIA,, also derived
from MIA.
(i) Single inter vocal « -m- » of 01 A, became « w bilabial spirant
nasalised, a nasal [t>], after the Second MIA. Period. With palatal vowels,
« w » figured as « y » in Early NIA. This « w, y » normally occurs in NIA,
as a mere nasalisation of a contiguous vowel. E.g,^ '^^T^,
« als^, Sis^, as^ » (*awlaa, amisa) ; ^% « bhfti » (bhuwi, bhumi). In Late
MIA., a « w » sound at times became « w » through analogy or infection,
and nasalised a vowel in NIA. : e.g.^ eMB. C'^t'®^t^ « pSara > (*pawara,
pavala, prabala) ; « sfta » tendril (*suwa, *su^a-, "'^sua-, suka-) ;
so probably OB. « *hau »<«^hawa, hawaih<hakam=:aham ». Conversely,
there are cases of denasalisation of « -m- > -w*- > -w- » in NB. : e.g,^ ^tWl
« kada » (kardama) ; ^f^i « call » / walk (*caliwi, ^calimi= calami ); cf.
also ^Tt^t, ^t^t, "^rt^^ < pSc&i, satlfci, atii », p. 303, beside « chWi »
(*eha-mika). This is discussed under ^ Nasals,' in the Phonology of the
Consonants,
NASALISATION FROM ' -M-, -N-, -I^-'
373
(ii) In the OB. and eMB. aflSx « -S » for the instrumental, we have
a ease of nasalisation of the vowel throuwli contact with original « -n- »
which dropped out : « -ena » > -ena, -enaih » > « -eih, -§ ». So OIA.
genitive plural affix « -5n5m » gives « » in Bengali. (See pp. 303, 306,
ante ; also in 3forj)hoh^j^i under * Inflexions of the Noun/ and * the
Pronouns.')
P0ST-C0NS0NA\TAL * -m-, -iV ^ IN TaTSAMAS.
In (s, words in NB., « -m- » subscript nasalises the vowel, and is not
itself pronounced separately: ^f%% « rukmini » [rukkini], ^sphll
« atma » [atta], ^1 « pad ma » [poddo, poddo], '^Kt^ « smasana » [J3jan],
^ « bhisma » [bfil/p], fV5I?r«l « vismarana » [bijpron], Skt. v5f^^
« tasmai, tasmin » etc. =[toj'jol, toJ*J*i[i]. The pronunciation [atma] for
^srhll = [atta, atta, atta] is on rare occasions heard, but that is un-Bengali.
In the group ® « jn », « -u- » similarly nasalises the vowel and is dropped :
« jiiana »= [gsern], « vijila » = [biggo].
CHAPTER IV
PHONOLOGY OF THE NATIVE ELEMENT: VOWELS
[D] Intei sivj: Vowels (« Viprakaksa Anaptyxis).
182. The introduction of a glide vowel between two consonants
forming a group has been referred to before (p. 256. See Pischel, § 1^31ff. ;
Geiger, Pali Grammar, § 29 ff). It has occurred in all the periods of lA., as
of other Indo-European speeches. The glide vowel comes between a liquid,
« r, 1 » or a nasal, « m, n » plm a stop, or the other way, or between a
sibilant and another consonant; or, again, between two stops. The infrusion
of the vowel takes place most frequently in connection with a liquid or
nasal. A glide breath or voice, which is easily transformed into a vowel,
comes in between two dissimilar stops when the first one is fully exploded and
articulated ; and the normal Indian habit, ever since the assimila-
tion of dissimilar consonant groups leading in the MIA. period, has been
to pronounce consonants in full, favouring the incoming of the glide. (See
p. 25 L) Hence Indian pronunciation of English words like act, begged
[sek^, bsg^?] commonly becomes [iek^t^, aek^t^, aek^fc'] and [^jeg^d^], and
buU07iy sudden [bAi!ri, sAfZri] become [bAtan, sA(Jan] . The sounds of <: r, I,
m, n » can be pronounced by themselves, and in this they partake of the
nature of vowels, and so they can easily bring in a vowel in their train ; and
the same remark is to a slight extent true of the sibilants. Apart from these
vocalic glides, there are the consonantal glides « w, y », in origin also vocalic
sounds, which occur between two vowels. Their nature has been discussed
before {pp. 338 ff.).
From the Early MIA. period, Sanskrit borrowings were coming in,
and they often showed this intrusive vowel. In Second and Late MIA.,
old worn-down tbh. forms were frequently replaced b}'' cognate is, forms,
and NIA. has duly inherited them. Thus the proper ihh, « sasava, sassava»
(sarsapa) was replaced by « *sarisava », whence Hindi « sarsS », Beng. >if^^,
jprfl « s&risa, s&rsa » ; instead of the expected OB, tlh, ^'^pama » < MIA,
INTRUSIVE VOWELS IN MIA. & NlA.
875
« ^pamma » < OIA. « padma » , we have ia OB. (Carya 19) ^^^^ « pafia
;= paua » < !MIA. sts. with intrusive vowel « *pau\^a, pacluma » <
< padma » . The Old Magadhi fhJi, « katfcaviya > , written « kataviva »
ia the Asoka inscriptions, from OIA. « kartavya came to be replaced,
possibly durinjGj the Transitional MIA. period, by a ds. with anaptyxis
« "^karitavya, *karitabb;i » , which became in L ite MIA. « ^^kariabba » ,
the source of the INIagadhan ^1%^ « karib- », « karab- » etc : the Old
Magadhi « *kaUaviya » would have given a NB. "^^^^ « *katui » .
Apart from those eases of « viprakarsa » in MIA., mainly with the
liquids and sonants (which are rather difBcult to distinguish if one of the
two consonants is not a stop in OIA.), NIA. has carried on this principle
in adopting (s, words, and foreign words. This practice was quite
a characteristic habit of the NIA. speeches in their * Old ' and * Middle '
period ; and in Modern NIA. it has fallen into disfavour, through the greater
influence of Sanskrit on the literary language. The « viprakarsa » forms
are never used in prose, and in eouvcr.-ation, except in the case of some
stereotyped or well-established forms : but they are thought quite proper
for poetry. Each language has its preferences for « viprakarsa » forms :
where Hindi will use forms in writing and conversation like « bhagat,
ratan, jatan, magan, saneh » etc., Bengali will prefer « bhakta, r^tna,
jatna (yatna), magna, sneha (or 'st?h^')»; but in the colloquial,
forms like « puttur, bhuru, n&kkh&tt§,r, tiris, bajj&r » would be perfectly
proper in Bengali.
In Bengali, intrusive vowels determine their nature from those in
their contiguity, as in most languages. Words, ^5. or foreign, cannot end
in two consonants in Bengali : either they must have the prop of a final
vowel, or « viprakarsa ».
Examples of « viprakarsa » in Bengali :
(i) «-a-»: ^^^<lt^ « antara-yami » (antar-yamin) ; ^t^^ « arasi »
(adarsa-: MIA.: see p. £06) ; ?F^5r « karam^ » (karma); W*R«kisan^»
(kfsna) « garab^ » (garva) ; 5f^CW « garaje » (garjati) ; ^f^t^ « garas^ »
(grasa) ; « candar^ » (eandra) ; « cakkar^ > (eakra) ; ^^tW
« chlirad^ » (sraddha : see p. 190) ; ^'^'^ « janam^ » (janma) ; sis, C^T^5?1,
376
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
C®tf^ « jocchana, jochana* (jyotsna) ; ^^p\ « taras^ » (trasa); W^P^
« d&r&s&nft » ; ft*tf% « dip&ti » (dipti) ; « dh&r&m^ ; « n&kkh&tt&r^ »
(naksatra), cf. ^5//. MB. « nakhata»; « pattar^ » (patra) ;
« paras^ » (sparsa) ; tt^^ « pattar^ » (patra) ; 't^t*!, I^t^ « piiran(i) »
(prana, -i) ; MB. ^m, NB. « b&jara, bajjS.^ » (vajra) ; MB. ftFf5f?(
« bid&g&dha » (vidagdha) ; MB. « bek&t& » (vyakta) ; * bhlik&t?l » ;
^t^^^ « bhadra-badhu > , also ^ot*P^^ * bhaddar^-bau » < < ^bhad&ra,
bhatdira », with iufluence of genitive « -ara » (bhratf-vadhu) ; 5|5tsT « magan^ » ;
« mar^t^ » (marta) ; « marlbin^ » ; « muracha » ; "Sj^VB
« mur&ti » ; « j&tan^ » (yatna) ; < r^tan^ » ; ^'S^ « Ug&n^ » ; MB,
« lubadha » ; « svap&n^ »; ^^5t « sv&ragat »; »tt^^ « sastar^ » ;
'^^^ « svatantar^ > ; ete._, etc.
Cf, +^rf^ * garastha » < « ^' garahastlia » or « '^garhastha^ or
< *grahastha » (=gfhastha) ; MB. ^^^^ « jaram^ » i^VM, a very common
word, is a back formation from the f6/i. « jama >, found in OB., =
MIA. < jamma »<OIA. « janma », on the analogy of « karama, dharama <
karma, dharma > kamma, dhamma > kama, dhama»; we have even
a false restoration to pseudo-Sanskrit of this « jlbrltma », to « jarmfi, ».
(ii) « -i- » : « indir » (indra) ; Jwr^ > f^f^fl « kire < kiriya »
an oath, e,^., CSt^ f^Z^ « tor^ kire » {I sivear) on thy funeral riles (kriya) ;
MB. ftfk^, f^f?[*f « giris§,, girisa » (MIA. « *girissa » = « grisma » ; a
genuine Magadhi form, with « *-ss- » for « -sm- » ; of . a ^4/^ ^^-fe « guma-t^ »
^^fl^, siifffinesfs = MIA. « *gumha », probably connected with < gimha ») ;
NB. 5^5. f^flrtt « girismi » [girljjl] (grisma) ; Jf^tf^^ « girit » (gbfta) ; f^,
f5f%«chirl, chiri» (probably MIA. 6'/^. = « srI »; cf. tbh. ft « ehi »); T^f^»t
« tiris^ », beside « trii§^ » : the ^M. is « tis^, tis^ » found in
compounds (trinsat) ; MB. ds. f%f^ < tiri » (MIA. : strl) ; f^^f%, ft#5
« pirlt(i) » (prlti) ; MB. f^lfffi^, « piliha, piliha » whence NB. fnt^
« pile » (pliha) ; « barisa » ( ? MIA. : varsa) ; MB. fts(f^ « bimarisli »
(vimarsa) ; MB. fif^ « sinana » (?MIA. : snana) ; MB. ^J?{\ « sineh& »
(? MIA. : sneha) ; ^Fff^^j c s&risa » (MIA. : sarsapa-) ; etc.
(iii) « -u- » : ^^f^, ^1^5? « agun(i) » (agni) ; MB. « durubar^ »
(durvSra) ; MB. ^WlN « durujoga » (duryoga) ; 5^^, * duwara
PROTHESIS OF VOWELS
377
<dwar&» (dvara); *f^, -fttt * paduma, -mini* («padma»;cf. OB.
« paiia * < MIA. « paduma- ») ; MB. * puhap& through Braja-bull
influence (^puhpa = paspa) ; «puttur^ » (putra) ; ^ « bhuru » (bhrti) ;
« mukuta » (mukta) ; MB. ^ « lubudha » (lubdha) ; ^ « sMtur »
(satru); * slddur^ » (sudra) ; MB. « sukhuma = » (? MIA.,
= suksma) ; « sum&r& » (smar-, smf » ; the MIA. sts. « sumara » gives
MB. (TTt^S^ « sow&r- », with change of « -m- » to « ^ ») ; etc. Cf . English
Jluk > « phulut ».
« -e- » : c^?rt^ geram^ » (j^rama) ; C^^t^ « cheradda », besides
« ch&rad^ » : see p. 190 ; C^^:5 * peret& (preta). Cf. English ^lass > C^^lt^
« gelas » .
(v) * -o- > : C»rtCffTt^ « §olok^ » (sloka) ; folk Bengali (TftC^t^S « sorot^l »
(srotas) ; etc.
For <! viprakarsa » in foreign words, see ^ Phonology of the Foreign
Elements.^
[E] PiioTHESis OY Vowels.
183. A change similar to that of the Latin « sperare » to French
« esperer » also characterised the transformation of a few words from 01 A.
into MIA. : e.^., Pali « itthi » < * "^istrl = stri », « umhayati » <
« *usmayate = smayate » . The prothetie vowel, however, was exceedingly
rare in MIA,, groups like « sk-, st-, sp-, sm- » being almost always
assimilated or altered to « kh-, th- (th-), ph-, mh- ». In ts. forms in
NIA., too, we find the prothetie vowel in some words. It occurs as « a- »
or « i- » . The « a- » seems to have become «a » in MB., and the MB,
forms have been continued down to NB. : ^.y., ^Tf^H « asnan^ » (suana), cf,
Hindi « asnan » ; ^t*^ « aspadd(h)a * (spardha) ; tft « ist(i)ri » , folk
pronunciation of « strl » . Compound consonant groups like ^ « ijka » , ^
< ska » etc. are pronounced in the school room as « agk§, » , ^ ask& »
etc., following the old tradition of the prothetie vowel. The names of the
three nasals \5, «1 « n, n » have got a prothetie vowel before them,
being pronounced ^^1, , ^tl^ [M, 13, dno] : cf. the Oriya name for
m n » — c an& » or « » .
48
378
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
Words like f^lir * tiri »j ^ « tana » are MB. stss. without prothetic
vowel (*8tiri = stri ; stana), which simply have dropped the « s- ». Ts.
words with the prothetic vowel are not many in Bengali, but a number of
examples are found from among foreign loan-words.
A few words in MB. have a prothetic « a- which has no special
value, except perhaps that of an intensive. The source of this « S>-, a- »
is not clear (see Morphology^ under Formative Affixes : * Prefixes ') :
^-g-y ^Hi*ltft, "^i^prr^t « akumari, akumarl » virgin, « &m&nd& »
had^ etc.
[F] Epbnthesis.
184. Epenthesis of « -i- » or « -u- » is not unknown to MIA., but
there it is not regular, not at all a characteristic of the language, only
some sporadic instances of it being found : e,g,^ « kera < *kaira, *kairla,
*kar][a = karya an old sis. of the MIA. period, used in Late MIA. (like
« kaa<kfta » , as well as « kara, kara ») with the genitive to strengthen it;
peranta < *pairanta, *pairianta, "^paiianta = paryanta » ; « pora < *paura,
*pauraa, *parua = parva » , etc. (Cf. Pischel, § 176.) In Magadhi
Apabhransa, epenthesis does not seem to have occurred. It is found only
to a very limited extent in ' Bihari ' ; and although it is quite a common
characteristic of the Eastern Magadhan group, it cannot be said to have
come into force in the Magadhan dialects or languages before the NIA.
period. The OB. remains in the Car j as and in Sarv&nanda^ as well as
the names in the inscriptions, do not give any traces of epenthesis. Forms
in the Oriya inscriptions of the 15th century (see ante, p. 107) show how
epenthesis had become established in Oriya by that date. In later Oriya,
the epenthetic habit fell into desuetude. The Sadani form of Central and
West Magadhan can be said to have epenthesis : e.g., « mairke < mari-ke »
having beaten, « mairke < mari-ke » having died, « ghait < ghati » having
lessened, « aij, kail < aji, kali » today, tomorrow, « kait < kati » having
cut, etc. (See E. H. Whitley, 'Notes on the Gfi?iwari Dialect of Lohardaga,
Chhota Nagpur,' Calcutta, 1896.) In Modern Maithill etc., there are just
traces of it, e,g,, in the change of a group « -ahu » to « ah » [dBu > o:R],
EPENTHESIS IN EARLY MIDDLE BENGALI
379
and it does not look as if Old or Early Middle Maithiti, as in the ' Varna-
rat nakara/ had epen thesis. The same can be said of Magahi and
Bhojpuriya.
So far as Bengali is concerned, we see a weakening of « -i, -u > after
<« a » in the 14th century ; and the beginnings of epenthesis certainly
go back to that century. In the 15th century, in the works of Kfttivasa,
Vijaya-gupta, and the rest, works which are preserved in rather late MSS.,
epenthesis is a noticeable thing. That the language was already anticipating
the « -i-, -u- » sounds as short vowels ending diphthongs, and shifting
them forwards, is evidenced from the orthography of the SKK. : e,(/,, '^Tf!^
« dsihk » = « aisiha » you will come (precative), beside « 5is4 > you
come; « asu » ^ beside « aisu » let Aim come ; ^f^f, ^Itnt « asi, asi »,
^tPT^ « asiS » having come, « as! » / come, ^tf^^, ^i^C^, '«rtP!C^^
« aslbib, -be, -beka » will come = « aisi, aisia, aisi, aisiba, etc. », beside "^Tt^^
« ai'se » /^^ ; ^tf^ « pali = paili » ^^o?* 7^as^ obtained^ beside *rtt^, ^Ttft^
etc. « paiU, payil& » obtained (also « pab&=paiba » / Bhall get) ; ^fy\,
1^ * pasi, p^sl » entered, ^fiflrl, ^PT'iPl ^ p^sia, plisina » ^ifi^f
« p&sil4 » entered, ^ « pasu ^ » ^^if €7iter,^<^ki-* y beside « paisi »
>laFz«^ entered, « paisu » fwi^^r, ^*fC^ « p&ise » <f«^fr* ; ^ « h&si »
h&isi » ^>l(3w ar^ beside ?f^1 « h&j'iS » ^arzft^ been ; etc. These spellings are
entirely in the spirit of later MB. orthography for the epenthetic vowel — like
^t1% «bari» for ^tt^ «bair»=Tf% « bahira » (bahis), ^STf^ « alu » for
« aula » dishevelled (akula), Ft^« cSlu » for « caul^ and even
Vft^ « dadu =► for the Mohammedan name ?f^Ff « daud » (Da*?ud).
Epenthesis in MB. is simply the anticipation of an « i » or « u » before
the consonant after which it occurred was pronounced : e.ff,,
* k&ri(y)a > > ^^R^l « *kairi(y)a » /iavi?ig do7ie. In most of the dialects,
the anticipatory or epenthetic vowel was retained, and the original one
was dropped generally, after it had affected the character of contiguous
^a» by advancing it a little— ^t^l, ^^^II « k&ir(y)a » [koJLra<*koiria],
as in East Bengali. In the Standard Bengali development of vowels by
* Can these spellings suggest a pronunciation * *dusu, »pausu/ in which the * i ' was
turned to * u' by contamination, beside a likely *ai8u, paisu* ?
380
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
Umlaut and Contraction, it seems that both the original vowel and its
anticipatory form are at the basis of the modern words : e,g.y
« *k4iria » > ^'C^, C^C^ « kore » [oi > oi > o, ia > ia > e£B > s, e] ;
so Jft^ « satb^ ^tt^ * sathua » > « *sauthua » >
« saithua » (cf. Typical East Bengali ^t^^l, ^T^«tl « sautha, saitha ») >
Standard Colloquial Q\VA\ « selho » companion [au > *aii > %ui > ai > e,
ua > ua > uo > o]. Epenthetic « a » changed to « i » in most Bengali
dialects. In original disyllables, ending in « -i, -u », there is no retention of
the vowel in its original place any longer — at least in the modern speech —
after there is epenthesis : e.g,, <Pt1% « kali »>^^^ft « "^kaili »>East Bengali
^tt^, « kail, kail », Standard Colloquial « kal > [ka:l] ; but certain
West Bengali dialects indicate the presence of the final « -i » in MB. by
having a slightly palatalised « 1 » — like *TT « -ly » — in addition to an
advanced « a » : [ ka:li , ka:{] . There was no epenthesis when « -i » (as in
the affix of the verb, first person, present tense) historically is the result
of Vowel Contraction (see page 351): ^f?r « k&ri * /(/o (< *karil,
*kariwi, ^karimi = *karami, karomi) ; but MB. lias an epenthetic form
like (^f% « airi » for the ts, « ari » enemy. Ts. words also undergo epenthesis
in Bengali.
Epenthetic vowels generally are not preserved in the Standard
Colloquial and in West Bengali : they have brought in other phonetic
changes. Examples : "STtfe « aji »> ^t^, « aij, aj » fadya) ; ts. '^ff
adi » > ^t^if, < aid, ad » ; ^tft^Jfl « alip&na » > ^^fs^^l, ^rf^l'li?!
« ailp&na, alp&na» (alimpana-) ; *^ti5 « kati »>^|fe, « kait, kat » dregii,
dirt (cf. Skt. kitta) ; ^tFI^ « kaliya » the black one> Tt^^, C^Z^ « kailya,
kele» (*kala + ika + a) ; ^f^ « khali » rfr^'^^*, mustard cahe >^^^, «f*?f « kh'&il,
khuU (MIA. khali) ; ^fg « gathi * > -yftt^, ^ *gait, glt» (ganthi,
granthi) ; « cari » > ^t^, Ft^ « cair, car » (catvari) ; ts. « jati » >
« jait, jat » ; n©]^?:^ * tarite » ifo > ^t^Cvs, n5^i|^\5 « t&irte,
torte » (< v/tf) ; <rtf^C« « thakite » rm<?/« > <2tt^r^, ^^t^f^ « thaikte,
thakte » (thakk-, stabh-kr) ; \5tf^ « dali » >\5T9^, ^5lcf « dail, 4al » ; ^^5.
»ftf?rc^^ * narikela » > ^it^^^T, ^V^"^ * nairk&l^t, nark&l » ; « p&ri^i ^
%, ^'^f*t « *pS.irsi, porsi » (prativgain) ; ItRSi « panita » wfl^^ry >
EPENTHETIC -U- ^
381
*tt^^1, « painta, panta » (paniya-) ; MB. sts. ^ « puni » >
« puin, pun » (*punla, punya) ; ^iScs « phutite » > ^^bc^,
« phuitte, phutte » (sphut-ya-) ; '^J^SUS « bujhite » to tuiderstand > ^^JC^,
U5 « buijhte, bujhte » (budhy-) ; ^f^^^T, ^f^^ « munis&, munisa » >
f^^l « ^muinsa, minsa » felloiv (Early MIA. munisa 7nan) ; 1^11%
« rati » > ^tt^, ^t^ * ^'ait, rat » (ratri) ; ^tN^I « rakhiya » having kejd >
C^C^ * raikhya^ rekhe » (v^raks) ; jrfil^ « s&risa » J>^5^^ Jf'C^
« s&irsa^ sorse » (sarsapa-) ; > ^1%^ « hari > hftria » a {contemp-
imus)>'^l[^y ^'C^ c hairy a, hore » ; etc., etc.
^t^l « kalua » Hack one > *^t^g^, ^^^t^g^, C^JM < *kaulua,
*kailua » (final « a » aback sound), « kelo » ( = kala + uka-) ; OB. « kawaru »>
MB. ^t^*^, ^t^^ * kawur » (kama-rupa) ; OB. « khasu » > ^'Jf,
« ^khaus^, khos > (kaechu) ; *C^t^^ « gokhurna » cow-hoof {-marked) = cobra,
from mark on its h€ad^^C^^^W^\, Q^\^X^ « "^goukhrua, g5khro » (go-ksura-) ;
^]i\^\x2,* tveat€ry>^'^^^\,W^y * j&ula, j&ila, jolo* ; so adjectives
in ^ * -ua » like ^rf|fl « math-ua » belonging to the field > ^spt^^, sffl;^,
C^l « *mauthua, maltha, metho »), ^ ?1 « jhar-ua > stormtf, STf^^ « majh-ua »
of the middle, ^t|!|j « batua > of the road (c£. Standard Colloquial c^t^
« beto ghora » « ^ff^?^'), etc ; Vft^ « dadu » > Wt^, Tt^ « daud, dad » (dadru);
Tf^, TtQ « magu, magu » « wotnan, wife {in contempt) > ait^ « maug^
mag », 5rt^^ + ^ « maug- + I » > ^sftft « magi » a loose woman (marga-) ;
ts, < sadhu » > ^t^?f, ^t^, 5It^^, « saud(h), saidh, sadh » , cf.
genitive ^C^T^, ^jl^W, OT^ « saudher, saidher, sedher »; etc.
It will be seen that the group « ai, au > ai » resulting from epenthesis
becomes « e » in some eases ; and epenthetic « &ur » from the group « *-&ru »
becomes contracted to * -ur », as in ^t\§^ « kawur » above, and ^tf^
* baehnr » , MB. ^<(tf^ « baeh&ru » (cf. Oriya « bach&ru », Marathi
* vasrfi » = vatsya-rupa), J ^ff^, ^tt^ * gab(h)ur » ij^o?*^ (< gabharu
garbha-rupa child), etc.
See also § 151 (i), lol (i).
185. The semivowel ^ *y» subscript ( « y&-ph&]a »), in a
consonant group in ts» words, behaves like ^ « i » , and undergoes epenthesis :
« 5dya » , pronounced in East Bengal as [aiddo] ; so ^ « anya » =
382
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
[oinno], ^SJl « kanya » = [koinna], ^t^J « kavya » = [kaibbo],
« karya » = [kairJ5D, kairdzo], ^TSJ «satya » =[JbittD] (butcf. ^^«sva-tva »
^ « sat-tva » both = [/otto]), C^^IT « yogya » = [^oiggo, dzoiggo],
« sandhya » = [jaind(fi)o], *1t*^^ « paseatya » = [pajeftiitto] ,
« mithya » = [raiittha, mittha], etc. Sanskrit ^ « ks » had in Bengali,
Assamese and Oriya the value of « khy- » initially and « -kkhy- « in the
interior of a word ; and Sanskrit ^ « ju » similarly had the sounds of
* oY'f "ooy* * 3 with nasalisation of the contiguous vowels. The « -y- »
element of these groups equally undergo epenthesis ; e,^,y « Ikksh »
[laikkho], ^I's? « aksa » [oikkho], ^x©9Fc| «t&t&-ksan^» ly that time
[totoikkhon], ^SS^"^ « pratyaksa » [prottoikkho < *proittoikkho] ; ef . flfsil
« ksama>khyama pronounced [khema, khaema] ; ^ « yajiia »=[^3iggo,
dzoiggo], « ajnata* [^>iggato], etc.
Epenthetic « i, u » were pronounced very short or weak, and they led
to the formation of diphthongs with preceding vowels ; and either these
diphthongs remain (as in East Bengali), or the « i, u » are entirely dropped,
with resultant modification of preceding « a » to « 5 » and « a » to « e »
(as iu the Standard Colloquial). Some dialects both of East and West
Bengal, again, are at the intermediate stage, in which just the suggestion
of the epenthetic vowel is heard : this extremely short vowel can be written
as « I, u or as « i ^ ^ above the line, in the Roman character : in Bengali,
the symbol ^ for first used for this purpose by Rai Bahadur Yogesh
Chandra Vidyanidhi, is very convenient, beside the apostrophe (').
Thus ?rt«1 « kal^ » tzme=hom Skt. « kala », [ka:l] in all Bengali; but MB.
^tf«1 « tali » torjjorroiv, yesterday (Skt. kalya) occurs as ^t^^,
[kail, kail, kaij, kali, ka:l] in the various dialects, the last being the
Standard Colloquial (Calcutta) form ; « caliya» having icalJceil^'^'^^^^
^% 5^11, 5'^, ^^T, 5^, C5tC5f [cfoilia, cfoila, cfoi la, cfols, cfole]
(also [ts] for [cj] in East Bengal) ; « sathua » > *5rr^<3^, TT^^,
(7f^, (TfC^ [Jauthua, Jautba, jaitha, /sithua, Jetho],
The vowels « i, u », even when not epenthetic, formed diphthongs with
preceding vowels, « &, a » specially, from Early MB. (See §146, pp. 295
ff.) In MB. orthography, epenthesis of « i, u » as well as their occurrence
EPENTHESIS & ORTHOGRAPHY
3S3
in diphthongs was expressed in various ways. One way, which is already
found in the ^KK. (see p. 379), was not to modify the spelling in any way,
when the following syllable had « i » or « u » ; so that ^fif^l < kari(y)a »
would be pronounced as « k&iria», ^f^^ « k§,ril&» as « kair(i)la », ^tft^^fl
« alip&na » as « ail(i)p&na », and \5tf^ « dali » as « 4ail(i) This practice
brought about the orthographic habit of writing the vowel afier the
consonant even when it was originally pronounced before it, and continued to
be pronounced so during the MB. period : e,g.^ through the custom of writing
red powder « phagu » ( = phalgu) as even when the pronunciation
¥t^^ « phaug » was established, C^t^^ < h§u-k, hou-k » let him he
was also written as « hitku > ; and a word like « aula » (akula)
came to be written as ^t^« Slu > : cf. ^STf^tt^ * aluaillb » let loose the hair
(past tense) (for ''srt^ffit^st ^ aulail^ »), which continued to be pronounced,
in spite of the spelling, with the « u » vowel, or « u > i >, before the
« 1 » ( « aulaila, ailaila », whence Calcutta Benojali ;£i^T^, -c^ « elal&, -le »
[ajlale]). In some stereotyped forms, like ^^<?rt^« alu-thalu » dishevelled,
crumpled, the spelling-pronunciation, however, has persisted, Epenthesis was
also phonetically indicated by writing t « i ^ « ai », ^ « u » fully,
especially it East Bengal MSS. : e.g., « s&tya », pron. [Joitto], is found
as « saitya > ; ^^Vf « aidli » for ^^tf^f « adi » ; ^t^S « sait& » for ^
« sati > (sasthi) ; 'TT^^f, It^^f « saud(h)li » for Jft^^* sSdhu » ; l&iks& »
for « l&ksH, », etc., etc. Again, because the « -y- » subscript in numerous
ts, words as pronounced was epenthetic « i », MB. scribes, from after Early
MB. times, employed the subscript < y » for indicating epenthesis in t6h.
forms : e,g., ^ hklyk > for « h&I-l& », « khatye » for ^Tt^C^
« khaite », ^t^Jl « kalya » for ^)^] « kaila » = <Ftf^fl * kaliya », ^t^J
« rakhya » for ^t^^ * raikba » < -^tf^^, ^tf^? « rakhia, lakhiha » == NB.
Standard Coll. C^^^ « rekho» ^ou icill keep (future precative), 'sJt^J « ayya »
for « am, aihA » (avidhava), ^Tt^S * alyag (t] » for ^sit^
« ailam » 7 came, ^Jl « karya » for ^t^l « kaira » < ^f^?1 « kariva* having
« basye » for -^^^^ < baise » dwells, ^Tt^^ « asye » for
« aise » he comes, tt^It«T « pakyala » for '^^^t«T « paikala » heroism, a
soldier^ $ devoir (<paik), ^5tH « bagyan^ » for ^tt^«l « baigan^ » (vatiggana),
»
384
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
and even a form like srW for « nasya » = STl ^^pHfl < na-aisiya » not
having come. Another way, which is due to the carelessness of the scribe,
was not to write the « i, u » at all, both epenthetic and diphthongal, even
when the next syllable did not have these vowels — so that its presence
could not even be implied through attraction. Thus, simply ^ « h§,l&» was
written for « h&j[l& * was, ^tft « b&harl = bohavl » for C^t^tft
« bauhari » (see p. 345), <tC"t « p&se » for ^^CH, « paise » enters, ^rf^
« alu » f or « ailu » / etc. This method, or want of method,
is late, and began only when in a great many words (in West Bengal),
the « i, u * vowels came to be dropped from pronunciation.
Among the NB. dialects, epenthesis still retains its force in the Vagga
or East Bengal speeches. In Standard Colloquial Bengali, and in West
Bengali generally, there has been contraction of epenthetic vowels, as well
as Umlaut, which was a direct result of epenthesis in these forms of NB.
(See below.) The ^ Crepar Xaxtrer Orthbhed/ being in the Dacca dialect,
indicates epenthesis quite regularly : e.g.y * coina » — (kanya) ;
« xaidher »=:>rfe«(^, 1t^?[^, (sadhu-her^) ; « baix bia » = ^\jT %1=^tf5T
ftfl « basi bia » * stale marriage^ tveddhtg ceremonies of the second day ;
« roiqha » = ^flfl (raksa) ; « xoito » = ^fST (satya) ; etc., etc.
186. Diphthongs, from original contact vowels (see § 171), as well
as from epenthetic vowels, remained in MB. In the NB. Standard
Colloquial, there have been some contractions, which are noted below.
(i) MB. [oi] became [ oi ], and this was reduced into [ o ] when it
occurred in a closed syllable : e,g,, ^ « k§,i » [koi] ichere ? (kahi) ; ^f^^
[poite] < ^#51 « pai-ta » etc. ; but > > ^C^l^ > c^^i [kholi >
khoil > kholl > kho:l] dregs^ dirt, mustard cake ; 5f %^ > j^^^ > *CTt^C"5
written 7|^r\5 [Johite > /oite > Joite] to bear, but ^t%U5 > ^^ysj)
> C^tt^ > C^l^*c^, written ^'^C^, C^^C^, also ^^n5 [korite > koirte >
kolrte > korte] ; ^fe^ > ^%7^ > c^tt^ > C^iP^ [bojite > boi/te,
boKjte > boXste > boste] to sit (here there has been a merging of the OB.
root ^ « b&is < upavis- » into the root ^7f^« b&s » = Skt. « vas » dwell) ;
^XTTt^X^rN [mo(B)iJo>moiJ > morj] etc. Similarly, MB. «&u, &ii »,
which also became « &i » , was changed to « ou, oi », which has been
DIPHTHONGISATION FROM EPENTHESIS 385
contracted to [o] when closed by a consonant : e.g., « ban » [boa],
but sh, * caksuh » > 5^, ^5t>5H^^^ > ^CFT^^, *C5tt^>C^^ [cfokkluu>
cfoukh, cfoikh > cfoukh, cfoikh > cfo:kh] ; MIA. « kavuna, kaiina >>^^^
>^C^t^>C^ [kounD > koun > ko:n] j MIA. «cau + pahara» (< catur
+ prahara) > > 5^^?r, 5%"^^ > CSt^, ^^^y "^C^^^, "^CFt^^^ >
as in C5t^W - (^1^ t^^^ da^ ^ong [cfbupofiDrD, cfoupo(G)oro >
cfoupoiro > cfbupO;r, cfoipoir > cjoupor, cfoipor > cfopor, cjopor] ; MIA.
^ baula » (= mukula) > Mi5. C^H *^^>C^t^^, *C^>C^
[boulo > baub, *boilo > boul, ^boll > bo:l] ; MIA. « ^saula » (= sakula)
> *t^q >C*ft5^, *^t5T>Clt^^, *C*ri^q>(?1t^ [jaulo > joulo, Joilo > Joul, /oil
>jo:l] ; etc., etc.
The diphthongs, with « i, u », or with just a suggestion of the « i, u
are found still in East Bengali dialects.
(ii) MB. « ai » remains as « ai » , except when closed by a consonant,
when the « i » is dropped in the Standard Colloquial : e,g.^ « bhai »,
but ^^<'5rtt^ « aj < aij » (adya) ; '5ft7R:^>^5rt|7|p®, 'STtf^C^ « aste > aiste,
asite ^ to come ( a-vis-) ; ^<^tt^, ^tf^^ * bar < ba(h)ir * (bahis) ; nf^
<^t^ * pak < paik > (MIA. paikka) ; ^<^tt§ * gaKg^if * (granthi) ;
^t^<?rt^ « rat < rait » (ratri) ; and sometimes we have forms like ^t^<
^tt^ <«ba3>bais » (dva-vinsati), though the «ai» group was not a diphthong
in MB.
MB. < ail, au > ai » is found as « au, ai » when occurring finally in
NB., and it is contracted to *a > in West Central Bengali, when closed by a
consonant. E.g., « lau » (alabu), ^srf^ « ai » (au, ayus), but Vt^ « mag »
<MB. 5(T^^ « maug » womaji ; ^rf^ « sadh »<^^^, >rtt^ '•saiidh, saidh »
(sadhu) ; <rf^ « dhat » <?ftS^, «(Tt^ « dhaut, dhait » (dhatu = retas) ;
>^rt^ «khauk >khak » let hint eat (khadatu -h ka) ; etc., etc. ; cf. also ^Tf^^
« mausi > masi » viother^s sider, through influence of rtfJf « pisi »<
f^l^jft « piusi » .
« ai, au >ai » in the body of a word extended by an affix is found as « e »
in West Central Bengali, e,g,, in forms like « meso » husband of mother* s
mter < NB. "^sfj^^^, « mausua, maisua», from « mausi »
=sNB. a^tjft * masI » (matf-svasf.) ^ C^l « dheno »< MB. -^tft^?^, ^^^5^,
49
386
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER IV
<ft?^ « dhSuouS, dhainua, dhanua » {land) growing paddy ^ rice-spirit (dhan-
+ ua, <dhanya); C^l < heto > < MB. *Ct^|^1, ^^t^|^, ^t|^ « hautua,
baituS, hafeua » belonging to the market (hata, hatta) ; so CfC^Tt < deno » given
as a gift (dan-ua, dana) ; etc., etc.
It seems that in West Central Bengali, especially round about Calcutta,
Hugli etc., just in the Late MB. period, the normal change of MB.
« ai », as well as of < ai < au », when this « ai » was not final {i,e., when
it was closed by a consonant or was in the middle of the word), was to an
« e » . This is closely connected with umlaut in this dialect* But
influence of other dialects, and especially of the literary language, prevented
a wholesale contraction of < ai » to « e », in the speech of the upper classes
at least. Thus, we have C^^J « pele » obtainedy C^TC^ « khele » ate^ <iig5
also tii^t'C « elum, elam » I came, « elo » he came^ also t£lC^l < elo » diske-
veiled etc. (respectively = Literary Bengali « paila > , * khaila »,
^t^qtH or better ^tf'J^Tt'^ « ailam, asilani », "^^^ or better ^tf^ « ail^>
and MB. "SfTt^, ail», Sula ») : these have become the accepted
forms in the colloquial when it is used in writing. If we have « car »
four < 5tt^ « cair », « rat » < ?[tt^ * rait *, ^§ « g§t^ » knoi <
5ftt§ « gait », « cal^ > rice < «1, 5t^^ « eail, caul », « sadh^ »
< Tf^«f, ^^«f « saudh, saidh » , as the ordinary forms in West
Central Bengali, — in the genitive, or instrumental-locative, with the ^
« -er^ » and i^i « -e » affixes respectively, the «a » in these words is changed
to « e » : €,g,, C5l^^ 'ftS « cerer^ pSc^ » ^th^ ; C^C^^ C^^l « reter^ bela » 7iigAt
lime ; C5l^ tt^ « celer^ hSrl » /Vr ; dtcS^ « geter^ kari » good
monet/i lit. money that is tied in one^s eloih hem ; CEfTC^ « core sedhe »
between a thief and an honest man ; and even C^®C^ « bheye bheye » among
brothers^ from « bhai », in Literary Bengali =^t^C^ ^T^C^ « bbaiye bhaiye ».
These forms in « e » < MB. « ai » are historically quite correct, but they
are falling into disuse among educated people speaking the Standard
Colloquial as their native dialect. Still, among educated classes, we hear C^^
« b§r^ » < « bair^ beside « bar » ; and we have the verb C^^PPfl
4t berano » to come 07/^<MB. ^tt^, ^tfic^Tt^ « ba(h)iran4 » ; and as we have
seen above, the verb forms in « e » are the recognised ones. In the speech
MB. ^ AI ' IN NB. : MB, DIPHTHONGS
387
of the lower classes in the West Central Bengali area, the * e » forms have
greater vogue. Thus we hear v-j^jt * ese * comes, for the educated ^tC^
*Sse» = MB. isrrtc^ *aise» (avisati) ; (c£i:^ in educated speech stands
only for ^tft^ « asi(y)a by umlaut) ; iSi^ « este » to come, for educated
^t^IC^ « aste» = MB. *^tf^C^, ^tt>!p5 «asi*te, aisite, aiste ». * Si »
before two consonants, however, is not changed to ^ e » : e.^., ^t^c^
« rakhte » ifo < ^^ft^j:^^ « raikhte », nt?t^ « parte » ^r/«^ doion <
^^tf^ps « pairte etc., not *C?r^C^, *C^JC^ « *rekhte, ^perte » : but C<TC^
« rekhe » C^C^ « pere » Jiaviiig brought ^?oa>»,<*^ttf^, *'ft^f^,
=^f^, ^f^?(1 « '^^'raikhift, *pairia = rakhia, pafia » .
Thus in the case of the NB. dropping of the final vowels « i, u » of
OB., as in ^Ft^^ « kal c<t^^ « khos », etc., the intermediate epenthetic
stage is commonly lost sight of : but the phonology of Middle Bengali
and of the present-day dialects sufficiently demonstrates the occurrence
of the epenthetic « i, u », which is quite a characteristic of Bengali.
Middle Bengali does nob seem to have developed any other diphthongs,
except « ai, au, ai, au », and « ea, oh *, at least in the Early MB. period.
Possibly the high vowels « i, u » formed diphthongs when following other
vowels as well, as NB. (West Central) contractions would suggest : NB.
« piSi » > *f^% « piusi » (pitr-svasr) ; ^ « dui » two > ^ « du » in
compounds (^M' « du-sa » tico /umdred, « du-to » < 5^ « dui-ta »
^2^70 jDztfCtf* etc.) ; r?ff « dik » /e^ /iu^i give < « diuk » < CJf^ « dcuk » •
etc., etc. (See before, p. 345.)
[G] VOWEL-MUTATIOX OR ^ UmLAUT
187, By Vowel-mutation, or ' Umlaut,' is meant the modification of
a vowel through the infiuence of another vowel or semi-vowel, of a different
quality, occurring in a following syllable. This phonetic change was first
observed in the Germanic languages, and as illustrations of this phenomenon
from Germanic one may give the following : Primitive Germanic « *harja-
= haria- » > Old English « here » army ; « *satjan = satian » > OE.
« settan * set ; * *ga5ini »>0E. « gyden » goddess ; « *walx-isk-az » > OE,
'388
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER IV
« *wealh-iscj *weal-isc > wielisc » foreign etc. Changes analogous to this
OE, modifieation of earlier « a, u, ea » to « e, y, le » through the influence
of the following « i » are found in NB., especially in the Standard
Colloquial : e,g,^ MB. 5tf?r^ « hariya, haria » (still preserved in the« sadhu-
hhasa » or literary language of prose) > NB. C5C^ « here » hating lost;
MB. "^f^^l « kariya, karia » > NB. ^'i:^, C^C^ « kore » having done.
There was epen thesis of the vowel before this modificxtioa could take place
(« *raikhia, *k&iria »). This kind of epenthesis-cum-umlaut is found in a
few instances in MIA. (p. 378), but it is but sporadic there. Among NIA,
languages, Sinhalese shows umlaut to a very great extent (W. Geiger,
* Litteratur und Spraehe der Sinhalesen/ §§ 9, 10). It is noticed also in
Lahndl and Sindhi, and to some extent in * BihSri ' and in the Kogkanl
form of Marathi, as well as in Gujarati. But in none of the above, except
Sinhalese, has this process been carried on to such a regularity and to such
an extent as in Bengali.
In Bengali again, the change is most favoured by the Standard
Colloquial. The change of 4 = [d, o] to [o], when the next syllable has
[i] or [u], the high vowels bringing in an anticipatory raising of [o] to [o],
is found in all the dialects of Bengali, as well as in Assamese : e.g.^ the
Assamese ^ « kila» Hack from « k5kila- », with original «i», is pronounced
[kola], whereas ^f^^i « k&ls » plantain from « kadala- », is pronounced [kala] ;
so « m&h^ » huff ale (< mahisa) = [moR], but ^mhh^^gnat{<
masa-ka-) = [mofi], and ^^1 « m§.ra > peacock (< mayura-, maiira-) = [mora],
but « m&ra » dead (< mada-, mata- = mfta) = [mora].
188. Epenthesis had become well-established in all the dialects of
Benofali by the beginning of the 15th century, but it is difficult to ascertain
when mutation started in the Eastern Radha area, The * Dhar ma-mag gala '
of Manika Gaggull (c. 1545), as published by the VSPd., gives the full
umlauted forms of NB., like ^f^?!, ^ h&yeehiU » had come, C^C^ « 4§te »
having called, « ela » came, C'tC^ « theke » having been, (TfC^ « mere »
having sf ruck, eta. So does the Vaggavasi edition of the * Candi-kavya '
of Kavikagkana (c. 1580). MSS. of even earlier writers show mutated
forms. But umlaut could hardly have been accomplished as early as tKe
1
UMLAUT FORMS IN THE ISTH CENTURY
.389
middle of the 16th centiir/. These are modernisations due to the later
scribes, who often altered the original un-umlauted forms which had become
archaic in their time ; and modern editors have followed them in emending
the language to something easily understandable. In MSS; of early and
late 17th eentury, such* as, for instance, of those of parts of Kfttivasa's
* Ramayana' from which the VSPd. texts have been printed, we find
plentiful evidence of epenthesis, but none of umlaut. Umlaut does not
seem to have been accomplished in the Standard Colloquial area even by
the first half of the 18th century. Bharata-eandra (1st half of the 18th
century) has forms like ^tf^, "^f^ « khati, ali » = « khaiti, alli » to eat, thou
Aast co?iie y 2is in an early edition of the * Annada-maggala^ printed in. the
thirties of the last century : words like the above would be emended to C^fT®,
tflfif «khete, eli » in modern editions. Probably in Bharata-candra's pronun-
ciation, in the West Central Bengali of Burdwan and Nadiya, the words
were [khaiti, khaite ; aili], or [khiete, jeli] : and this would be about the stage
(as the spelling would also suggest) in the early 18th century in the tfans-
formation of eMB. [khaite, aili] through 1MB. [khaite, aili] to the 19th
century NB. [khete, eli]. A typical early 19th century MS. (dated = 1804 :
VSP., pp. 743 ff.) shows spellings like C^^IU^ « peryaehe » ias brought
dowttj tfl^rt^ « esyache » has come, « enya » having brought, « esya»
having come, « thekya » having been, C^T^ « beraila * came otU,
beside « khatye > to eat, ^t^Jl « bayya » having rowed, < kandya »
having wept (respectively in the literary = ^rf^?lt^, ^^rfpi^t^ ^tf^, "^rtfjRl,
^T^ei or ^f^^, ^C®, ^Tftfl or ^Tt^, or #tf^,
colloquial C^^t^, ^^1^^, ^C^j ^^^j C«^^, C^^^tC^d or C^,
C#Of). The spellings in ^ («enya» etc.) are contemporary phonetic spellings,
[ens, ene], while those in 'STl (* bayya > etc.) are archaic and conventional
— the old « a » having undoubtedly been altered to an [e] sound by the end
of the 18th century. The pronunciation of the above forms in the
Standard Colloquial area (Nadiya, Calcutta) at that time was in all
likelihood as follows : [perscfhe, ejscjhe, ens, ejs, theks, berolo, khete, bees,
kSde]. When the umlaut habit came in^ or^ rather, when there was the
tendency towards contraction of epenthetic and other vowels in contact^
390
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
subscribed « -y- » before « a, e .Jt, CJ was employed to indicate the
sound of [se] or [s]. From an eMB, group like « a+i -f a » [a-f i + a], the
change to N6. Standard Colloquial was somewhat along this line: [al + ia]
>[ttl+ea] > [sei+sae] > [6i+«:]>[e+e]>[e + e]>[e+e]. (Seep. 133.)
In the latter part of the J 8th century, the form of Bengali along the
Hugli river (which developed into the Standard Colloquial) was in the
[si 4-6] or [s + e] stage, so far as this group is concerned; and the
close pronunciation seems to have come in only during the first quarter
of the 19th century. Carey in his ' Bengali Dialogues ' (1801), mainly
on a Standard Colloquial basis, spells words like present-day Bengali C^C^
f*fC^ «chele pile* children (<«chfiliya pila ») as f^^Jl « chSlya
pilya»: these spellings undoubtedly are archaic for the time, but they
are near enough to [ejhels pile], which seem to have been the pronunciation
in Calcutta over a hundred years ago. Ham-Mohan Ray in his Bengali
grammar (1833) gives C^tC^ « gecho » belonging to a tree {^ixAx-xjA),
«mete ^ earthen (matia), etc., which would indicate a pronunciation identical
with the modern one in Calcutta ; but it may be reasonably expected that
in Ram-Mohan Ray's time the articulation was slightly more open than at
present.
Through the influence of the Standard Colloquial, umlaut is affecting
other dialects. The Typical East Bengali pronunciation [thaika, ralkha]
etc. are heard, but [thsika, r&ikha] are quite common. The « sadhu-bhasa »
is approximating more and more to the Calcutta Dialect, and many of the
umlauted forms of the latter have been adopted and fully established in
the literary language, e,g,, « theke » as an ablative post-position
(instead of the full from < thakiya »), C^C^ « bene » beside a compromise
C^f^rat « benia » trader (for « baniya »), C^C^ » chele » son^ « meye »
daughter i woman (instead of « chaliya » and « maiya »), etc.
189. The current orthography of Bengali is very lax and unsystema-
tic in representing these recent changes in vowel-quality by both Umlaut
and Vowel Harmony (see p. 383), Excepting an apostrophe, ('), which
is frequently used now*a-days to indicate the loss of « i » and modification
of the vowel that is left, no diacritical marks are used, and there is no
VOWEL-MUTATION & ORTHOGRAPHY 391
established standard or usage in this matter, [e] and [o] from [a],
through the influence of [i, u], are ordinarily represented by ^ (c) and « (C-t)
« a, 6 » : e,^,, c^C^ « rekhe » , C^l « he to » (hatua). Final .Jt « -ya » for
the open [s] sound which was used in 1MB., CW^, ^TT^, is still used in
writing East Bengali dialectal pronunciation : in the Standard Colloquial,
however, subscribed .11 « -ya » is employed for the sound of [ae.] And
[a] from MB [s]<OB., MIA. [e], through reasons of Vowel Harmony,
is ordinarily left to be expressed by the vowel cQ (t) but at the present day
some writers employ the NB. devise of .Jl « ya » : e.^,, [daekhe] sees is
writen by some as ^fC^ « dyakhe » , beside the historical (M'^ « dekhe » ;
[aeddin] from [seto din] so many ilays^ such a long time is written ^rtf^*(
« yyaddin » in the ' Hutom Penear Naksa ' (see p. 135). So we have >ITTC^
« myale », ^sf^ « kyamangt > etc. for spellings with t£| (c) . The greatest
hesitancy is felt about [o] from the mutation of « a » [o]. Sometimes it
is phonetically written (C-l) « o » : occasionally the apostrophe (') serves
to indicate both the dropping of the « i, u » and the modification of « Ik »
to [o] ; and frequently there is nothing to indicate the alteration, [koria
> kore] having done is thus written C^jT^, ^'C^, (the last spelling is
identical with ^C^, pronounced [kore],= does) ; [koribo > korbo] I sliall do,
= literary Bengali ^f?[^ « k&riba is written C^t^^, C^^,
^ etc. ; [fioeiga, fioia > fioee, fioe] hating leen is written as
^'C^, [JS^'ua > Jgolo] as C^T^ql, ^'C^, ^C^. The spelling
with ^ (ct) is rigidly phonetic, the one in ^ wtihout the (') decidedly
careless and slovenly. The spelling with the apostrophe indicating
the loss of the vowel, is not wholly phonetic ; but it seeks to
represent the pronunciation by the convention that « & » [o] followed by
(') is modified to [o] ; and, at the same time, it to a great extent
embraces the dialects, and by a too lavish use of the letter >Q 'cT) does not
effect a violent break with the orthography of the standard language. The
apostrophe, however, is not usually placed after the mutated « e » from
original « a », when there is an [u] sound in question, as the change in
quality in the Standard Colloquial is too marked : e.g., [majgEua >
me^o] second^ lit. of ihe middlc^mM^ rarely OT/ but never or C^'€? ;
39^
PHOI^OLOGY : CHAPTER IV
but [khaia>kheSe] havmg eaten is written C^Cf, 0(X^ etc., — with the
apostrophe. The use of the symbol, the top-loop o£ the letter ^, ^
« i, u », after « a », for the epenthetic and elided vowels, has been suggested
by Bai Bahadur Yogesh Chandra Vidyanidhi {e.g., ^^), but this has
not caught on, as it is a new symbol ; and it is not suitable for representing
the entire change in quality in a form like « mejo » from « ^maijhuS,
*maujhua, majh-ua
Types of Mutation in Bengali.
(1) Mutation or Vowel-Modification by Contraction, after Epenthesis.
190, (i) ^+t + ^ [o + i W + o] > ^ f « [o + o], written ^ (Cl)+^
> C^tC^, ^'C^1 [fioib] > [fiolo] was ;
> C^t^t, ^1, ^'C^ [R^Ao] > [floeo] you xcill he (future precative) ;
*^f?rc^ > C^t^l, CTt^, C^tC^, (M^y ^'C^,
etc. [korilo, korile] >[korlo, kollo ; korle, ^ssAX^'] he did \ West Central
Bengali ^f^l>C^T^^^, C^t^, etc. [koricfho] > [korcJ(h)o,
koccf(h)o] = Typical East Bengali ^fe^f, ^T^C^ ^spf^ [koirteso,
koirte osa] you are doing ^T = *(?rtC^l' in pronunciation, [joitto] > [Jotto],
East Bengali [Joitto] ; so = *C^rt^^' in pronunciation, [loikkho >
lokkho]; etc., etc.
(ii) ^+^-1.^1 [o4.i(i) + a]>vs + ^ [o + e] : eMB. 'sr + .jt, NB.
^-|-^£|, + ^+;£j', ^ + ^5, ^ + etc.
^f^>^J1, ^^J>^'C5T, <:A\J^j etc. [bolia > boils >bole] having
mid ; ^f?[^ > ^^Tl ^C^I > "^'l^, CMC^, etc. [koria > koirs >kore] having
done ; > ^^SIl, ^OT > ^'C^, C^t^^, etc. [roGia > rois > roee] havitig
remained ; « sadhu-bhasa » forms like ^Ff?|>5tT, / used to do, I used to
say, etc. become in the Standard Colloquial pronuuciation ^'^C^^^ ^'^Cn©^
[koritam, bolitam > koirtem^ boiltem > kortem, boltem] ; so ^fll^t^,
^f^^K I did, I said > ^'^C^3(, ^'^C^ [korilam, bolilam > korlem, bollem] ;
but East Bengali has [koirtam, boIltam, koirlam, boIllam], etc. ; sts.
clear > Standai-d ColL 'C^TWW' [porijkar > ^poirJksr> po/ker] ;
MUTATION OF ^A + I + A'
393
^^^1 > you will do [koriba > koirbs > korbe] ; sts, ^^t^ >
[obbfiittjo> oibbRsJ > obbfiej] ; Persian « xarldar * buyer > ^^C^
[xari:da:r > khoridar > khoXrdsr > khodder] ; etc.
The epenthetic staj^e is preserved in Typical East Bengali.
In verbal noun forms in t^j « iba » — 5f^^, ^^t^ < karibar^,
c&libar&, hd,ibar^ > etc.— the native speakers of the Standard Colloquial
say [o] rather than [o] — [korbar, cfolbar, fiobar] etc., instead of *[korbar^
^olbar, Robar]. This is aj^ainst the rule for mutation given above.
Probably here we have an influence of the verbal nouns in ^1 « -a » — ^^t,
5^, ^91 [kara, cfola fiooa] etc., which have [o] and not [o] ; and it is
also possible that the Old Bengali equivalent of this verbal noun in ^^1
« iba * was « *-aba- » or « *-eba- », so that the « i » epen thesis and mutation
were not possible here. (See under Morphology — ' The Verb : Verbal
Nouns.*)
(iii) + (or <ll, in present participles in « -ite » of roots
ending in ^«a»)[a + i + a/e]>;£l + ci} [e+e], written in 1MB. ^(1)4- -11, '^l(t)
-hCJ, in NB. 'il(c) + <il(c), ^(cy + ^(0. o'' ^(C) + ^ (^)': ejj., ^t%1> ^T(tM
^(t)?:^>C^^, C^^^' hci^ing kept [rakhia> raikhs >rekhe] ; ^tf^1>^t(t)fJl,
^(t)C^ > having chosen [bacfliia > balcfhs> becfhe] ; ^tr5>^rf^v5T >
eating, to eat [khaite > khaits > khete] ; ^TttCvo > > going,
9^ [JSaite > Jgaite > Jgete] (but not > *C^^j:^, ^tfe^ > ^Tft^
> where we have roots ending in consonants — « rakh, gah ^ — keep,
sing) I Tt^t^t^ a village name > C^twtl [panifiati > painiati > peneti] (also
[peniti] by Vowel Harmony); ^fSl > in folk- Bengali, in response
to a command or address {a^^^ia > aiggg > egge, egge] ; etc. Ts, words
generally resist this sort of modification.
Typical East Bengah preserves the epenthesis, and does not change
the final <« a » . The * sadhu-bhasa » forms ^tR^rfsr, iTtf^tstSf / kept, I
used to keep etc. have their Standard Colloquial modification ^t^^^, ?rt^^rc\5^
[rakhilam, rakhitam > ^aikhlsm, *raikhtsm > rakhlem, rakhtem] :
compare East Bengali [raikhlam, raikhtam] : here the proper dialectal
or native West Centi-al Bengali forms like ^tf^q?, ^tf^^ > ^T^^si,
[rakhilum, rakhitum > rakhlum, rakhtum], (which do not admit of the
50
394
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
epenthesis-cum-mutation scheme [a + i + a > e + e], and preserve the
root-vowel « a » unchanged), have prevented the change of ^tf^t^, ^tf^^
to *c?r'^K^, -^c^^f^^.
(iv) % ^, I, til, ^ + ^t^ + ^ > respectively vQ, ^1, % | (or c£i),
^+t+ti3 [o, a, i, u, e, o + ai + a] > [o, a, i, i(e), u + i + e]. The [o] in
the mutated form, when it comes from [o], is written ^ or >Q in NB. ; and
the final « e » = .Jt « -ya » in 1MB., is written q£1 in NB. Examples : ^^rrt^>
CTtf^?:^, ^f^C^ Mvini/ caused to say [bol-a-ia>bolie] ; ^5tt^1 >^tf5^5
having made io dance [nacj-a-ia>nac|ie] ; fesfj^ > having stepped
over {something lying on the ground) [digg-ai-a > digie] ; '^^ttfl >^f%C^
having dried or cured [Jukh-ai-tt> jukie]; C^QHt^^^l > fsftc^ having earned to
give [de(6)-ai-a>diie], but (?f^^1> C^ff^^ having made to see [dekh-ai-a>
dekhie] ; C*tHtt^l > 'Qtc^ having made to sleep [jo(6>ai-a>Juie] ; etc.
East Bengali uses the full forms of Middle Bengali, without contrac-
tion and mutation.
(v) ^ + 1^4-^ [D + ia + i] >^ + (i|-f^ [o + e + i]— [o] written ^, % ^\
and the [e] = l^MB. .Jl. E,g,,^t(^ > ^'?:^fl I have do7ie [kor-ia-cfhi >
koir5cfhi>korecfhi] ; ^^t^ >^'C^t immediately after having been [fia-ia-i >
fioisi>fioeei], by Vowel Harmony [fioii]. Epenthesis is preserved in EB. :
[koirasi; fioiai, fioisi].
(vi) % ^ ete. + ^ + l^ [o, a + o + ia] > vQ, ^1 + ^ f cfi [o, a + u + e] :
5T'tf?ra1>5f^?3r, •('^CtT belonging to the city [nogoria > '^nOgoiria>*nogoir& >
nogure>nogure] : > prone to weeping [kad3nia> *kadoinia>
kadoins>kaduneJ ; ^t?f^^ > belonging to the rainy season [badolia>
badule] ; ^^f«l^ > C^^C^? pertaining to brinjals, brinjal-colotired, deep
purple [baigonia> begune] ; etc. Typical East Bengali forms are [nagoira,
k&ndoina, badolla, balgolna].
(vii) ^4-^ + ^ [o-j-oi + a] >^8 + t + <il [o+i4 e] : -^^^1 >
a talker [*koRoia>koie] ; so "^^^^>^'PI?:^ [boloia> belie]. Cf. '^T5^f1>
•rtfe( dancer ^nacfoia > nacfie], ^ 9tt^>^ftCi, si^iger [^gaRoia >
gaBie, gaie], etc.
(viii) ^ + ^ + ^ [o + u + a]>^ + ^[o + o], written in NB. as ^ + (ct),
+ « (Ct), '^f+^Cc.t)^ ^ + Kg., > ^'c^l watery [^Dlua>^olo:,
VOWEL HARMONY
395
^f^^ > *t'C&1 painter [pDtua > poto], etc. In Eastern Bengali, the epen-
thetic stag^e is found [dzolla, dzoula ; pouta, poltfia],
(ix) ^ + ^+^ [a + u + a] > c£j + '« [e^-o] • ^^^1 > (M'^ comrade
[Jathua > jetho] ; ^ft^^l > arboreal [gacfhua >gecfho] ; sit^X^fl^,
of the middle, second [majsfiua > me^o], etc. Typical East Bengali
[Jaltha, Jlautha ; gausa ; malza].
(2) Mutation without Epenthesis. Vowel Harmony.
191. There is one kind of vowel change in Bengali, by which the
high or low quality of a vowel in a following syllable conduces to a similar
modification in a preceding one. This is a kind of anticipatory Vowel
Harmony. This Vowel Harmony characterises the NB. Standard Colloquial
most, but there are some types of it which seem to have occurred in all the
dialects of Bengali^ and from a very early period in the history of the Ben-
gali language, ^'.y., we have in Carya 3 « sundini », with a pun = (i) a
female loine-dealer, (ii) one possessing a trudk, where in the first sense the
word is to be connected with a form like « *sondl, *s8rl < saun4ika » : the
feminine form « '^sondiui » would thus seem to allow a variant in OB.
« sundini », ia which the low vowel « o » is raised to « u » because of the
following high vowel « i » ; and similarly in Carya 11, we have
« mattihara », also with a pun, connecting the word with both (i) Skt.
« mukti » and (ii) OB. « moti < mottia < mauktika » — in the second case
there being a modification allowable, in OB. phonetics, of an « o »,
to « u » when followed by « i » . But on the whole, these two cases
are exceptional in OB. ; and the rule that when there is a low vowel
following, [e, o, a], the language prefers an [e, o] in the first syllable,
or when there is a high vowel [i, u], the first syllable would have [i, u,]
which is so characteristic of Bengali, and is found also in Assamese, does
not seem to have been established in OB. This characteristic is absent
in most other NIA. Thus in Middle Bengali we have « potha > a big
MS,y but *C*1t^>^^ < *pothi>ruthi» as a diminutive (and this diminutive
form only is found in NB.); Bengali CTtt^ « dole» he stoi^igs, but *(?rtf^>^
396
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
«*d6li>duli » / C5t^ « cora » the thieving one, f rom « c6r& »
thief, but C5t^^ > « cor&ni > curni » woman thief; C^tC^ « gone > A<f
counts, but «guni» T count ; Skt. «i'ohita » carjo=''^cartft>^ft> ^ «%5hl
> ruhi, rui the name « rohitdsva » occurs in MB. as a sts. ^Ff^ft'l
« ruhidas& » . This habit is fairly established in Early Middle Bengali,
and may have started in the OB. period: SKK. forms like
« kuyill » , feminine, from « kokila » ; « gut! » one piece (determinative),
beside C^t^ « gota » ; J^^^ « cur§,nl, curini >, ^ « curl » ^A^/l^, beside
C5t^ « cor& » ; ^^^1 « chuilfi, » touched, beside CW\ « cho » ; f^^Tt^t
« chinarl » a wanton woman, beside C^sft^ « ehenari » ; 'jj^, ^ff^'^Pl
« puri, puria, puria » having burnt up, beside C^X^ « pore » hums ; etc.
This system of alternating between "high and low vowels of the same class
through influence of following ones is a remarkable thing in NB. phonology,
especially in West Central Bengali : e,ff,, [e] with [a, e, o] in the next
syllable is lowered to [ae] : Ott^ « dekhe » he sees is pronounced [daekhe],
but Off^ > (M^ « dekhia > dekhe » having seen is [dekhe], the influence
of the [i] preventing a lowering of [e] to [se] ; so cvf^ « dekh& » you see
= [dgekho], but « dekhuk » = [dekhuk], (?ff^ «dekhi» / see =
[dekhi] ; t£l^ « ek^ » o;/^ is [sek], « eka » <2/(?«)? is [jeka], « ek^tS »
one piece = [sekta], but ek^ti » one little thing is [ekti] and
« ek^ttu » a little = [ektu] .
Cases of Harmonic Vowel Mutation in Bengali.
(i) [o-hi] > ^ + t [o + il- The mutated [o > o] is left un-
noticed in spelling, being written ^. B.g., ^f^ « k&ri » / do, ts. ^ft < k&rl »
elephant [kori] ; « gh^ri » gong [gflori] ; « n4nl > n&ni » cr^a?» of
milk [noni] ; « karl>k&ri » cowj^ s/ze^^ [kori] ; tss, ^tf^ « p&ti » [poti],
^ « y&di » [^odi], >ri%N5 « sahit^ » [ JoRit], tf^ « p&thik^ » [pothik], etc.,
etc. This modification is fo md in foreign words as well : e,g,, Persian
« garib » > « g&rib » ;joi?r [gorib] ; « barf » ictf > « b&r&ph »
[boroph], but « barf I * > « b&r^phi » a sweet-meat, sugar and cream
ice = [borp(h)T] ; « majlis » an assemblf/ > ^^fil^f « m&jlis » ^[mojgli/] ;
English guernsey > 9f|t * g&fiji » = fgonjgi], permit > *t^ftf&, C*tt^f^
[pormit], etc,
* 0+U ' ; MODIFICATIONS OF ' I, E, U, O ' 397
The diphthong 'Sf^ « §,i » becomes [oij through this rule.
(ii) [o + u]><3 + ^ [o + u] : The [o] is written as 'SJ. E.g., ^
[bou] bride y wife (vadhu) ; [koruk] let him do ; [dolui]
a surname < « dal4i » (dalapati) ; tss. like Sf^, cj^, 5f§ [modfiu, Jgodu,
logfiu, monu] etc., etc.
The privative affix in ts. and sis. forms normally is not altered
to [o], — it remains [o] even when followed by [i] or [u] : e.g,y [odfiir]
impatient, rarely [odBir] ; [o/ukh] illness^ never [o/ukh].
Because ^ [o] followed by % % [i, u] in the next syllable is pronounced
^ [o], the careless habit of using ^ and not « (cl) in spelling, in some
words, which historically ought to have ^8 (C.1) , is found : e.g,, « m&ti »,
pron. [moti] : the genuine Bengali form ^f© « muti > occurs in MB., and
^fe={?rtf^ is from the Hindostani, wrongly spelt (mauktika- > motI) ;
so * g&ru » [goru] is for C^t^» « goru » (go-rupa) ; etc.
It is not impossible that in ts. and fort^ign words, this change of « & »
[o] to [oj, through the occurrence of an fi, u] in a following syllable,
came in train of MB. epenthesis of [i, u], resulting in [oi, ou] which was
duly changed to [o] : witness a MB. spelling like <^f^ [oiri] for ^sff^ [^>ri]j
NB. [ori] = Skt. *ari » (p. 380; see also p. :384^).
(iii) ^ + ^, ^, % % [i-f a, e, o, o] > + ^ [e+a, e, o, o] :
f^fl * \/gil » to mallow > CM^I « gela * swalloived {pass, part.), « gele »
he swallows f C^^f, C^tC^ « gel&, gelo * ^i^ou swallow : but f^fif « gili » /
swallow, f^t^[Jf^ « giluk » hi?}i swallow : etc.
(iv) t£i + ^, c£i, [e + a, e, o, o] > ^, % ^ [se + a, e, o, o] :
CSf^ \/[dekh] to see > Cf^ [djekha] see7i, OT^ [dsekhe] CW^, (M'^
[dsekho] you see, but CWf^ [dekhi] / .w, [dekhuk] let Aim see ; etc.
(v) ^, ^, ^ [n + a, o] > ^ + ^, c£|, %n8 [o + a, e, o, o] ;
[/an] ifo Aear : 'Q^rl > C^W [J^^^ci] ^-^^^frr/, > c«rtW [Jone] hears, dt^,
CitCffl [/ono] you Aear, but ^f^( [/uni] I Aear, [Januk] lei Aim
hear ; etc.
(vi) [o+i, u] > ^ + 1, ^ [u + i, u] : efl [Jo] lie, sleep > tl^
[fui] ^C^^^lrs [Jute] lie down, ^^<*c*it^ [Juk < Jo(6)uko]
let Aim he down : but CtRI [Jooa] one tAat Aas lain down, [JoS] he lies
»
398
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER IV
down, etc. ; so siss. -^1% [pu/ji] dependent, adopted {son), from C'tNJ « posya »,
^[f^ [^uggi] <C^t5U « yogya », etc.
(vii) c£i + t [e + i] > t-f-t [i + i]: this characterises the Standard
Colloquial specially. CJft > f^, [dei > dii, di(:)] / give ; C5f% [de/i]
becomes f?f*f [di/i] couniry^made, couniry-horn ; so f^^tf^ [bilati] > f^f%
[bileti] (see pp. 400-401) > f^ft^ [biliti] /(?m>;^ ( = Persian < wilayati ») ;
similarly f^f^ > %lff > f^ttf^, f^f^ [giacfhi > giecfhi > giicfhi, gicfhi]
/ have gmie^ f^^tfl^ > fTOif?^ > fif^M, f^f^^ [diacfhilo > diecfhilo >
dii^ilo, dicfhilo] yi^ /^«^ given, etc. ; so C5f»tti:s(ft > C^l-ttf^lft [me/ameji >
me/amiji], aswciation miixi:) > > ^ Jff^^ ' [/onnia/i,
jbinneaji > lojmtlx > Jonniji] ; etc.
(viii) The raising of an interior < -a- > -i- » of Early Middle
Bengali, to < u », when there is a high vowel following, is a most note-
worthy thing in the phonology of the NB. standard speech. This has
been referred to before. This change also occurred in Early Middle
Bengali : of. ^KK. forms -ft « ekhuni, -I » immediately, beside
^£1^ « ekh^ni and « p&huri » watchman, beside 1^ « p&h&rl » ;
and it would seem, from a form like OB. « pakhudi » petal (Carya
10) (paksa- + -da-), that its beginnings go back to OH. times. This
change obviously took place through an intermediate stage of [o].
^'9^y ^^fe- [at-poure] < ^^-'^^f^l « *ath&-p&h&ria » (asta-praha-
rika-) ; ^Sft^fq < ajuli » (anjali-) ; '«rt^f*f « ajull », beside « ajal^ »
(f ju) ; ^^fi^ ^ aguni » ("^agani, agni) ; « uruni » ("^odhania, ava-
vestanika) ; « kurul * < ^v5tft, ^tf^ « kur&li, kurali » (kutharika) ;
^Ff^ « kakui » < ^l<p^ « kakai » (kagkatika) ; 5^*. ^^tp? « g&pure » ^a/yta-
(gal pa > gappa + da + iya) ; « ehauni » (chadanika) ;
« jwaluni » burning sensation (jvalana-) ; ^^fil « jiuli » a ^r^e (jiva-la-) ;
« jarul » a ^r<?^ (jatali) ; ^WW^ « thSkrun » < ^^t^ « thakuranl »
(thakkura + ani) ; Co^^ « tgtul »<OB. « tentali » ; c?f^tt « deuti »>^ft«J&t
« *di4tl » (dipa + varttika) ; « dhunuri » < « dhunari » cotton^carder
(dhuna-karin) ; « narun » ("^naha-harania, *nakha-haranika); ^Ttgf^T
« nacuni > (nacca-, nf tya) ; nt^Sf « parul OB, « parali » (patali) ; ^tt^f^I
« j^uli » a» ornament (parsva-) ; f^l^^ « pithuli » < f^^^ « pithali »
^ > ' THROUGH INFLUENCE OP FOLLOWING 'I' 399
(pista-+aU); « puk(h)ur OB. -« pokhiri » (cf. pusharini) ;
f^f^ « piuli > yellow colour (pita-la-) ; f^t% « biuli » cleaned pulse
(vidalita) ; f^fif « biuni » (vyajanika) ; « bharui » a bird (bharata-,
bharata-) ; « in§,uni » clmrning'Siick (mathanika) ; f^f^-^^*? « mich^-
kaune » < ^^f^l^ « kahaniya » (kathana 4- -ika-) ; ^Tt^f^ * maduH » drum-
shaped amulet^ cf. spftf^l « madal^ » ^Zn^/M (mardala) j ft^f^l « siuli »
(sephSlika); etc., etc. Tatmma and foreign words fare similarly: e.g.^
•rt^^ « natuke » (nataka-), « eandure » = U^f^ft « candariya », a
familiar form of the name Candra^ *t^?r «sahure» iirba7i (Pers, «§ahr»), etc.
There is mutation of [o] to [o] : see § 190 (vi).
An original « o » vowel is similarly changed to « u » : e,g.j stss. fi^^
(J^^ « niugl, neugi » (niyogi) ; ^1^c*T « amude > ??ierry (amoda+iya);
« purut » > "^^^^t^^ * ^puroita » (purohita) ; etc.
Through the analogy and influence of the above forms, which form a
numerous class, we sometimes find cases of change of interior « -a- » > »
to « u » , even though there is no high vowel following : e,g.y ^Tf?^
> ^^T^^ « thahlira > thaura » to ponder, deliherale : cf. Hind « thaharna »;
^'W?! « sajhara* evening ligM>'^X^\ « sajhura > . Here, again, a change
to « o » marked the intermediate stage. In some common words, even
when there is quiescent « ^ » following, we have also change of « & » to
« u 3^ : e.g., Tt^^f * bamun^ »<^|;^iT « bamana » (brahmana), C^^^ « begun »
<^tt^*l < baigan^ » (vatiggana), sts, ^^js( « bastum » [bojtum] < ^Ih,
« b&st&m, b&istcL^^ » (vaisnava), etc, etc.
(ix) Change of quality from front to back, or vice versa ^ through the
influence of a following vowel, is rather rare in Bengali. There are a few
cases inherited from MIA. : e.g., « munis^ » labourer^ found already in
ASokan inscriptions (= manusya), whence we have NB, fsR^fj « minsa »
a fellow {in contempt) ; cf . the sts. ^fi{^ « m&nisyi » [moni/ji] =
<t manusya » ; and OB. « p5khiri » has an analogous form in the
' Divyavadana ^ word « puskirini » . NB. examples are Pff^ « siki » <
« suki » Itk, four-anna bit ( = ? sapadikS ; so Platts derives Hindos-
tanl « sfika, suki »). Cf. Oriya « duhii)k& > dihiijka » ^/ ^li'^?. Con-
versely, we have change of«i» to«u»: « bindu > *bundu > ^if
»
400
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
biid^ » , and « susak^ » porpoise, of. Pali « sunsumara » , Skt
« sisumSra ».
192. The above are cases where Vowel Mutation results from the
influence of a followinor vowel. The modification of a following vowel
through the influence of a preceding one, which is the kind of Vowel
Harmony that characterises the Dravidian and Ural-Altaic speeches {e,g,^
Telugu and Turkish), is also found in NB. It is the result apparently
of a strong initial stress ; and those families of speech in which we have
it are agglutinating in nature, in which the root syllable is the initial one
and possesses the dominant stress which influences the following syllables.
The Standard Colloquial is specially characterised by this kind of Vowel
Harmony, and East Bengali and most other dialects resist it : naturally
enough, as the Standard Colloquial is a dialect of strong initial stress.
(x) 'Sf^ vs-f^ [o, a, o + o] > ^, ^ + ^ [J>, Q, o + o]. This
modification of [o] to [o] may be said to be optional. The resultant
[o] is often left unnoticed in spelling : e.g., siss. ^^3^, 9t^, ^ etc. =
[roton, gorob, Jgoton] ; 5^ = [cfolon] ; ^^>^^5{ [Boon > Boon] ;
similarly [bfiarot], -^tr^ [pci^og], ^tf^ [^^don], ^V^^ [madol], etc.;
Csrt^ [moRon], is. C^m [.^obor], (^X^^ [loton], etc. So foreign
borrowings: ^ [goigol] (= P^rs. ^gazaU), [dobol] (= English
double), [dojgon] (= English dozen), [nombor] (English number),
^tt^tf [garod] (English guard), C^t^^ [botol] (Portuguese « botelba »), CTt^^
[morog] (Persian < morg., raurg. ») j etc., etc.
The group [o + o] is not preferred by the Standard Colloquial, the
second or both must be altered to [o]. The English group [o: (ou)+o: (ofi)]
in jt?/5o/(> [foutouj becomes [photr)] ; ef. oUo = ^rtfet [oto],
(xi) '^-f ^ [a -ho] > ^t-f^il [a + a] is found in the colloquial ^^t^tCl
[tdBale] < [tafiole] < ^ « taba h&ile » then, that being so.
(xii) ^ + ^ [i + ct] > ^4-^ [i + 6] • very common, in tbh.^ as well as
^5. and foreign forms, [iecp^e] (iccha) ; MB. [bine] (vina) ;
^T?\^ [mijel] (misal& mixed < misra-) ; W^^rj [mitthel (mithya) ;
[bfiikkhe] (bhiksa) ; T^H, vm^y ^'M^^y C^C^, etc., etc. [^ilem dilem,
kortem, ^etem], Standard Coll pronunciations of « chilam, dilam, klirit»m,
MODIFICATIONS OP * A '
401
jaitam etc. = / tvaSj I gave, I nsed to do, I used toga; so ^'^^
[korbe] you will do < « k&riba » ; dialeetally also ^^C^^, [korber,
diber], etc.=/or doing, for givmg < « k&ribar^, dibar^ »; [^ciine]
/ %7rt;ii5, "^f^m [korine] / donH do < « caina », ^f^1 « k§rina » ;
[cfaini] / ^2^? ?2<?^ want<:^^^^j?^, ^fts^tft « eainei, eahinahi » ; so ^f^^r-
[bolijne] thou won't sai/- ^1 * b&lis^ na », ^f^jR [bolijni] =
*^f^7l^5{t, ^PPRtft « balis nei, -nahi etc. ; %q [nile], folk-Bengali for
cfl?rl « llla » ; [pitemo], folk^Bengali for f^^t^ « pitam^^h^ » ;^ 1^T^,
f^?Stt^ « biswas^; nihswas^i etc., commonly become [bijje/, nijjej], aad
all similar forms; fe^^ [Rijeb] accounts (Perso- Arabic « hisab ») ; f^^vg
[bilet] foreign land, Europe (Perso-Arabic « wilayat ») ; [phite]
ribbon (Portuguese « fita »). Also in forms like <ij^1 [iekta]
[atta] eight pieces^ but [tinte] three pieces, MB. f^fJl^
«tini-ta [cfarte]/o?/r i?2(?tf^5== MB. 5Tf^^ « eari-ta »=East Bengali
[tsalrta, tsairta].
(xiii) ''^ + ^1 [u + a]>^ + « + "^^^^ modification is also very
common both in /W^. and iss, : [puJSo] (puja) ; ^^1 [mulo] radish
(mula<mula-); ^ [khuro] (khura <ksudra+tata) ; ^\ [dfiulo]
(dhula < dhula-); ^!s\^, ^ [ubhon] court-yard ; (utha«^ = ut-sthapana-) ;
^ [cfuro] (cuda); [muro] (mura < munda-) ; [duor] (*duara
=dwara);^^^ [Juk(h)o] ^/y=^^1 « sukha » (suska-) ; etc., etc. Cf.
Perso- Arabic * huqqah » > ^"^1 « hiika » > ^'c^ [Ruko] hookah,
Also^+^*[u + o] > ^ + NS [u + o] : t^?r [Juor] (su&r& < su-kara);
etc. See p. 398.
(xiv) + [e + a+e] > cf}4-c£l + <£) [e + e + e] : as in
[ekhene] < ;£l^t^ * ekhane » here-, so (jm?^ [Jekhene] there, om?^
[Igekhene] tvhere.
This Vowel Harmony habit of Bengali asserts itself exceedingly in
the speech of women, and of the uneducated classes generally, and it
works havoc with the tss. imported from Sanskrit : to give some remarkable
examples, we have f5ir5!t?rftj [nilimijji] in women's speech =« niramisya » ;
f^t^, f<^W [pit(t)ime] =* pratima » (see p. 337 for change of < pra- »
to * pi- ») ; ^^-n^^a [uccfhuggu] any offering before a detty ^ ^ xxi^^xgii * y
51
4oa
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
[duj^ug] bad weaUer=* duryoga »; ^f%f?(f^ [niribili] quiet (place)
= « oirabila » ; ^WW, ft^f^f^ [photkiri, phitkiri] alum = «sphatika+
ara- » ; l^f^f^ft^ [bitikiccjhi] u^lj/ = « vicikitsa- » ; etc., etc. In changing
the is, words into colloquial Bengali forms similar to those given above,
the cultural factor, communal as well as personal, decides how far they
are to stray from the Sanskrit standard. But it is remarkable how great
an importance the principle of Vowel Harmony has with the least cultured
classes ; and, as the ordinary colloquial transformation of the fbk, and of
the naturalised fs. and foreign words would show, with the best-cultured
speakers of Bengali as well.
[H] Origin of the New Bengali Vowels,
193. The general line of development of 01 A, vowels into Bengali
has been indicated above. The sources of the NB. vowels are now indicated
origin below. The vowels of the Standard Colloquial are seven [i, e,
SB, a, 0, o, u]; with the rare [a] in foreign words, they are eight.
They are taken below in the order of the Bengali Alphabet, viz., [o, a, i, u,
e, SB, o]. For [a], [sd, a, o] are normally substituted : and it will not be
necessary to speak further about [a].
New Bengali [d, O:], written ^, 9.
194. Bengali [o] occurs both as long and as short, as in ^
[j^o:l] water and ^ [^^la] marsA respectively. In popular notion, ^ [o] is
generally called the short of 'sit [a], but the difference in quality between
the two vowels is instinctively recognised by all Bengali speakers, and
this is shown by the fact that when a Bengali child begins to learn the
alphabet, he is taught to name the vowel letters as follows — = « sv&re k »
[Jore 0:] amonp the vowels, a ; ^ = * svare a » [/ore a:] among the vowels^ a ;
t = « hr&sv& i > [firo//D i:] short i; dlrgh& i » long ^ ; so ^ = « hrasvi
u dlrgha u », ^ = « ri |H = « dlrgh& ri », > = « li », | = « dirgha li ^
til « e », <^ « &x » [oi], « « 6 », ^ * * ^"]^ « &n » [og], ^: « &h » [oh] :
% ^ are not called « hrftsvft &, dlrghii § Bengali % «rt do npt inter-
THE SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI ' o '
403
change now, but they did, up to the end of the eMB. period, when ^ was a
lower and an opener sound than at present (see pp. 260^ 263). Bengali
[o] commonly represents OI A. short [a], through MIA. OB., eMB. [d].
Middle Bengali [d>o] normally becomes [o] in the MB. Standard Colloquial
when followed by [i, u] : see aute^ pp. 396, 397.
The sources of the NB. [o] :
(i) OIA. short «a» = [a] : ^^t^ « [korat] (karapatra) ; ^ [koe] (kahei,
kathayati) ; K«1 [cfole] (calati) ; ^ [M^'^l (jala) ; etc., etc.
(ii) OIA. long « a » = [a:], in a few cases through absence of stress in
OB. and Early MB. : ^'5tt^ [p^gcir] (prakara), ^J{t^^ [bonaroji] (varanasiya),
etc.; see p. 321. Cf. also ^^T^1 [korola], [korela] (karavella) ;
^ [thai > thoi] ihpth^ bottom (*staghika); etc. Post-consonantal [wa:]
of Skt. in initial syllables became [o:] in Early Middle Bengali, in a few
tss. and is found as [d] in NB, (see p. 260) : e.g., '^if [J3:d] = ^t? * svada »;
X [J^mi], a folk-pronunciation of '^t^ « svami » ; Tfvg^ [/^-g] imitation^
mimicry, dramatic caricature^ < « svanga » : cf. Hind. « swaijg » ; cf .
also X 5fv© [do:t], a folk pronunciation of CWW^s [doat] from the Perso-Arabie
« dawat » ink-pot.
In ts. compounds like « jalanjali, siddhanna, paramdnna, payasftnna
madhyahna», etc., the [a:] is frequently turned into [o, o>o] in folk-pronun-
ciation — e.g. [^olon^oli, /iddfionno, parmonno, paejonno, moddRonno].
Conversely, « murdhl^ny& n& », the name of the latter «|, commonly becomes
[moddfianno no, modfianno].
(iii) OIA. [i:, i] : [boem] (MIA. bahe^aa, OIA. vibhitaka);
v5?r^ [toro/u > tor/u] day before yesterday, day after tomorrow (tirah-svah) ;
*t^^ [porokh] (parlksa) ; etc.
(iv) OIA. [u] > eMB. [dJ, altered to [o] in NB. : MB.
« m&urii » (mukuta) ; ef. [bole] (MIA. bollai', OIA. braviti, ^^bru).
(v) OIA. [f] : [mom] (nif ta-) ; etc. : see pp. 354, 355.
(vi) OIA. [e:] : ^^^1 [korola, korola] (karavella) ; sfss. [Jondo]
(sandeha), ^Tt^^^ [narkol, -kol] (narikela), etc.
(vii) OIA. [o:]: Calcutta Bengali [goela] fgopala-), through
influence of sf^l [moera] (madaka-), and similar words with the group
404
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
[08+0]; so WII [kaela] charcoal koldla^ », eueioo-eoloured ; cf. Hind,
koili) ; cf. JW^n [maSla] dirty (MIA. mailla-), see p. 334. See also under
[06].
(viii) OIA. short [a] + consonant (stop, aspirate, or sibilant) + short
[a] > OB. [mvD, dRd] > eMB. [o:, ofio] > NB.[o] : see pp. 846-848.
For loss of interior [o], see ante, pp. 330, 331.
[o] forms diphthongs with [e, o] following : see below under [oe, oo].
[o] in foreign words is noted later.
Bengali [a, a:], written ^1, ^.
195. Sources of Bengali [a] :
(i) OIA. « a » [a:] initial, and before one consonant : ^tC^ [pO.V^]
(patayati) ; ^t^Tt^ [^alaS] (^ealapayati, calayati) ; ^\ I ma:] (mata) ; ^Ttf^
[Jaer] (sagara) ; H^t^ U^^^ (srgala), etc. See pp. 320-3£K
(ii) OIA. « a » initial, through stress in eMB. : see p. 314.
(iii) OIA.«a, a» [a, a:] before two consonants: see pp. 316-317,
321.
(iv) From * a-ha, a » in contact in Late MIA. = OIA. « a, a » -|-
consonant-j-« a, a » : see pp. 349-350.
(v) From OIA. * f » initial, through an earlier stage of « a » : see
pp. 354-355.
Post-consonantal « -ya » in is, words is changed to [se] in NB., for
which see under [ae] ; see also p. 200. The change of [a] to [se] in Bengali,
in connection with a nasal, when the following syllable also has [a], has
been noticed at p. 322. See also under [se].
Modification of [a] to [e, o] and [o>u] by Vowel Harmony: see
pp. 400-401, 398 ; also dropping of [a] through loss of stress, see pp.
331-332.
196. In some tbh. forms, there is alternation between [a] and [i] : ^
[^a:l] and fl^l [cfhilka > efhilke] sHn of fruit (cf. Skt. challi) ; v/'ft^
[jcL:dh] enter and V^^ [Ji:dh] a passage through a wall (sandhi) ; v^5T^ [cfa:b]
and v/fe^ [cji-b] <^^^^ (\/carv) ; v^^^ [cfatp] and ^/f^^ [^i:p] pre%B (cf.
Apabhransa v/eamp) ; 'Ttl [pa:cfh] and [pi:cfh] behinA (Cf. J. Beamcs,
c
INTERCHANGE BETWEEN ' A ' AND ^ O, U * 405
*Comp. Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India,' II, p. 297) ;
etc. This alternation is as old as MIA. Also alternation between [a] and
[o, u] is found in some groups of words, mostly desi : e,g., [dagor] big,
also, dialectally v5t^ [dakor], beside C^mi, CnST^^ [dokra, dokla] lout,
clnmst/ fellow, spemUkrIfl, huge and ungainlij, C^^^l [dtekra] fool, i^gljj one ;
and^9?1 [daga, dsega] lilgk beside C^sf^l [t<egra] high land, Hindostam
* dugcrar, doggar * ///// ; ^^^1, C^^^1 [jgabm, Jgobra] splash, blotch ;
[jV-ri ^^^'^ (^^^' jadda) beside [.fgura] get cool ; ^t^
[pha:k] en?jjt^ space, beside C^'m [pbokor] iole, slit, probably connected
with [pha:p] sioellijfg, c¥'t^^1 [phopra] hollow, C^^^^ [phopol] ewj)f^ff
(cf. v^spha) ; v5t^^ [dabor] a capacious pot {of mdal), ^ [da:b] green
coeo-nut, beside CsSt^l [doba] puddle, small tank ; [Ratna] crawl on
fours (cf . « hammati » in the ancient speech of Surastra), beside
'[fxnmri] a fall on one's face; etc. Compare [ka:d ] r;v/, and C#t^f^
[kodol] women's noisy finarrel ( = kanda-la-, y/krand). The reasons of the
above types ot interchange of vowels are not clear.
The [a] in fi?^t^^t, H^t^t [niranobbui, niranoi], also changed
to [e] by Vowel Harmony, [nirenobbui, nirenoi], is unusual. It is
found in other NIA., together with the euphonic (?) * r » : e, g., Hind.
* ninanawai, nawanawai ^ Panjabi * niranawe etc., and it probably comes
from the "MIA, stageT So also in some words like [noean] (nayana),
^ [bogan] (vadana) ; cf. MB. ^ [para] (pataha) ; NB. sis. slang
C^im^ [pellae] awful, excessive, thundering, huge (pralaya), etc. : see p. 336.
[a] in foreign words : see below.
New Bengali [f, i:], written ^, ^, f?, ff.
197. Bengali [i] is not a very close sound, and it easily passes into
[e]. Thus, in the Calcutta Colloquial, words like « bhitar^ », ff^
*chil&» are ordinarily pronounced [bRetor, ^fhelo] . The interchange of
[i] and [e] is found in MB.
(i) OIA., MIA. [i, i:l : see pp. 308, 323-3^4, 336-337.
(ii) OIA. [f] > MIA. [i] : see p. 355. Also from Skt. [f] to [ri, ir]
in tss, and stss., pp. 356-357.
406
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER IV
(Hi) OIA. < a, a » [a, a:] : see p. 335 ; cf. also f^Cf [picfhe] ( = pajscat),
[Ji-d(h)] (=sandhi); f^- [bi-] (=dva-) in compounds— %tm>T [biallij]
(=dv5-eatvarinsat), etc. ; [cfhi^] ( = sat), as in %tf^^ [cfhiallij]
(=safc-eatvarinsat), etc.; desi f^^t [khirki] ivindo^Vy (khadakkl) ;
sU, WiWf^ [phitklri] ahm (sphatika-), etc.
The OIA. affix « -ant- » gave «-it- » in Bengali : see also p. 335.
(iv) OIA. « -ya » [la] after consonants : f&m [bRitor] (abhjantara),
[bijgni] (vyajanika) (?it, Jitt [nei, nai] argument (nyaya). OIA.
« -ya » for the indeclinable conjunctive^OB, « -ia, -ia », MB, t,^, t/l
« -i, -I, -ia, -ii », has been assimilated to c£i « e » in NB. Also from earlier
MB. « -yu- » in the sts. [khidej (khyudha, ksudha).
In stss.y « -ya- » after a consonant becomes [i], with the preceding
consonant doubled: e.g., « satya » > ^f^I [Jotti], so ^f^J « acary& »
> 'srfFrf^ [acfajjgi], ^^^?(J « pathy& » > 'INJ [potthi], 5f?g « madhya ^ >
^fifT [moddhi], * sadhyi » > Jftf^ [Jaddhi], ^^^rj « akathylk »
[okotthi], C^^T «bhojya» > [bfiuj^i] uncooked rice^ pulses, vegetables^
butter etc, in religions offering, etc. Similarly with "5^ « ks = khy »
and m «jn = gy-»: e,g., Tff^I « saksya » > Tfjf^ [Jakkhi], W
«yaks& = j&khya» > ^ [jsokkhi], * yajnib = j&gya * >^
f&^^g^I]^ «d&ib&jna» > [doiboggi , etc. The eMB.
pronunciation was [acfajjgiD, potthiD, mixldfiiD, jakkhiD, jgnkkhiD,
^Dggln], etc. : it is the [Id] which has resulted in the contracted [i]
in NB., like « -iS, » of Apabhransa to «i» in Bengali: see pp.302,
303, 307, 352.
(v) OIA. [u] : [y^^^t^y min/e] (manusya) ; f^ff^" [jiki]
fourth, for ^PF [Juki]. Early MB. [u] became [il when epenthetic:
examples have been given above, see p. 385 ; cf. ^ [ai] (au, ayus), ^
[bai] (bau, vayu) ; etc.
For interchange between [i] and [u] in desl and tbh. forms, see
under [u], p, 408.
(vi) OIA. [a:i, e:], MIA. [e:, e] : cf. MB. nf^% [porijij (prativesin) ;
NB. Jftt [thai] (*thame, sthaman) ; ^ [dui] (duve, dvi) ; [nei]
indulgence (*nehi, *nehe, sneha) ; etc.
SOURCES OP NEW BENGALI 'I' ''V
407
f%f^ [till] < Cvgf^ « teli » (tailika) ; f^tfiRtfS [giritnati] < C^fir- « geri- »
(srairika-rafttika) ; f^t [dii] / ^/re (*demi = dadami) ; etc., by Vowel
Harmony.
(vii) Through contraction of MIA. contact vowels in OB. : see
pp. 350, 351, Sbt.
(viii) In certain class dialects in the Standard Colloquial area, final
« ai » is contracted to [i] : e./;., c^fl [J5e;hi] < C^Mt « jethai » (jyestha-
tata + ika) ; f5[f5 [mithi] < C^^ft^ fsf^ft « methai, mi- » sweetmeat (mi-^ta-);
Ttf^ [Jani] < Tt^TT^ « sanai » (Pers. « §ah-nal»), etc.
The epenthetic « -i, -u > -i » , and the formation of diphthongs with
« -i », have been discussed before.
For [i] in foreign words : see below.
Bengali [u, u;], written ^, ^, ^ ^.
198- Bengali [u], like [i], is not a close, high sound, but rather low,
approaching [o]. It is drawn down to the [oj position through influence of
a following low vowel. In Calcutta, and elsewhere in Bengal, we have
pronunciations like [opor, jondor] = ^*f^, « upar^, sundar^ > etc.
Sources of [n] :
(i) OIA. [u:, u] > MIA. [u, u:] : See pp. 310, 311, 325, 326, 337.
(ii) OIA. [f] > MIA. [u] : p. 355.
(iii) OIA. [a, a:] : in the interior of a word^ when flanked by high
vowels, we have change to [u] in NB. : see pp, 394, 398.
In initial syllables, through influence of a preceding labial, in a few
cases in MB. and NB. : e,p., MB. ^jk^ [bufiito] (vahitra) ; [bufiini
(bhagini) ; etc. The intermediate stage was [o]. See pp. 319, 320 ; cf.
« m&hasay^ * sir > sp-ff^ [naojae, mo/ai], East Bengali [mu/oe].
(iv) OIA. [ua] after consonants > MIA. [-uw-] : [/urr] ("^suvara,
svara) ; *f^^ [por/u] (^para^uva, parasvah) ; ISi^ [/u:J] (^suvasa, svas) ; ^, ^
[Ju] (suvav-, svap), etc. See pp. 329, 330, 352.
(v) OIA. [i] : tjf [hu:d] (bindu) ; ^ [fiolud] (haridra) ; C^IF^I
[gerua (gairika, ^gairuka) ; ^^^^ IhS^^] (cf- Skt. sisumara, Pali
sunsumara).
408
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
(vi) OIA. [a:u, o:] >MIA. [o:, o] : through influence of a high vowel
mainly. See pp. 398, 399, [pukur] (MIA. pokkhara-, puskarini) ;
^5^^^ [bhimrul] (*bhfgga-r6lika) ; ^C? [ure] (Oriya, Odl^iaa-, Au^rlyaka),
etc, etc.
(vii) Through coatraetion of MIA. contact vowels: see pp. 350, 352,
Also of. (iv) above. Cf. [feoluni] burning «tf«Aa^«o»<*jfiilauni, ^j&laisirani
(^jwalapanika), etc.
For [u] in foreign words, see below.
199. [i] and [u] as high vowels interchange in some tbh. and deht
forms (including onomatopoetics). This is apart from change of epenthetic
[u] to [i], and from the cases of isolated modification of [u] to [i], and
vice versa, E.g,^ ^^J^ [gumot] stuffiness beside MIA. « gimha * (grlsma);
[tikkhi] sharp and [tukfior] clever (tiksna) • [niJsBum]
silentj asleep, also ^ [gfium] sleep^ beside [^Bi^^a] doze — a dest form,
ef . Marathi « jhSpne » sleep ; fe^f^T [tikli] and [tukra] a piece, bit,
fragment ; fesfl [digga] beside C5T^ < [doga] a canoe, a boat ; T^^ff 1
[^hilka] skin of fruit, beside ^ [cjhula, c^iola] to skin, [cjhuli] skin-
disease, also [^q:1] ^kin ; fs^, 5^5! [^pjcL, ^up/tt] be dried up,
€07itract, beside 5t*f [cfttT] P'^^^^ j ^i*^ [ukun] lo7ise (*utkuna), beside J
[ikun] ; f*(^t^ [Jikni] exzidation from nose (\/siggh), beside (^\^ [Ju-k,
/3:k] smell, snif {y/H\M^%\x) ; cf. NIA. [u:kh, i:kh, a:kh] (=:iksu). As can
be easily seen, these alternances go back to the Early MIA. stage, and are
probably earlier. The desi forms probably are based on dialectal variations
in the original non- Aryan languages from which OIA. or MIA. borrowed
the words. The lA. vowel alternance — « guna » and ^ vrddhi », and Early
MIA. change of « jr » to « i, u e.g., [ghut, gfiit, gfiflt] from « ghfsta *, in
the same dialect, made the alternances in the desl and tbh, forms appear
quite natural, and in conformity with the spirit of lA.
Bengali [e, e:] = til, C?.
200. (0 OIA. [e:J > MIA. [e:, e] : also in desl words : see
pp. 3^27-328, 337.
(ii) OIA. [a:i] > MIA. [e:, e] : pp. 328, 337.
SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI ' E '
409
(iii) OIA. [f] : (Tf^ [de:kh] (x/dfk-s-) ; see p. 356. Also in itss, :
p. 357.
(iv) OIA. [q, a:] : through influence of following [i, i] = MIA. [e] :
[/e:l] (salya, sglla) ; C»\^ [/e:J5] (sajya, sejja) ; C^'^ [J§^<iru >
/sB^aru], in South-eastern Bengali ct^l [fiSza], beside ^*t^t^
(salyaka^ sayyaka, sejjaa + rupa) ; ci)^ [er] (kera<karya) ; etc. In ^q^<\
[jotero], [ponero] beside ^n©^, [Jotoro, ponoro], we have change
of OIA. [a] to [e] in NB. (saptadasa, pancadasa) ; also in the honorific
verb forms in <sm [en] (-anti) : tf.^., [^olen] (calanti).
(v) OIA. [i], through a MIA. change to [e] : see p. Also
finally, in verb forms : ^ [khae] (khai, khadati), etc.
(vi) OIA. [u:] : C^^^ [neur] (nupura).
(vii) By contraction, in MIA., OB. and eMB. times, from various
groups of OIA., with [a] : see pp. 343, 344, 350, 351, 352. [neul]
(nakula) ; MB. OTTf% [neali] (^nayamallia, navamallika) ; ^ [cfble] (calati);
[ghore] (gharahi, grha-hdhi) ; etc.
OB, stss,, with [id] < post-consonantal Skt. « -yS. » [la], as much
as [Id] in t6A. words, is contracted to [e, s] in MB. > [ae] in NB. :
see p. 351 : also examples like C^vS, ^Jt^ [bseg] (*biagga, vyaijga), CWTl
[bseggoma] (^biaggama, vihaggama-), ^Jt^ [jgsnto, Jgsento] (jianta,
jivant-), etc.
Early MB. final t^l, etc.= [ia, ia] becomes [e] in NB. : e.^,,
eMB. ■'^Ftl^fN > 1MB. 5t^^.^Tl > NB. 5t|^^', 5t|c^, 5^^^ [cfaturn-
j^ia> cfaturjgs > cjcLturJ5e, cfafcujjge, cJarujJ5e] a Brahman surname =
tie tong-livecl one, or son (jiva) of (the village of) C§tu {or Catta ; cf. the
equivalent Ut^f^ * catuti » = « catta-f putra »), Anglicised into Ckatterji etc.,
Sanskritised into < c&ttopadhyay^ >\ so MB. "^j^^ > ^^c«sr [mukhurJ5S
> mukur^e, mukuj^e] Mickkerji \ ^^f^^l > [uttoria > utture]
northern ^f?r?l1> ^'C^ [koria > kore] havvig done, etc., etc.: see pp. 393,
394.
(viii) By contraction from MB. epenthetic [ai, au > ai] < OIA.
[a:+i, uj : see pp. 385, 386, 389.
(ix) By Vowel Harmony, from MB. [i] and MB. [a] : see pp. 400-401.
52
»
410
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
In tss, of NB., subscript * -yS » of Skt. gives [e], and this [e] remains
when followed by a high vowel : otherwise the [e] becomes [ae] : e.g,^
^Tf%5 [bekti] (vyakti), but [baekto] (vyakta) ; so <IT^ [baethar
bethi] a si/mpathiser in sorrow (vyatha, vyathin) ; [Wfi] (vjasti) ;
^T^t^ [betito] (vyatita) ; etc.
For [e] in foreign words : see infra.
Bengali [se, ce:]
201. [ae] is a comparatively recent sound in the NB. Standard
Colloquial, and it originated from MB. [s] and groups like [sa, sa, ea],
not earlier than towards the very end of the MB. period. In East Bengal
dialects, [se] is rare or unknown, and [s] and [a, a] are used for it. Long
[e:] and [ae:] of the Standard Colloquial commonly occur in Typical East
Bengali as [&:] ; persons speaking East Bengali dialects find it difficult
to distinguish between English [se] and [s] — the latter, in the ordinary
West Bengali pronunciation of English, becomes [e] (together with English
[9], which is a sound not found in Bengali). Thus, admiral y appreciate,
acquaintance [aerfmarol, apriijiei/, akweln^sns], in West Bengali pronuncia-
tion [sBiJmirsel, aBpri:/ie:t, sekoentens], become [©(Jmirsl, spri:ji5:t,
skoentsns] in East Bengali; and the following spellings of English
words from examination scripts submitted by East Bengal students, are
typical of East Bengali pronunciation : « matropolice, h<?ndi-work, tendancy,
pmc^oner (= parishioner), commander, intentionally, angels, harr^ssed,
merriment, advice, emity, aminence, anemy, oriantd, mawny (= many)
etc.
Bengali [se], when it comes from [e], is written as i£i. The subscribed
« -y- » followed by « -a » — '?irl^ .Jl> is otherwise employed. In
post-consonantal « -ya » of Skt., which became [sa] in MB., is written as
« -ya » ; also post consonantal « -ya » in initial syllables. The tendency
in writing the NB. Standard Colloquial now is to employ lavishly the
^-^+^— « -yS =.Jl : e.g., wrm * dyakhe » for am dekhe » = [dffikhe]
=MB. [d8khe],MIA. [dekkhni].
SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI ' M '
411
Origin of [as] .
(i) In tbAs. [©] is found in initial syllables for a Late MIA. [e:, e],
which is derived from various sources in OIA. — [e:, a:i, f] and [a + conso-
nant -fa, i + consonant + a] 9 etc. In eMB., if not in OB., the pronunciation
certainly was [s]. See pp. 327-328, 343, 851, 409.
[ae:] is found in monosyllables when they are closed by ^
« k(h) j^j^-cc*, ^«r»,ora nasal, or by ^ « y > from earlier t£J « e » : e,ff,y
[8e:k], MB, [s:k, sko], MIA. « ekka » ; is. C^^ llaa-^ilx] write thou
(in the old pronunciation in the Standard Colloquial, now through Skt.
influence changed to [le:kh]^ ; Of\ [dae:kh] look thou, MB. [d&kho] ;
[p»:c^ twist; C%5 [cfh«:cf] pound thou; C^^ [n2e:r] hard stools;
[phaern] froth ; [bse:g] frop ; [daein] he gives, they give (honorific)
(MIA. *denti); (?R [/sein] a surname ; OT, [d^e, nsee] gives, takes, etc.
In other cases, we have [e:] : e,g., [ne:t], an archaic word = fine cloth
(netra) ; ct§ [h6:t] stooping, low (hettha, *adhistat), etc. Cf. tss, Cfn, C^,
C^, OT, C^, C^, C(R etc. [de:/, be:J, ke:/, metgfi, pre:t, Jert, de:b] ; etc.
Onomatopoetics have the [se] pronunciation, irrespective of the conso-
nant which follows : e.g., [pe:t] belli/, but C^C^, [paet paet] ;
C^^ [khe:t] /^W (ksetra), but [kh«t kh«t], etc. Here East
Bengali will employ [s] in all cases.
In disyllables (and polysyllables), when the second syllable is closed
by a vowel other than [i] or [u], [ae] for [e] is the rule. 75. words,
however, sometimes resist the tendency to change to the opener sound.
E.g.y tij^ [seka] alone; Oi"^ [daekho] seeyoiiyMB. [dskho:, dskhnRn] ;
(jm [mtele] opens up {e^es), spreads; [p^cfa] owl; c^cfl [haela] ; C^^
[bsela] ; (^^ [taero] thirteen, MB. [t&ro:, tsroho] ; [gaelo] went ; C^sfl
[phaena] ; Q^m [d^khe] sees ; (M^ [phale] throws, MB- [psle, ph&Ie,
psbi] (prerayati ?) ; [bieta] son; CWS^ [d»or] (devara) ; CH«§1,
[naeota>n8eoto] afectionate (sneha-vftta-), beside [nei] indulgence
( = sneha) ; [kseot] a caste (kevatta, kaivarta) ; [Jseba], beside, in
recent pronunciation, through Skt influence [Jeba] ; CW^l [da;ba] as in the
phrase ORl C^srfSr C^fft [/gJemon dseba temni debi] as is the god, so the
goddess like husband, like wife; etc., etc. ; tflSR, C^, [aemon,
412
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
^aemon, taemon, kaemon] , adjectives or adverbs of manner, respectively from
^5, C^9 CS, [e:, jfee:, te:, ke:] tkis, who^ that^ who ? \ but in C^<^1, CT^^Tl [^etha,
jetha] where^ ther€y curiously enough, the [se] sound is resisted, and also in
(j^^ [fietha] here^^i*^^ [etha] in OB. (of. MIA. ettha = OlA. ittha).
Where, however, the Bengali root has [i], derived forms with [a, e, o]
vowels in the next syllable do not change the [i>e] of the root (through
Vowel Harmony, see p. 397) to [se] : e. > (?fC^ [mele] is obtained^
but [mjele] spreads closes (melay-) ; fe?f > [phere] turns^ but
[gfisere] encloses ^ surrounds (ef. Hindostani phirna, gherna) ; etc.
(ii) [se] occurs in onomatopoetic words which are reduplicated. In
the earlier stages of the language, the sound was probably an [s] or [e] :
e,g.i ^ ^ [g» gel], &Jl §Tl [cjae cjse], Wf5^^5 [phaecj phsecjj, etc., etc.
(iii) [ae, se] comes from earlier [a] when the next syllable has [a] :
see p. 322.
(iv) [se] is derived from eMB. groups like [id] and [itt > ie] by
Vowel-Harmony : e,g,, 5^Jt^ [^sento] living = eMB. [^^^^^] y ^'^^
[ggecjhe] has gone^ from [giacjhe > giecjbe]. See pp. 351, 400,
(v) MB, in^^ ^ [sfia, sa, sa] became [se] ; also ^ [eSn, en]
became [see, seo] in NB. The [e, o] in [see, aeo] is an after-glide, which is
optionally omitted. E.g., C^f^^Tl [/aeola], MB. *C*Nc|1 [/soola], besides
C«f3^ [Jeeala] (*saivala-, saivala) ; c^^t [beai, baei], MB. [befiai]
(vaivahika); 'Cif^' " [dseela], "mB. (?f^H, CW^, Cf^l, (OT^l [ds(B)ala,
ds(fi)Dla] a ^a^y'* 5m7tf %n sleep (deva + ?); [Jaeentt] clever ^ MB.
OTTt^l [Jsana] (cf. Hind, syana).
Foreign words with [sa] in 1MB. similarly change this group to [ae]
or [see] : e,g,y Persian « pyala » cujp > [psala] > [psela], also [pseela] ;
« ziyadah » much^ excessive > [^sada] > C^^, ^iTfl, ^JtWl [^aeda,
j^aeeda] : Portuguese < viola » violin > [bsala] >^Jt^, ^IT^ [baela,
bseela] ; « pera » pear > cW^i [psara] > ^t^?rl [pseera] : English
« bearer » > C^^l, ^TtWl [bsara > baeera], also [beara] ; etc., etc,
(vi) In tss, : « -y&- » after a consonant in initial syllables, when
the following syllable does not have an [i] or [u], becomes [sb]. In MB.
the intermediate stage was [&]. See p. 410.
SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI ' O
413
(vii) Post-consonantal « -ya » in tss, have become [ae]. One MB.
stage was that of a low [s] plus 2l fronted [a]. See page 260. ^^«t
[kollaenj ; ^^^f [porittseg] ; ^ [Rottse] ; etc. 9^1 « ksa > (k)khya »
and ^ « jfia > (g)gya » similarly gave [ae] : e.^,, ^1 [rokkhae], also
[rokkhe, < rokkhia] ; [g3e:n] ; "^^^1 C^>bogg«] ; etc.
Bengali [o, o:], written % ^, % C^.
202. AH final [o] tends to become [o] in the Standard Colloquial.
The more important sources of [o] are :
(i) OIA. [o:] : see pp, 3^9, 337.
(ii) OIA. [u, u:] etc. > MIA. [o, o:] : pp. 327, 329. ^
(iii) OIA. [f] : pp. 356, 357. Cf. also c^t^l [gocfha] (guccha,
*goccha, OIA. ^gfpsa).
(iv) (a) OIA. « S. » [a], through influence of preceding labial : C^\^^
[bhomra] (bhawara-_, bhamara-) ; see pp. 319-3 Z0.
(b) Change of eMB. < h > to [o] through Epen thesis, Umlaut and
Vowel Harmony has been discussed before. This MB. «&» comes from
OIA. [a, a:]
(v) Through contraction of various groups in OIA. and MIA. : OIA.
«&va, &ma, a + stop + a, afstop + u, uv(a)-, »etc., etc. See pp. 344, 346,
347, 350, 352, 353. K^., C^- [mo, to] (« mama, tava » : this change
of « a^a, ava » to « o is pre-Bengali) ; (??t^ [notun 1 (nava-) ; [ola]
descend, as in "^^i^ cholera (avalabh + ut-stha) j (TftUfl [Jodo] as in C^TCT
^\>\\t ^ \ [/odo bRaJano] ' launching on sea' the boat festival ( = ? *sawuddua,
samudra-hnka-) ; etc., etc.
(vi) (a) Through Vowel Harmony, from eMB. [u] from various sources
in OIA. : C^^ [boJ5(fi)a] to understand (budhy-) ; OTt^ [JoJ5^] ^^'^aightj
easy^ clear (sudhy-) ; etc. See p. 397.
(b) From MB. [u + a] > [u + o], we have NB. [o]
by Vowel Harmony. See under [ua, uo] below. Cit^ [Jo:r] (suara, sukara) ;
C^Fl [ko:] (kua, kupa-) ; (^\ [jgo:] (jua, dyiita-) ; etc.
For [o] in foreign word*?, see below.
414
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
Interchange between [i] and [e], and between [u] and [o] in Bengali.
203. This interchange characterises NB. phonology, and it originated
in the following ways.
(i) In some words, the interchange is the result of Primitive Indo-Euro-
pean Vowel Altemance (Ablaut), as it had been modified in the OIA., < i : gi,
e» and «u: au, o » : e,g,, Fil [lip] smear , C^^^ [leoa] a mearing (lip-ya-,
lepa-) ; ^ [tut] he broJcen^ [tor] break (trut-ya, trot-aya-) ; etc. This is
paralleled out by the alternance between [o] and [a] in R^l [cfole] walks and
5tC^ [^ale] moves (calati, calayati), etc. In Bengali, the laws of Vowel
Harmony have obscured to a very great extent the real nature of these alter-
nances between [i] and [e], and [u] and [o] when they are of ablaut orgin in
OIA. The original ablaut relation has lost its significance, and it has become
quite subsidiary to NB. phonetic habits. Thus, for instance, the root
[dul] to stving has [u], but the verbal noun by « guua* in OIA. has [o] —
[do:l] a swing, — also the causative (?f1«Tt^ [dolai] / cause to swing ; but ^
« dule » he stoings (<*dulati) becomes CTt^ [dole], original [u] becoming
[o] through influence of the following [e] ; and « ^dolapanikl » the act of
swinging becomes, through the stages ^CTHI^^, *C5ft^^f^ ^(?rW^^
« ^dolawanl, *dolaonI, *dolauni », ^gf^? [duluni], beside Oft^TTf^ [dolani]; and
« dolika>*dolia» jE?a/aw^7«'», litter gives [duli]. The original scheme of
[u] for the active, and [o] for the causative and for noun formations, is
in this way destroyed. So ^ [cjhut] run and its causative derivative C^t^
[cfh5r] throw, toss give ^ > Clti^ [cfhote] he runs and dt^ >
[cfhuri] / throw, beside |i5 [cfhutij / run and c|tC5 [cjh5re] he throws,
rendering the original [u, o] alternance ineffective for the purpose of distin-
guishing the causative form.
There is the MIA. change of OIA. [i:, u:, i, u] to [e, o], which gave
BengaH [e, o]. (See Pischel, §§119, 125, 1«7, 212 : ante, p. 327.) This of
course is not a case of interchange so far as Bengali is concerned. In such
alternations in MIA,, there was probably the influence of the ablaut
relations between « i : e » and « u : 5 which MIA. inherited from OlA.
(ii) Alternanees of [i] and [u] with [e] and [o] through Vowel-
Harmony is a most important thing in New Bengali phonology, and
NEW BENGALI DIPHTHONGS
415
this has been discussed before. This is due partly to the low position
of the Bengali [i] and [u] vowels. Cf. MB. cS? [tehS, teB5, tefio],
he {honorific) (= "^tenha), NB. CS^^ [tenar] his {honorific) (= *tenha
+ -ara: *tenha = teha, teham = tesam < te bam), but NB. nominative
fef^ [tini] he {honorific) (= "^ten-i = *teiia, tenam + i); ts, c^*f
[ko:p] anger y but ^f^q [kupib] he angered ; ^vSifl [orna] veil (oddhana-,
ava-vestana-), but [uruni] sheet worn a$ cloak (o44hania, ^ocjdhawania,
=5= -^avavestanika, *aYavestapanika) ; etc., etc.
Bengali Diphthongk.
204. Of Bengali diphthongs, only two have special letters for them,
namely [oi] = and [ou] = ^. In the NB. Standard Colloquial, as
many as 25 vowel combinations and diphthongs are found : [ie, ia, io, iu ;
ei, ea, eo, eu ; jee, aeo ; ai, ae, ao, au ; oe, oa, oo ; oi, oe, oq, ou ; ui, ue, ua,
uo] (see ' Brief Sketch of Bengali Phonetics,' §49). In OB., [di] and [nu],
sources partly of the NB. [oi, ou], were the only diphthongs. Early MB.
probably developed some new combinations, [id, iu, la, sa, sa] etc. and [ud,
8a] etc. from subscribed «y, v»+«a, a» etc. in ts. words; and some
fresh diphthongs, with the high vowels [i, u] forming the second element,
accompanied epenthesis in MB. (See ante, p. 387). MB. diphthongs or
vowel combinations have mostly been monophthongised in NB. in the
Standard Colloquial: e,g,, [sa] has given [sej, [6a] has resulted in [o]
in some cases, and [p\ > oi, nu > ou, oi] have resulted in [o], and [ai], [au
> ai] in [ej (see ante, p. 386). NB. diphthongs are in the main recent
creations. Many of them have not as yet entirely passed through the
stage between two syllables and a diphthongal monosyllable, especially
when the group ends in the low vowel [a]. When the syllable is closed
with a consonant, the disyllabic character is often retained : e.g.y C^TW
to wash, washed {pass, part.) is [dhoa = dhoa], almost riming with French
« dois, doit » [dwa] ; but C^TtTt^ wash-out, scourings, is often more like
[dRooat] than [dBoat = dBoafc] ; so brother is [bfiai = bfial], but
=rft^ [ba^/] twenty-two is [baeij, ba-i/l ; and ^ is, are = [fioe, fioe], but
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
^ [boe/j age is found as [bo8e/, bo-ej], besides [boeoj]. But the tendency
to pronounce these groups as one syllable is no less strong, and in cases
like the above, where we have [ai, oej etc., closed by a consonant, there is
frequently simplification or contraction of the diphthong to a monophthong :
^*9-9 ^t^'f* occur as with a suggestion of the [i] in a fronted
[a] — [ba:J], and of the [e] in a little hesitation before the [J], [bo-J] ; and
^^^•K [Roeen, X9(B)en] he becomes , he is ; he suffers (honorific) have
been regularly transformed into [Bo:n, Jo;n] in the Colloquial Speech,
NB, diphthongs are generally the result of the loss of intervocal
« -h- » of MB., of Epenthesis and Vowel Modification, and of Vowel
Harmony. And above all, there is the influence of the strong initial
stress which reduces two syllables into one. Brief notes on the origin
of the NB. diphthongs are given below. They are taken in the order
given in the preceding page.
205. Bengali [ie], in the Colloquial, written is derived from
^1 < -iya » of MB. (preserved in the literary language) : [die] having
gtven < find « diya » ; [bie] marriage < « biya » (vivSha) ; etc.
Where the [i] in [ie] was anticipated by epenthesis, as in ^tf^^l « ania,
aniya ^ having brought > *^rt^f^1, « *aniya, ainya > > [sns] >
^JM [ene], contraction took place generally during the transition from MB.
to NB. ; but a dialectal form like [snie] is still heard. So ^tf^
« rakhiya » having kept > c^C^ [rekhe], beside (M"^ [rskhie], etc. The ten-
dency to shorten [ie] to [e] is quite a marked one in the Calcutta Colloquial :
so that we have even forms like Of [de] having given^ with { = instrumental
post-position) beside [die] ; C§ as in 'C^Tf^' parrot [te, tepakhi], beside iSc^
[tie] < [tia] ; [be] marrvtge beside [bie] < [bia] ; [gecf(h)e,
gaecj(h)e] has gone beside f'JfCT:? [gie^(^)e] < f^Wlf [g^O-cfbe], CVf-fcrf^
[dejlai] matches beside fra»t^ [dieJ(o)lai] and fw^(t)^ [diaj(a)lai,
diajolai] (dipa + salSka-) ; etc., etc.
[ie] also comes from contraction of ^sft^ « aiya » of the causative
conjunctive indeclinable : Wtf^ [rakhie] having caused to keep <
^^t^ * rakhaiya ». It is found also in contracted noun-forms : e.^.,
tfe^ [gaie] singer. See p. 394.
NEW BENGALI ^E, I A
417
In a case like [kie], from f%C? [ki Re] what^ 0 ! — hallo ^ we have
[ie] from dropping of « -h- ».
In some archaic forms like f*tC^ [pie] drinh, MB. f^^ [pie, piee],
(pibati), [jgie] lives, MB. ^^ii [J5i(e)e] (jivati), we have original
MB. [ie], with optional in-glide, derived from contraction of OB. and MIA.
contact vowels. So in [jg^^i®] by the daughter^ as in ^rtC^i [mae
JfgBie] mother and daughter together, we have an OB. combination (jhl =
dhita, duhitr + -ena).
206. Bengali [ia], written occurs mainly in tlh. forms, and is
rather archaic, so far as the Standard Colloquial is concerned : tf.^., ^tf^^
[rakhia], Wtt?(1 [koraia], ^^^^ [nogoria], f^ORtf^^l [binodia], ^f^l
[uria], etc., etc. ; also [jial], %| [hia], [pial], Tm%^ [bialli/],
f^^t^ [cjhiattor], etc., which give instances of the [ia] group in the
« sadhu-bhasa ». [ia] in verb forms is contracted to [e], with epenthesis,
in NB. ; and also [ia] in adjectives and nouns. In initial syllables, it
frequently becomes [se] : e.g., [jse:l] < f*t^H [/icil], also [jeal], by vowel
harmony; f^^jf^^ [biallij] becomes [beallij, bjellij] ; but fffTs^ [ajhiattor]
does not alter in the Standard Colloquial.
Some of the more important sources of [ia] may be noted.
In the conjunctive indeclinable, it comes apparently from an OB.
strengthening of the MTA. affix « -ia > by the syllable « a » : ^T^^
[koria, koria] < MIA. « karia + a >. (See under Morphology : the Verb :
' Conjunctive Indeclinables.')
The adjectival, — agentive, intensive, pejorative — affix [ia] is from OIA.
« -ika, -lya ^ pins the affix « a NB. has the [ia] forms only as archaic
words, e.g.f [purobia] or 'SJTOI [pubia] eastern : Standard Colloquial
forms would be ^i^^ and ^ [purube, pube] ; wf^f^l^l [dokhinia] > ?ff^lC5(,
5f'^5? [dokhine>dokhne] southern; ^^fsHH [kohonia] ifaW*e/>^C^ [koune] ;
^tf^^ [kalia] the LlaQk one > [kele] ; etc., etc.
In other cases, [ia] represents MIA. « udvrtta » vowels — the [a] =
«a» often representing cases of contraction of « udvrtta a, 54- a, a >
of MIA. The [ia] was preserved by means of the « y » glide in OB.,
and Early MB., and contraction came in only in the NB , — the
53
418
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
earlier full [la], however, is quite a familiar group through influence of
literature.
[ia] is found in foreign words : e.g,^ \\av\fnendi boon-companion
< Persian «jar »; ^fs^^l [dunia] world < Perso-Arabic « dunya » ; (ilft^l
[ejia] = English Asia ; ^f^^ [rujia] = Bns8ia, etc. ; but cf. a naturalised
Portuguese word like « toalha » towel > C^Mf^^^ C^t^ft«l [toalia >
toale],
207. Bengali [io], written ^^fl, In MB., this diphthong,
in tbhs., was [ifio, ieo]. It is found in tbh, forms like ftw [Jior] (-sihara,
sikhara) ; [tior] a caste (tivara) ; [iS^^^] in ^t^-^tl^
1^*l-^t1S « ji&n^-kathi m&ran^.katbi » wand of life and waiid of death
(jivana); the OIA. source is thus « i, I » + consonant which has dropped
off + «a».
In the future preeative 2nd person of the verb, [io] represents OB.,
MB. « ih4 » [ifio:] = OIA. « -isyatha » : e.g,^ {%A\o\ (calihi,
*calihaha, calisyatha). In the Colloquial, this is reduced to [o] : €.g,, ^'c^jj
[cfolo], [rekho] (= rakhihi, *rakhihaha, raksisyatha) etc., except
where contraction is not possible — e,g,^ fif^ [^io] (dihi, *dihaha=dasyatha) ;
f«1^, #1^ [pio, j^io] are both ordinary imperative future or preeative.
[io] occurs in the Standard Colloquial causative preeative or imperative
future, as a contraction of MB. « ~ai&, -aiha » = « *-apayisyatha » of
OIA. : e,g.y ^tf^^ [rakhio] (rakhaio, rakhai(h)a, *rakkhavaihaha = *raksa-
payisyatha), etc.
Causative passive participles, or verbal nouns, in « -an& », of roots
in 4e -i » in the Standard Colloquial show the [io] groups by mutation
through Vowel Harmony : e, y., ^^St^rt [^iono] (i) iejpt alive, (ii) bringing
hack to life (MB. #l?lt^ « jiani » = (i) « -y/jlv- » + « mana- », (ii)
« *jlv5pana- >) ; ftc^tRl [miono] become cold or iceak (MB.
m. xniyana » : OIA. < v^ml ») ; etc.
In ts. words, Skt, « iy5, iya » become [io] in Bengali : TOff^ [l>^og]
(viyoga) ; [i^iog] (« nioga » : but fsit^t^ > (?^^ [«iogi >
neugi], [io > eu] through influence of [i] following); fsf^ [niom]
(niyama); etc.
NEW BENGALI ' 10, IU, EI ' 419
Some peculiar forms also show [io] : e.g., [obioto] unmarried,
(= *ibiautft- < a- + vivaha 4-vanta ?) ; f^^8^ [gRior] a sweetmeat (Hind.
ghSwar < ghfta-) ; ctt« [Geio] exclamation in pulling something.
[io] is found in foreign (European) names : tntC^tl [iorop] Europe,
IctI^ [iork] York, etc.
208. Bengali [iu], written tl, comes from the following : MB.
« iu, eu » in the imperative .'5rd person of roots in « -i, -e » = « -atu, -antu »
oE OIA.: [i^iuk] (jivatu+ka); f«J^ [diun] (*diyantu);
tif^^ [diuk] (MB. « deu . = . *d5tu »). In NB., this [iu] is normally
reduced to [i] : #f (rare), fw^!, fw^, etc.= [j5ik, din, dik], etc.
[iu] also comes from OB., MB. « -ia-, -ihli-, -ia- > -io- » through
the influence of a following [i] : see p. 398. [^^iuli] a tree
(jiva-la-); [biuni] (*vyaianika) ; ft^ft Cfiuli] (MB. Sihili < fiephS-
lika) ; etc. ,^ ,^
[iu] occurs in ononiatopoetics: fsi^fl^ [miu mm] metctng ; t^t^
[klu klu] whine of a dog ; etc.
It is found in some Hindi loan-words with a restricted use : e.g., m
[piu] (priya), ^ [jgiu] (jiva). ^^j^ r- -UR -f 1
Foreign words also show this vowel-group : t^IWI^ [lumbRarsiti]
Univennty,^^^^ [iunaite4 stets] United States, etc.
209 Bengali [ei], written lil^, ^f^, ^tt-
[ei] 'comes from OB., MB. « ei, ehi, e hi, -S-hi » : e.g., [dei] I give,
more usually fwt [dii] (*clemi); [tei] therefore, a poetic word (t5 h^
tena hi); 0^(1,0^ [J5eiJ«]^''-^'W '^'^''^ j^'^'' ^^'^''^ l
[<.fiorei]t»#>5e home indeed (ghare hi); C^^ [teij] (trayov.nsati) ; also
[nei] indulgence (OB. *nehi, n5ha = sneha); C^^ [khe.], beside
[khe:]cK« (OB. *khewi, khewa = ksepa) ; (^t [lei] yum^paste (lepa) ;
etCt
From «ai» of earlier Ben-ali : e.g., [nei] does not exist <
. nai . ; (J^-^^ [nei-akure] argumentative (MB. *firat|-^f^l * °'yai-
Jkiria. < «nyaya»); (.^ [jViJ i^^tediately, as soon as < ^,-^
.«iai» (yada hi). This sort of change of « ai » to [ei] is rather
exceptional. In a few words we have [ei] through Vowel-Harmony : e.g.,
420
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
froi^ [diei] immediately on giving < f^t^ « dial » (dia+ [h]i) ; C^^ [bei]
father of son47i4aic or daiigJiter-in4ato < ^Jt^ [bsei], both occurring side by
side with C^^^ [beai] < C^^t^ [befiai] (vaivahika) ; etc.
In some onomatopoetics : C^C^f^ [dfiei sound of ivild romping.
In foreign words, occasionally the English [ei] is represented by [ei],
rather than the normal [e] : e.g,^ C^^Jf [cfein] chain, [train] train,
but more commonly in the Standard Colloquial [cje:n, tre:n], etc.
210. Bengali [ea] , written t£ii1, from MB, [ea, eea, efia] : CWt^
[beai] (vaivahika), [kea] (ketaka-), etc.
Also from [ia], through lowering of the [i] to [e] : e.g,, [neai]
(%idhapika).
MB. [eoa] optionally becomes [ea] in NB. : [nea] = C^^fl
[neoa] to take ; C^^ [khea] ferry (ksepa-) ; etc.
The [e] in [ea] is, so far as the tdh, forms are concerned, essentially a
glide sound. Skt. « -ya- » in the middle of a word, when not after a conso-
nant, becomes [ea] e.g,y [doea], sjt^ [maea], ^t^l [cfhaea] ; etc.
[ea] is found^in foreign words also : C*!^^ [peajs] onion < Persian
« pyaz * ; C5^t^ [cjear] = English chair, etc.
211. Bengali [eo] written This is a recent diphthong,
mostly through contraction of MB, «ai(h)4, aua » by Umlaut: e.g., cq3 [eo]
a woman whose husband is living (aiha, avidhavS) ; [^geo] yoa will go
(jaihi) ; [gfieo] (gha-ua mangy ^ with wounds = gha < ghata + ua) ;
di'S [geo] (gS-ua) rustic ; etc.
212. Bengali [eu] = i£[\.
From O B. « -ewu-, -ehu- » : (Jf^n [deal] (devakula) ; c^?\ [neul]
(nakula) : [neur] (nupura) ; desl [dReu] ; C^^ [keu] anyone,
someone (^kevi? = kah-fapi; or kehu < *ke khu = kah khalu?);
etc.
From OB. « e^'a, eh& », with following [i] vowel, through Vowel-
Harmony : C'f^ft [deurl] (cf. Skt. dehali) ; Cf. [reuri] a sioeet-^
meat < Hind. « rewri » j [jeu] apple < Hind. « sew ».
From OB. « iwa » : J [teuri] oven (tri-vf t-) ; (Tf^lf [deuti]
(dipa-varttika) ; etc.
NEW BENGALI ' EU, ^E, ^O, AI '
421
In c^v5 [kheur] poetical ^fiitling ' > ahme (MB. kheru <
khela ?), [beur] a thin bamboo (cf. MIA. ve.lu, Skt. venu), we have
probably instances of [eu] in NR. through epenthesis.
Sts. [neugi] (< niyogi) a surna7}ie, is through lowering of [i] to
[e] through influence of [o], and the [o] itself later became [u] through
the presence of [i] in the following syllable.
[eu] is found in onomatopoetic forms : [gReu gfieu] boic^woic,
Cf^ [keu keu] tvhining of a dog, angle dog (cf. Late Skt.
« pheru » : loss of « -r- » in Bengali ?), [fieu] 9oiind of belching j etc.
213. Bengali [see], written ^% -sfJt^, .]t^.
From OB* « ei>ey through Vowel-Harmony : c^f^ [dsee] (dei), (J{^
[nsee] (nei).
From OB. [lae] > MB. [sae], in ts. roots : ^ [dfijee], 1MB.
[dfisag], OB. ^[dRiae] (dhyayati).
From MB. < ea, efis » : see p. 412, under [te],
HindostanI «ai»=[s;, se^ see, ae] becomes [se, see] in NB., in borrowed
forms : e.g., ^qft^Jfl ^tl^l [J5£eesa ke tseesa] ( = jajsa ke taisa).
214. Bengali [sec], written t£i^^, occasionally , It ^, comes from eMB.
[eoD, efiD] followed by [d, q] in the next syllable: e.g., c^^Q^1 [tseora],
MB. [teonra] crumpled ptevada-, trivfta-); C^^^l [kseora] (kevada-,
ketaka + 4a); Cn^^fl [jaeola] (*sev&la, ^ivala) ; c^ns^I [baeora] affair
(*bevara-, ^viavara-, vyapara) ; C^T^:^ [na?oto], MB. [nefio:ta] (sneha-
Vftta-); etc. MB. CVf^, « deha, neha » give, take become in NB.
Of^, C^^ [daeo, naeo], which are frequently heard, beside the more common
Wt^, •its [dao, nao] through influence of ^tS, [khao, ^ao] etc.
[jBo] is found in onomatopoetics : [meeo] meiv of a tom-caL
215. Bengali [ai], written ^t, ^tft, ^^rfft, ^t, etc.
From OIA. group of « a » or « a » + consonant -h « i, f, -ika- -ati »
etc. > IMIA. « ai, -aia, -ami, awi, -5hia » etc. > OB., MB. « ai, ai, a\yi,
5hi, ahl etc. See pp. 308, 309, 310. E.g., ^ [aij grandmother
(ayyia, aryika) ; [bRai] (bhratj-) \ ^\ [gai] (gavi) ; #t^t^ [kajai]
name of a river (Kansavati) ; MB. Brfiltt [cjapai] 7iame of a city (CampavatI) ;
[pai] piccy fourth of an anna (padika) ; 5Jt^ [rai], eMB. [rafii]
422
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER IV
(radhika) ; [bair], beside Tt^T, C^^ [ba:r, be:r] (MIA. babiram, OIA.
bahis) ; 3Tt| [nai] (nabhi) ; 5lt^ [rai] (rajika) ; ^ [jki] (svatnl) ; ^Tt^ [/ai]
(*sainika, sami) ; [gai] (gramika) ; [kaf] tamarind ( ? : cf . Onya
k&yS ^r^^« tamarind) ; etc. The suffix [ai], as in [bomi] ioa*^ <
[baro] ^r^iz/, ^| [jScicjai] enquiry < Tt^ [J5ci:cj^ demand^ will come
under Ibis: see below. Morphology \ 'Formative AflSxes.* So [ai] as the
affix for the verb first person present tense : ^t^ [khai] (khadami),
[jgai] (yami), ^ [pai] (^prapami — prapnonai), [cfolai] (^calapayami),
^^tt [khaoai] (^khadapayami), etc. la a few cases, NB. [ai] probably
represents the Magadhi Ap. nominative forms in « -i » < Magadhi Prakrit
« -e » < OIA. « -ah, -am » : e.g.^ ^ [tbcli] (*thawi, *thame, sthaman) ;
5tt [cfhai] (*« chari, *chare, ksarah », with loss of « -r- » in Bengali?),
[ai] also comes froca OB. « au » in train of MB. epenthesis : e.g,y
^tt [bai] fad J ' hmor ' (vayu) ; Bt%. ^$ttt [^ppai] (alpayus) ; [aiburo]
bachelor y maid < young jperson icho will live long (ay ur + vf ddha) ; etc. It
is possibly found in the affix ^spf^ [ai] in names = « ayus » : e.g.y ^^Tt^
[bolai] for ?f^t^ « baUram^ » , [donai] for « j&nardan^ »,
fsRtt [nimai]<^RN «nim^ », as neem (mme to avoid the evil eye) ; etc.
In onomatopoetics : l^^ft^ [Jai /ai] %vhistling sound as of wind,
^^'Ttt [pai P^^] rushing sound as of a stoift runner, ^t^t [bai bai] sound
as of a top or icheel^ etc.
[ai] is found in foreign words as well : see later.
216. Bengali [ae], written ^spf^.
[ae] in verb forms is derived from OB. « ai », 3rd person present of
verbs in « ^a » : e,g,, ^ [khae], ^ft [jSae], «(tl [dfiae] (dhavati), MB. ^
[bae] plays (vadayati), etc. ; from OB. « awai », 3rd person present of
causatives : [korae] (^karawai, *ka/arapayati), etc. ; and also from
OB. « -ahai MB. « -ahe » : ^ [bae] (bahe, vahayati), ^ [gae]
(gahe, ^gathayati < gatha) ; etc.
It occurs in the instrumental-locative of nouns in « -a » = 0B. « -a-§ » :
C^^l^ [gfiorae] — OB. « *ghorag » (ghotaka H- -ena) ; ^ [pae] (padena) ;
^ as in ^ [sek gfiae] toith one blow (ghata) ; •TlW, •TtC^ [°cie] boat
(nSvena) J etc, etc.
NEW BENGALI ^AE, AO, AU'
42S
In a few words, OB. « aya » gives [ae] in NB., through change of
the euphonic «y»+«a»to«e»: [bae] 2vi?idy hreeze (vata) ; JfK^^
[faer] (sayara, sagara), etc. (see p. 34^). Cf. ^ [Jae] eml (?OIA. = sayam
end of the day, eve?mip) ; of. also 5p«tt^ [mojae] Sir (mahS.&iya > *m&asay^,
m&say^) ; etc.
21 7, Bengali [ao], written
[ao] originates from OTA. « a+ consonant + a » (IMIA. a>a) » ,
resulting in OB. « aha, awa > : imperative forms ^t^, ^« [khao,
f^ao, gao] (khaha, jaha, gahaha = khadat(h)a, yat{h)a, *gathayat(h)a) ;
MB. ^\^, ^t^, [bao, mao, gao, cjhao] (vata, mata, gatra, saba);
NB. ^t^9|1 [baola] to to wi?i7iow (vata-) ; ^t^^ > ^^il^l [tbaoka >
-ko] detacJied amount, limp suniy cash (*sthawakka- < ^sthapa-); ^t^^
[aora] repeat (a-vrt) ; 'Sft^^ [aota] stir milk etc) (avarta-) ; etc.
In ift^ •It^ [dao, nao], imperative forms, eMB. Of^, csf^ « deh4,
nehA », we have change from MIA. -t eh4 » through [seo] to [ao]. See
§ 214. So ^^^1 [kaora] a caste from « kevatta » : cf. C^^^ [kaeot].
In the Calcutta * Cockney ^ ^S^l [cjliaora] (chaya + -(Ja-), we have [ao]
from the euphonic glide.
218. Bengali [au], written ^srt^.
From OB. « awu » < MIA. « au » < 01 A. « a + consonant + u- »;
[haul] (vatula, vyakula) ; ^tt^ [JS^^ciu] (jhabuka) ; ^ [lau] (alabu) ;
MB. [aula] (akula-); MB. Tf^ [bau] (vayu) ; cf. ^Tt^ [fS^uti
khauk] (yatu, khadatu), etc.
In eMB., this group, when not epenthetic, probably was pronounced
as two syllables, with euphonic « w » in between see pp. 310, 342, 345.
From OB. « awa, awa » by Vowel-Harmony, through influence of
following «i » : [cfhauni] (ehadana+ika), etc., etc. : see p. 398 ; v5|1^»fl
[auni bauni] < "^^1^1 •?! « "^am&ni (awani) bidhani » harvest
festival in the month of F ansa ^ when an earthen pot filled with new rice
(« am&n§l=Skt. amanna », wrongly connected with « hemanta » autum^i,
to mean autumn rice) is covered and tied tip with rope of new straw
(« badhani, badhuni » < « bandhant », changed to « bSuni » through conta-
mination) ; etc., etc.
424
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
MB. [ail] by epenthesis is changed to [a, e] in NB. : see pp. 385-386.
[au] occurs in onomatopoetie doublets; [fiau Rau], tt^^Tt^ [fiau
mau], etc. But cf. Fft^ Jft^ [dau dau] the noise of a raging fire ("^dawa dawa,
< dSva, d£iv&nala).
In foreign words : see below.
219. Bengali [oe], written ^rc^.
OB. « -awai, ahai » in verbs > MB. « ae, ahe » > NB. [oe] :
[Boe] is (*ahai, *as-a-ti) ; Jf^ [/oe] (*sahati=sahate) ; ^ [koe] (kathayati) ;
^ [boe] (vahati). In MB., OB. « -ai' » optionally occurs as « &e »= [oe] :
^(£|, '^T^, [koroe] (karai, kardti) ; cf. < ^T^, [n^)e <
nofioe] is not (na + *ahai). MB. medial « a(h)e » becomes the diphthong
[oe] ; e,g., ts, name [moRe/] , in contempt SHPTl [moeja] ; "WB] [boera]
(MIA. bahedaa=vibhitaka).
OB. « ai, ahi » in some words is found as [oe] : ^l^^ [moela] (MIA.
maiUa-); [poela] (pahila-, MIA. pahilla) ; [^oqIq] friend {among
girh or tvomen) {^2^i<:,sdikhl + \\h) WTt, [bBoeJa, bhoeja] belonging
to a Itiffalo, or buffaloes milk (^mbainsa mahinsa, mahisa) ; •f?!^ [p^^jcr]
(paisa, pada-) ; [khoera] catechi-co loured (khai'ra-, khadira-) ; etc.
From MIA. « aya, anna > ana » through « samprasarana » : ^ [cjhoe]
(chaya= Early MIA. *cha4-ka); [noe] nine (naya-, naa, nava) ;
^ [p3el as in the numerals for 55, 45, 65 (pafia-, paiina-, panca-) ; URf^l
[moera] confectioner (madaka-ra-), etc.
OB. « 01 » becomes [oe] in [koela] coal (< kokila- cuckoo). In
[goela] milkmauy as in the Calcutta dialect, we have these stages
presumably : « gopala- » > « goala », « *go&la, *goy*la » > [goela] : there
was also the influence of forms like ^^^1, and 3^^^1.
Skt. « aya ^ in iss. becomes [oej : [JS^e], ^ [bfioe], [aloe],
[boeoj, boeJJ, etc.
In the Standard Colloquial, [oe] generally is contracted to [o], in
original disyllables with [o] + [e] + consonant in the second syllable: e.g.,
the honorific verb forms in « -en » : ^T^^ > [ben > lo:n], > ^
[Boen > Born] ; ^=^;£i5f > [boej > bo^j] ; etc.
[oe] is found in foreign loan words : see later-
NEW BENGALI 'qA, qO, 01'
425
220. Bengali [oa] is found through loss of glide [o, e], or [B] : tf.^^.,
^«^1>^ [koRa, kooa > koa] spoken \ ^ [Booa > fioa] heew,
rarely > [goeali > goalij Brahman from Gaya ; etc.
221. Bengali [oo], written occasionally comes mainly
from OB. « -awa, -aha » : e,g,y [hoc] ^c??^ itf (h&ha, *as-a-tha) ; [noo]
yo\i are not (naha, na + *as-a-tha) ; ^« [koo] (kah&ba, kathayatha); '^^^\
[noola] c«rr/ <?/ (nawa-Ia-) ; [doola] ca?v^ of ten (daha-la, dasa-la) ;
^■^^1 [cfoora] hroad (*cawada < catur four) ; ^^^\ [moora] brunt of
attack (mahara = muha-da-) ; etc.
In Persian loan-words, [oo] is sometimes found : see below.
222. Bengali [oi], written
[oi] comes mainly from MB. « ai » [ni, oi], MB. « ii, Mii » < OB.
« ayi, ahi » < MIA. « ai, ahi » < 01 A. « a » + consonant -h « i » : '^itt^
< [poite < poita] (pavitra-) ; ^ [cfhoi] (chadis) ; ^ [doi] (dadhi) ;
[joi] (sakhi-); etc. See pp. 308, 609, 384-389.
From OB* « awai, awai » > MB. « ai, -ai » : [koi] a/^^ (kavayi) ;
^ [^oi] (cavayi) : see pp. 347ff. So OB. « ^-ahi<*-ahiwl, *-ahami » gives
the NB. [oi] : [joi] (*sahimi = sahami) ] [boi] (^bahimi = vahami),
3?^ [Boi] (*ahiwi < *ahami = %s-a-mi = as-mi), etc. See. p. 351.
OB. « awu », ultimately from 01 A. « a »+ consonant + « u or from
Skt. « au » in ts, words, became « &i » in MB., after epenthesis. This
« &i » of MB. is normally contracted to [o] in the NB. Standard Colloquial,
but we have instances of [oi] as well : e,g., W{ [qoipor din] all the
day long (see p. 385) ; etc.
In ts. words, « ai » becomes [oi] : [toilo], bf^ [doinno],
[boiri], [cfoitonno], sts. 'Ju^ [cfoiton], etc. Old 5^55. like
are sometimes pronounced as disyllabies, [to-il, Jo-il], the second syllable
being emphasised by the final consonant ; but the diphthongal monosyllabic
[toll, /oil] are heard, beside the sts. [toilo, joilo], etc.
Sanskrit ^ft, ^sfft « ayi, &yi », especially in final positions, are pronounced
[oi], and written occasionally as : e.g.y if^ft [doeamoi], occasionally
found as Wlt^ ; ^C^^t [koikei] is vulgarly pronounced as [koikoi] ; and
there are cases of Skt. « au » being changed to « ai » = [oi] in some
64
426
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
following the analogy of change of epenthetic « &a » to « ai » in MB.:
in folk- Bengali we have ^Jf^^ [/oirob(fi)], [^oibon], and even
^if^fij^ [doibarik] =« saurablia, yaavana, dauvarika ».
[oi] is found in onomatopoetics ; iut^ [cjoi cfoi], used in calling
ducks to feed them ; ^1^*1^ [poi poi] in the sense of repeatedly
(=i<pade pade?) ; ^ [Eoi fioi] s/wut and 7wise, etc.
[oi] occurs in foreigu words: e.g,. ^ [Joi] signature^ genuine
(Perso-Arabie « sahili » , Persian [sahi:h] < Arabic [satlih-]). See
infra^
223. Bengali [oe], written ^11, «C^, ^9, "^'^^ etc., is derived
primarily from MB. « 6e, ohe », as well as MB. « uhe, ue » by Vowel
Harmony, as in verb forms of the 3rd person : e,g., C^ft^ < CTtt^ < ^C? <
[doe < doBe < dufie < dufioi] (^duhati=d6gdhi) ; (?^t5 < C^ft^il
[joe < joee] (suvai, svapiti) ; C^T^ [roe] (ropayati); c|t^ [cfhSe] (chuvai=s
spfsati)^ etc.
It is also derived from an earlier MB. group « aia, ahia » ; e.g., ^'c^
[Goe] (< [hols, fioeiea, fioia]) ; so ^'C^ iJoe] having snffe red <
fl^ll « s&hia » ; etc.
In an extremely lax prouuneiation in Calcutta, [ponero] 15
becomes [poero] (and even [pooro]).
[oe] is found in foreign words, mainly English : see below,
224, Bengali [oa], written vQ^, ^Q^, comes from OB. groups like
« awa, owa, uwa, oha », going back to various OIA, combinations with an
intervocal consonant. The [oa] diphthong is frequently contracted to
[a] in the NB. speech. The [o] in this group is essentially a glide sound
so far as NB, is concerned, and [oa] of course is not much different from
« wa » [wa], only that the quality of the first element is very open. Examples :
eMB. ^tC^TNt^ [rakhooalo] > NB. [rakhal] herdsman (raksapak) ;
C^tlfSt^, Wt^^ [kotoal, kotal] (kotta-pala) ; C^t^t^ [jgoal] yoke
(yoga+ala) J ^8^T^ [oar] damage^ destroy (apakara) ; ^?rt? [oar] jnllow-case
(*oharha, ohadha = avavesta) ; C^«l1 [goala] (gopala-) ; C^fT^t^ > C^T^
[goRal >goal] (gosala); ^t^^W^ [baroari] (« bara ^^conrt, gate + * uarl »
pavilion, public festival in a decorated bamboo pavilion — wrongly derived
NEW BENGALI ' OA, OU '
427
from Indian « bara » 13 +t^t<T « iyar^ » friend < Pers. « }ar *) } Clt^l
[poa] a quarter (MIA. *poa-, ^pa\Va-=pada-) ; C^t^ [khoa] hrick-bat^ hrol-en
bit (< ksaya- ?) ; CTtfl [moa] (modaka-) ; etc.
In C?^^, > C?t?1, C^t?l [deoa, neoa > doa, noa] to give^ to take,
we have change of [eoa], to [oa] through [*seoa, "^aoa]. Spe pp. 4'£1, 423.
la some old is. and .^^5. words in MB., Skt. « -va, -va» after a vowel or
a consonant appeared as [oa], which is preserved in NB. : MB, ^»rt^?tf
[aoa/] (ava^a) ; ^sTf^^T^ [ot/oaj] (asvasa) ; C^W^, (TfWfe [Joath, Joasti]
(svasti), besides [Joosti, Josti] ; (Tlt^tft [joami] (svami) ; CTWf*f,
[doadoj, doadoji] (dvadasa, -si), etc. This [oaj also has become [o] in
NB. : see p. 403.
[oa] occurs in foreign words, for « wa ».
225. Bengali [ou], written 'k, etc. This diphthong
originates from MB- « au, a-u, ahu » < OB. « au, awu, ahu » < MIA.
« aii, ahu » < OIA. « a » + consonant + « u » : [cfou] (catur-) ;
[fgou] (jata) ; etc. See pp. 310, 344.
OB, « ahau, awaii > gave in 1MB. [ou], which is commonly contracted
to [o| in NB. : [kok] ht him talk <W^y « k&uk, k&huk» ;
[bo:k] < « bauk^ bahuk » him bear ; etc.
In C*ik«^ [poune] one-^ourihj ^ths, from « padona », we have
[ou] from OB. « %wu », MIA. « ao », through influence of a following
« i » (padona- < paona, paona- ; paon-ia > p^une). In [dour], MB.
[kouri], we have [ou] from IMIA. [ava] : see p. 348.
«au»of Sanskrit becomes [ou] in tss,: [oujod(fi)], C^t^ [/ou-
rob(R)], [jgoubon], C^fi^^ [gourDb], etc. In OB., ^ « au » became
« a-ii » [dou] in 5^*.?., e,g,, 5t^, « gaurii, m^una ». These sometimes
retain a disyllabic character in NB. [go-ur, mo-un] , but a monosyllabic
pronunciation [gour, moun] is heard as well. (See the parallel case of
[oi] from « ai ».)
In the sis, i?^?r [mour], we have [ou] from Skt. * -ayu- » (mayura).
[ou] occurs in Persian and other borrowings, and is also found in
early 19th century borrowings from English : e.g., (^"^ [k6u/uli] =
counseL See later, under ' Foreign Elements,'
428
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
226, Bengali [ui] , written ^fl, etc.
It comes from OB, « nwi, uwT, uhi, uhl, uhi », in verb forms, and
in nouns, representing contractions and modifications of various OIA.
groups : tf.^., ^ [dui] (*dawi, duve, dve) ; ^ [dui] / mili (*duhl,
*duhil, *duhi^i, *duhami, duhami) ; [jg^ii] yuthika) ;
[pui] (putika); etc. [fui], dialectal, seems to be from HindostanI
« sul » (suci, sueika).
From OB. « o\^i, ohi », coming from various OIA. groups, through
influence of the following « i» : e.t/., ^ [dRui] I wash (^dho) ; ^ [rui]
7 plant (ropayami) ; [rui] carp-Jisk (rohita) ; % [J5^^] (jj^ti?,
*joi); 5t [nui] I ^e7id ("^nowi, namami); etc. ^ [lui] woollen stuff is
from Hind. « lol » (< loma+ik§ ?).
OB, « ayi, ayl, awi awl » gave « oi » > [ui] in NB. ; see under Vowel-
Harmony, p. 398. Similar in nature is the change of « *tvay-ena, ^may-
ena » > OB. « tal, mal » > NB. ^t, ^ [tui, mui].
[ui] occurs in foreign words, mostly English. Cf. also [ruiton]
diaynonds {in cards) < Dutch « ruiten » .
227. Bengali [ue], written ^Cf. This has not wholly passed into
the monosyllabic stage. It commonly originates through vowel mutation
from «uia, oia » of MB.: ^t?rt «§ui5» (from *C*rt^^1 « s5ia ») gives
[/ne] having lain dotcn*^ « dhuia » (< *dh6i5) becomes ^ [dfiue]
haviiig washed,
MB. « uhe » gives [ue] : [mue] in the face (muhe < muha,
mukha).
In rapid speech, original (MB.) « uie » becomes [ue] : « duie » with
two becomes [due]. Standard Colloquial [uie] from earlier Bengali
« u + ai+a » in causatives (seep. 394) does not, however, contract to [ue].
228. Bengali [ua] , written is a diphthong properly belong-
ing to the literary language, that is, to MB. It is found in East Bengali
to some extent. In the Standard Colloquial, it is normally mutated to
[o], through the stage [uo] resulting from Vowel- Harmony : ^^srf^
[/uar] > '^S^r, [Juor, Jo:r] (sukara) ; [jg^^lua] > ^'c^ [^olo].
See ^nie^ p. 413,
'UA, UO; DOUBLE VOWELS, TRIPHTHONGS, ETC. 429
[ua] frequently changes to [oa] : [cfufiar, cfaar] > C5t^,
C5W^ [4^{fi)ar] « ruffian (see p. 71); CTW^f C«fm^ [do(R)ar] ^iwy^r in
chorus (< dhruva-kara) ; etc. See p. 401, siipra.
[ua] figures inlonomatopoetics : ^ [Sua fiua] tAe cry of the j achat,
229. Bengali [no], written ^^1, is a NB. formation from [ua]
above by Vo wel- Harmony ; and [uo], as noted before, tends to become
[o] in the Standard Colloquial : e.g,, ^1, CWl [^guo, Jgo:] < ^
[fgua] (dyuta-) ; ^S, [kuo, ko:] < ^ [kua] (kupa-) ;
[dRuo, dfio:] < ^ [dfiua] refrain (dhriiva-) ; ^t^, CTt^
[duor, doa] < [duar] {*duvara, dvara) ; ^^t^ [dBuok]<^^ [dfiuak]
< 5JT^ * dhuSuk » let him cause to wash ; etc.
230. The double vowels ^ [ii], [ee], [aa], ^^S [oo] and
^ [uu], the second occurrence being pronounced as a distinct, syllable,
are found in New Bengali, and are the results of a similar dropping of
intervening « h » or glide, and of Mutation and Vowel-Harmony : fi.g., fwt
[dii], also in a simplified form [di'jigive; c^, pronounced [khee]
also [kheee] having eaten [khaa] beside tft^^l [khaoa] eaten, to eat;
[dfioo, dfioo] i^ou wash < MB. C^t^ [dfioo:] (dhavata) ; [uu] is rather
rare : an example is in the onomatopoetie ^ [kuu] the cry of the cuckoo,
which is found side by side with ^ [kuRu] .
231. The following triphthongal and tetraphthongal groups are found
in the NB. Standard Colloquial : [iei, ieo, iae, eie, eio, eao, eoi, euo, seei, seoi,
aie, aio, aei, aoi, aui, oei, ooi, oeo, oie, oei, oeo, oai, oae, oui, uie, uio, uei, ueo,
uae, uao, uoe] and [eoai, eoae, aoai, aoae, oaio]. The « sadhu-bhasa » has
the groups [ooaio, aoaio], which are really three syllables [oo-ai-o, ao-al-o].
They can be traced to three or more syllables in MB. and OB., separated
by « -h- » or « y, w » . In all cases their derivation is clear, and they need
not be taken up for detailed study.
[I] Vowels in Sanskhit Words.
232. Enough has been said incidentally about the way in which Skt.
vowels are pronounced in Bengali. These ?ilways conform to the speech
430 PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER IV
habits of the various Bengali dialects. In the Standard Colloquial area
they take up the following sounds, even in reading or chanting a Sanskrit
passage :
« a » is pronounced as [o], and as [o] when the next syllable has « i »
or « u », or has « y » preceded by a consonant.
« a, i, I, u, u » remain; « f, f, 1 » become [ri, ri:, ii], « e, 5 » remain
as in Sanskrit, i.e., as [e:, o:] ; and initial [e:] as a rule is not pronounced
as [®].
« ai, au » became Foi, oul .
The [ae] sound is given to post-consonantal « -ya and often to
« -yJl » . In East Bengali prontmciation, there is epenthesis in connection
with post-consonantal « -y- ».
The vowels are nasalised when they are preceded by a post-consonantal
« -m- » .
Below are given transcriptions, of the first two verses of the ' Megha-
duta,' (i) in the current pronunciation of the Standard Colloquial area and
(ii) in a sort of Typical or Common East Bengali articulation.
(i) [kojc^it kan:ta:biroEoguruna: J:a:dBika:rop:romot:oh
/a:pe:na:stoggomitomofiima: borJobBog:e:no bBortuh (uortuh) |
JSokihoJcfokrre: ^onDkotono6tt:sna:nopun:o:doke:Ju
snigdfioc?fhaea:toru/u bo/otig ra:mogir^ffis:rome:Ju || 1 ||
to/:rn:od:rou koticfldobola: biprroj'gukto/io ka:mi:
nitra: ma:Ja:n konokob?)loSob:Brog/oriktop:roko:/thoh 1
a:/a:rRoJ:o p:rothomodibo/e: me:gBomQs:li/to/a:nug
bop:rDk:ri:ra: porinotogo^op:rek:honi:og dodorja |i 2 || ]
(ii) [kojtsit kan:ta:biroBogurunQ /:a:d(B)ika:rop:romot:oh
/a:pe:nQ:stoggomitomoBima: bor/ob(B)oIg:enD b(B)ortuh |
dzoikihof tsokire: dzonokotonoStt: sna:nopuln:o:doke:ju
snigd(fi)os:a:ett: toruju bojotig rarmogirdzasiromeiju || 1 ||
SEMI-TATSAMAS IN NEW BENGALI 431
toJ:in: 0(J:rou kotitsidobola: biprrodzuktofto karmi:
nit:a: mQ:Jtt:n konokoboIo8ob:(R)or3ijJoriktop:roko/thoh I
a:Ja:r(B)ojLj:o pirothomodiboje: me:g(fi)omas:li/tofa:nug
bop:rok:ri:ra:porinotogodzDp:reI:k:hDni:J)g dodorjo || 2 || ]
233. The vernacular Bengali habits of mutation and vowel harmony,
bimorism and anaptjxis^ haplologjr and metathesis, and dropping and assi-
milation of consonants strive to have their way with fs. importations, and
in the speech of the women and children and the uneducated, they refuse
to be restrained by the influence of the classical tongue. The result is
that in Bengali, in addition to the more correct approximations to the
Sanskrit (according to the Bengali standard), there are folk-forms or
iemUtatsarnas widely aberrated from the Sanskrit. These semi'tatsamas
often require to be spelt phonetically, so far they are removed from the
Sanskrit; and with the present-day insistence on verisimilitude in
literature, they are being recognised once more (as they always were
in Middle Bengali times), and are being employed more and more in the
novel and the drama. Some examples of folk forms have been given
above, pp. 381, 382, 406. Some more are given below, but it is not
worth while to illustrate the line of development from eMB. pronun-
ciation of Us. : [bscgotta] eager nrayer (*beagart5 = vyagrata) ;
(Tlt^ [Jomotto] growa-vjj (samartha) ; 5^t^^, -C^To [cjonnametto, -merto]
holy water of art idol (caranamfta) ; ^t^^*t [bajj^ogjo] hobbi/ (vayvansa) ;
♦rtlft^^ [padokjgol] washings of the feet of a revered persoii^ treated as
holy water (padodaka-jala) ; [josten] an expiatory and benedictory
ceremony (svastayana) ; ?t^J^ [^^ctg^i] <^ostly (*maarghia, mah^rghya) ;
^5t*l, ''T^jrt*! [ogghran, ogghan] (agrahaj ana) ; ^ [fSoJtil (jyaistha) ;
ff^f%^ [cjhurittir] (srotriya) ; ^!3J(\\ [fiunuman] (hanuman); ^f^^
[cjokkotti] a smname (cakravarti) ; C^t^ [bo:J] a surname (vasu) ;
[monjguri] (manjari) ; [onfjuli] (anjali) ; ^^?rtfe^ [^prajsite]
a flower (aparajita) j '^T^-^^rf^' f RoJJidiggfii] sense of projpriety (hrasva-
dlrgha) ; ^oWt% [bfiotcjajjgi] (bhattAcarya) ; [ketton] (kirttana) ;
432
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER IV
(?m [netto] (nftya) ; ^sf^ [kodujjgi] (kadarya) ; (?lt^^l [moc^ob]
(mabotsava) ; etc.^ etc.
234. The general lines of development of the vowels in Bengali on
the basis of the Standard Colloquial have been sought to be traced above.
A study of the phonology of the different dialects of Bengali has not
been possible. Only some general remarks have been made — e.^., about
the East Bengali and North Bengali dialects being conservative in their
vowel system, preserving a great deal of the MB. conditions of epentheais
and absence of mutation. For a thorough and detailed study of the develop-
ment of Bengali, it will be necessary to compare the dialects. A survey
of the phonetics and phonology of each special variation of Bengali will
be the material indispensable for such a study. Intimate personal
acquaintance with the dialects concerned, joined to a scientific training,
is the qualification necessary for such work. But that is wanting at the
present day. The specimens in the LSI. are invaluble, and articles in the
VSPdP. and other Bengali journals on the dialects of Bengali are also
very valuable material : but these have their limitations, specially from
point of view of phonetics and phonology. The historical study of the
Bengali dialects in their envemble is therefore to be left for the future.
CHAPTER V
PHONOLOGY OF THE NATIVE ELEMENT: CONSONANTS
[A] OIA. Consonants : General Lines of Change to Bengali.
235. The history of the consonant sounds of lA. in its general
outline has been given in Chapter I. The main points in the development
of the OIA, consonants into those of (Old) Bengali may be recapitulated :
examples will be found under each sound in indicating the origins of
the Bengali consonants, infra.
[I] Single Consonants,
(I) Single initial consonants have generally remained unchanged.
There have been, however, some cases of aspiration and desaspiration ot
stops, of change of a sibilant to a palatal « c(h) », and of « bh- » to « h- »
(see iiifray under * Aspiration and under Bengali [cjli] and [fi] respec-
tively) ; OIA. « y- » and « v- » have changed to « j- » and « b- and
* r- » is found as « 1, l>n » and also as « r ».
(^) Single intervocal consonants :
[a] the stops ^ -k-, -g-, -t-, -d-, -p-, -b-, -y-, -v- » have been dropped ;
« -t-, -d- » have been reduced to « -r- ; and in a number of Magadhi
inheritances, « -ft- (-rt-) > have resulted in « r (t) » as well ; intervocal < -c-,
-j- » both remain as « -c-, -j- » (in original Magadhi words), or are dropped
(in non-Magadhi forms).
[b] the aspirates « -kh-, -gh-, -th-, -dh-, -ph-, -bh- » have been
reduced to < -h- » ; « -th-, -4h- » occur as « -rh- », in 1MB. and NB.
deaspirated to < -r- ».
[c] « -m- * has become a mere nasalisation of contiguous vowels,
through an intermediate stage of « -w- » ; < -n-, -n- » probably both occurred
as the cerebral « -n- », to be changed to the dental « -n- » in MB.
[d j an intervocal sibilant has transformed itself to « -h- >, in some
cases, besides normally occurring as « ^ ».
55
434,
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
[e] « -r-, -1- » interchange a little ; « -h- » remained in OB,, generally,
to be lost in NB. (whether original OIA., or MIA. -h- » derived from
OIA, aspirates).
[II] CONSOXANTAIi GllOUPS.
These, initial or medial, have been reduced to a single consonant in
Bengali, after having undergone assimilation in the Early MIA, stage.
The following were the main lines of treatment.
(I) [a] Stop + stop became a single stop; stop + aspirate became a
single aspirate. Where the first of these sounds differed in its point of
articulation from the second, the first assimilated itself to the second
in the MIx\. (kt > tt, gdh > ddh, tk > kk, etc.) This kind of consonant
nexus occurred medially only,
[b] Stop + nasal : « -kn-, -tn- » became « -k-, -t- » ; « -gn- » became
* -g-, 'i](g)- * ; « -jn- » became « -n- » ; « dn » had already become « nn » in
OIA., and this gave « -n- » in Bengali ; « -tm- » in « atman » gave < -p- »
(^srtlsT « ap&n^ » — a non-M§gadhi form), and « -dm- » seems to have
become « -d- ».
[c] Stop or aspirate -f« y ».
(i) Gutturals, palatals, cerebrals and labials + « -y- » : the « -y- » was
assimilated to the preceding consonant, which was doubled medially, in
MIA. (but the genuine Magadhi change seems to have been to « kiy-,
4ty- etc.). Bengali preserves a single stop or aspirate.
(ii) Dentals + «y»: the group became « -ce(h)-, -jj(h)- » medially,
and « C-, (eh-), y, jh- » initially. Bengali preserves a single « c(h), j(h) ».
[This palatalisation of <t(h), d(h)-|-y» seems not to have been characteristic
of Old Magadhi, which changed « ty, dy, dhy » to « tiy-, -yy- (diy ?),
-dhiy- » : the palatalised forms, evidently from other dialects in Second or
Late MIA,, seem to have overwhelmed Magadhi.]
[d] Stop or aspirate -f« r The « r » was assimilated to the preced-
ing sound, which was doubled in a medial position, in MIA. Bengali has
one stop or aspirate. The group « -dr- » probably became « ^-dl- » in the
CONSONANTAL CHANGE PROM OIA. TO BENGALI 435
OIA. source dialect of MSgaJhi, whence we have « -11- > -1- » in a few
words in NIA.
[e] Stop or aspirate + « 1 » : assimilation of « 1 ».
[f] Stop or aspirate + « v » : assimilation of « v ». (In the groups
« -tv-, -dv-, -dhv- the resultant form in some eases is « -p-, -b-, -bh- » in
NB., as in other MIA. : this labialisation is non-Magadhi : see infra, under
the Labials.)
[g] Stop + sibilant :
(0 » gives « kh » (through the MSgadhl), « ch » (through extra-
Magadhl MIA. forms).
(ii) 4c ts, ps » became « eeh » in MIA., whence « eh » in Bengali.
(i) [a] Nasal + stop or aspirate : for treatment in Bengali, see §177,
pp. 362-367, stipra.
[b] Nasal + nasal : the OIA. groups were « -nn-, -nn- » and « -mm- * :
« -nn-, -nn- » occur as « n », and « -mm- » as « -m- > in Bengali.
[c] Nasal (anusvara) -h « y, (r, 1), v, s, (s), s, h » ; see above, §177,
(3) « -yy- » gave « j » in Bengali.
(4) [a] « r » + stop or aspirate :
(i) « r » before a guttural, palatal, or labial : the latter was doubled
and the « r » was assimilated. In Bengali, these assimilated groups result
in a single guttural, palatal or labial stop or aspirate.
(ii) « r »-|- dental stop or aspirate of OIA. show a two-fold treatment :
the « r » eerebralised and doubled the dental, and was so assimilated, or
it simply doubled the dental without eerebralising it. The former is the
proper Magadhi treatment : the latter non-Magadhi. Bengali has « -t{h)-,
-r(h)- » in Magadhi inheritances, and « -t(h)-, -d(h)- » in apparently non-
Magadhi forms.
[b] «r»-Fnasal: « -rn-, -rn- > were assimilated to « -nii- » in
MIA., which gave « -n- » in Bengali^ and * -rm- » gave « -mm- » >
* -m- ».
[c] « -ry- » : the Early MIA. (non-Magadhi) assimilation was to
< -yy- », which gave Second MIA. « -33- whence Bengali ». Cases of
% -ry- » > « -yy- » > « -y- > are known in Old Bengali, The genuine
436
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
M^adhl change was to « -liy* », which is not preserved in Bengali, but
« -ry- » also occurs as « -1- » in Bengali (through a stage « -ly- > -11- »).
[d] « -rl- » > MIA. ^ -11- » > Bengali « -1-
[e] « -rv- » IS found as « -bb- > > « -b- ».
[f] « r » + sibilant : assimilation with the sibilant, which is doubled
(-§§-, -ss ss- in Magadhi), and is reduced to a single sibilant pronounced
« § » in Bengali.
[g] « -rh- » became < -Ih- » in Magadhi, whence « 1 » in NB.
(5) [a] « -1- »+stop : assimilation of « 1 », leading to single stop in
Bengali,
[b] * -Im- », gave through MIA. « -mm- »^ « -m- » in Bengali.
[e] « -ly- » became « -yy- » in Old Magadhi, whence ultimately
in Bengali. Examples showing the non-Magadhl change of « -ly- > -11-
> -1- » also occur.
[d] ^ -11- » > MIA. « -11- > > Bengali * -1- ».
[e] « -Iv- » > MIA. « -II- > > Bengali « -1- ».
(6) « -vy- » > MIA. « -VV-, -bb- » > Bengali « -b- This is a non-
Magadhl change : the original MSgadhl alteration of « -vy- » was to « -viy-
which is lost, and « -vy- > -vv-, -bb- » forms have become established.
(7) [a] Groups with sibilant + stop or aspirate: « sc, sk, st(h), sp,
sk(h), st(h), sp(h) » became initially an aspirate, medially a stop + its
aspirate, in MIA. In Bengali we have a single aspirate.
[b] Sibilant + nasal :
« sn > MIA. nh > OB. nh > MB., NB. n »;
* sn > MIA. nh > OB. n, nh (?) > NB. n»;
« gm, sm, sm>MIA. ss (ss Magadhi), mh>OB. s, mh(m)>NB. s, m».
[c] Sibilant + « y » : normally, assimilated to double sibilant in MIA.,
whence Bengali single sibilant. There are cases of modification of this
assimilated double sibilant to « h which are found in Bensrali.
[d] Sibilant r, 1, v » — assimilation of « r, 1, v, », resulting in
double sibilant > single sibilant pronounced « § » in Bengali.
(8) «h» + nasal (hn, hn, hm) : this group underwent metathesis
in MIA. (nh, nh, mh), and in Bengali, they have resulted in a simple nasal.
CONSONANT GKOUPS, ASPIRATION
437
« by » probably became « *-hiy- » in Old Magadhi. In otber MIA. it
became < -jjh- ». It is not represented in Bengali.
(9) « Visarga »-|- consonant simply doubled the latter, and Bengali has
a single consonant representing the OIA. group.
Groups of more than two consonants (like « rdhv, rtm, tsy, str, nstr,
ndhy » etc., do not require any special remarks : it is the semivowels,
liquids or sibilants in them that were assimilated, and then they behaved
in MIA. like OIA, groups of two consonants. A post-consonantal « v » or
«y » sometimes labialised or palatalised a preceding dental : e.^., « ubha»
(MIA. ubbha- < *udhba, *uddhva = urdhva), ^t^5 « baic^ » boat race
(MIA, ^vahicea < ? %ahitrya < vahitra), etc.
Phonological changes of a more general character are discussed below.
[B] Aspiration axd Deaspiratiox.
236. The aspirates are a prominent class of sounds in lA., and they
were passed on to all NIA., except Sinhalese, which quite early in its
history (before the Elu stage : see p. 15) deaspirated them. Deaspiration
of aspirates inherited from OIA. also occurs in NB. : this is discussed
below (§§S39 ff.). All NIA. languages possess some words in which there
is aspiration, but their Sanskrit counterparts show absence of it. These
words have aspiration in MIA. ; and in certain cases the MIA. forms owe
the aspiration conditions obtaining in OIA. itself.
Where it is a case of initial aspiration of an unvoiced stop, a possible
explanation is to be sought in OIA. (and perhaps IE.) omission of « s- »
before « k, c, t, p, n » at the head of the word (see Jules Bloeh, ' Langue
Marathe,' §84; Pischel, §§ 205 ff. ; cf. also Waekernagel, ' Altindische
Grammatik,^ I, § '230). OIA. groups of « sp, st, sk, sc » occurred without
the « s- » as well : <9.^., « pasyati : spasah ; candrah : -scandrah ; t3ra : stf
etc. ; OIA. « ^skarpara after loss of sibilant in pre-MIA, times, gave
Skt. «karpara», and «*skarpara» (with the «s->) in MIA. times would give
« khappara », whence Bengali ^^^1 « khap^ra » sherd, tile. Later, « khap-
para » itself was Sanskritised as « kbarpara ». So « skandha » > MIA.
438
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER V
« khandha » would be expected to give a Bengali *^t^ * *kbadh^ » ; but the
Bengali form is * kSdh^ which seems to go back to an OIA, « *kan-
dha (The Bengali in ^^<^»t5l « k&ndh&-kata » head-less {ghost) is a
late from the Sanskrit « kabandha ».) But it is possible to explain only a
few words showing alternation of initial voiceless stops and aspirates in 01 A.
and MIA. in this way. In most cases, however, the aspiration remains obs-
cure : especially where we have aspiration of sonant stops, not attested in
Sanskrit. Following Jaeobi, Jules Bloeh sees some connexion of an « s » or
« r » in aspirating a stop (Bloch, op. cU,^ §86) : but although in MIA.
and NIA., forms in aspirated stops occur in certain words with « s » or « r *,
as, €,g,, « bhusi » (busa-) ; Hindi « bhes » (*besa < vesa) ; ^ « jhas^ »
fish (OIA. « jhasa » beside ^ jasa >) ; ^*^t^ « phls^ » (pasa) ; t^5^ > f^fj^ft
« khicari > khicuri » 7nes8 of rice and ionises with butter (cf, Skt. krsara <
kfsara) ; ^t^^ « jhSj&r^ » sieve (? jarjara) ; ^5^(1 « jhuna » oW, eirperiencedj
dried zip {as a coco-nnt) (jurna- ?), etc. ; ef. also Skt. «sfi)ka» chai?i{?) beside
« srijkhala », — this is not a satisfactory explanation, as Bloch himself
admits. It seems that contamination with other forms, plus a vague sense
of onomatopoeia, which is so very strong as an indirect influence in Indian
speech, had more to do in aspirating stops than the presence of any particular
sound ; especially in initial aspiration. The Dravidian articulation of the
stops, in Tamil-Malayalam, in Kannada, in Telugu, is slightly aspirated :
can the cases of initial aspiration in MIA. and NIA, be partly due to a
Dravidian influence ? Other instances of initial aspiration in Bengali (apart
from cases of ti-ansferred aspiration, noted below, and besides those given
above) are the following : f^c| « khil^ » (Skt. kila, MIA. khila) ;
« khab&1?l » a handful^ mouthful (? kabala) ; (m « khel^l » (Skt. khela :
v/kr!4) ; ^ « ghurl » paper kite (ef. Hindi guddl) ; « jhSpan^ »
(*jappana, yapya-yana) ; C^*:^ « phele », beside MB. C^T^ < pele » throivs
(? prerayati, MIA. pellai) ; MB. "J^F^^ * phuklire » shouts (cf. Hindi
pukar 5^07^^=phutkara ?) ; « ph&rii) » grasshopper (patagga) ; etc.
^ does not seem to be due to deaspiration of ^ ' kh ' from an earlier •^^f : Bengali
is prone to drop the aspiration in a non-initia] rather than in an initial aspirate.
ASPIRATION IN DESI & TBH. WORDS
439
(See under the various aspirates, infra,) Some dekl and tlk, words seem
to show alternation of aspirated and unaspirated forms : e.g., « gor^ »
footyheel,h\xi C^t^^^t^l * ^h^xi-ioA* high-heeled (^t^o/), "^fg, « ghuti,
ghunti » heel ; * jhal^ » hot to taste, connected with ^s^^l « jwala* fjiirn-
ing sensation (?); so ^ « jb^Igt » sparkle, of. « jwlil > ^^^n^ ; C^tt^
« jhol^ », tcatert/ mass, soup, saliva, beside C^\^, « jol^, juli » chamcl,
river{-bed), see pp. 65, 66 ; d\S « theg > [thieg] ^A/??, beside ^t'S
« tag C5^] « d.hela » clody piece of stone beside C^^ll « dela > clod, lump ;
Cl?5f1 « 4heg(g)a » beside \5t^^ < daga-r^ » dig, huge ; OJ^ « dhSki*
jwnnding or hvskivg machine^ beside \5t^ * dagg-as^ » goad ; UtHt^, 5(t^^^
« dhamall, dhumali * or^^, riototisuess, besides vBfTtrot^ « damadolgt »
hnhhthy huUahoo ; CFt^ « (Jhol^ » beside CSt^ * 4t>^ * rmt'^ shaped
Hie a drn}7t', « jhuti » forelock, crest, beside g'^t ^j^^tl, cut!
(cot!) » queue, connected with « cultit » hair, Ski. « cu4a » (?)^
« jhlbt » quickly, also ^Tf^ * jhat^jt c£. Skt. « jhatiti beside 5^ « c&t »
(« jhat-iti » connected with « v/jhar » by Wackernagel, I^ § 141);
etc., etc.
237. Aspiration in the interior of words is also found, and it is
still more obscure. The Sanskrit pleonastic « -ka » is represented by « -h- »
in Second MIA. (see Pischel, § 206). Is this « -h- » due to aspiration of
OIA, < -k- » to -kh- » ? Cf. Pali * sunakba », Second MIA. « sunaha »
(=:Skt. « suna-ka », — otherwise explained as being « su + nakha ^, and not
as a case of « -kha < -ka»). Cases of aspiration of intervoeal stops,
however, are found in MIA. and in NIA. : eg,, Asokan Prakrit (Dhauli)
« akhakhase » (akarkasa), « kichi ( = kinehi ?) » (kificid) ; Hathigurapha
Inscription « Bharadha- {=Bharadha)» = Second MIA. « Bharaha »
(<*Bharatha=:Bharata) ; Hind. « -har » (-kara : or ? < Skt. hara, v/hf) '
KaSmiri and Panjabi « Vihath > (Vitasta) = Jhelam River] Bengali
from « bigh&t^ < *bih&t^ » span (= vitasti?: j^ossibly a case of
transference of aspiration) (see also E. Miiller, ' Pali Grammar/ p. 25).
Aspiration of a voiced stop seems to have been favoured in some cases
through the influence of a preceding nasal. Cases of alternation of «-mb- »
and « -mbh- » occurred in OIA, (Bloeh, op, cit., p. 100 ; Wackernagel, I.,
4iO
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
p. 129.) Bengali mstanees are — ^spt^, beside ^»rt^ « andhu, = idhu, idu »
(anduka) ; MB. ^tft^T^ ^^t^, ^t^^ « jainlr&, janabirlb, jambhiri »
(jambira) ; MB. TJtTt^ « samae » ^«!?<?7-5 ( ? samayati), beside ^\^,
« sambae, sambhae » (? through contamination with < sambhalayati »
> 5?t^ft^, ^rW^^ « sam[bh]ale » 4ear5, supports) ; ^t^, ?tft^> ^tit^
« Ham(bh)lr& » (Perso- Arabic « amir * ) ; eMB. (SKK.) ^ « khaudhi >
grain, corn (Persian « xand » ) ; f^T'^J^;, f^l^ « sind(h)ukql » chest, bar
(Perso- Arabic « sinduq- ») ; etc. In lMB.,^^t^ « kandari > (kan(Jagarin)
and ^t*i5t^ « kandhari » (karna-dhara-), meaning helmsman^ seemed to
have occurred side by side, and were doubtless regarded as the same
word. Bengali « nibha » , beside W1 « niba » out {a light)
(nir-va-) probably takes its aspiration from « \^bha * (nir + bha) ; and
MB. « sabha > for Jf^ « saba » (sabba, sarva) is probably through
contamination with « sabha » (see p. 319).
238. Aspiration through metathesis of « h » is found in lA. from Late
OIA. times. This kind of aspiration by transposition of the « h » in some
cases was naturally accompanied by deaspiration within the same word.
E.g., NB. sts. « agkhai^ » (ahagkara) ; c^t^ « khos^ », OB. « khasu »
(kacchu<; ) ; « *ghar^ > (ghara = *garha < gf ha) ; OIA. y/ « ghat »
= « gath » = « grath » : cf . « ghata- »> ^1 « ghara » tvater-jar^ < gath »>
MB. ^ « garh NB. 5f^ « gar » to build ; MB. ^W. « agh&na,
»glkn^ »^ NB. ds. « aghran^ » (*aggahana, agrahayana); MB. ^
« parha » (pataha-) ; 5ff5f| « gadha » (gaddaha-, gardabha) ; 5^5.
« phlindi » scheme, stratagem (*prabandhika : cf . phad^, p. 366); ^*PI « phupi *
edge of dkoti with hanging threads like tassels, often gathered together in a
bunch (*phumpia, *phuppia = pupphia, puspika) ; « bhSiy^sa,
hhdkh^ ^ belonging to bufaloes {^mhsiinsQ,', mahinsa, mahisa) ; C^5^, Co^
« bhera, bh§ra » (*mheda-, ^mhea-fj^-, ^meha-da- < mesa-) ; « bhukh^ »
(*buhukkha < bubhuksa); \»t^ « bhap^l » (bhappa, '^bappha<baspa) ; MB.
sts. «bibha» (%ibah4 = vivaha : cf. tbh, ft^l « biya^ bia» <
« *biaha ») ; MB. sts, C^^^ « bebhara » (*biabahara=vyavahara: cf. MB.
C^^ft « blfcuhari p. 345) ; etc. As examples of entire deaspiration,
through transference of aspiration, may be given C^^^, t t « bon^>
MB. WEAKENING OP INTERVOCAL ASPIRATION 441
bun^, buin^» =« bahini, bhagio! », and CTf^t^, C?W^ « dohEr^, doar^ »
(*dhuara, dhruva-kara):
239. The aspirates^ initial and inter vocal, which Bengali inherited
from OIA,, were preserved intact in the OB., and to a very large extent
in the eMB. period. But even from the eMB. period, from the latter
part of the loth century it would seem, (judging from the orthography of
Early Bengali MSS,, and from NB. history of the aspirates), the aspirates as
well as « -h- * grew rather feeble in an intervocal position — ^and also finally —
although they do not suffer from any lax articulation initially. In Modern
Bengali there has been entire loss of aspiration in final and intervocal
aspirates in a very large number of cases ; and where aspiration is found
in writing, it is not always faithfully representative of the pronunciation,
especially in the Standard Colloquial. The dialects of Western Raijha are
rather conservative in the matter of retaining aspiration intervoeally and
finally. Some forms of East Bengali also preserve an intervocal unvoiced
aspirate, e.g., in words like « atha » gtm-past€y tf^ « pakha » fan, STf^
« msKtha » head, where the Standard Colloquial will normally use a « t, k,
t ». Similarly, there has been a very wide loss of intervocal « -h- » in New
Bengali, leading to fresh groups of contact vowels which have been
diphthongised : and final « -h », representing earlier Bengali « -ha », may
be said to be lost in Bengali. But aspirates are not ordinarily disturbed
when they occur initially in the Standard Colloquial and in West Bengali
generally ; although in most forms of East Bengali, initial voiced aspirates
are either wholly deaspirated, or the aspiration becomes very weak. As
has been said before, tendency to drop aspiration manifested itself towards
the end of the I4th century, when intervocal « h » is found frequently to be
dropped, leading to the assimilation of a group « hhh * to « 4 » : e.g.,
SKK. ^ bara » beside « bar&ha » 12, « khaa > beside ^
« khah& * you eat, C^^Tt^ « goarS, * beside C^t?t^t « goarl ^ petitioUy etc.
(see p. 296). But aspirated stops as a rule, judging from the printed edition
of the !§KK., remained intact ; although ^ mh, nh » seem to have heen
deaspirated, inspite of their being retained in writing. Absence of dated
MSS. makes it difficult to determine when aspiration ceased to be a regular
56
442
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
thing ia MB. It seems in the early I6th century, voiced aspirated forms
like ^ « p&fh- * read (path), « karh » snatch away (ka44haj tf s^a),
STt^l < narha » shaverL'heacl=^Q\7 Bengali 5?t^, C^vgl [nsera], ^t^? * barhe »
increases (vfdb), burha » (vfddha) still obtained, although it is likely
that the aspiration had become feeble. The voiced aspirates seem to have
preserved the aspiration (in the West Central dialect) longer than the
unvoiced ones, in both final and intervocal positions. Words like
« hat^ » (hasta), ^fft « hati » (hastiu), * * (asfea), « katgl*, MB.
« jata » (yasti), for OB, and eMB. « hathli, hathi, atha, kafcha, jatha »
etc., seem to have been established by the 16th century even though « -rh-,
-dh-, -bh-, -gh- » retained the aspiration. The use of unaspirated stops
is common in most MB. MSS. (excepting the SKK.).
240. Conditions in the present day Standard Colloquial are in the
main the following (see * Brief Sketch of Bengali Phonetics,' §§ 26, 26a): —
(1) Initial aspirates remain, whether voiced or unvoiced (excepting
in the ease of « ph, bh ^, for which see below).
(2) Final aspirates are deaspirated : but is. foims tend to preserve
them, though not so strongly as when initial.
(3) Pre-consonantal aspirates are normally deaspirated.
(4) Intervoeal aspirates as a rule are deaspirated, but it is not
uncommon to find aspiration in some cases. In formal discourse, and in
singing, as well as in careful speech, the aspirates are retained ; but they
are deaspirated in quick conversation. No hard and fast rule can be laid
down in this matter, but it seems that in less common words and forms,
and in tss, where they are susceptible to the influence of the spelling, the
aspiration commonly comes in.
Final aspiration, if uttered not strongly, can be tolerated in NB., as
well as pre-consonantal aspiration, especially if it is of an unvoiced stop.
So also intervocal aspiration. Intervoeal « (c)ch » in verb forms commonly
loses the aspiration, but a suggestion of aspiration is also heard.
In the pronunciation of the aspirates in NB., there is one point to
consider, about « ph bh ». Within recent times, not much beyond
half a century from now (i.e. the end of the first quarter of the -lOth century),
REPRESENTATION OP NON-INITIAL ASPIRATES 443
these have developed spirant values, either bilabial [f, v>] or denti-labial
[f, v]. Bengali transcriptions of foreign names and words (Portuguese and
English), using ^ « b » for the sound of the denti-Iabial « v » in the latter
languages (and not ^ «bh»=[T5, v] as at present) right down to the
middle of the 19th century, and later, show that this spirant pronunciation
is a post- 1 9th century affair. These are commonly substituted for the
[pb, bfi] aspirates, but the aspirates have not been entirely ousted, (See
* Brief Sketch of Bengali Phonetics,' §30.) No other set of aspirates
has developed a similar spirant pronunciation (in the Standard Bengali :
the spirants [x, 9.] for « k, kh » are found in dialectal East Bengali.)
241. Where loss of aspiration has become well-established from
Late MB., the Bengali spelling fmnkly recognised it in some cases by
using stops, e.ff,, « hat^ », (JiZ^ « mejo » (<majh^, madhya), ^ « p&r »
read (< parh < path), ct5 « hit^ » (*adhistat), ^ « gafc^ (granthi), ^srf^J^
« abcha » ^U2j/ (abhra-), etc. But generally, the historical spelling obtains
as the standard one, and this is helped by the absence of entire loss of
aspiration : e.^., ^ « raat(h)^ » field, 5(t^ « mae(h)^ » Jis/ij « kat(h)^ »
woody ^t^ « bag(h)^ » ^t^ « bad(h)^ » bund, « rak(h) > to keep,
Cif^ « dek(h) » to see, f»t^ « sik(h) » to learn, fil^ ^ lik(h) » to write,
« p&t(h)5l > ioaff, beside C^t^ « g5p(h)^ » moustache, ^rtfl, ^
« lat(h)i » 5j|f^ « maj(h)i » helmsman, etc., etc. Purely phonetic
spellings we find in Persian loan-words like C*t^, « sek > (5ayx), beside
C*t^ « sekh », « hi,pta » tveek, for "'^^^ ^ "^haphta » (haftah),
« t&kta » for « takhta » (taxtah), etc. In the spelling of
Bengalis not earing for the established orthography, and in the present-day
works of drama and fiction, as well as in journalese employing the colloquial,
the use of stops for aspirates is quite noteworthy : €,g,, C?r^ « dekte » for
Cf^t^ « dekhte > <(yi^T^ « dekhite » to see, "^[^ « bujte » to itmlerstand <
^f%ra « bujhite », « adla » for < adh^la » half-pice, ^f^f^^l « sad-
kha » for « sadhukhan » a surname, ^^f^t « maggi » = « maharghya »,
« hocce » zs, becoming = ^j:^X^ « haiteche », « b&dna » tvater-pot
with spout < ^«Rl * badh^n^, etc., etc. The spellings with 5, «e-, -cc- »
for 5, ^ «ch, ccb, »in the progressive and perfect verb forms (v^^sftf * aeh »),
444
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
found in the * Hutom Peear Naksa ' (see p. 135), have obtained acceptance
in the hands of a writer like Rablndra-Dath : e.g\, « diece » lia^ given^
f^C65 « dicce » is giving y ^^C^fe « koreci » / have done, ^^fe < kocci »
/ flaw CTFCBS « berueee » ^« o?^^, etc.^ etc. (but rarely in the
case of ^5rtC5 « ache and never in the ease o£ past perfect forms in ff^l
« -chili » etc.). Colloquial Oriya agrees with the Bengali Standard Collo-
quial in changing the « -ch- » of verb forms to « -c- ».
242. Bengali in the matter of aspiration differs remarkably from its
sisters and cousins of the West — ^from Maithill-Magahl, Bhojpuriya, Eastern
Hindi and Western Hindi, and also from Panjabl(in the last, in the Eastern
and North Central Panjabi region at least, however, the sonant aspirates
become surd stops, with low tone marking loss of aspiration). The Northern
Indian languages of the plains, from the Panjab to the borders of Bengal,
in the main preserve aspiration as well as intervoeal « -h- » : especially in
the Gangetic plain. The weakening of final intervoeal aspirates charac-
terises Marathi almost as much as it does Bengali (cf. Jules Bloch^
'Langue Marathe,' §§87 ff.). Gujarat! final and intervoeal aspiration
also is weak, and is dropped in many eases, as well as intervoeal « -h- ».
R. L. Turner has observed that in Nepali (Khaskura) pre-consonantal
aspirates become deaspirated, and intervoeal « -h- » is entirely lost there
CGujarati Phonology,' JRAS., 1921, pp. 509-510).
243. Loss of aspiration occurred in MIA. as well. (See W. Geiger,
Pali Grammar, §40 ; Pischel, §§ 213, 214.) All NIA. obtained some of
these deaspirated forms from MIA. Examples in Bengali are :
« ut^, lit^ », cf . Hind, «ftt»(utta, *unta < *uttha=ustra) ; so ^
« i^^, It^»> cf. Hind. « it, Ita » (itta-, ^inta- = ista-) ; ft^ « dhit^ » (dhfsta) ;
« sik&l^ », OB. (Sarv^nanda) « sigkala » (sfgkhala : but cf . Sanskrit
« sfgka »=cAa2?2 ?) ; *ft«T& « pal&t^ » (pallatta, paryasta) ; and probably a
few more. Sanskrit « visarga » in the middle of a word is changed to
« s, s, s » according as the consonant (stop or aspirate) following is a
palatal, guttural or dental (« visarga » after « i, u » changing itself to « s »,
which also cerebralises a following « t »). But it seems that in MIA*
the « visarga » did not turn to a sibilant, but simply assimilated itself
* VIS ARGA ' + CONSONANT ; VOICING OF * K ' TO * G ' 445
to the following stop. In such eases, we have ia NIA. a normal siraplifiea-
tiqa of the resultant double stop to a single stop, and not aspirate, which
normally results from « sk, se, st »: e.g,^ « nilj4- karma, Skt. niskarma-
MIA, « *nikkamma », whence Bengali fSf^fa? « nikam^ », beside ^U, fs?^
« nisk&mraa » ; « nih + kasa-, Skt. nis-kasa » > MIA. « *nikkasa » >
fiT^i « nikas^ » c/eantt^j ; so « nih + kalayati, Skt. niskal- » >
fSf^FtC^ « nikale » driven outy ft^q « nikale » cowe* j « nib-cala, Skt.
niSeala » > MB. f5f5^ «nic&li»; so « nih-caya, niseaya * > MB. fSl5l
*nio&ya»; <c catur + ka=catuhka, catuska > 5^, cst^ « c&k^l, c&uk^ ».
The forms with geminated stops, without aspiration, occur in MIA.
(Pali and 'Prakrit'): see Pisehel, § 329: ef, Pali forms like « niccala,
nikkanto Asokan < dukara ( =dukkara) », etc. In the development of the
NIA. forms there seems to have been but slight influence of Sanskrit in
this matter. A MB. form like * nata », besides < nkthk » (=nasta)
as in the SKK., is a ds. ; the genuine tdA. is found in the NB. 5ff& « nat^ »
< •rt^ « natha » crmipleiL
[C] lUTfiRCHANGE AMONG CONSONANTS.
Voicing and Unvoicing.
244- In addition to interchange of aspirates and non-aspirates,
voicing of unvoiced consonants, and the reverse process, as well as changes
in the place of articulation, occur in Bengali. In some cases, the changes
are quite normal, and in others, they are uncommon, and can be explained
as being due to contamination with a form similar in sound or meaning,
or to dialectal admixture, or again to the workings of folk-etymology.
Voicing of [k] to [g] is common enough, though not the rule, being
found in some sis, words in the Standard Colloquial. Intervocal [k > g >
was the normal change in Transitional and Second MIA. This
tendency to turn a voiceless stop to its voiced spirant form has continued
down to the present day in NB. (see ' Brief Sketch of Bengali Phonetics/
§ 31). Examples of NB. forms with the [g] developed out of the
[k]are: * kSg^ » (kaka), * b&g^ » (baka), "tt^ * sag^ » (§5ka),
446 PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
^C^l * -gula, -gulo» (-kula-), ^f^f^f, f^^f « -(a)dig& » (-adi-ka);
MB. * m&gar^ * (makara) ; NB. 1^^, C^^^ « ch&g&r^,
chftg^ra, cheg^ra » (sakata) ; East Bengali t * b&g&l^ » (sakala) ; etc.
Unvoicing of [g] to [k] is rather uncommon, although it is found :
tt^^ « pak^ri » for ^^\^ « pag?lrl » turban (cf . « pragraha » : influence
of « pak^ » « if«7'5^) ; « jh&k^ra * beside ^^v5l « jh&g^lra » quarrel ;
^ « kue^ » a red herry (gunja).
Interchange of [cf, ^] are found : f^ft « bici » (bija : or<vftya-?) ;
^TtW ^tlt « pSean^-bari » a coivJiercVs stick (prajana) ; '^t^ « paji » almanac
(panjika, pancika) ; cf . ^it, beside f « kul&el, kuluci :
kul&jl, kuluji » family annals (kula-panjika) ; ^ kue^ » (g^^j*) j
Interchange of [t] and [4 > r] occurs to some extent. Also of
[t, d] : « chut » < « ehudha» unclean (chuddha; ksubdha); C^t^
« besad^ » < C^^fff^ « besati » (^besS,-, vaisya-) ; « bhayad^ » <
'^'^l^^tf^ * bhaiyati » kinship, kin (bhai-) ; MB. ^^tlff « slig&llad^ »
< 'HPit^ « s&k&lat^ » a costly stuff (Perso-arabic « saqalat ») ; etc.
[b], medial and final, is found as [p] in some cases: ^t^tft <
-^^^ « pap?lp < pab^ri » (pabba-, parva) ; ^TfC^ft^l « adope » <
^srtOTt^^ « adobe » «^ least (Skt, locative « adau » + Bengali locative
affix « -e » < « *adowe »). Persian words in some cases show [p] for [b] :
ff,^., « xarab »>^t*t « khSrap » « mihrab »> (?(^t^ « merap » [mjerap]
awmiig : cf . Assamese 1%^5t^ « kitap » book < « kitab ». [p] also becomes
[b] : ^^d^ > ^1 * bapu > babu » ; ^?ttW, ^Wl < ^?f^,
« thap&r^, thapparql, thapra > thab&r^, thab^ra » slap ; Wt*t > ?t^^ « dap^
> dab^rl » vanntiug, intimidafton (darpa > dappa), beside Jft^^ « dap&t^ »
mighty prowess,^
Change in Point op Articulation.
245. The more important changes which occur in Bengali are of
« g » [J] to « c, ch » [cf, cjhjj of [1] to [n], and vtce-versa, in initial positions,
and final and preeonsonantal [w] to [m] . These are discussed later, while
treating the above sounds. Shifting of articulation from one point
SHIFTING OF ARTICULATION: DOUBLING 447
to another is also found. The most important item in this connection
is the cerebralisation of OX A, dentals — a change which Bengali has inherited
from Magadhi. The absence of cerebralisation in Bengali is perhaps due
to the influence of non*Magadhl dialects. This is discussed below^ under the
Cerebrals. Interchange between gutturals and palatals as well as cerebrals
and palatals seems to characterise some groups of desl words : see under
Palatals. Change of OIA. dental stops and aspirates before « y » to palatal
affricates is a phonological altemtion which is derived from MIA.
* j * [^] hecomes « z » in a few cases in the Standard Colloquial
(where the « z » sound is not the rule, unlike Eastern and Northern Bengali
dialects, which normally alter lA. « j » to « dz, z »). Foreign * z »
normally becomes « j » in Bengali.
Some other changes in articulation, which are the result of assimilation
in MIA., are treated below.
Besides the above, there are sporadic cases of other interchange, e.g.y
between a guttural and a labial, which are not characteristic, and which
will be noted at their proper places.
[D] Doubling oy Consonants,
246. Consonants in Bengali are doubled, or rather, lengthened, in
ts, words, when they occur before « r, 1, y, v » : e.g.^ [cfokiro = cjokkro],
^IF [Jukkb = /uk:lo], T^^J, fvff^ [dib:o = dibbo, dib:i =dibbi], "Sj^ [od:o=
oddo], ft^^ [birotro = birDtto], etc. Doubling is found in HindostanI
and other loan-words: e.g,^ ^ttot [pat:tt, patta] address, [/aci/a,
jSsLc^^a], etc. Through loss of intevening vowel, and through consequent
assimilation as well, NB. has developed double consonants : e.g., ^spf^^
[atta, at:a] eight pieces > « afc(h)&H--ta * ; ^i^^c^ [pcitte] < *1tf%^^
«patite» to spread; sjtC^ [matte] < ^\'?^U5, ^\J^U5 « marte, marite » to
beat ; ' ^Tt^ ' l^^SS^] <^C^» « jak ge, jauk^ giya » let it go ! ;
etc., etc.
In the above instances, doubling or lengthening is historical, or merely
phonological. But there is another kind of lengthening in New Bengali
448
PHONOLO&Y : CHAPTER V
which is semantic. With a desire to emphasise, or to modify the
idea in other ways, a consonant is frequently doubled in NB. (This has
been noticed in the ' Brief Sketch of Bengali Phonetics,' § 53.) Thus,
^C^^tC^ [ffikebare] at once, for good, entirely : [iekkebare]/of all
time, entirely {without hope of any alteration); C'ftt [g8:p] moustache:
C6k?ft?« [^ougSppa] v^hiskers; ^ [fia:t] hand: ^ [Rtttta] handful,
with full hand, right and left, line or thread draivn by the hand ; 5(1^
[dfiakka]i?asA: SC^^ [dfiDkol] strain, a.ndi MB. CU^ [4Gskal push;
[thapor] slap : «tt?n$ [thappor] generally = slaps in quick succession ; CPtST
{l^o:t] thief: C^rRsm [^occfor] from ^^m^ [^aa^or] cheat < e/ieat at
dice ; [^ajkm], beside ^ [^okkor] a. ramshackle carriage (sakata) ;
etc. This kind of doubling for emphasis seems to have been due to stress
—the consonant following the stressed vowel being lengthened through
accession in force of the whole syllable. It originated in Bengali
possibly during the OB. period.
[E] Changes of Consonants in Contact: Assimilation.
247- The behaviour oE Bengali vowels under mutual influence with in
a word, in separation and in contact, has been described under Epenthesis
and Vowel-Mutation, etc Contraction has taken place largely in IM B.
and NB., by which vowels have been dropped, and consonants which were
separated in OB. and eMB. have been brought together. New consonant
groups have thus developed in NB. (see p. 251). These have in the main
retained there original character, in preserving their point of articulation,
but in the matter of breath or voice, there has been assimilation in most
eases.
[r] tends to be dropped within a word or sense group before palatals,
cerebrals and dentals : e.g., \»4 3&ny* '"'"^ generally becomes
[tttjj^onno], Tt<fl «karyft» becomes [kaj^o], 5ttCT^ ^ « gaSr^ jwala »
heat of the body> anger becomes [gaejjgala], ^ « mureha » > [muccfha],
^ * j&ler^ tlkb^ » water tub becomes [^olettab], ♦ft^t^ vSW * pakhlr^
4ana» bird's toing > [pakhi44ana] , ^ ^]sM4.tkK» for whose sake
CONSONANT ASSIMILATION IN NB. 449
> [kattore], ^TWT^ « sardar » chiefs from the Persian « sardav » > [Joddar],
etc. Also [r] is dropped before gutturals and labials, in U^.y e.g.^ > '^^ht
« sw&rg& » > [foggo], > ^ « tirk& » > [tokko], Jf*f > 7f?f « s&rp& »
> [/w^]? > «g&rb4» > [gobbo], > « dbarma » >
[dRommo], but not in tlJi. or foreign words and sense-groups : \5t^
^tC5 « tar^ kaehe » ivith him, 5?f^^ « c&rk(h)a » spinning wheel < Pers.
« carxah « b&r^ga » r j/V^r < Portuguese « verga », ^ij^t^ < ^f^PTt^
« k&rbar^ < k&ribar^ » ^/o, etc. : see under [r], infra.
In the NB. dissimilar groups like « kt(h), tk(h), pt(h), tp(h), kt(h),
tk^h), tt(h), tt(h), tp(h), pt(h), gb(h), bg(h), gd(h), dg(h), bd > br, db >
rb » etc., the stops (and the flap sound of « r ») are fully exploded. In such
groups, where we have breathed stop + breathed stop or aspirate, or voiced
stop + voiced stop or aspirate, there is no modification : e.g.^ ^^t^^ [thakte]
to remain, ^^s^^l [Juktara] the planet Venus, ^^C^ [dtke] having sustained
a shock affright, [apto] self, ?t^<11 [Ratpa] hand and foot, ^srf^l [atka]
Jired, ft^^ [Ratte] to toalk, >ft<^t [Japta] emhraciag all, ^^ft [bagdi] a caste,
etc.; ^t§C^1«l1 [Ratkhola] a marl, ^^#t^ [patkhir] condensed-)inlk 2^^ste
spread out on a leaf, ^t^^ [Jabdfian] careful, [odbfiut] strange,
[dugdRo] milk^ ^if^sf [udgfiaton] opening, etc.
In the case of aspirate (stop, or affricate) 4- aspirate or stop, voiced or
unvoiced, there is deaspiration of the first aspirate. In deliberate and
careful pronunciation, however, the aspirate may be retained (so far as it
can be retained in a final position in a syllable) where we have a sound of
a different class. Examples : ^^\5^1 [rothtola > rottola] car^festival
co7nmon; [dudRdoi > duddoi] milk and curds ; ^t^^Jft^ [a:dfi + tha:n
> ttdthan, atthan] h^lf a piece {of cloth) (not [adRthan]) ; ^^^M [mukh-
khaui > mukkhani] that face ; ^t^^ [baghbondi > bagbondi] capturing
the tiger {a game) ; ^^C*tt^1 [mukhpom > mukpora] burnt face (a term of
abuse) ([mukhpora] is also heard); so ^t^^t^ [kathphata > katphata]
wood-splitting (said of sunshine) ; ^t^C¥t^ [adfiphota > adphofca] half-open
{as a floioer) ; and Persian « haftah, taxtah » > *^5jv^, *^5^ < h&phta,
t&khta » > [Ropta] week, [tokta] a plank ; [pathgfiat >
potgfiat] roads and ferries ; Th«t^^^ [bagRbRalluk > bogbRalluk] tigers
57
450
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
and bears, etc., which can have the aspirate retained in the first consonant
of the group.
There is Regressive AssmilaHcn when stops (or affricates) and aspirates
of the same class occur side by side, by the first sound acquiring or losing
voice according as the second one in the group possesses or does not possess
it : and the first sound, if it is an aspirate, loses its aspiration ; e.^,, t^l^-^t^ft
[aeggari] onf waggon4oad < [se:k + gari] ; tii^ ^ [aetk + gfium > seggSum]
one {long) sleep; [da:k + gRo:r > daggfior] post-office]
[ra:g + kora > rakkora] to be angry; <^ ^CSPC^ [me:g(B) + korecJhe >
raekkorecf(h)e] ^7 is cloudy; ^t^^^T [paicj-figoin > pdjjgon] {five) people ;
^t^-FtTtC*l1 [ka:^ + cjalano > kaccjalano] carrying on wori, just useful;
^-^^^ [bor(o) 4- thakur > botfchaknr] hnshmuVs elder brother {among
ivomen); 5w-Ut^1 [cJo:t 4- dfiaka>cJ'oddfiaka] covered with gunny cloth; til^fw^
[aeto + din > aeddin] such a long time; MB. ^ffs^ < ^^f^l [/a:t+dina >
*Jaddina, /adina] seventh-day celebration {after birth of a child); ^^-Cif^
[fia-.t + dsekha > fiaddakha] seeing one'^s palm, feeling one^s pulse; i^t^-5(^
[fia:t4-dfiora > fiaddfiora] catching one^s hand^ tinder one's control; ^?(-C«t^1
[du:dB+tola > duttola] vomiting milk {as a baby); ^f^--^^^ [jD:b + pa6a>
jbppaoa] get all; *tt*f-'«^ [ptt:pH-bfioe > pabbRoe] /(J/x/- of sin; 5^t*f-C^^
[ba:p + baeta > babbaeta] /^z^/^^r and son ; etc. But when there are stops or
aspirates, voiced and unvoiced, of different classe^s, ordinarily there is absence
of assimilation to voice or breath of the first sound. It is, however, not
unlikely that there is a certain amount of unavoidable unvoicing of a voiced
consonant before an unvoiced one, and vice-versa, and there is no full assimi-
lation in this ease. Entire assimilation to voice or breath is generally absent
because of the full explosion given to the first stop or aspirate : e,g,,
'^IkC^i^t^ [tttdfi + phota > adphota] half -open {flower) does not become
[atphottt] ; so ^t'f^t^ [cjddpal] a per social name is never [cjcitpal], ^l^^^tW
[fiatbaJ5ar] mart and fair is not [fiadbajgar, fiarbajgar], nor is
^Sf^t^ [^i^S'^^y to-day a7id morroiOy nowadays assimilated to [acfkal];
so we have ^t^5^5^^ [jatdak] seven calls, calling one for a long time, f^^^
[jibtola] Siva's spot {temple of Siva), tV?^^ from ttf^^t^ [Bdri-
tttt(h) > fiarkat(h)] sacrificial Hake, [rajfgputbir] a Rajput
CONSONANT ASSIMILATION IN NB.
451
warrior^ ^^-T%§ [Jobkicfhn] everi/ thing, ^-5ttWl [Itgada] hrick'StacJc, ^^-WH
[ffikdom] at one breath, entirely, (?ff5-^ [motbo(B)a] load-carrying, etc., etc.
There are a few exceptions, however : e>g.^ C^lt^^ [lokjgon] people is heard
frequently as [logj^on], and CWtWt^fl \^l\\o\odi(3Aa] little elder brother {=::
fourth elder brother, generally) becomes Cft^ [cjhorda] ; ^T^C^ > ^^^X^
« bujhite > bujhte » to understand becomes [buzte, buste] ; but a case
like ^*tVt^ [upokar > ubgar] is through a MB. and NB. tendency to
voice intervocal breathed stops [ubogar].
Before the (unvoiced) sibilant, there is no unvoicing of a voiced stop or
affricate, or aspirate: e.g.^'S^^-l'^ii\ [aA{^)j^xa] of half a seer ioeigkt,A\^'
Wt^ [JaJ5(f5)Xokal] evening and morning, (?Tt^-*tt^ [gfior/<^l] ^table^ C^R-^
[debJobRa, -/otsa] gods^ gathering^ etc.
Assimilation of consonants of different groups, also a regressive
assimilation, is found in some eases. Here, howover the points of
articulation are not very much removed from each other, [t, d], and
occasionally [t], become assimilated to a following [cj, jg], and sometimes
\S\ i ai^d [cj] is assimilated to a [JJ : e.g., ft^ f^C^ [fiait + cjhinie >
Bttccjhinie] having jerked away the hand ; ^tf ^t^^ [ba:d + Jgabe > bajjjabe]
it will he deducted \ C^-5T^ > C^tt^^ [go:t + ^a:r > goccfar] some four,
a few I [pa:cf/o: > paj/o] five handred) ^5^^ [pa:^+ja:t > paj/at]
Jive and seven, a few ; ^t^*tt^ [pa:th+Ja:l] school becomes [pajjal] ; ^T'^^^^
[Jsetjete] damp becomes [JseJJete], and ^^CTf^ft «pauca + seri» five seers
probably gave « "^pSss^ri, pasarl », whence [p^'/uri] ; etc., etc.
Assimilation of a dental stop to a cerebral one is extremely rare : e,g,,
Barisal dialect ^t^^l > ^TtfeSl [Jatta > Jatta] 5<?t'e/i pieces, 7 o^ clock.
The dialect of Chittagong is most advanced in the matter of assimila-
tion, both by shifting the point of articulation and by voicing or unvoicing.
Assimilation in Chittagong Bengali is both progressive (in the case of
stops and affricates and the sibilant and [1]), and regressive (in the case of
the nasal) : e.g,^ ^t5C^ [pacfgoa] five pieces > [paccfoa], tf^^^
[datgun] teetk = Standard Bengali ^t^^f^ [datguli] or i^t^^C^fl [datguno]
>[dattun]; C^t^^t^ [rojgkar] daily wages, income, from Persian « roz-kar »j
> [rojJSctr] y ^ttc^ 'Itf^ [J5<iite pari] 1 can go = [jgaittari] ; fifC^ *ttt^
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER V
[dite pari] / can give > [dittari] ; ^^^t^ [upokar] benefit, > [*apkar >
uppar] ; ^OTf^ [nomojkar, norJTsar] obeisance > [nojjar] ; ^'^1%
[brifio/poti] > [biu/jut] ; f^^^5ttf| [/lalgoa] tie jackal > [fiialloa] ;
+3^ «ghora + ni» mare [*gfiorni > *gfiurni > gunni]; Cff^K^ ^ *1tf^
[dekhite na pari] lean not 5<f5<[deinnari]. (See Basanta-Kumar Chatter ji^
VSPdP., 1326, No, 2, p. 108fF.). The dialect of Chittagoag thus stands
apart from most Bengali dialects, and from MIA., in which assimilation
is generally regressive.
Progressive AssimilatioH, however, is found in a few cases in Bengali
{e.g., [i^obdo] pimislment from Persian [zabt] < Arabic [5abt']); also
in MIA. (ef, « lagna, bhagna > > « lagga, bhagga beside « ^lanna
'^'bhanna » : c£. Bengali f^^^f « hilan^ » = « abhilagna » , and ^^Tl
« bhana » to pouwl, as rice = « bhagna »).
[E] Metathesis.
248, Aspiration and deaspiration by metathesis of « h » , e.g.,
« bhaginl> bahin, mahisa > mabinsa > bhals », have been noticed before.
Methathesis is found occasionally in OIA. and MIA, (cf. Wackernagel,
1,239; Pischel, § 354; Geiger^ Pali Grammar, § 47). Some Bengali
words are the result of this early metathesis : e.g., « ghar^ < *garha,
gfha » ; ^fi^, « bikhin, bon < bahini < bhagini » ; Vf , ?f ? * da, dah& >
daha < hada < hrada » lake, tank ; ^t^^1 « halka », cf . MIA. « halukka =
laghuka» light, etc. Instances in Bengali: '^^^ [J'itki] dried fish
(*sukhati < suska) ; « gajra » to fret andfnme^ to he filled icitli rage
(^^.-v/garj) ; ^ « -v/p&r » i5o }mt on, MB. « p&hr& » , < ^f^^ « p&hirfi, »
(pari + dha); « >/catka » knead with the fingers < « k&cta »
( ? y^krs + vf t) ; « kanui » = [konui] elhoiv (< « "^kanohi < kahoni
< kaphoni ») ; <Ff*I « phal » leap, cf. ^t<? « laph » leap (Skt. lampha) ; MB.
f*l5(C5 « pin&he » on < « p&hine » (apinah-) ; MB. ^ff?^
« pfbhican^ » knowledge, acqiiaintance^ recognition (paccahinna, pratyabhijfia) ;
srtC^St^l" « marwari » wa/i yrm Mancar (marwari) ; etc., etc. In is,
words, we find metathesis in a few cases : e.g., « picas^ > (pisaca) ;
METATHESIS: HAPLOLOGY: THE GUTTURALS 458
« mafcuk^ » (mukuta) ; « giroF^ * (garuda) ; etc. Also in foreign
words : e.^., « kulup > padlock (Arabic « qufl *) ; C^\5^\ •« bScka »
i?^?^^^^ (Turki « bug-ca ») ; C5^, « deks&, baska » = English desJti box^
beside the proper C^S^j « 4^ska, baksa » ; etc.
[G] Haplology.
249* Loss of consonant through haplology is found in some iustauces
in Bengali, mainly in dss : e.g,^ JfR^ilW « s&mibhyare » (samabhivyahara-) ;
^^T^ « sabyasta » arranged (savyavastha) ; ^t?:?t^^5I * paduk^jil^ »
(pibdudaka-jala) ; ^^If « anda » as a name (ananda) ; C^iW^ « nauk&ta » social
courtesies (laukikata) ; SRR ^ narun » nail-cntiing imtrument (aahaharanl,
nakha*haranika), etc. Also « -da, -di » for ?tf1, f^f^ or « dada,
didi (-1) » ^Wer hr oilier^ elder sister, CL the Anglo-Indian spellings
Krishnagar, Krishnath (for Krishdu-nagar, Krishna^nUth), which are appar-
ently based on not uncommon colloquial forms.
[H] History of the Bengali Coxsonants.
[I] Thk Stops and Affricates, axd Aspirates.
(1) The Gutturals or Velars [k, kh, g, gh].
250. Intervocal stops tend to be lazily pronounced in NB., leading
frequently to ' under-artieulation/ or open or spirant articulation with
very little audible friction. (See 'Brief Sketch of Bengali Phonetics,'
§31.) In the Standard Colloquial, intervocal [k, g] of NB. is found to be
dropped in a few eases : e,g,y ^Tt^ > [thakur > thaur], >
M^*l> ^1^*1 > ^ [thttkurani > thakuron, thaurun > ^fchaurn, *thaun
> than]. The elision in the above words has been noted in the ordinary
orthography. But voiced and open articulation of [k] is not infrequently
heard, though not in careful speech. But it has not become sufficiently
prominent to attract the attention of Bengali speakers, although here and
there in stss. and foreign words, we see the [g] fully established : e.g,^ -^sil
454
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
[-gula], plural affix (-kula-) ; c^^fvsj [cfha3gra] ramshackle carriage (sakata-) ;
MB, T^t^ « sagallad » (Perso-Arabic « saqalat »), etc. : see uipra^ p. 445.
Final [-k] in some thfi, verb and other forms has become [g] in the
Standard Colloquial, e.g., f^^, f^^ « dik, nik » let him give, let him take
frequently become [dig, Dig]-
This voicing of non-initial [k] is a MIA. speech-habifc which has thus
continued down to the present day. It is found occasionally in OB. as
well : e,g.j « saguna >=» sakuni » in Carya 50.
Elision of intervocal [k, g] has almost become the rule in the
Chittagong dialect— [fiool, fi9:l] = Jf^ri (sakala); [aaj, a:/] = ^^tn
(akasa); [doan] = CTf^sT (Perso-Arabic « dukan ») ; [Roun]=»f^ -s^*.
(sakuni); [Rror] =?if^ * sikar^ » root^, [RlolJ =f%^ci < sikal?t » chain \
[daibo] = Standard Bengali ^tf^:^ « dakibe * icill mill ; etc., etc.
In some East Bengali dialects, intervocal [k, kh] take the spirant
sound of [x] : this [x] seems to have had its origin in the unvoicing of
[g>9']- ^^'^ also find [fij. The [x], and the [g.] where it is heard,
do not have a strong friction : it is a mere open consonant, that is all.
Thus we have, in the western and south-western Vagga dialects especially,
^^1 [taka] rupee, raoney as [ta^a, tafia, taxa] ; Ft^l Dacca town is heard as
[dfiaka, doRa, da^a, daxa] ; Perso-Arabic * muqaddamah » > CSft^^,
C^t^^ « mokaddama, mokardama » late-suit becomes [moxordoma, moRor-
doma] = Standard Colloquial [raokoddoma] ; Perso-Arabic < hakim » >
^tf^sf « hakim ^ judge is found as [aRim] ; « mulluk » > « mulluk »
coimfri/ becomes, in the locative ^gc^ « mulluke ^, [ranlluRe, mullug-e,
raulluxe] ; Skt. < narikela » is transformed to [nairfiol, nairxol]. This
fricative pronunciation is sometimes indicated by 2^ « h ».
Initial [k, kh] becomes the spirant [x] regularly in Eastern and
South Eastern Vagga (Sylhet, Tipperah, Noakhali and Chittagong) : e.g.,
[kali] < [xali], f%| [ki^fhu] a little = [xisn], ^^^fl [kotha] = [xota],
C^5{ [kajno] ichy'i > [xs:n], [kologko] > [xobgko], [kobfiu]
even at times = [xouu, xobu], c^t^l [korta, kotta] coat = [xotta], C^^rt^c:©
[kholaite] 0/ = [xolait], etc. Final [k] also is found as [x] com-
monly enough : e.g,, T^^^ [tilok] > [tilox], [je:k] > [sx, hsx, ffi:x],
OPEN ^ K ' : SOURCES OP ' K '
455
etc. This spirantisation is not found in the other Vag^a dialects, but initial
[k] when it becomes intervoeal within connected speech can become [x] or
[R]. The Chittagong and Eastern Bengali habit of turning initial [k]
sounds to [x] also affects foreign words, and Bengali maulavls from
Chittagong, which is one of the predominantly Muhammadan districts of
Bengal, often pronounce Arabic and Persian with [x] for [k, q] ; and this
has given rise to this Persian saying among Biharl and Hindostani maulavls
in Calcutta and elsewhere : « agar eatgami Savad mauIavT, ^ xiblah ' u
* xabah ' u * xuza ' mi-ravl » if the 31 aid av J is a CJiitlagongese, then you go to
xiblah, xabah and xuza {for qiblah direct ion faced in praying^ qa^'bah shrine
at Mecca, kuja [Persian] where).
In the * Crepar Xaxtrer Orthbhed/ Bengali [k] is transcribed « c »
before « a, o, u « qu » before « e, i and « q » when final : e,g., « crepa »
(kf pa) ; « coina » ^S^l (k^nya) ; « cotha » ^^?f1 (katha) ; « xocol »
(s&k&l?t) ; « tthacur » ^tf^ (thakur^) ; « thacuq » (thakuk) lei it
remain; « queno » (kena) n-hy ; « eq » (*^'k^) ; « quissu »
(kiehu) a III tie-, « eque » (iJC^ (eke) by ot}e ) « thaquia » 9|tf^^[| (thakiya)
having reraained ; « houq » (hauk) let it he ; « naroq » ^^"^ (narak^) ;
etc. There is no representation of a spirant pronunciation in the * Crepar
Xaxtrer Orthbhed/
251. Bengali [k] in tbh, and de'sl words comes from IMIA. «k-_,-kk- ».
Initially, Bengali [k] is derived ultimately from —
OIA. « k- » : « k&r » (\/kr) ; ^tf « kam^l » (karma) ; ^^Tt
« kala » (kadala-) ; « kaj » (karya) ; ^ff%, ^ kal(i) »
(kalya) ; « kan^ » (karna) ; ^ « ku » (ku-) ; ^t^T^, Tt?
« kanai, kanu » (ki^na-) ; « kachgl » (kaeeha, kaksa) ;
« ke » (ka-) ; ^5 « kay » (kathayati) ; etc., etc.
OIA. * kr-, kr- » : C^X?{ « kine, kene » (krinati) ; C^t*f « kus^t »
(krosa) ; C^t^ * kol^ » (kro(Ja) ; $tC^ (krandati) ; ]MB. 'S^ffT
« kaila » (krta+illa-) ; etc.
OIA. « kv- » : « kai » ^irt^^^ (kvatha) ; c^t^^tl « kotha » /
(kva- + tra); <pm<P1^ [konkon], an onomatopoetie, based on
« y^kvan »,
456 PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
OIA. ^ sk- > k- » ; #t«( * kadh§t » (skandha) : see p. 438.
Inter vocally (and finally in NB., through dropping of vowels at the
end of the word), NB, [k] comes from —
MIA. « k » after « g » < OIA. « -gk-, -kr-, -gkr- -rk- » : #t^«l
« kak^n^ » (kagkana) ; « pakgt » (pagka) ; ?ft^ « Mka »
(vagka-, vakra) ; fc^J « sako » (sagkrama) ; « klk&r^ »
(kagkara, karkara) ; « kak^ra » (kagka-ta-, karka-) ; etc. ;
from MIA. « -kk- » from the following OIA. groups :
* -k- >, doubled in old Iss, in MIA. : c£|^ * ck^ » (ekka, eka) ; also
t£l^ « ekus »j etc. ;
« -kk- » : « cik&n§l » /?i<? (eikkana) ; cf. C^^-gfgC^ * tel^l
eiikcnke * ^listenin^ tcifJi o^7 = MIA. « tella-cikkana » ; ^Tf^^,
C^^T^i [nakar > nsekar] (nakkara, nyakkara);
« kukur » (kukkura) ; beside tf^ * hakgt, kak^ » (MIA.
hakka) ;
« -kn- » : MB. -g^^^l « mukala > (mukka < ^mukna = Skt. mukta) ;
f^^l « nika » 2^'//9<? (nikka < *nikna<Y/ninj, nij) ;
« -ky- » : fH^ « sika » (sikya-) ; ^fs^^F « manik^ » (manikya) ;
* -kr- » : * eak^ » (cakra) ; ^^-^ * sukfl-tara » Fenm (sukra) ;
§^ « tak^ » acid (« takra » sour-milk, tohey : or onomato-
poetic ?) ; f^f% « biki » ^^r/e as in f^f%-f?pf5f « biki-kini »
transaction^ buy and sell (vi-krx-) ; etc. ;
« -kv- » : * paka » (pakva) ;
< -ks- » : f5(f% « niki » (of. Skt. niksa) ;
« -tk- » : 5^ « chak^ » (satka) ;
« -tk- » : « euk^ * (eukka, eyut-kr) ; « ukun?l » (utkuna) ;
^ .rk- » : *ltf ^ « pskur » (parkati) ; ^ mak&r?l > (markata) •
^ take, takae » (tarkayati) ; ^^5(f % akanda »
(akka-manda = arka-mandara); etc.;
* -Ik- » : « uk?l » (ulka) ;
^ -hk. » = Skt, 4t -sk-, -sk- » : 5^ * c&k c^^^il * c^uka > (eatuh +
ka : catuska) ; fif^t^, « nikas, nikal see p. 445 ; ^
« nak?l » (nas, *nah-hka > nakka) ; * dukal^l » (dufakala) ;
SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI 'K^
457
« -g- », through transference of voice in MIA. : l?tC^ * 41iake » covers
(dhakka'i, ^thagati < sthagati ?).
From MIA. « -ggh- from OIA. « -ggh- » > « -k- » in N13. : ^^^f^
« siknl » (sigghana) ; tsV, c4t^ « ^uk, s5k » (suggh, siggh) ; etc.
From MIA. « -kk- » from Semi to-Iranian « -kk- », written « -ky- »
in Late Sanskrit: C^^ll « sek^ra » (^sekka-ara; see pp. 194-195).
Some isolated cases are « kuc^ » (gunja), and T*f^\5 « sikar^ >,
OB. (Sarv&nanda) « sihada » (sipha-) ; cf. « sik&l?t » (MIA. « sigkala »,
Skt. « sfgkhala beside « srgka »).
« k » occurs in a few words oi: probable de'i<l origin : e.fj.y ^ « buk^ »
ched, « bak^ » chaiter, « jhak^ » ^i^J/-jyu7/^^(? (i/(^67 jhakkia),
« (Jak^ » crt^/, tt^ « hak^ » (rf^^^ hakka), etc.
« k » is also found as an affix in numerous nouns and derived verbs :
^•iJ-y « morak^ » packet {<y^m\xv roll, f^^^^^) ; * car&k^ »
mvingingy ' Churnick ^festival (cadakka^ v''ca4 ''i^^) ) « cafcak^ » A7^^/^f,
brightness ] ^ ^hhXhk^ ^ fame \ f%f^^ « jliilik^ » ^'(^
« c&mak^ » /a67^, ; 5|^^ « marak^ » pedilence \ « baithak^ »
seat , stand for an f/tking, assemhlf/yi^cssiou ] ^t§^ « atak^ » restraint', ^t^"^1
« hal^-ka » //y/^iJ ; C^t^^l * cho-k^-ra » /a// ; Clt^^l « chot^-ka » little one, ef.
Hindi « lar-ka » 4^>y beside Assamese « Ura » [lora] (*Ia4-i-a-) ;
« y/thak » reinaiu ; « thak » rt^ 67a;z(/ ; « mae^jtkay » sprains,
cracJcles, hreaks ; cl^^t^ « h^c^kay » r/n/y.>' ; §^t^ « tap^^kay » /^a^;.? ; etc.
The NB. « -ka-, -k- » is derived from a MIA. « -kka- » . Hoernie traces
this « -kka- to the OIA. root « -kf- » : cf. * camat-kr » in Skt. =
« camakka » , « ^eyut-kf » > MIA. « eukka etc. (' Gaudian Grammar,'
§204; JASB., 1880, 1, p. 37). Jules Bloeb thinks that this « -k- <
-kk- » goes back in part at least to an OIA. « -kya- < -akiya >, as in
« parakya < parakiya » , but also suggests a Dravidian affinity (' Langue
Marathe/ p. 105). (See infra, under Morphology : Origin of the Formative
Affixes: ^-k-'.)
Final « -k^ » as a verbal person affix (3rd person) occurs in Bengali :
^.^v ^f^C^^ * tar-il-e-k^ » /^(? did, ^t^C^^ « ja-ib-e-k^ » he tcill go, '^'^
« di-u-k§l » let him give, etc. : the origin of this « -k^ » is obscure, but
58
458
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
it is possibly the 01 A, pleonastic « -k- » , present in oVIIA. as « -kk- » .
(See later, under MorpJioloyij : the Verb ; ^ Personal Affixes.*)
Interchange between « -k- » and « -g- » has been noticed above. In
one ease, « -k- » occurs for « -p- » in the Calcutta dialect : « dukur^ »
for « dupur^ » mid-day (dvi-prahara) ; for « t », in the phrase ^^^-^C^
« parak^.pakse also ^t'^5f « parag^ », for ^^n© « parat^ pakse o«
the eventualiti/ of one beivg able. In MB. (SKK.), we have the its. ^^^^
« kukuh&l& » (= kutuhala).
In ^J. words, « -k- » occurs long (or double) in interior groups with
* 3^, r, 1, V, m »; also in « -khy- > : eJi., »ft^ [/akko], [cfokkro],
[Jukkb], [pDkko], ^T%^ [rukkini], ^Jt^Tl [biekklue, btekkha]. In ^
« -ks- pronounced [kkh], we have a similar doubling of « k ».
[k] is comraonly found through deaspiration of intervoeal, final
and iireconsonantal [kh] in NB.
[ k ] in foreign words, Persian, Portuguese, English, is noted
below.
252. [khj, intervoeally and finally, Las a tendency to be deaspirated
in the Standard Colloquial. Intervocal [kh] in Typical Easit Bengali often
becomes the spirant [x], with very little audible friction, and is reduced
to the glottal spirant [fi] : ejj.^ CWC^^T [diekhen] seeny yo*f -^ee {honorijir) =
[dsxen, defien] ; ^tf^^ « rakhio » you will keep. Standard Colloquial [rekho],
becomes [raifio] ; cii^t^^ [ekhane] /^^'^vj = [sBane]. In certain cases, the
spirant is dropped : ejj,^ Chittagong Bengali [toon, torn] = [tokhon]
ihtiu
In the * Crepar Xaxtrer Orthbhed,^ « ijh » is used for [kh] : <?.^.,
« qhaibar » = ^^^t^ io eai^ « xaqhi » == ^Tt^ wilnesSy « duqh » = pcii^^-
The spirant pronunciation is probably indicated in an occasional case like
« rahoal » = ^t^^W^ ^ rakhoal^ », NB. ?[t^t^ < rakhal^* /56'/-j5;;tfl»— unless
it is a typographical error for « qh ». Initially in some cases we have
*c» for «qh»— « calax » -= ^t^t^ (Perso- Arabic * xalas
« coraq » = c^^t^ meal (Pers. <k xurak »), «cadaia> = <M\t^ driving atvay^
m cazuaite » = ^^ttf^C^, ^t^^^lc^ to scratch, etc., which may be due to
the mistake of the transcriber.
SOUKCES OF NEW BENGALI ^ KH '
459
[kh], initially, comes from MIA. « kh^ derived from —
OIA. « kh- » : ^t^ « Ivliay » (khadati) ; ^t^l * kbaja » (khadya-) ;
"^t^^j C^^^ * kha/ejur^ > (kharjura) ; {^fS^ «khao3a<khHju-a- »
scmfc/i (kharjii, v^kharj) ; « khat^ » (khatva) ;
« kh^nta » (khauitra-) ; « khar^ » (khanda) ; « khayer^ »
(khadira) ; « v/^^hur * dt(/ (khu^^a : < ?) ; ^ « khai »
(khata-) ; etc.
« ks- » : C''^^^ C^^^ « khet^ » (ksetra) ; « khari > (khatika) ; ^
* khud^ > (ksudra) ; « khir^ » (ksira) ; C^l « kheya » /?rr^
(ksepa-); MB. "^1, ^fC^ (ksauma-) ; « khan^ » (ksana),
also ^«l = [khie:n] ; sis, C^^\ « khema » [khrrma] ^ksama) ; ^1
« khura » (^ksudra-tata).
The change of « ks » to « kkh » seems to have been the Magadhi
change. The « eh » development of « ks » characterised the North-western
I A. dialect of the Early ^11 A. period. Bengali has some « eh » words
as well, which apparently were later additions into the Eastern speech.
OIA. « k- », by aspiration : e-.^., '^^f^ « khiici » basM (kuficika) ;
fV^T « khil^ » (klla, khila) ; C^^ « khel^ » (khela) ; Rg#t « khicun » (kf sara,
*krsarika); ^^^'t^^, ^^f^oT^ « kbar(a)tal^, khattal^ » cijmhals (kara-tala) ;
^H^I < khabal^ », dn. (kavala : /i//. = kal^, see p. ?A1) ; hUr (cf. Skt.
« khalla beside « kf tti ») ; :\IB. KK.) sh. « khast&ri * (kasturl), -^t^^l
« kharala < *karala » (garala poison) ; NB. C^t^^^fl « khulagga >, beside
{= desj ?) ; MB. ^tt^ttt * kutmati » rZd'/rt27.s
hiclcpiing = NB. ^"ft^ttt « khutinati » (kutta-) ; etc.
« sk- » : ^5ft^ « khamar^ » < honae with posts (skambhfigara) ;
« khara » standing^ erecl (MIA. khaddha = OIA. "^skabdha).
The word « khan^ » plac^^ piece, is probably a blend of « khanda »
+ « sthana »: see page 305. « kh- » i^^ found in some de^it words : <?.y.,
f^^^ft « khirjjikl » (khadakkl), « khar^t * straw, « khakharrf » abuse,
insulfy cf. Assamese « khag » fO/-7i?>- (*khagkha-).
Medially and finally, [kh] is from —
OIA. « -khy- » > MIA. * -kkh- » : ^t^s? « bakhan<i » (vyakbyana) ;
OIA. « -gkh- » > MIA. « -gkh- > : »fN * sakh^ » (sagkha) ;
460
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
01 A. •« -k- » > MIA. « -kk- », by aspiration : "Itf^l^ beside »ttf^^
«salikhsl, salik^ » (SarikS). Cf. ^t^^ as in ^t^?T « bite bin-
khura » s/wrt, dwarfish ( ? *vagk-ura, vakra) ;
OIA. « -ks- » > MIA. « -kkh-, -gkh- » : #H « kakh^ » (kaksa) ;
« pakhl » (paksin) ; l^VA « rakhe » (raksati) ; ^Hv5l
« akh^ra > (aksa-vata-) ; « akh » (aksi) ; MB. « pekh^ »
(preksa) ; 5|t^^ « makhe » (mraksati) ; « lakh^l » (laksa) ;
FfC^ « cakhe » (cakkhai, ^eaks) ; etc. ;
OIA. * -ksn- > > MIA. « -kkh- » : MB. 'fl^ « tikhfi, » (tiksna) ; but
cf. Orija « sana » from « slaksna » (MIA. sanha) j
OIA. * -k^m- in the old 5^5, c^^^ = c|^^ [lokkhi] (laksmi); MB.
sts, ^f^^^ « lakhindara » (laksmindra) ;
OIA. « -tkh-, *-dkh. >>MIA. « -kkh- > : * nkhar^ » (iitkhata) ;
« ukh^li » (*udkhala-, udukhala-) ;
OIA. « -sk(h)-, -skh-»>MIA. « -kkh- » : * pukhur^ » (pus-
karini) ; '^^l « sakha » (sihska-) ; ^WC^ * pakhale » (pra-skhala-
yati) ;
OIA. « -hkh- » > :MIA. « -kkh- » : * dukh » [dnrkh] (duhkha).
In one or two words, in the Apabhraiisa or Old Bengali stao^e,
medial « -kkh- > has been reduced to « -h- » : ^^1, cfl « laha > la » (laksa) ;
and < -ke- », frona « "^kahi » (locative of « *kakha =kaksa » : or < « kai'
< kae < krte » ?). In ^^1 « bakha » fo go astraj/, from earlier ^f^l
« bahaka » (vabakka,^/ vah), cf. Hind. « bahakna», «kh » originates through
transposition of the aspirate.
« kh » occurs in is. words : « [J«kh], -ft^ [Jakha], -^Jtf^ [khseti],
[dukkho], f^^ [likh], etc. ; sL^. fm * khida » (ksudha) ; ^^r-l
[rokkhie, rokkha] (raksa), etc.
In the medieval pronunciation of Sanskrit, % < s » uas [kh] in
Northern India. See p. :2 13. This value of « s » was unknown to
Bengal But some Us. and sis, from Northern India (Western and Eastern
Hindi and ' Biharl ' areas) with [kh] for « s », have come to Bengali also,
mainly through the Brajabuli dialect : e.g., MB. crt^ ^ d6kh& > (dosa) ;
NB. c^Y< « rokhal » (rosa) ; m in ^mfi ^ jh&kh^-mari » evil deed < the
SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI ' G '
461
^rori of a Ji^her-^man, ef. « jhas^ * fish (3hasa)(?) ; MB. ^f^^ * hariklii »
(harsa); ^f^^if, ^f^?:^ * barildiana, barikhe » (varsana, varsati) ; CM^, f^*t
* v/jok^^ jii^^^i * ^iT/V///, comjiute (« jus*, as in the ' Dhatu-patha ' = * paritar-
kanam, uhah: ^ j^sayati kantam anyasaktam bala/ tarkayati ity arthah » :
NIA. « v^joh » 5^^, is probably another derivation).
Persian [x] regularly becomes [kh] ia Bengali.
253. [g] is spirantised and dropped intervoeally in the Chittagong
dialect : e.g., [aoin] again, agani » (agni) ; [bfiaina] =^f^ * bhagina »
(bhagineya) ; [saol] = ft^^ * ehag&l?l » /jrotz^ ; [kaots] tagaj^ »
^j^^j^r (Persian « kaga? ») ; [jau] ^^f^ <^ sagii » sago (< Portuguese), etc.
But on the whole, [g] derived from OB. is preserved in the NB. dialects.
Initial [g] comes ultimately from —
OIA. « g- 5^ : Mt^ * g5n^ ; ^tl « ga » (gatra : see p. 255) ; « geli, »
(gata + illa) ; C^t^ « goru » (go-rupa); C^t^ « goth^ » (gostha) ;
v^a^t « gun^ » (lualify, rope ; ^3«!, 15^1 « ^/gtin » c<?i^fl^ {y/ gan) ;
* gun^ » (goni) ; ^ttf^ « gali (garba-) ; C^t^l « gora *
(gaura-) \ 'm * g&le ^ (galati) ; C^^p^l « gerua » (gairika ») ;
g§,la » (gala-) ; ^ * ga]<^ » ^'7/^^/5^ (MIA. galla = gantja) ;
C^rt^l « g<>la » (gdlaka-) ; etc. ;
OIA. « gr- » : ^1 « ga » (grama) ; 5fT§ « gat > (granthi); MB. ^fW^
« gktha-gh§,r& » (grantha- + g}-ha) ; ^3f§ * gum&t^ » for « *gim&t^ »
(grlsma-); MB. « gima »^ (gnva) ; 51^1, * gabann,
gayna » ornahients (grahana-) ; etc. ;
Medial and final [g] :
OIA. « -gn- * > MIA. * -gg- * : ^tR * ag(i) * (agni-) ; m
« lag^ » (lagna) ; ^t^t « bhag » r?^/7 away.jlee (bhagna) ;
OIA « -gy- »> NIA « -gg- * : MB. C^^t < joga > (yogya) ;
OIA. * -gr- » > MIA. * -gg- » : ^I^H * aga » (agra-) ; W * Piig^ »
(pragraha) ; MB. 'STf^, ^t'^sf * ag&n^, aghan& » (agra-
hayana) ;
OIA. « -gg- » : this « -g- » is frequently nasalised to « gg > g » (see
pp. 363-364) : MB, ^""t^ * ^/bhag- * (bhagga) ;
OIA. « -dg- » > NIA. « -gg- » : ^^-^1 * khag^-ra » (khadga) ;
462
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER V
OIA. * -dg- » > MIA. « -gg- » : « naug^ beside « J»ug(g) >►
(madga); ^<9^ « mugur^ (madgara) ; STt-^^ « magur^ *
(madgura) ;
OIA. ^ -rg- » > MIA, ^ -gg- > : ^t^t^ « ag&l^ » (argala) ; srf^^f,
5rt^ « magu > maag » (*niarguka) ; OB. * ma(g)ga NB.
« mag > (marga) ; 5(tC5f * raa(g)ge ^ (margayati) ;
« bag^ > (varga) ; < dug! » coiiiemptnons form of the name
Durga ("^durgika) ;
OIA. « -Ig. » > MIA. * .gg. » : ^5r, -^^^ < ph5g?t, phagun?l »
(phalgu^ phalguna) ; « bag^ » r^/« (valga).
OIA. ^ -k- » is represented by « -g- » in the numeral tfj^tt^ « egara »
[ipgaro] , which is a »sf.?. in Late MIA. Similar « -g- » for « -k- » is found
in a few other sIsb.^ e.g,y « big(&)i'a » to get vicious (vikata-), beside
the ihh, C^?1 « beara » had, vghj, vicious; ^5ft^ « pagar^ » (prak3ra) ;
MB. 5[5t^ « m&gara » (makara), etc. See ante, pp. 445, 446.
[g] stands for Skt, « g » in tss. and stss, : ^^ « j&g§, » (jagat), ^
* j"g?' * (yuga), « ag&m&n^ » (OB. tbi. « avana NB. 'srW * ana»),
^15} [bieggro] (vyagra) ; etc. [g] also occurs in the pronunciation of
the Skt. groups « -ghr-, -ghv- » : ^Jt^ [bseggfiro] (vyaghra) ; [JiggBro],
(sighra), with a sfs. %5if5f^ IJiggii'] ; MB. ^I^ft, Jl^^f^ « lagghl, nagghl >
(laghvl) = /mifr (call), j)assiMg water, [gh] > [g] is found in final and
inter vocal positions, and sometimes the spelling notes it : <?.//., sts,
« bag^ra » (vyaghata -f -da-) ; ^^fC^ < ^t^^ * haglire > haghare =
ba*ghariya > /tameless, vagrant (cf. ^t«tf%^1 > ^^t^^ « habhatiya > habate »
Itggar^ eryer for rice).
Ts. « jn» is pronounced « gy-, -ggy-*; and sometimes in MB. and NB,
we find the sis. orthography * gey- » : e.g,, C^^t^, ^^mt?? « geyana,
ageyana* (jnana, ajnana) ; ^C^I «age », as iu the phrase « karjy&ii-
cage» as a preliminary in formal or official letters and legal documents
(= Skt. « karyail ca ajnapayati » : see RamSndra-sundar Trivedl, 'iSabda-
katha,^ San 1324, pp. 93, 94).
In South-eastern Beagali of Chittagong, there is a euphonic [g]
originating in consonant groups with the semivowel « -y- » : e,g,, fipjft^
SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI ' GH *
468
« sinduriya » vennillion-coloured, Standard Colloquial [Jidure], Typical
East Bengali [Jinduira,-iria] > [Ginduirgs] ; ^^^^ « kuriya * lazy. Standard
ColL [kure]. Typical East Bengali [kuira, kuiria], > [xuirgs]; Standard
Beng. «1tfiR « parib& », East Bengali *ftf^^ « paribam, pairbam » ^\^\
« pSrimu » I shall be able = Chittagong ^lf??^^^ « pariyam > > [^phairlom
> FairgiDm] ; Standard ^ft^4"t + ^^ « kahila + i + oi » he said indeed^
he said > ["^koillioi > xoilgloi, xoilgoi]. Cf. Sinhalese « surgya- »
= Skt, « surya » , beside tbh, « ira ».
In foreign words, Persian « g^ 9- and sometimes « 4 are represented
by [g] ill Bengali. See iu/ra.
254. [gfi] medial and final tends to be ueaspirated in NB. Medial
[gh], however, is very rare in (Ihs, See under ^Nasalisation/ sujyra,
p. 364.
Initially, NB. [o-fi] comes from :
OlA. < gh- » : « ghana » thick (ghanaka) ; < gharl » Zr^//,
trafch (ghatika) ; « gham^ » wru^ (gliarma) ;^ « gha » wound
(ghata) ; « ghl » (glif ta) ; ^f^ « gl^at^ » (gliatta < ; f^«l
« ghin^ » (gbrna) ; « ghas^ » (gliasa) ; ^i^, f^*fe, -^^g « gl'afc,
ghit, ghut » (ghfSta) ; « \/gl^as » (^z ghrs) ; c^c^ « ghol^ »
churaed milk^ whey ; maiin// turbid (ghurn-) ; C<lt^ « ghora »
(ghota-, < desJ),
01 A. « ghr- » > MIA, « gh- * : ^"f^ « ghanl » oil-mill (« ghmnika » ;
cf. « ghranaka », in Siyadoni Inscription, Lalitpur, V, P., 11th
century, Ep. Ind., I, pp. 16-2 ff.).
Medially: from OL\. « -ghr- » > MIA. « -ggh- » : Tt^ « bagh^t >
(vyaghra).
In « ghan^ » < « grha », we have [gR] by transposition of [fi] and
[r] in the Late OIA, or Early MIA. period (grha > -^garha). Cf. NB.
its. « aghran^ » (agrahayana), beside the folk form [oggeran] : the
fM. k found in MB,, ^sp^R, « ag(h)&na ». So Oriya « ghenai »
= « efrhnati ».
In f^<; « bighat » spa)i=* vitasti in MIA. « vihatthi » (Pischel,
§ 207), we have [gfi] for MIA. « h », which itself is obscure. The word
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
f^^ « bigba » a land measure, is similarly unexplained, although it has
been connected with « varga ». The followiog [gR] words also are among
the obscure ones : some of them seem to be of dehl origin. E.g,, OB. ^Tt^
« ghata », NB. ^f? « ghar^ » cf. Hind. « ghefc » ; « ghabgtra »
to he confused, cf . Hind. « ghabrana » ; « gbugr! » tchooping cough
(probably onomatopoetie^ but cf. Hind. « ghumri » vej'tigoe) ;
« ghugnlj ghug^oi » boiled peas with spices and oil (Hind. also = ghuggDi) ;
C^^&l < ghomta » veil, cf. Hind. « ghuijghat »; (TTfWl, C^tt5?1 « g(h)oi]ga »
dumb', ^1 « ghuca » Juiished ; C^f5 as in C^'ft-^f^ « gh§ci-k&ri » kuoited
cowry -shell ; connected with the last probably is f^fi? « ghinji » close,
narrow, crowded; C^^ « gher^ » circnrnference « ghuggur^ »
worn round feet in dancing, morris-bells = Hind. « ghuggru » ;
« ghumsT, ghugsi » thread ornament for the ivaist (cf. Hind, *ghumna»
^c? tarn round); « ghunti, ghuudi » ^?//,^ hnttons (also in Hind.) ;
« ghus^ » secreL bribe^ as in « ghus^kl » a aecret harlot, ^5^^ ^
« ghus^ghuse jwarsi » ferer not easily noticed ; OB. « ghala- »
(also in Rajasthani) ; ^ « ghum^ » cf. f^5(T»I * jhimani »
Marathi « jhSpnS » ,s^(?^7; ; « ghuri » paper kite, Hind. « guddl >.
For gutturals interchanging with palatals, see below, under Palatals.
(:>) The Palatal Aifrieates [cj, ^fh, J5, jgR].
255. The OIA. palatal slops [e, ch, j, jfi] became palatal affricates in
Eastern India as early as the First MIA. period (see §lo2). This value is
preserved in West Bengali ; but in North and East Bengali, they have been
further modified to the dental affricates and sibilants [ts, s, dz, zl. There
are class dialects in the [ts] -areas, however, in which the West Bengali
[cJ]-pronuneiation is occasionally heard. The ^ Crepar Xaxtrer Orthbhed'
employs both « ch » ( = fj] in Modern Portuguese, but earlier [tj]) and
« s » for the sound of 5 < c » in Dacca Bengali : e.g., « chair »=^^, ^^f^
« cair < cari ^fonr, also « sair » ; « xancha, xansa » = >f < saca » true ;
« pause » = « pace » fifthly ; « chinio, sinio » = f^^ « cihna », etc.
Probably both the sounds of [ts] and [c£] were heard. But Padre
'TS, J)Z' PRONUNCIATION OF ^ C, J *
465
Assump^am writes « s, ss » invariably for ^ « ch » : « asse » = '^t^
« ache » is J « quissu » = f^§ « kichu » a little^ « soe « ebay *
« saoal » = 5t^^ « chaoal » e//«7d, etc., which would demonstrate that
[s] was the only value of §. The letters W ^ « 3, jh » are both transliterated
by « z » : it seems it was due more to the absence in the Portuguese-Roman
script of a symbol for the sound of [jg, dg] rather than to that sound being
not heard in Dacca Bengali : for the [jg] sound is not yet entirely
suppressed by [dz] there.
256, The dental affricate and sibilant pronunciation does not seem to
have developed in West Bengali, and in the ^ Bihar! ' speeches. As it has
been suggested before (p. 79)^ the dental affricates ^ tongue-tip alveolar
or dental, instead of tongue-middle supra-alveolar sounds) probably origi-
nated in North-eastern Bengal and Kama-rupa, whence they advanced south
and west, and affected the East Bengali (Vagga) dialects to a considerable
extent. The Tibetan values of the letters ^, ^, as « ts, tsh,dz» in
^ www
the transliteration of Sanskrit words (ef. Sarat Chandra Das, ^ Tibetan-
English Dictionary/ Calcutta, 1902, p. xviii) would perhaps indicate some
influence from North and East Bengal in the closins centuries of the 1st
millennium and beginning of the second millennium A. C, when Bengali
scholars had a great deal to do with the religious organisation of Tibet.
The [ts] values were probably established in Kama-rupa as early as the 7th
century, whence they spread to East Bengal and North Bengal. In West
Bengali (Radha), « c, ch » never shifted their palatal or supra-dental
articulation, as we see from a frequent change of ^, ^ « s, s, s » = [JJ to
1 [cf, cjh], and from an occasional change of ^, 5 [cj, cjh] to ^ [Jj,
This alternation of [cJ, cfh] and [/] means simply the introduction or
removal of the stop element : cf . the derivation of [J] in French from earlier
[tj] : Late Latin « eaballus » [kabahus] > [kavaLus] > [cavahu] >
[tjsvala] > [j'aval]. As there is no reason to doubt that the sibilant in Old
Bengali, at least in the west, was anything but [J], this interchange would
be a strong evidence that « c, ch etc., never altered ih^xx j) datal affricate
character (whatever might have been the change in East and North Bengali,
and in the old Kama-rupa dialect).
59
466
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
257. The interchange between « e, eh » and the sibilants is quite
old in lA. (see Jules Bloch, ^ Langue Marathe/ p. 111). In OlA.
« t, n, + s », i.e. [t, + optionally results in [ceh, jich] : here only the
stop [t] shifts its position back to the palatal region, and the spirant [9]
is turned to the aspirate stop [ch], or the nasal [p] alters the spirant to
a stop aspirate [eh] : [tat + grutwa: > tacehrutwa:, swapaji ge:te: >
swapojicheite:] , In some rare eases, alternation of « s > and « ch » in
OIA. and MIA. forms is due to Indo-European phonetic conditions : e.^.,
IE. « ^koipo-, "^skoipo- » (k = ^ palatal > Skt. « sepa- », MIA. « ehepa »
respectively (Waekernagel, I, §230b). In other cases, interchange between
« ch » and the sibilants « s, s » are due to OIA. and MIA. dialectal
pronunciation. Skt. forms like « Yasistha, kisalaya, kesara, kalasa,
sukara, Kosala, Kansa etc., side by side with the earlier « Vasistha,
kisalaya, kesara, kalasa, sukara, Kosala, Kansa » in all probability originated
in the dialect with « § » pronunciation (Magadhi) ; and similarly « surpa »
for « surpa » was an imposition from an « s » dialect in Early MIA. In
Asokan Prakrit, and in Pali, as well as in the Second MIA., we have cases
of original OIA. or derived MIA. « cc, cch » occurring as sibilants :
e.^., « cikisa » (Dhauli, Jaugada and Kaisi) beside « cikicha, ciklchS »
(Girnar) ( = cikitsa) ; « usapapite » ( Rumindei, < *ucehrapSpita = ucehrapita) ;
« usahena » (Pillar edicts ; utsahena) ; « usatena » ly the best (Rock edict X :
a Magadhi form = « utsrta -h ueehrita ; Pali « ussisaka » (ucchirsaka),
« ussussati » (ucchusa-), « ussagki » (ucchagki), « ussa » (ucca), « Kaku-
sanda » (Krakucchanda), « kasira » (kfcehra) ; Second MIA. « usaveha »
(ucehrapayata), « usaa » (ucchaya), etc, (ef. Pischel, §327a)- The change,
at least for the Eastern speech of Asoka and for the Pali forms (which
can reasonably be expected to have been on a Magadhi basis), was that
of the palatal affricates of Magadhi to palatal sibilants : these palatal
sibilants would be indifferently written « s », or « s » (through the influence
of the orthography of the Western Pracya court dialect, presumably), in the
Magadhi or the Eastern Pracya area; and the « s » spellings would establish
the dental sibilant pronunciation in the Midland speech, Pali, as re-
presenting Late OIA. « ceh » : thus, OIA. [cikitsa:] > [^cikiecha:] >
«
SS' FOR 'CCH' IN MIA.
467
pre-Asokan Pracya [cjikiccjha:] > Asokan Magadhi [^cfikijja:] , written
« cikisa » (but in Girnar probably pronounced [cikiccha:], with stop sounds,
and written « eikicha, cikicha »); so 01 A. « ^uechrapapita ( = ucchrapita) »
gave [*uecfhapa:pita] > [u/japa:pita], written « usapapit- >, and OIA.
[utsf ta] possibly through influence o£ « ucchrita », in Pracya Magadhi [*ucc^-
hata]> [ujjata], written « usata ». The Pali forms may similarly expected
to have been based on eastern forms in « ss » for « cc, ch »^ written « s »
or « ss » ; and Skt. « kaeehapa » seems to be from a Magadhi « ^kassapa » =
OIA. « kasyapa ». Is the Later Magadhi (Second MIA.) orthography
« so » for the derived « cch » connected with a « ss » pronunciation which
originated at least as early as the time of Asoka ? Cases of « s » for the
affricate « ch » in Bengali are given below, under the treatment of [J].
This « s, ss » in the orthography of the Asokan inscriptions and of
Pali does not by itself warrant the conclusion that the « s, ss » is the
result of a [ts, ss] pronunciation of [e, ch] in the Early MIA. period.
Change of « cch » > « ss » in the Second MIA. period (Pischel, §.327a),
may, however, be partly due to the pronunciation of « c » as « ts » and
of « ch » as « s » which in all likelihood characterised the source forms of
MarSthi (and Sajastfaanl), at least dialectally, during the middle of the
first millennium A. And MIA. change of « s, s » to « ch » (Pischel,
§211), savours of being in its origin Magadhan : but so great has been the
intermixture among the lA. dialects, that the original threads in the
texture have been overlapped, and are now almost impossible to trace.
Hindi, for example has « lalac » = Skt. « lalasa and « rauskurana » Sfnile,
but cf. Bengali ^5f^^ * muc^fciya hasa » ; and it is difficult to unravel
the « e : s » relation. That Asokan and Pali « ss = cch » is on the basis of
[ih modification of Eastern lA. [ecfh] only can be legitimately inferred.
' In Harathi, MIA. *c' has become the dental affricate * ts ' before the back vowels,
and remains a palatal affricate before the front vowels ; and MIA. * ch ' has become * s,*
which changed to 's' before front vowels. In Sinhalese thlis., MIA.' c, cc, ch, cch'
changed to 's' in the Elu stage (W. Geiger, ' Litteratur und Sprache der Sinhaleaen/
pp. 40, 46). The South- Western IE, speech, the source of Mara^hi, and possibly also of
Sinhalese, can well be assumed to have developed the * ts ' value for *c ' ( = cs, ts) early.
46S
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
258. According to the Prakrit grammarians, Magadhi did not drop
the intervocal palatals, while the other groups of MIA. did. This would
be quite in accordance with the theory that the palatals become affricates
in Magadhi earlier than in Sauraseni and Maharasfcri, in which they were
voiced and elided, like the guttural and the dental stops. As a descendant
of Magadhi, Bengali ought to preserve the intervocal palatals in ihh. words.
We have a few words, which are ibli^.y showing « -c-, -j- » (page 24-7) ; but
there are quite a number of other words with elided palatal ; e.g.^ MB. ^t^^
« raut^ » (raja-putra) ; ^t^«1 « raul^ » (raja-kula) ; fif^^ « siuni » (secanika) ;
MB. « rayani » (rajani), and « sui » beside ^5 « chac, sue »
(suei), in addition to the words noted above at p. 247. The words with
elided palatal can very well be borrowings from the SaurasenI and Ardha-
magadhl. Bengali does not show long a list of words with the elided
palatal, as Hindi for instance : words like ^ bla » (bija-), « ar » (ajagara),
« loyana » (locana), « bhoyana » (bhojana), « baina, bayana » (vacana),
« gayavara, gaivara » ( = 01d Rajasthani gemara) (gajavara), « gainda »
(gajendra), « bena » (vyajanaka), etc., are absent in Bengali ; and if the
SKK., which preserves a larger percentage of old ihhs, than any MB.
work, employs the form ^^^rfft « r&anl » once, « r&j&ni » is employed
5 times; and « b&cana » is found 21 times, but a form with elided
« c », never. And side by side with f^^^ « biuni we have what may be
regarded as the genuine Bengali f^^^ « bij^ni » (vyajanika). The OB.
of the ^ Carya-padas ' shows a few forms with elision, like « nia » ( = nija)
(Caryas 13, 32, 39, 49), * biara- > ( = vieara-) (Carya 20), « baana »
( = vacana) (Cartas 38, 39, 45) ; but these have never taken root in the
language, and look like being borrowings from SaurasenI Apabhransa.
On the other hand, the Caryas have a form like « acaya » (Carya 36 =
acarya) which seems to have been a living form in Eastern Magadhan, as it
is attested in an Oriya Inscription of the 13th century. Dropping of «c»
occurs in the names of the numerals in Bengali : e,g.^ fwtfl^ « biallis^ »
(dvEcatvarinsat). But the numerals are exceptional words in most NIA.,
they represent a mix-up of forms from diverse MIA. dialects which
were standai-dised possibly in the Midland daring the Transitional MIA.
OIA. 'KS' IN MIA. AND NIA.
469
period, and they do not represent in all cases the genuine ]Magadhi
forms.
259. OIA. «ks» had a two-fold development in Early MIA.,
« (k)kh » and < (e)ch » : the former characterised the dialects of the East
and the Midland, and the latter those of the North-west and South-west,
as can be judged from the early epigraphical and other evidence. (Jules
Bloch, ' Langue Marathe,' §104', p. 112). But there has been through
an early inter-influence among the MIA. dialects a mingling of « kh » and
« ch » forms in all NIA. speeches. Marathi, as Bloch shows (qp. cit.,
p. 114), is in its origin a « (c)ch » dialect, being derived from a South-
western I A. speech; and so are Sinhalese, and Gujaiati, in their basic
stratum. « (c)ch » words seem to have been imposed upon ^auraseni (and
Pali) by its western neighbour, the North-western speech ; and Bengali
and Oriya, and other Magadhan speeches, can reasonably be regarded as
having obtained the « (c)ch » words they possess, side by side with the
older « (k)kh » forms in some case?, as loan words through Saurasem,
The western or « cch » tradition in the pronunciation of « ks » seems to
have become thoroughly naturalised in the Midland, and from thence into
Eastern India excluding the Oriy a- Bengali- Assamese tracts ; so much so
that in the Western Hindi, and Eastern Hindi, and partly in the * Bihari '
areas, the compound consonant ^ « ks » normally has come to acquire the
value of « cch », except in the present-day educated pronunciation, in which
the « ks » sound seems to be a revival. Early and Medieval Hindi stss.
are based on the « cch » pronunciation. Thus, in the ^ Prithiraja-Rasau '
we have « laechana » (laksana), « paccha » (paksa), < dacchina » (daksina),
« nachatra * (naksatra), ^ chana » (ksana), etc. ; and we find ^ used
in old Hindi MSS. and inscriptions even for a « cch » which is not
connected with « ks » : ^.y., qftr?T for « pacchima » (<pascima). The
North-western tradition thus overshadowed the original * (k)kh » change
from OIA. in the Midland, And the « (k)kh » value, in its turn, is
not absent in the Panjabi and Lahndi {i.e. North-Western) areas. But
the « (c)ch » pronunciation never established itself in Bengali, despite a
number of « eh » words imposed on it. The « (k)kh(y) » sound alone is
470
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
the basis for the alteration of « ks » in is, and sts. words. (See pp. 2£6,
227, 228).
260. Quite a number of cases of the palatal affricate in NIA. go
back to OIA. groups of a dental -f- « y »: thus « ty » [ti] > palatalised
^ t' » + * y » [tj] > [t?, tc] >« CO » [cc], later [ecj] ; * dy » [di] > [dj] >
[dj] >* jj » to, 3J5] ; * thy > [thl] > [thj] > * eeh »^ [ech, ecfh] ; ^ dhy »
[dGi] > [dfij] > * jjh » [bR, jjgS]. (See p. 250.) The intermediate stage
of [cc, g], etc., is heard in the pronunciation of Sanskrit words in parts
of Western and Southern India.
In the Magadhi or Pracya speech of the First MIA. stage, as
illustrated in the inscriptions of ASoka, there was no palatalising tendency :
« ty, dhy » etc. became « tiy, dhiy », and « dy » occurs as « yy ». The
dialects of the West changed these groups to double palatals. Words
with the palatalised sounds thus were introduced into Magadhi, and later
Magadhi fell in line with other MIA. in this matter, giving up the
vocalised forms native to it.
261. NB. [c[],= [ts] in East and North Bengal, in initial positions
comes from —
OIA. * c- » > MIA., OB., MB. * c- » : dt- * c&u- » (catur-) ; St^f
« cad^ » (candra) ; 51^ « cak^ » (cakra) ; 5TC^ * cakhe » tastes
(cakkhai = caste < ^caks) ; 5^1 « caka » (cakravaka) ; 5M*f
« c&llis^ » (catvarinsat) ; f5^«| « cik&n^ » (cikkana) ; fe^ « cit^ »
(citta) ; « cie » (cetayati) ; ^v5l « cita » (citra-) ; g « euci »
(cucuka) ; f^5( « cin^ » (cihna) ; ^ ^ cume » (cumbati) ; c§T5
« c8c4 » (cailcu) ; etc. ;
OIA. « cy- » > MIA., OB., MB. « e- » : «cue» leaks (cyavati).
Medial and final [cf] is from —
OIA. «-c-, -cc->>MIA. «-c- (?), -cc-, *-nc.»: « uea »
{^ufica-, ucca-) ; ttS, ^t^ kScgt, kac?l * (^kafioa, kaea) ; 1 5
« chfic also ^ < sue * [/u:cfj (^ehuncj, *sucl, suci) ; cijJo
* chice » [cfblecfe] (*chencei, secayati) ; * plcll^t » (*panclla,
*paclla = pracira) ; (*penca-, pecaka-) ; c^5l * pgcS » [psecfa] ;
^55? « b&can^ » (vaeana) ; etc, ;
SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI ' C '
471
01 A. « -ne- »>MIA. « -nc- » : ^tPI « Seal^ » (aneala) ; C#tFt « kSca »
(v/kuuc) ; « chae^ » (sanca) ; « pac§t » (panca) ;
3rf5l « maca = maca » (maiica-) ; etc. ;
OIA. « -ey- » > MIA. « -cc- » : « race » (rucyati, or roeate ?) ;
OIA. « -ty- » > MIA. « -cc- » : ^tt5 * aic^ » surname (aditya) ;
> ^tStft « *kacahari > kacharl » office (kftya-grha-) ;
MB. * kae^ » (kftya) ; C^W5 « konac^l » at an angle (kona-
tya-) ; *f^^t^ > C^^t^ « ^jiyaca > j?ac?t » {jlvitftpatya) ; ^jlgfl
« saca » (satya-) ; etc. ;
OIA. « -try- » > MIA. « -cc- » : ^tt^ « baie^ », also ^tt^ « baich^ »
boat-race (^vahieca, *vahitrya ?).
By unvoicing of « j we have [cjj in a few instances : e,g,y
« pican^-barl » cotcliercVs stick (prajana : cf. Pali paeeti = OIA.
prSjayati) ; C^U * bOce » selh (beccai < ^bejjai = vyayati : ?) ; ^
« kuc^ » (gunj^) ; f ^ft, « kul&cl, kuluel » for « kul&jl » (knla-
pafijika).
By palatalisation : a solitary instance in lA. is f^^t^ « cirata », OB.
« eirayita-* (cilaitta-, cilaa + titta = kirata-tikta) ; ^t^^ « caul^ », OB. ^t^,
>8t^«1 « taul4, taruli, » (tandula< ?).
By deaspiration : OB. « catipanna », but MB. ftft^«l, 5tf^*^*l
« chatl&n&, cbafiTana NB. ^f^^^ « chatim^ » (ehattavanna, saptaparna);
OB. ^ cilll » mV)t^/ (jhilll); ft^tf^ « bicali » (<? *bichali : cf. %t^l
« biehana » < « vicchadana- ; Ft^l « can^ » beside ft^ « chan^ »
(sn5na) ; C&«^, C5«^1 « cegra, eegra » beside Cf^ « chemra c|t^
« chSra » nrcJiiUy lad.
In words, [cf] is regular for Skt. « c ». The group « t + s now
pronounced as [t+Xl, used to be [ccfh] in the earlier pronunciation with
a Prakrit tradition which is now disappearing : ^.y., the sts. forms ^
« bhliccha » (bhartsa-), ^5^1 « kuceha » (kutsa)^ « baecbar^ » (vatsara),
^fi^^ « kucehit^ > (kutsita), aj^g « macch& » (matsya), C^t^^il « jocch&na »
(jyotsna) ; etc., etc.
is also the result of assimilation : ^C^t^ + ft^f >C^tt^, *C^tt§C^
Ctt66tW, "^VdS^ « *g6ta.eiara > *gotcar, gutcer> goccSr^, guceer* mmtfonr.
472
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER V
some ; ^|rsC5 > f 'tB5 « h&itSche > *hoitche > hocche, hoccfe » is
falsing place, is happening (?).
in foreign words, represents Persian « c also « s, § » ; Portuguese
[tj (?), [J], and English cJi = [tj] : see aj/i'fl.
262. Bengali [cfh]. Initially, it is from —
OIA. « eh- » : « chai » (ehadis) ; f^^Tf^ « chinal^ » woman of bad
character (ehinna-) ; W\"^{X) « chat(a) » (ehatra-) ; CW, « che,
cheni » (cheda, chedanika) ; * chal^ (challi) ; « cha-
p&r^ » (chat vara) ; C^^fl « chgdS * (*chinda-, chidra-) ; 5t^?
« chare » (ehardati) ; ^f^^l «chaoa» (ehaya-) ; MB. C^fq «eheli»
(chayala-, chagala-) ; f^^\5 « ehire » (chin^ati) ; etc., etc. ;
OIA- « ks- » : in words which apparently did not belong to the Old
Magadhi dialect. E,g,j « cbar^, chai » fl*^^^ (ksSra) ;
sts, « ehep^ » after cfteioing {a heieUleaf)
(ksepa) ; « china » thin (kslna*) ; ^ < ^ chut^ <
OB, chudha » jiollution^ untouchaUlity (ksubdha) ; ^f^ « churi »
(ksura-) ; tk^ » ehip^ » a ^e^i/X Aoa^ ; an angling rod (kf ipra) ;
OIA. « S-, s- > > probably « ch- » in Late MIA.: f1 «cha»
(sabaka) ; C^5l * chSca * (y/ sic) ; « chuc » (suci) ; ^"f^
^ chuei » ceremonial cleanliness (saueika ; suci ?) j ^ « ehut^ »
as in O(\0 « do-chut^ » pieces of cloth, dhdtl and chadar
(sutra) ; « chutar^ » (sutra-dhara, -kara) ; «.chatu »
(saktu-) ; MB. ^ chamu » (sanmukha) ; §1% « chuli »
disease, OB. (SarvS.nanda) « sihuli » (cf. Skt. sidhma) ; ^
« chi » (§rl) ; 5^5. « ehir! » (MIA. *sl, si < sri) ; 5/*.
« ch&ttar^ » (satra) ; etc.
In some obscure words, Aryan and desJ, we have also « eh- »: ^T^,
C^t^ « chSe < chue » (chuvai, ^chumvai = sprsati) ; « chi »
(< ?) ; « chota » (< ?); etc.
Medially, [cfh] represents —
OIA. « -cch- » (from Indo-European < *^-sko- »)>MIA. « cch » :
« ache » (acehai < acehati < ^es-sko-ti) ; « gach^ »
tree (gaccha progression, line, race, tree < m-sko-) ; ^fef
SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI ' CH '
473
« p&hiicbe » reaches (*pahunc[h]ai, pabucchai < *pvabhucebati
< *pro + bhu-sko-ti) ; « puche » (puecbai' < pfcchati<
*pfk-sko-ti) ; also f^fcf « pieh&l^ » (piccbala < ?) ;
01 A. « -cch- « -ks- » : ^tW «kaebql » neighbottrhood (kaccba, kaksa) ;
« kScbi » hawser (kacchika = *kaksika ?) ; StC5 < §tCf
« cSce < eaebe » (*caiiehai, tacehai, y^^^^s) ; 5||f^ « maehi »
(maksika) ; MB. "^vft^l * p&rlcba» aiiendant (pratlksaka-) ;
OIA. « -cb-, -cch- : ft^t^^l « bichana » bed (viechadana-) ; C^l
« mecb^ » Tibeto-Burman tribe (? mleccba=*m1aiksa) ;
OIA. « -tsv- » > « -cch- » : MB. §5t^ « uehSsijl » (ucchvasa <
ut-svasa) ;
OIA. « -ts- » : « iicb&M » (ucebala < utsala) ; « bachS »
(vatsa-) ; ^tf^ « bachur^ » (vatsa-rupa). Also sfss, : GTt^^
« moccbab^ » (mabotsava), etc. See supra,
OIA. « -tsy- » : s(t^ « maeb^ » (matsya) ;
OIA. « -tby- » : fsi^l « mieba » (mithya-) ; MB, ^it^, « laeh&,
nacba OB. (Sarvananda) « laccha » (rathya) ;
OIA. « -ps- »>« -cch- » : C^tfl « ^oeha » (goccha-, *gfp-sa-) ; MB. sis,
^*t^^1 « &pacchara a blend of a thh, in ^ « -ch- », « *acebara »
+ the « apsaras ».
OIA. « -so- » : C^^5, C^^5l « ter&cb^, ter^eha » (tirasca-) ; <1t^1
« pacha » (paseat-) ; « bicha » (cf . vrscika) ; sis.
« bar^eha » (vrasca-) ; sis, '^f^ « plichim^ », also ^fe^ « p&c-
cim^ * (pascima) ;
OIA. « -§y- » > « -cch- » : ^tf^ « kaehim^ (kaccbapa, kasyapa:
see p. 335) ;
OIA. « -sr-, -sr- » : C^tS « moch^ » (nahaeehu, smasru) ; sis. ^^B|^
« ajfirCchal^ » (ajasra) ; ^f/*. « pecchap^ » (prasrava) ; etc.
Interchange of [cfh] and [JJ is very noticeable. It occurs in the
naturalised forms of foreign words : e.g.^ ^l<P^t^ « akchar » continually
(Persian « ak&ar », < Arabic « ak^ar- »), « p^ch&nda » liking
(Persian « pasand »), ^Flt^ * ch&ylap » iiumdatiou (Pers. « sayl-ab »), etc. ;
Western Hind! « iaisS, taisa, laisan, taisan », etc., were written (and
60
474
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
possibly pronounced also) «ch» in MB.; €,g.y « j&iche », ^5^?
< tiieh&n^ » = < jaise, taisan »; so the archaic Western Hindi (=Avahattha)
forms like < yachu » (=jasu, yasya), « tachu* ( = tasu, tasya), etc.
For change of [cjh] to [JJ, see infray under the latter sound.
In parts of Central Bengal (Jessore, Nadiya, 24-Parganas, Hugh),
intervocal [cjb] is dropped : e.g,^ C^tc^ * g^ile » for C^fe^ « geehile » =
Rftfe^ « giyaehile » yi?^^ went^ you had gone; « hoyelo » for
« hoyechilo »=5^^tf5^ « h&iy5chil& » did happen. This elision is
recent : [^h >/>5>J>X]: the spirant [j] is at times faintly audible.
In Chittagong and Noakhali, similarly, the « ch » > « s » of verb forms
is altered and voiced, and the spirant which takes its place becomes trans-
formed to a full guttural « g » : e.g., ^f^^f^ « k&riyachi » > ^t^^f^ [koirsi]
> *[koirzi] > *[koirji] > [koirgji] > [koirgi] , written ?Ff^. The «z»
pronunciation also is heard.
263. Bengali [^] is written ^ or ?«y» when connected
etymologically with Skt. « y » : the « y » spellings are recent (see
Introduction, p. 226). Initially, [^] comes from —
OIA. « j- » : « jle » (jlvati) ; ^^1 « j&l^ » (jala) ; ^l^^f « jage »
(jagarti); « jltn^ » (jana) ; ^fC^T «jane» (janati);
* jamai » (jamatr) ; f%^, « jib(h)^ » (jibbha < jihva) ;
^tW^ «jay^.ph&l^* (jatiphala); «3^«» (j**"); C^W^
« johar^ » (jaya-kara) ; OB. * jama » (janma) ;
* 3&g& * in compounds (jagat) ; OB, « jan », NB « jala » /r^r^^
earthen jar {desl j etc. ;
OIA, « jy- » : MB. (JS^ « jeth^ » (jyestha) ; « jetha » (jyestha-
tata); ^^R, C^t^ « juni, jonaki » moonlight> fire-Ay (jyotsna-) ;
OIA. « jv- » : ^c^, « j(w)&le » [JSole] (jvalati) ; ^tC^, ^\x^
m j(w)ale » [jsale] (jvalayati); « j(w)ar^ * (jvara) ;
OIA. «dy-»: ^1,^ « jua » (dyuta-) ; t\t « jui » fi**e (jyotis,
v/dyut.) ;
OIA. * y- * : ?r?l, MB. ^ <^ jay » (yati) ; a MB. « je » (yah) ;
Wl^ « j&be » (yad-) ; ^ ^ ja » hnsband*s brotker^s wife,
mter-in-Iatc (yata) ; c^, « jo » opportuaity (yoga) ;
SOUBCES OF NEW BENGALI ^J' 475
atlt^ * 3«al?l, joal^ » yoke (yoga-) ; (?lt^, C^t^ * j^t^ * (yoktra) ;
MB. ^ « jatha » (cf- y^?^0 ^ ^t^^^ ^i^ta »
grinding mill (yaiitra-) ; ^ « jujhe » (yudhyati) ;
* jiijhar^ » (3ujha + -ara < yudhy- + -kara). In forms also :
e.g., * jat&n^ * (yatna), ^JJt « jug^ » (yuga), « jib^ »
(yava), etc.
Medially and finally, the sources of [jg] are —
OIA. « -j- » : « raj^ » (lajan) ; OB. « uju MB,, NB. 'srMt
«aj&ll» (rj«-); *bhaj^l» (bhratf-jaya) ; »rt^ « salaj^ »
(syala-jaya) ; MB. f^W^ « bij&ni » (vyajanika) ;
OIA. « -jj- »: « kaj&l^ » (tajjala ; = < kad-yala ? : cf. H.
Petersen in the ' Indogermanisehe Forschungen,' 1914, Vol.
XXXIV, p. 223) ; * bhSj » to inj (bhrajj-) ; Tt^ ^saj^l »
(sajja) ; ^t^ « laj^ » (laj ja) ; sitW in ^t^^t^ « maj^-kath^ » //^ar/f
z^oc^f/ or timber (majja) ; etc. ;
OIA. « -jjv- » : * uj&l^ » (wjjvala) \
OIA. *-jy-»: MB. Trf«t^ «banijar^» (vanijya-kara) ; ^t^
« raj^ » (»ajya) ; c^^t^ « bhejae » Bhnh (abhyajyate) ;
OIA. « -jr- » : ^t^ ^ baj^ » (vajra) ;
OIA. « -nj- » : «g8.ja» (ef, gafijika) ; -^^m « pajar^» (paiijara);
H^^l « pij^lra » (pinjara-) \ « bhij^l » (bhanja) ;
« x/bhij » (abhyaiij) ;
OIA. « -dj- » : ^ttt « vile fdlotc, nrdcli paji » (padja- ; or<? payya-) ;
OIA. - -dy- » : « aj?l » (adya) ; ^^Tt^ * anaj^ » (ann&dya) ; ^\-^
«sai&» //W^ (sadya-); «baja» (vadya-) ; «khaja»
(khadya-) ; ^'tC^ * up&je » (utpadyate) ; ^? ^ ujay »
d.rea)ii (udyati) ; f^Sf^, f^^^ « bijiill, bijuli * (vidyut-) ; OB.
« chijai » (chidyate) ; MB. « beja » (vaidya) ; etc. ;
OIA. « -bj- » : fwl « kiijo < kuja » (kiij ja-, *kunja- < kubja) ;
OIA. « -yy. : (?m « sej^ »^ (sayya) ;
OIA. « -rj. » : t^t^^ « khaoja » (kharj-) ; ^t^, C^^^ « khajur^,
khejur^ » (kharjura) ; ^fC© * gaje » (garjati) ; C«tSr^t^1 * bhoj^-
pata » (bhurja-patra-) ; sit^ « maja » (marjita-) ; etc.
476
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
OIA. « -ry. » : « kaj^ » (karya) ; ^tf^^l « aji-ma » grandma
(aryika mata) 5 sis, « dujjug^ » (duryoga) ;
OIA. « -ly- » : ^"t^^F « sajaru », C^'^t^ « sSjaru », East Bengali (^^^
[R§za], OB. (Sarvananda) « sejja-ka » (Sanskritised) (OIA.
« salyaka- H- rupa » : « Salyaka » gave in Old Magadhi « *sayyaka,
*seyyaka », ia Asokan orthography « sayake^ seyake » ; the
Bengali form « seja- » is derived from the Magadhi form. This
« -ly, > -yy- » of Magadhi is absent in other dialects of Asoka.
Cf. the French modification of [Ij, iCJ to [j, i]).
OIA. « -ya- » of passive forms became «-ia-, -iya-, -i- » in MB., where
not assimilated with a preceding consonant. (See under Morphology :
the Verb, ' Passive Voice The Western Apabhrausa dialects turned this
« -ya- » of OIA. to both « -i(y)a- » and « -ijja- > -ija- ». The adjectival
« -iy&- » aflBx similarly became * -ia-, -ija- ». Bengali has some obsolete
« -ij- » forms, which look like having beeu introduced from the West : e.g.,
fqc^, f«!C^ « li(j)j^ * ^a^^M («s arithmetical raleis of Subhankara, in
the old hulian system) (^lahijjai, labhyate) ; the MB. ordinals
« du&j&, ti&ja », NB. C?t^> Cs^^ only in compounds like CTt^-^fir^,
C^-^fV^ < doj^-b^riya, tej4-b§,riya » a bridegroom for the second timey
for the third time (^duajja, *Juijja = dvitiya ; tiajja, tiijja = trtiya) (dosar-,
tesar- » are the genuine Magadhan forms ; see under Morphology : ' the
Numerals'). Bengali ^T^^, '^vm\ « k&lija, k&leja » (kaleya) seems
similarly to be a Western form with « -j- » for « -ya- ».
[^] occurs in Bengali through deaspiration of [jgfi], medially and
finally : e.g.^ "^W^ [maj^khane] in the middle (majh^, madhya) ; cH^^%
< ^\^^ [/S^iifci < JcL^Buti] evening lamp (sljh^-: sandhya-vartti-) : etc.
[^] occurs in ts. words : in the groups « -jy-^ -jv-, -jr- », [jg] is
' doubled ' in Bengali. In the groups « -hy- > in st^s,, pronounced [jJSSJ, we
have th<* \_%\ sound. E.g., ^tf^, ^t^ * jati, jat » ;^ tm [raj^o] (rSjya) \
[ujjfe^l] (tijjvala) ; [boj^ro] (vajra) ; Jj^ [Jojjgfio] (sahya) ; etc
Sanskrit « y- » in ts. words is pronounced as « j- » in most cases in
Northern India, and Bengali also has the « j- » pronunciation generally,
except when the « y » is subscribed. The following rule laid down in
TATSAMA 'Y' = 'J':'J^>'Z*
477
the * Yajiiavalkya Siksa ' is obviously indicative of the medieval pronuncia-
tion of Sanskrit in Northern India, which some Yajur-veda schools still
follow in the North, but not in the South :
« padadSku ca, padSidau ca, sathyog&vagraheau ca ]
* jah^ sabda ifci vijneyo, yo * nyah sa ' ya* iti smftah |1 »
A6 the heginiiing of a foot , and at the beginning of a ivord, os well as
when compounded or a?ialifsed, the sound of ^^j* is lode knoion, and
eUewhere^ « y » enjoined, (^I5ka 150, ^ Yajnavalkya-siksa ' in
the * Siksa-saggraha/ Benares, 1889.)
The above rule holds good for Bengali pronunciation of Sanskrit, and
for te. in Bengali. Thus, [jS^^g] (yoga), [JS^kti] (yukti),
Skt. 5lf?[^ [JSo/i^"] (yasmin) ; ^rtFt^ [durjfgog] (duryoga), ds,
[duj^ug] ; -^^^ [kar^o] (karya) ; Jf^^ [/^>gjS«kta] (samyukta), etc.
In a few instances, were the « avagraha » or breaking up the word is not
present in the mind of the speaker, we have « y » : e.^., f^Clt^ [biog], not
[Wj^og], but [Ju/gog], ^-^f^ [JuJSukti], etc.
[is] pronounced [dz, z] in the Eastern and Northern Bengali
dialects, and this is not found in the Standard Colloquial. But in the
latter, however, in the groups « -jhd-, -jht- -jd-, -jt- », [jg] has developed
a [z] pronunciation, which is frequently unvoiced to [s] : e.g., 3rt|r^ ?tWl
> CSfC^WW > CT^Wl [majgRua-dada > mej^odada > mejgda > raezda]
second elder brother \ so ^f^C^ > ^^Cso>^^J[:^ [bujgBite > baj5(R)te >
buzte > buste] to understand; ^tm^^ > Jft^^C^ [j<iJS'^®> JcLJS^e > jazte>
Jaste] to adorn oneself « -ct-, -eht- » also similarly are assimilated to < -st- » :
e^g^y ^TtT^C^ > ^rt^t^ [nacjite > nacjte > naste] to dance ; tmd^ > ^t5^^5
[bcLcfite > bdcfte > bdste] to live ; ^t5^^?J^ [ kacjhtheke > kastheke]
from the neighbourhood =from, etc. : ef. also f^^t^ > [bicfhana >
bi^na, bisna] bed.
In foreign loan words, Persian « j, z » ([z]=: Arabic [z, 3, d, z]) and
« £ » = [5I are changed to [jg] in Bengali ; also Portuguese « z English
[zjdg, 5]. infra.
264. « jh = Standard Bengali [J5R], Marathl Gujarat! [z], is a
very rare sound in OIA., but it became quite prominent in MIA., both
478
PHONOLOOY: CHAPTEK V
in some tadd/iava forms and in a number of non-Aryan words^ and
in onomatopoetie formations. « jh > words in MIA. show some relationship
with the « ks » of Sanskrit, and with the other palatals, « ch, j, s
and sometimes with the dentals. The exact derivation and aihliation of
most of the « jh » words has not been settled.
The following are the typical groups of « jh- » words in Bengali :
they are also to be found in most other NIA. languages and dialects.
« jh&k, jh4k-jhak, jh&k-m&k » //Itsfen, he bright^
shine : from a MIA. « *jha(va)kka >.
« jh&k?tra, jblig^ra > qmirrel, ef. ^^1 in WW^l « b&ka-
jh&ka » reprimaudy rebuke, speak sharp words (ef. desi jbakkia=
vacana).
^ « jhat », MB. ^tfe « jhatgt » ^/w/c/f- (ef. Skt. jhatiti) ; « jhar^ »
5^or;/^, ^z^A (ef. Skt. jhatika^ dekl jhadl = nirantara-vfstih) ;
derivatives — « jhat^ka», « jh&r^ka» jerk^ dash ;
«jhat-pat» Jiatier (ef. ^auraseni Ap. « jhadappada » quick).
This group is probably connected with « \/jhar » ^<?i^j //r/p,
see below : an OIA, passive participle « *jhrta, *jharta » would
become in MIA. « ^jhata, ^jbatta, jhada ». Cf, 6^ «c&t»
connected probably with « y/^^^ *efta, *carta ».
« jhap » splashy dash, quick: a moditication «jhup», and
extensions « jh&pak^ jh&piit, jh&pas » ; probably
connected with ^*t^ «jhap^ » plunge, see below.
« jhan-jhan » metallic sotuid, sound of gong : onomatopoetie.
« jham-jh&m » Ww^, patter like heaiuj rain ; onomatopoetie.
« jhir » (a« toater)yfloio \ ^^^1 « Jh&r^na » tt?rt^(?r./}z;/ :
^^f^5l « jhar-jh§riya » c/f?a/', jjne {like runniug-ivater) ; a
modification « jhir-jhir » gentle, fine, slotv (as breeze) ;
« jbarl » toaier-pol with a spout. From dialectal OIA.
« Y/*jhar»=s Skt. «^ksar», preserving the voiced sound of the
Indo-Iranian « *zhar, *gzhar » < Indo-European «*gwh3er,
bher »).
^^N), ^^^1 * jh4rokha, jhir^ka > /(^i?/:*^;^ (< y jala-gavaksa-).
* JH. ' WORDS IN BENGALI 479
* jh&l » (1) hmif/, dangle : ^ « jhul » thiifjlf > feMoon ;
« jhul&n^ » ; C^ffll « jhola » ^^7^, « jhull »
f%fiffs([il « jhilimili » lattice, s/intte7*it ; ^^1^ « jhal&r^ » lace-end,
(Cf. r/?^7 jhullurl = gulma).
^cf « jh&l » (2) blight; '^^'^ « jh&l-mal > .yya^'/(7<?;
« jhala » tvell), to clear^ to polhh^ to repair {as a pot
hy soldering) ; « jhal^tsa » to roast (ef. rfe^^Z jhalasia=J?^r«f5) ;
« jhal^ka » scorching flame (ef . Saur. Ap. jhalakka hiirn :
< Skt. v/jval ?).
« jhau » pine-tree (Skt. jhabuka :< ?)•
^"l « jha » <7if/c?^, with f^peed of windy as it were : connected with Skt.
« y/dhma, dham » blow (?) j or onomatopoetic ; cf. ^1 « si »
^] « jha-jha » shim?ner of sitn-shine ; ? connected with « jhama*.
^"t^ <«jhak» .?^aX-<?: extended to ^*t^^l, ^*t^^, ^"t^ « jhak^ra,
jhak^ra, jhak&r^ » dishevelled, loose, easilif shakeable {as long
hair) ; '^t^ « jhak^ » flight of birds, mmrm, scattered band ;
« jhaka » (/(? loose articles). (Cf • rfi^^v jhankharia
= avaeayana).
« jhSjh^l »//rt?o?i/', flavour; cymbals with very loud noise
(cf. Skt. jhaujha); <t^?r * jhSjh&r^ » (I) cymbals, (2) perforated
ladle [(1) = jarjara? (2) — jharjhara < x/jhar ?]. [(2) also
found as ^"t^^l. ^*t^ « jhajh^m, .ihajh^rl »].
^itt^ * jhar^ » (Skt. jhata) ; ^"t^, ^tf^ « jhSta, jharu » ;
^t^l « jhara » clear, ^t^^? « jharlin^ > duster ; ^'t^
« jhat^ » //^/;-, ^^(//J /^rtzV/also « jhfltl », C^'t^^^ « jh5t&n^ »
tuff of hair [iti, ^^^.v jhanti^iaghurdhva-kesah ; but eonn, with
pi «eul^» ^ii/>=Skt. «ciida»?). Also ^'t^t « jhat! »,
« jhinti » a playit,
%\^\, ^^1 « jhanda, jh&nda » ^^tandard , flag (derivation suggested from
« dhvaja », also from « jayauta » : but probably connected with
« jhar^ » /r<?tf above),
^t?^ « jhanu » e/«-^r (< ?).
4S0
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
^*T^ «jliap?l» jnynpy plvnge (Skt. jhampa: cf. Aehi jhampai =
bhramati) ; « jhap^ta » throiving, dmggling ; ^*t^ « jbSp^l »
covermg, malted shutter ; ^*t^ « jf^^pi * basket icith lid :
cf . also ^t^^ « jhap^sa » hazy, * covered-like ' (cf. jbampan!
eyelashy connected with « ^/ksap » ^^/ow ?).
^*t*tt^ < jhftpan^ » /zVi'f/ ( = Skt. yapyayana).
« jhama » brick, pumice stone] ^f^i^l « jham&ra »
through fever ^ pale (cf. Skt, ksama).
^Tfcij^ «3hamela» crowd, noisy gathering ] an intricate hisiness (cf. dehi
jamala = magic) .
« jhal^ » ^0 ; ^^t^«l1 « jbala-pala » burning and scorching,
said of ear-grating noise or chatter (< OIA, x/jval, jvala ? ; or
= Skt. ksara ?).
^*tf1 « jha.sa* flattery (< ?).
^ « jhi, jhl » daughter > w aid-servant ('^dhlta < diihita).
f^*f%* « jhijhl » cricket {insect) : onomatopoetie, cf. Skt « jhilli ».
tV^f^^g « jhljhit^ » a tune (Hindi jhinjhauti = jejakabhuktika).
f^srl « jhig(^)a » a vegetable-, cf. also ft^^ « cicig(g)a » awo^^er
tahle of the same sort (desJ),
f^ftt'J « jhim-jhira * feeling of dizzifiess <to hear a tinkling or singing
sound : a variant of « jh&m-jh&m » ? : but cf . doze below,
f^sjl « jhima » ^/^i?/?, : connected with ^ « ghum » sleep etc. :
see §§ 199, 265.
1%^, ^ * jhil^, jhll^t » /aA^', channel of water : conn, with
« jhol^ » ? : see below.
« jhinuk^t » ^tfdi?-/ : cf . C^t^t « jog^ra » : Skt. « sanabuka ».
« jhtijha » ooe^, in)?, exude (as blood from a wound) : cf. Skt.
« Y^ksud — ksundate aplavane ».
^1 « 3hut(h)a » miSj leavings of meal ; false^ lying {desi jhuttha,
rsSkt. justa),
^r^Tl « jhuna » seasoned, old (< jurna- ?)
^ « jhum-jhum » tinkling noise : « jhumur^l » ; a kind of
song and dance ; « jhum^lka l&ta » a creeper with
JH-^ WORDS IN BENGALI: SOURCES
481
jimcen in hanging clmferH^ like helh worn on the ioe^ : onomato-
poetie, apparently a variant of « jham-jham ».
^^1 « jhura » poicdered ^tvjf, loose sfiif: ef. ^ « euv^ » poivder,
k*kt. « curna ».
^f?r « jhuri » tv:ig : cf. ^*?$f?t from « phiiUjlmri < -jh&ri » gohleu
rain {fre-ivork)^ < « v/.l'^^^' *•
« jhure » weeps \ MB. 'Si^^ « ajh&ru », NB. ^C^t^ « ajhor^ »
tears^jiocd of tears : ? conn, with a MIx\. form « ^afij(h)u = asru »,
attested in Siiidbl ; or connected with « » ?
C^*t^, C^^t^ « jh5k(h)^ » leaning, f*C^<^*^^ <t ]huk(h)e » leans, ^*f%
« jhuki » a leaning ; ^ft < *cCt^f^ « jh&kki < * jhSkkhi »
responsibilitf/ ; « jhik^ » support for p)ot in the oven i < ?
C^M « jhop^ * C^*t*f^1 « jhOp^ra » ^•flriiV, collage (Saur. Ap.
jhumpaija co^^^?^^ : cf. Skt. ksupa).
C^*^«11 « jhlt^Ia » ?«<>5.?, s^»?^;;f, beside C5^^1 « ehet^la » (< ? : cf. Skt.
sFlivSla, sadvala).
C4\^ « jhor^ » jungle ; C^t^1 « jhora » laskel : conn, with
^ « jhar^ » ?
C^t^ « jhol^ » ; C^t^1 « jhola » water t/ : cf. CWH « j^l^f*
juli » etc., pp. G5, 6G.
The above are some of the more important words in Bengali with initial
« jh- », It will be seen that in most cases, no sure OIA. affinity can be
found. In a certain number of eases, we find the « jh- » is obviously the
result ot aspiration of original « j- In other cases, as in « y^j^^^^ ^®
have inheritances from an OIA. dialect which altered Indo-Iranian
< *gz(h)-, *zh » to « jh- », and not to « ks- » as in Sanskrit. Possibly a large
proportion of the « jh- » words will be explained from this point of view.
Some, again, are desly and others obviously onomatopoetic.
^ledial and final « -jh- » in Bengali is found mainly in ihh,
words :
OIA. « -dhy- » is the source commonly of this « -jh- »: e.g.^ ^^t
« ojhn » (upiidh}aya) ; "^X^ « majh^ » (madhya) ; ^ W « sajh^ »
(sandhyti) ; « bujhe » (budhyati) ; '^'^^ « s&mujhe »
61
483
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER V
(sambudhyati) ; ^ « * (ywdhyati) ; fifC^ « sijhe » is
hailed^ boils (sijjhai, sidhyate) ; ^\^\ « bajha » (vandhya).
In fs, words, « -hy- » is pronouuced « -jjh- » : ^^J [J0JJ5R0]
(sahya), ^t^J [bajjsfio] (babya), 5tt5T [grajjgfio] (grahya),
etc. In Skt. words, it is always written 5J « hy » : but often
in the sts. words as phonetically written, we find ^ « jj ^^9^}
[gerajjsi.] (< grahya).
Interchange between Palatals and Gutturals, and Palatals and
Cerebrals and Dentals.
265. In a small number of words, connected in meaning and probably
also in etymology, we note interchange between palatals and gutturals.
These words seem to be mainly dekl in origin. The gutturals are of course
the older sounds. Examples are given below.
C^*t « kop^ » blow with a sivord (connected by some with « -x/klp ») :
C5t% C^^ « cop^, eob^ » ibid,, cf. * ehob&l^ » smke-hite, bite ; C^t^fl, ^
* khog(g)a, khug(g)l » box of bamboo or cane : C5W^ « cog(g)a, cug(g)i »
bamboO'Ojlinder used as vessel, cylinder; ^f5($ « kam&r^ » bite : ^5^^,
« cim^rS, cim^fca » ; ^ « ghumgt » sleep : 1%H « jhim^ » r?^?^^', i^T^Sf
« ni-jhiim^ » silence of sleep; « gam&k^ » elegance-. ^'S^^ « j&m&k^ »,
^*t^ « jakgt » ; "^f^T « khai^ » : 5|5f « chal^ » 5>^^M, ff^t^l
« chilgtka » .^z^'/^i /''^tit, C^t^l « chola » to shin, §^ « chuli » skin^disease
(an Aryan group, apparentlv); C^*t?1 « khSra » lame, ef. Oriya « ehotS »
^rtw^; c^^ « lej^ », C^^, C^^^ « le(n)jur(T) » Oriya « lafija » ifrt27 : but ef.
Skt. « lag^ula » ; « dh4g(g)4 », beside ^ft^ « dhaj^ », ^Tf^ « dhlca »
manner, form, sfyle, fashion ; gf^ « eurii Skt. « eucuka » nipple, teal:
Skt, « kaea » breast ; OB. « bahenel », NB. ^tf^, c^fg; « bStlci, bSc » a fruit
= Skt. « vikagkata ». Cf. also Bengali fe^t^t « cirata = Skt. kirata-tikta :
kir5ta=MIA. cilaa-, eiraa- ».
Palatals, and cerebrals and dentals : St^, fet^ « tak(h) » : 51"^ « eakh »
(eaks-) ; Sf^ « tag cfe^ft « teg(g)?l" » % (<?/ meat), connected
with Wt? «3^g* = *j'i9^ha» (?) ; MB. C5«Uf^ ^ Qtiii^hakh * vicionsness,
THE CEREBRALS
483
connected with « c^nda 5Qt^ « c&n4al^ » beside NB. §^t^, ^«t^
* t&ndai, tandai > iviUhiess, opposition, perversity/ (?) ; (^f^ « t§tal », OB.
< tcntall » tamarind, Skt. « tintidi », beside Skt. « einca», Telagu « cinta » :
compare also Benj?aU as in ^t^-f^fs « kai-bici * tamariwUeed, Oriya
« kayS * tmi^riad (<*kanfn.-, ^kausa- ?) ; NB. * caiil^t MB.
^^5! * caul& » beside ^t?^, ^t\^ * taala, tirum » = Skt. « tandula »
threshed and wimioived grain > rice ( ? Aryan : < ^tandrula, cf. v^fcandr) ;
Bens?ali 5^ « v/e§,s » cidtimtte, 5W « easa » cMivator, of. OIA. « carsani- »
cnliivating *v/M»= Oriya • t&sa » (?««mz.^or ; MB. JRft * d&nai »,
/7 pet form of the name « Jaaftrdana », for ^^?t^ * *j§na? »; * Ue^la »
^0 rinse, beside « k&t^lla » ; etc.
(:^) The RetroHex or Cerebral Stops and Aspirates [t, th, d, dfi], and the
Rctroflex Flapped and its Aspirate, [r, rR].
Cerebralisation in OIA. and in the Eastern Dialect:
Resultant Cerebralisation,
266. The cerebrals had originated in the Aryan language in India
already in the earliest period The conditions under which the cerebral stops
and aspirates (and sibilant as well as lateral) came into being are various.
Thus, for example, Indo-European dental « s » under certain conditions
became « § > (an sh sound) in Indo-Tranian, and this * S » changed to « s »
in OIA. ; and a « t(h) » follo^ving it was duly cerebralised : e,g,, IE.
« *sthisthami » > Indo-lran. « *oi§fchami » > OIA. «tisr,hami»; IE.
« *asto- » > Indo-lran. * ^uSta- » > OIA. « usta- OIA. superlative affix
Jfr.istho- » > Indo-lran. « *.i§thi- »>OIA. «-istha- » ; etc. Similarly, IE.
* z » became * S », and this « 2: » was changed to « z » (or [i]) in the oldest
lA., to be cerebralised and assimilated with a following « d(h) » : e.g.,
« *ui.sd-os, ^nizdos > *niSd<is > *nizdas, *ni4das> nidah » ; « *mizdhos>
*mi5dhas > ^mizdhas, ^miidhas > midhah Indo-European groups of
* palatal ' * k, g » + « t, d(h) » respectively became « st, d(h) » in OIA. :
<f.y., « ^oktou > %9tau, *astau > *astau « *mrgdIqo- > ^mfzdika- >
*mFzdika-, ^mf4dlka->^mrd-, mrdika ^) * ^ligh-to-, ^ligdho.>*li^dha.>.
484
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
*lizdha-, ^lijdha- > lldha » ; etc. (Cf. C. Uhlenbeck, ' Manual of Sanskrit
Phonetics/ London, 189S, 44, 63, 8G ; J. Wackernagel, ' Altindische
Grammatik/ I, § 145 &; A. A. Macdonell, * Vedic Grammar/ §4*2).
Through analogy, we get « t, (J » in certain nominal and verbal forms in
OIA. (Skt.) : « vit < *vik < *viks < %iss, = IE. ^wik-s » ; « dvit <
*dvik < ^dviks < ^dvi§-§, = IE. *dwis-s » ; « vidbhih < *vijbhis
< *vizbhis < IE. ^wigbhis, *wig = wik » ; so « rat < x/ ^'^j * J * <
< v/vah » ; etc. In addition to the above changes, the dentals were
cerebralised in OIA. when they occurred in connection with the liquid «1 »
(and « r »). In the earliest staore of lA., the Indo-European (and Indo-
Iranian) group of « 1 » -{-dental (stop, aspirate nasal, or sibilant), became
cerebralised, with assimilation of the * 1 » : thus IE. « *spheko » gave OIA.
(Skt.) « sphafca-mi » ; « ^gholto- » through I-Ir. « ^zhalta- » gave Skt,
« hata(-ka) » ; IE. « ^kulth- » gave « kuth-ara », « ^pelnos » gave « panah »,
and «*v^lals » gave «v/las ». But while « 1 » + dental w^as thus cerebralised,
IE. «r»-l- dental was retained intact (except in the case of « *rn, *rs »,
which changed to « rn, rs » in OL\.) : e.^., IE. « *werto » > OIA.
« varta-mi », « *merdo » > « mardami », « ^wornos » > « varnah »,
*dherso » > « dharsa-mi », etc. This kind ot cerebral isation (generalised
into a law by Fortunate v, cf. Uhlenbeck, op, cil, § 44) scem^ thus to have
characterised the oldest Indo-Aryan, wdiich as a whole distinguished
between IE. « r » and « 1 ». But already as early as the time of the
Vedic hymns, the earlier « r, 1 » were co ifused in the various dialects of
OIA. In one dialect, that of the west, on which the speech of the Rig-
Veda stems to have been based, all original « I » became « r », apparently
after the change of « 1 dental groups to cerebrals (see rt^^^", p. 3 1),
and it maintained the OIA. speech habit in not allowing cerebralisation
of the group « r » + dental. In another dialect, apparently that of the
extreme east (the speech of the Pracya tracts and and the source of the
eastern dialect of Asoka — of Ardha-magadhl and Magadhi) all original
« r » sound seems to have become « 1 » : so that the « r » sound was absent
in this dialect. What happened in the central dialect, or dialects, in the
OIA. period, to which the later Midland speech (SaurasenI) is to be
CEREBRALISATION OF 'L^ + DENTAL IN OIA,
485
affiliated, is not knotvn; but it seems there was no tenJency to use
exclusively one sound iu it. (Cf. A. A. Macdonell, ' Vedic Grammar for
Students/ Oxford, 1916, p. 11.) It is not impossible that these three
groups of Aryan speakers formed originally three separate bodies, the eastern-
most coming into India first, and being followed by the others^ and
the western-most having certain Iranian affinities. However, Sanskrit
in the matter of its « r, 1 » sounds agrees mainly with Vedic speech, and
it does not normally change a « r » to « I » when occurring with a dental.
The normal OIA. « vikrta, artha, vardhita » etc., as in Vedic and Sanskrit^
can be expected to have become « *altha, ^vikjta, ^valdhita » in the OIA.
source-dialect of Magadhi etc.; so that Early Eastern ^NII A. forms like
« atfcha, vikata, va4dhita » can very well be regarded as the result of the
continuation of the « 1 »+dentil > cerebral tradition in the Ea«t.^ It is
very likely that the cerebralisation in connection with this «l-ft(h),
etc. » came into being, giving rise lirst to forms like « *alfcha, ^valdhita »,
in the OIA. period. A form like « vikata », found in the Rig- Veda,
is an indication of its existence in the Late OIA. stage at least. It is
not necessary, however, to assume stages like « It, It, h » in the develop-
ment of « rt (ft) » to « t »: in dialectal Norwegian and Swedish, there
is change of « r » + dental stop to a cerebml stop without an « 1 » staije.
But the case in the Praeya speech seems to have been through the « 1 »
stage, which characterised that dialect in the Brahmana period and possibly
also in the Late Vedic period : witness a form like OIA. « ksulla », from
« ^ksudla » (= ksudra), found in the ^ Atharva-Veda,' the ^Taittirlya
Satnhita' and the 'Satapatha Brahmana' (see p. 82).
When the « r » followed a dental stop, as in the groups « tr, dr »,
we find cerebralisation from Late OIA. times. (Cf. Wackernagel, oj), cit.,
I) § 147.) Such cases, however, are not so very common, and althougli they
might be MSgadhl or Pracya in origin, nothing can be asserted about them,
^ Compare the case of the Germanic name ' ''Hildaz (Xildaz) ' >" Cita ' (see ante, pp.
245-246). This change of ' -Id-,' or ' -It-,' to ' -U>' however, is late, and occurs as a sporadic
case apparently in the Soath-western MIA. of the Transitional period.
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER V
Be it as it may, the nett result is that in Early MIA. oF the East
the OIA» « rt, rd », etc. became eerebralised to « tt, dd > by the 3rd
century B.C., but « rt, rd » remaiued intact in the North-west in the same
period. In other dialects, of the Midland and of the South-west, they
were assimilated to « tt, dd », without eerebralisation. The Western
speeches ' resisted the eerebralising tendency of the East for quite a long
time. But as we can see from the Asoka inscriptions, and the Kusana and
other inscriptions in the Western areas. Eastern or Magadhan forms
with cerebrals had imposed themselves on the former. This was due both
to political influence of Magadha and to social and other relations between
the eastern and the western tracts. Non-eerebralising dialects of the
Midland, West and North-west thus gradually came to acquire and
naturalise from the Early MIA. period quite a number of eerebralised
forms. And the Eastern eerebralising speech ^ in its turn, through the
strong influence exerted on it by the Midland and the Western dialects,
received a number of non-cerebralised forms which have largely overlaid
the original eerebralised ones. Thus Magadh! or Eastern forms like
« mata » ( = mfta), « *mafctika * (rarttika), * y/v^^^^h » (vfdh, vardh),
« bhata » (bhfta), « vatta » (vartman), etc., are found not only in the
Magadhan languages, but also in other non-Magadhi lA., like Western
Hindi, Rajasthani-Gujarati, Marathi and Panjabi. And non-Magadhi
forms like « addha » (ardha), « sattha » (sartha), « *vattika » (vartika),
etc. are equally found in Bengali etc. « bharta > bhatta, bhatta >• '^f^
hhsit^ > a l/a/d, originally = 6t Brahman, is a genuine Magadhi form in
Bengali, and « bharta > bhatta, bhatta », extended to « bhattara », whence
Bengali ^St^StW « bhatar^ » kiis6an.fi, is a later and a non-Magadhi form.
Further examples will be found under the treatment of the cerebral and
dental stops and aspirates individually. The Magadhan dialects became
subject to greater and still greater influence of the Midland speech after
^ Sindhl, alone, however, among the Western I A. tongues, developed a tsndency to
eerebralisation, but this seems to have been very late : e.g.^ • putru* = ' putra,* * candn ' «
' candra,' * tre* * tri,' etc.
SPONTANEOUS CEREBRALISATION
487
a brief period of suzerainty which it seems to have exercised in the few
centuries before the Christian era over the whole of Indo-Arjandom ; so
much so, that from the Second MIA. period, it borrowed numerous forms
from the latter, and adopted tliem, to the restriction or suppression of
its native forms : and these later Western b)r rowings have been inherited
by the Modern Maj^adhan languages : thus « mrta = mata > ma4a » gave
WS\ « m&ra » to Bengali, which is no longer used to indicate the past
tense, but has only a restricted meaning, namely, of a dead body ; and a
Western form « maa, maya » (< mfta) was adopted in the Second MIA.,
which, strengthened with the « -ila > -ilia » affix, gave the Mag. Ap, past
base « mailla- », whence Old and Middle Bengali « maila as well as
the forms in other Magadhan. Cf. the case of ^f^^ « k&rib& » as non-
Magadhi form, which has ousted the native Magadhi « "^kattaviya » : see
p. 375. The habit of cerebral isation, which once marked off the Eastern
Aryan dialect from the dialects of the Midland and the West, has thus
from the Transitional or Second MIA. period ceased to be a distinctive trait.
Spontaneous Cerebralisation.
267. Apart from the ^resultant' cerebralisation (through the
influence of « -S- > -s-, -z- » and « -1- » in the proto-Indian stage, and
of « r », or « r > 1 » in the eastern dialect, in the OIA. stage) which has
been described above, original I A. dentals have in a number of cases been
cerebralised without any explicable cause. There is no neighbouring «r»or
« 1 » which can account for the change, A few instances of this spontane-
ous cerebralisation are found in OIA. : e,g,^ Skt. « \/di, ud + di > uddi »
from « y/dl » tofiy ; « a^i, ati » from earlier « ati » a ivafer^bird ; « atati »<
« atati » ; and a few others. But the number of such forms is on the increase
from the MIA. period. (Cf. Wackernagel, I, § 14.8b; Jules Blocfa, op, cit.^
§§ 117-119). It cannot be ascertained which form of OIA. or MIA. was
characterised specially by this tendency. But judging from South-western
and North-western Asokan forms, like « dbidasa- » (Girnar), « badaya- »
(= « badaza », Shahbazgarhi : the Mansehra form « duvadasa- » is a
488
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER V
' Maojadhism a<= eontrasfefl with the cerebral is ed form « duvadasa- »
(Kalsi; also Pillar Edict VI, Delhi-Siwalik, Allahabad, Radhia and Mathia
and the Barabar Caves ^) ; and Panjabl and Sindhi « pawe, pae » (<*paaV,
*padadi = patati), as compared with Eastern and Midland (Bengali,
' BiharT,' Hindi, etc.) cerebralised « pare * falls (<padai, *padadi, ^patati =
patati) ; it may be surmised that the spontaneous cerebralisation charac-
terised the Eastern (and possibly also the Midland) dialects, rather than
those of the North-west and the South-west. In a few instances, the same
Aryan word oceure in two forms in NIA. : ^tt « khai » trench, beside
« kharl » channel, ( = khata, *khata-), found also in Western
Hindi. Intervoeal « -n- » and « -1- » became cerebralised in all dialects
in the Second MIA., but curiously enough, only the sp3eches of the West
(Western and Eastern Panjabi, Rajasthanl-Gujarati and Marathi, and
partly Sindhi) have preserved the « -n-, -1- » inherited from MIA., and
not the Midland dialects and the dialects of the East (exeept Oriya).
In the development of spontaneous cerebralisation, analogy and contamina-
tion certainly played some part: ^. ^sis-dasa > *sazdasa » certainly
gave « so(Jasa », and the « r » in « trayi5dasa » may have influenced the
cerebralisation of the « d » which gave « *tedasa > teraha » : and through
analoofy, « ekadasa > *egadaha>egaraha, dvadasa > duvadasa », etc., may
have originated; so Magadhi « gada < gata < gata » through the analogy
of « ka^a, maija < kati, mata < kfta, mpta », and Bengali vg't^ « dSr^ »
from « dan da >^ through influence of the following « r ». But analogy and
contamination do not explain eases like « patati > ^patati, padai », « saptati
> %attati, *sattadi, sattari », « daksina > ^tft^ dahin^ », « y/daiis >
MIA. dansa>Bengali \5't»t das^ { — gnat) », « patai]ga>?f^t pharig » grass-
hopper, etc. Such interchange between cerebrals and dentals is unknown to
Dra vidian, in which each type of sound has its nett value.
^ Dhauli and Jaiigada (Rock Edict III), however, show * davadasa/ with the dental,
rather than 'duvadasa': this is carious, but it cannot be doubted that the *d' forms
characterised the Eastern I A speech as contrasted with the Western dialects : cf, ' panna-
dasa' = 'paficad.i5a ' in Pillar Eilict V. But the equivalents of *caturda9a' all show
* d* and n.it *d.' The nuuierals are a puzzle, and show cross influences.
SOUBCES OF NEW BENGALI *T-'
489
A great many NIA. words with initial cerebral are evidently de'sl in
origin. But it is noteworthy that the cerebral as an initial sound does
not occur in Dravidian, at least in Modern Dravidiau. Kol, or ' Old Kol/
possibly had cerebrals initially. It is also possible that the non-Aryan
sources of the NIA. dehl words with initial (and medial) cerebral, whether
in Primitive Dravidian, or Primitive Kol, partly had dental + * r », for the
NIA. cerebral: so that the change in this matter, in Indo- Aryan at
least, has been uniform for a number of words of both Aryan and non-
Aryan origin. In any case, the words with initial cerebral (as well
as initial palatal, in some eases) present a possible pre-Aryan sub-
stratum, and quite a numerous and characteristic one too, in MIA. and
NIA.
In deffi words, [t th d dR] seem to interchange with each other.
The cerebrals occur largely in onomatopoeties as well.
268. Bengali [t]. Initially, it is from —
MIA. « t- », from OIA, « t- », and from desl sources : e.g,^ ^c^l
« t&le » (talati) ; §t^1 * taka » rupee < coined money (tazjka-) ;
and the following words, among others, are apparently of desi
origin : e,g., « tag » fooiy C§^ft « teg(g)^rl » leg {of meat);
Cfe^l < teg(g)^ra » JdgJi land, also a fish ; §t5f1 « v/tag(g)a *
hang\ %\ « t^g » liujh ground y loft ; §1^, c§lt « t&kkar§[, tekkS »
'Striking, competition ; « tuk^ » strike gently^ note down
(cf. ^ « thuk ») ; « tuk^m » a tiny bit, fe^^ « tik^ll »
a dicCy a piece ; C^t^^l, |^ft « tok^ra, tuk^ri » basket ; ^if[
* tuni » little one J a little girl ; §t5?t « tag(g)i » aa^e (< tagka?) ;
fef^F « tiki » tii/t of hairy iop-knot, queue ; « tip^ » prefss wit A
the fingers, a point ; c5 ^ « \/tik, y^tek » endure^ cfe*^, 'S^t^l
« teka, taka » repair, sew ( = tagka ?) ; (fSt^^ < toplir^ » helmet,
oroivn of tinsel worn by bridegtoomSy « tupi » helmet >
hat ; (^^\ « tdna » c/ianhy sorcery ; C§t^ « tol^ » depression {opp,
to swelling); C§t^, tola, tuli » 5'?^t7?V^/ a totcn, C§t^
* tol^ » vniversity or college quarter > Sanskrit school; jS^ll
« tila » hillocky high land; 'S^^ « t&h&l^ » waU\ wander ;
490 PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
< tiya » parrot ; « t^itl » ; « ter^ » knowledge,
consciousness ; etc., etc.
MIA. « t- * from OIA. dental « t- through spontaneous cerebrali-
sation : e.ff.y « \/taa » ^7raz«?, tigM (v/tan, tanayati),
connected with which are « t&n t&n » pain with feeling of
tightness, fe^T^ « t&n&k^ » tight, memory, consciousness ; « tip »
rfrojo (ef . tip = ksarane) ; fe^ « t&s » ^?rt/?, y^/^ a* a drop of
water (cf . v^tans draw to and fro^ decorate, pour out), whence
« t&s^ka drop off; ^'p\ « ^/t8.s » to be all over with any
thing (ef. ^tans be distressed, y^tas^upaksaj^e, vastu-hanir iti) ;
sts, §5t^ « t&g&r^ » « flower (tagara) ; etc.
MIA. « t- » from OIA. « t- », in connection with « r (1) » either
immediately following or in a following syllable: tf.^.,
« tute » (trutyati) ; ^ « tat^ ^ plate of metal, « tati » w^a^
(tratra plate^ ; ^1 « tika » sect-mark on forehead, pointy pateh^
work (*tilka-, tilaka-) ; 'Sf^, « ta(t)tu » joowjr (tartf ka ?) ;
f?^f^ « tiktiki » wooden triangle for whipping (tri-kaatha- ?) ;
fetl « tap^ » Jumping, stamping of foot, fe^l^ « t&p^kS » croM
or(?r at one bound (ef . tf p = hinsayam) ; ^ « t&k^ » a«W or smir
to taste (taki-a- ?) ; fet^ « taku » (tarku-) ; « tak(h)e »
(< ? tark- ; ? eakkh=caks), cf. §t^?[1 « takj^ra » palate;
C&^l «tera» squint-eyed { — 'h2ite Skt. tagara-), beside c^5^ «tera»
aw^'^, Hind. « terha » (conn, with « tiryac » ?) ; « tar^ », aw
ornament for the arm beside « tar^ » (tata, tada) ; ^•\\ « tena»
beside c^l rag ; etc., etc.
Medially and finally, [t] is from —
MIA. * 4t., -nt. »< OIA. « -tj-. -tr-, -tv-, -rt-, -rt-(4t-), -rtm-,
-st(h)-, -st- » ; also<rf^^7 « -tt- » : e,g,, '^t^ «ata » /o?^r (*atta-<
OIA. *arta-) ; *ltfe « pat^ » s«7>fc > jide (patta) ; ^flffe «laggit^ »
(*ligga-patta) ; « kot^ » /o?-/, demand (kotta, kostha)
C^fST^ « kotal^ > (kottapala, kostha-pala) ; « mot^ load
(motta : desl ?) ; ^5 « ghat^ » (ghatta, ghatta : dekl ?) ; ^
« hat^l » (hatta : desl ?) ; « pet^ * {desl ^pefcta, potta) ; OB.
SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI ' -T- '
491
« pita », NB. +C*I^ « P^t^ * earthen jjot^ pail^ probably conn, with
the preceding \ (?!t§, <^ « lotg[, lut^ » ro^/ grotind, scatter
(lotfca,<?) ; ^ * \/eat » ^/e^*, bach kick ("^^catta : casta? <\/^cas
as in « casaka » ^e^/w^*) ; « bit^la » a leryji of abuse
(for a Btahman generally) (cf. vita; MIA. vitt(h)ala- polluter \
< vistha ?) ; ^cfe « tute » (trntyati) ; ^ « khat^ » (khatva) ;
^t^^ « khate » ^tw^-^, labours, « khatay > ;j7^^* mow^j^ t»
hifsiness (Late Skt. khattayati, < ?) ; ^&t^ « tat^ » (tratra) ;
^ « that^ » .s^j^/e?, maimer (? stha+tra) ; C^Sj « beta »
( ? vetra; cf. vansa farnily) ; ^ft^ « kate » « kute »
jmnuh (kattai, kuttai < x/^^F^" • karttati, kuttati) ; ?^
phate » cracks, « phute » hursts, pricks ("^phattai, phuttai <
Y/sphat(t), sphut(t) < ^spblt) ; C)^t^ « chot& » 5?^?^/^, conn, with
^ « y/chut » scalier ? (chut==-v/*ehrt ?) ; ^t^^tft « katari »
(kartarika) ; 5rt§ « nat^ » (natta < narta, v^nft) ; ^ « bhat^ »
(bharta) ; C*?^§1 « neota » (sneha-vrtta-) ; C^^fe « keot^ »
(kaivartta); MB. f^'^'US « nib&re » (oir-l- ^^vft) ; ^Tf^^l « nag(g)-
^ta » naked (*nagga-vatta-, nagna-vrtta-) ; «aste » smelling
of rank flesh or fish (^alsatia, ^awisawattia-, amisa-vfttika-) ;
C^^St « deuti » (dipa-varttika) ; the affix fel « -ta »j * -ti *
(? vartta-) ; s^^tt « matl » (mfttika) ; ^f^ct « bfttul^ » ^rt//,
sling-stone (varttula) j ''It^S^ <5 aota » stirring {as milk) (avartta-);
C^t^ « m5|a » fat (? murtaka) j « bat^ » (vartma), C^^^ as in
C^cSl C^t^ « beto ghOra » (batua < bat&-, vartma-) ;
« it^ » (isfca) ; ^ « ut^ » (ustra) ; ^*t^ « gliSt^ » (gbf sta) ;
Ifife « pal&t^ » (paryasta) ; etc., etc.
MIA. « -nt- » from OIA. « -nt-^ -f nt- » : #t5t « kSta » (kantaka-) ;
#t^^ «kStal^» jack-fruit (kantala-); ^ « bite »
disfributeSy shares (vantati) ; ^§ « bat^ » teat, c^t§1 « bSta »
foot-stalk of leaf or flower ("^varita-, %onta- = vrnta).
By deaspi ration of « -th- >, we get * -t- » in MB. and NB. : e.g., f^^
« sita » //r<?^« (MIA. sittha-, *sittha- sista-,) ; « at^ » (atha,
attha, a^ta-) ; c5§t « 4li§tsfc » from fti « 4hit(h)?l » (dhf sta-) ;
49i
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER V
« kat(h)^ » (kastha) ; ^ < * lutb?t » (Skt.
-v/lunth) ; ^ « thatta, from the Hind. «thattba»(< ?) ;
etc. Cf. CTt^ « kot^ », ^tfe « ghat^ » etc., above.
Through unvoicing of « d » : vs'l^ « ^tai » 5#a^A-, ^'t^ « ^tl » pestle y
little stick (dandika) ; CljS^I « dbet^ra » proclamafion by heat
of drnniy ef. Hind. « dhand(h)ora ».
In the word *tW^ « pakati > dried jiUe^stalk med asfiiely also ^^t^
« pakati », we have a MB. or NB. case of assimilation of « t »
to a following « k », from 'tt^-'^ttl « pat^-kSthi » (or is it from
'^t^^^t^ « pSk^-kathl », from the jute stalks being soaked
in river or tank beds, « pagka » ?).
NB, « t » in a few eases comes from OIA. « n » in OB. and Early
MB, stss, : e.g,^ C^l « kestli » < ^kfsna », C®|1 « testa » <
« tfsna etc. See under the Nasals.
In the printed text of the Caryapadas, ^ « t » is found consistently
for U « dh(rh) » : €.g., fiffe « dita » for ^ « didha », 5^ « gatai »
for « gadhai », etc. This is certainly a variant form of
the letter u in the alphabet of the Carja MS.^ as the U « dh »
sound remains a voiced aspirate in Early MB.
[t] in foreign words commonly represents the alveolar [/] of English.
See infra, under Tlionology of the Etiglish Element,
269. Bengali [th].
Initial [tb] is from MIA. < th- » derived from —
OIA. « St-, sth- » : ^ * tha » (< v/stha) ; ^ * thai > (sthaman) ;
« thek^ * leaning^ also « tbak^ » (cf . stakati striU against) ;
15^ « thik^ » siandivg, correct^ fixed ^ right (<Y/stha?); if^l
<« tban4a » (*than4ha., *tha44ha^ = stabdha ?) ; ^ « that^ »
(sthatra ?) ; etc.
« th- » is unexplained in a number of words, possibly of deii origin :
^•^v « thak^l, th&g^ » cheat ; « thahar^ » cognisance
of something solid mid standing {hy one of weal eye-sight), cf.
Hind. « thaharnS » ^/^rw^? 4;///^ ; « thakur^l » gody respected
being; iitil, ^ * that(h)a » thunder; <« thar^ » loohing
€
SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI 'TH^ 493
aslance, gesinre, speech \ ^ * v^thas » liiead, presis; W
«th4s&k^* eoiujiielry; « ythuk «v^thok» sirile
gently, as wit/i a rod; ^ « thul! » dlhilers for Worses or oxen ;
* theg(g)a » stick ; * x/thel » piisk ; * tbes^ » ;
C^t^fl « thog(g)a» ; dt^ * t-hona » a blow under ilie chin ;
« thiita » arhdess ; etc.
« th- * is through unvoicing, in « theta » (= dhifctha, dhrsta),
feminine * thgti » (also = ^ tohiie sari worn by widows :
< ?; cf. C^^l, C^^ * ^ena » /^^/a).
* th- » seems to be intrusive in cSTt^ * thSt^ » (< ottha, ostha). In
dsf, ck ^ theg » leg, beside tag », « th- * is probably
due to the aspiration of * t- » (through influence of c^^
* theg(g)a » stick ?).
Medially and finally, [t^] is from—
OIA. « -nth- » : MB. * kathl » (kanthika) ; «siith » (sunthi) :
OIA. « -nth- » through influence of « r » : ^ti * gSth » (granthi) ;
OIA. « -rth- » > * -tth- » in Old Magadhi : eMB. (^KK.)
* ahuth& 1MB. ^srt^ « aut^ »='Ji (MIA. a44huttha < ardha-
caturtha) ; dfti « eautha » (eaturtba-), with cerebralisation
absent in « cauth » in Hindi etc. ; «i3itha» billy-goat <f/oung
of animal, failing (prthuka, ^parthu- ?).
OIA, * -sKb)- * ■ > * agguthi, agti » nw$^ (aggusthika) ;
« kutharl » clumber (kosthagarika); ^t^ « kath^ » (kastha);
C-nt^ * goth^ » (gostha) ; ^t^ « jatha » (yasti) ; C^^l * jetha »
(jyestha-tata) ; ^ « dhlt^ » (dhrsta) ; T^^^^ « nithur^l » (nisthura);
f^li pith^t » (prstha) ; <tJ * put(h)i » « /^// (prosthika) ; ^
«muthi» (musti-) ; fl^ * ritha» (arista-) ; ?til « matha » cm/w
(? mfSta-) ; ft^ « mitha » (mista-) ; Cl^ «seth » (sresthin) ;
^ < sath^ » (sasthi) ; ^fl « lathi » (latthi = OIA. yasti) ; MB,
«beth&n&» turban (as in the * Caitanya- Bhagavata * :
< « vestana ») ; etc.
OIA. « st(h)- » : ^ « athi » ^"^ (asthi) ; * pathay »
sends (pattliavei, prasthapayati) ; « uthan^ » conrt^t/ard (*ut-
494
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
stbana^ Skt. utthana) ; « beth^ low (^adbistat = adbastit :
cf. uparistat).
270. Bengali [4, dR ; r, rR].
Intervocal « d, 4^ » have a liquid' pronunciation — that of the
so-called cerebral « r » — in all Indian languages, Aryan or Dravidian.
In the northern languages (Bengali, ' BibSri/ Hindostaol, Fanjabi,
Sindbl), the « r » pronunciation is indicated in orthography ^, j etc.) ;
in Gujarat! and Marathi, the script does not recognise the « r » modifi-
cation, any more than the Dravidian alphabets. The « r » pronunciation
is at least as old as the Transitional MIA. period (see supra, p. !^49), and
it is a sort of link in the change of « -4-, -!-, -I- » to « -r- » and vice-versa^
in MIA. and NIA. (cf. Pischel, §§ :^38, ^40, 241, 258), The liquid
pronunciation of « r » never occurs initially ; and the stop « d » occurs in the
interior of words only when it is doubled (except in loan-words, like those
from English, where we find single intervocal stop « -d- »). In East and
North Bengali, in Assamese, and even in portions of West Bengal (in Mur-
shidabad district, for instance), « d > r » is reduced to « r » ; and « r, r »
are confused in some class dialects in different parts of Bengal.
« -4h- > -rh- » became deaspirated to r » in Late MB. (see p. 44f2).
271. Bengali [d], initially, is from MIA. « d- » (except where the
eerebralisation is a late phenomenon in Bengali), mainly in desi words,
and in some cases from OIA. « d- », with or without influence of « r » :
s53f « 4ar?l » fear (dara) ; ^5t^1 « 4aba », \5t^^ « 4^b&-r^ » a roimd vessel
(darvl ?) ; « 4ull » (ddlika) ; C\5W * 4^gga » (? droni :
probably dehJ); *y/^k\* press, rub (v/dal) ; \5«ll « 4&^a »
lump (dalaka- ?) ; ^ « 4*1^ * branch (*4alla=dru, daru ?) ; \5t^,
* 4*1> 42^il •'j beside earlier tftt'f, ftf^ « dail, dali » split
pulse (dalita) ; \5t^ « 4^1™^ », beside W\^^ * darim^ »
(da4ii^ha) ; C5t^ « 4or^ » sfri?i^ (ef . doraka, 4^^^^*) ; CS^
« 4^?^ * beside CW «der^» (^4ia44ha, dia44ha = dvyardha) ;
NB. J\5t^ * dar^t » beside « dar^ » oar (dan4a) ; v5t*f * dis?t »
(dansa) ; N5t5^ * 4ahuk^ » (cf . Skt. datyuha) ;
9
SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI D'
495
« dumur^ » (adambara) ; \5tT^»^, ^t^, ^t^ * da(h)in^, dan^ »
(daksina) ; OB. « dadhi- » bnnit rice (^daddhia, dagdhika) ; MB.
sts, ^St^^l « 4*?»ita ^fetters (daruka), etc.
Initial « (J- » is found in CSf? « ^om^ » (in Sanskrit <}omba),
« dim^ » (dimba), OB. « daudha », NB. dtTi « 4h5ra » a w^er-
snalie (by transference of aspirate) (^^untjluha, 4^'^4"bl^^j
dandubha)^ ^^t^^^ « damadol^ » tnmuit (ef» 4^mara), etc. ;
but these seem to be of dehl origin, like the following^ . which
are some of the typical « d- » words of Bengali : e.g., \5t^
« v^dak » skont ; ^ « \/dub » 5zwA: (cf. MIA. budda=Beng. ^
« v/bur ») ; ^t^^ * ^^g&r?'' * CS^^t « dek^ra » ungainly ,
loittish ; v5f il « d4h&r?l » fZ^rqt? ; v5^^1 « d&b^kS » i?^.ro;;/, ef . vS^nS^
« d^tb^d&be » j?«Vy, v5t^ « dab^ » coco-nut ; \5?ft « (Jig* »
end of a branch \ ^St^f « dag », ^t^'l « dag(g)&s^ » 9i{cl\pi7i^ goad,
conn, with « diiijklk » biting ] \5t?1 « daha » complete, efifirei
vS^^I > C^S « d&hua > deo » a fruity cmtard-api^le ;
« 4^'i?lr2fc » ^0 blubber out ; OT^?, C^^ « i^xs^^y 4^P^ » sprout,
young of snahe ; CB\^, C5t«l « 4^^^^ d&ul^ » ^/^/z;?!? ; C59f^ « deg-
g&r^ » vifll « disa » half -ripe {as fruit) (= ^/^«^
6tf bitten hard, < y/dans ?) ; \lt^ * 4Sto » stiff, able*,
(=dan4a- ? : see p. 492 snpra) ; « dala » a basket ; ponr^
throw (ef . I?t=11 * 4hala » joo2^;-) ; f^l « dig(g)a » boat, to step or
cross over something (conn, with «4^9(»)** above ?); "fe^l,
fef^^l « 4iba, 4ibiya » ronnd box (conn, with above ?) ;
^ « ^\xm2t » a square slice ; « 4^>^ * house, tent ;
CSt^l « 4^^^ * puddle (conn, with ^y^^^^* sin]{ ?) ;
« 4^1?^ * drmn-shaped pot or buchet ; C^5t^?11 « t^ok^la »
spendthrift (conn, with C^S^^I «dek^(ra» above ?) ; etc.
Medially and finally, [4>r] is from —
OIA. « -t- commonly from « -rt- », or de'sl sources, >MIA « -d- » :
« akb^ra » (aksa-vata-) ; * kar^ » ri7ig, bracelet (kata,
kf ta) ; MB. ^t^(t) « kanftr(a) » (karnataka-) ; « c&re (ca4ai,
catati) ; « eira » (cipitaka- ) ; ^ « y^jur » (\/yut) ; ^
496
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
« jhar^l » (jhata) ; *tp5 « pure » (putati) ; ^C^, ^f^l « kure,
kuriya » (k«t!-) ; ^ « kb&ri * chal^ (khatika) ; ^1
« gh&ra » (ghata-) : C^t^ « ghora» (ghotaka-) ; ^ « dh&r^ »
(dbata : dhf ta) ; 's^ « n&r^ » /Zawff^r > a cade (nata : nrtu ) ;
MB. fir?^ « niy&r?l » (nikata) ; * P^r* » (petaka-) ;
« beyara » (vikata-) ; « barl » (vatika : >v/vrt) ; ^ft
« b&rl » (vatika) ; ?t^^ « bahure » returns (vyaghutati) ; 'S^
« bhiy^ » soldiery servant > a surname ; a kind of boat (bhata,
<bbfta) ; MB. cft^ « miufll » (mukufca) ; y{tf{ « sari » (satika);
(MV^ « tore » (trotayati) ; CW\US « phore » (sphotayati) ;
< phare » (sphatayati) ; etc., etc.
OIA. « -4- » : « gur^l » (gu4a<?) ; CWt^ as in JClt^H «chor5n^ »
% (cf. ehotayati sj^lits, opens < ychut) ; ^ « nir?t » (Dl4a) ;
C^Ttr^ * khOre » ^?V7« (ksoda-) ; ^Tlft « nari (na4ika) ; ^
« bar^sl ^fish-hook (ba^isa-) ;
OIA. « 4y- * : ^t^ * jar^ * ^^^^^ (ja44a, 3a4ya) ;
OIA. * -4r- » : * ure < uriya » (044laa-, Audriyaka-) ;
C^t^1 « bora » fl^ large snake (vodra-) ; ^ « burl » one fourth of
a pamty \th of 80=^20 (vo4ri) ; ^ * b&r& » % (Late Skt.
va4ra < ? ; but probably < vata-, vf ta) ;
OIA. < -n- »>MIA. « beur^ » o^* iaw^ioo (cf. Pali
velu = venu); ^i?t5 «pahar^ » //^7^ (cf. pasana) ;
OIA, « -nd- » : « kiir^ » (kun4a) 5 ^t? * kir^ » arm<; (k5n4a) ;
« khSr^ » molassesy « khSra » ^^aiy^ sacrificial sioord
(khan4a.) ; t|C? «cblre » (ehin4ati) j It^^ « cftral^ » (can4ila) j
« ar^ » (an4a) ; « nar^ » (landa) ; OB., MB. 'Itfis^
« pan4ia », NB. '^ffC^' « pSre » a iAV/>^ Indian Brahman (pan-
4ita- ) ; ^"t^ « pbir^l » circumference (phanda, phan4a belly <1) ;
^V?t^ * bhlrar^t » (bhgn4&gara) ; 'ir?='ft^ « » (nian4a) ;
« sur^ » (sun4a) ; tt^ « sar^ » (sanda) ; etc. ;
OIA. « -n<Jr. » : « pur^ » sugar-cane^ a tribe (pundra) ;
OIA. « -t- mainly in connection with « f , r » ; *lf^%,
« p&r(i)si » (prative^in) ; MB. "^ift^l * pirteha » (pratlksaka-) ;
SOURCES OP NEW BENGALI 'R^
497
so 'tfvb- «pari»<« prati- » in MB. ^^tf^^t^ « p^rihae > (pratibhati),
*^T^T^ < parihasa- » (pratihasa-), etc. ; '^US « pare * (patiai,
*patati, patati) ; ?.f^ * pharig » (Pali patagga, patani^a) ; ^^^i,
« bayrai <bahera » (MIA, bahe(Jaa- = vibhitaka); also ^t^\51
« am^ra » (amrataka), f*f^T^ « sig(g)ara » (sfngatata, -taka),
etc. ; Magadhi Pkfc. « garja » (gata) i^? on the model of « kada,
mada » (^kata, mata = krta, mrta) : this « ga'.'a » is found in the
ilB. of the ISKK. (see p. footnote). Cf. 7f^^ « sarak^ »
nmd (sfta, A> f/o). The OIA. < -t- »> MIA., NI A. * -r- »
words should properly come under this heading. The common
IMIA. and NIA. pleonastic affix « -c?- > =eMIA, -« -t-
seems to have been * «ta- » in OIA. : see ////>a, under ^formative
Affixes.'
OIA. «-dd- > -dd- * > MIA. « -4^J- » > beng. « -r- » : « ure »
(uddayati, ud + dayati).
OIA. «-dr. » > MIA. * *-dd- * : "^fjl * khura » (^khudda-, ksudra-
tata) ; *rr?1 « para » rillaf/e quarter (padra xilloge^ cf . Yata-padra-
> Vafjavadda > ^"afjod- = Baroda in Gifjarat) ;
OIA. « -nd- » : ^t^t% * sarasi » (MIA. *sandansia, Skt. sandaiisika) ;
OIA. « -rt- (-ft-) » : see under « -t-, -t- » above.
OIA. «-rd- »>MIA. « -dd- » : ^v5l «klira» (kaparda-) ; ^fC? « chare »
(chardati) ; sjjc^ « mare » poimds fas in a?i cqiothecaryh mortar)
(mardati) ;
OIA. « -1- » > « -1- » > « -d- » : ;5t^ « tari » fermented daie-pahn
juice ^ * toWy ^ (tala, ^talika).
Through deaspiration, intervocal and final [rRj has in all eases become
[r] in NB. : see under [rfi], below.
The following are some of the unexplained words with interior [d >
r] ; they are probably of dehl origin : ^ « ^/er » give up, « v' nar »
move^ ^ * v/ mur » fold : all these three roots are found in Dravidian
(Tamil) ; '^t^ « ar^ » eross-ivise, screeu, whence ]\TB. ^t^t*ft « arani » liiklrella,
NB. '^rrst'^ « aral^ » obstruction ; ^v5^\5l « adda » d7«^, rendezvous ; ^t^5f^1
« ar^gi.ra » statj/eit ; ^ « khar^ also* «kher^ » .>f/ra/6*, ./V/e?/, ^f^^t
63
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
« kh&r?lkiya » foof/i-jnck of rushes ; f^^^ « khir^ki » toindo%v, back-door
(MIA. kbajakkl) j * kli^r^^ * bracelet (khacjdu-) ; garu » era^^^r-
^01? ; « v/ga>r » to roll, whence ^fN^t « garl » carriage,
« gariyan » sloping ground ( = illA. ga'l(Ja : see p. 66) ; ^ « ger^ »
sprout ^ govi ^ foot goA'a), C^t^ * gora » beginning ciVS
< %^ri ^ flesJuj navel (see p. 07) : C^t^i « gSra » bigoted partisan;
^t^ * ghar^ >, OB. « ghata > neck} C^W? * coar^ rufiau (see p. 71);
^TSt « Dari > ; MB. irt<5l,. « nar(h)a NB. C^TSl « nera »
shaven-head) ^ffvs « par^ » e/zzV/, excessive-, % « para » buffalo;
« phSra » impending danger, Inch/ escape ; fe^ « bhir^ » croivd ; « \/lar »
/>//^; cit^^ < laru » stveet-,neat (MIA. latj^ju-) ; * hoi^ > competition,
slippery (ef. ^^T^r? * hurahuri » shaking and imshing) ; « har^ » io?^<?
(= Late Skt. ha VJa-) ; etc., etc.
[d-, -cj-] in foreign woids represents the alveolar \d\ of English ; also
the Persian dental « d » in f^f? * dihi » district, area (dih count ij), C«f^
« deg » caldron (deg).
272. Bengali [r.fi]. Initially, it is from —
OlA. « fib- » : 1^^, CUt^ « dhuke, dh5ke » 6>«^^r.s (y^dhauk > MIA.
dhokkai approaches) : but cf. f, next page ;
OlA. < dhr- » in « dhlt^ » (dhrsta);
OlA. «*-rtb-»: fu^l « dhila » (MIA. « dhilla- » = « "^sidhila-,
^sithila* beside Ski. « sithila » < «*sfthila»: but this
derivation is very doubtful) ;
OIA. « sth- » : UtC^ « dhake ^ (« dhakkai < ^thagati < sthagati » :
very doubtful).
In C^W^ « 4h8ra » « 2ra/<?r 5«^/Ar^, we have « dh » through aspiration :
see ante, p. 425.
In most « dh- >, however, as in those given above, the etymology is
doubtful : « dh- » words are mostly dest. Typical Beiigali words : ^
« dh&g » stt/le, manner, gallantry, coquetry ; UWf^ * dhamali » revelry, orgy,
also ^rt^rtf^ * dbamah » ; B^Ti « dbana » jij^//^', ^tv/iA:; « v^dhal » slope,
to lean, to Jloto ; Ut^ « (Jhak^ » (Skt. (jhakka<?) ; I^l^ft « dhag(g)a» tall ; l?t*l
« dhal^ » ; l?fC^ « 'lhale > ponrs, Ff^ «f;halu » sloping, conn, with 1?^ ;
^DH'; SOURCES OF ^ RH, R" 499
l^'t^l « f.'haca » y>;m, nhnpe (aUo = §t5l) ; « y/*. hika » he iveart/ (ef.
Skt. dhiks) j 1^*1 « dhip » 50?/^^^/ of cornet king faUhig (cf. \/cjip = ksepane) ;
IFf^ « {;hibi » mound, Cl^^^ « uhebua » a > a voia {stamped bit of
copper) ; fl?^#t « fjlub^ii » cuvl^-iro?i ; f^l « (liima » ^/ozr ; « dhil^ > clod,
piece of stone ; « Y/dhul » /wore and/roiv {as a choicrifj, doze, )iod one^s
head in sleepy g'vS « y^t.hur » (MIA. <;hanriliai) ; 1? «.^hu » liittiiff/ itith
ihe head, 5^ « Y/cjhus » ?rz7// ///e? head, gore; QS^ < (jheu > ware; Clf^^
^ (Jh§ki » rice-jmuiding machine, lever machine ; C^§^1 « dhltgtra » proclama-
tion hif heat of drum; > belching \ (^^^ « f;h§riks^ » «
vegetable, ' lady* s fingers^ « dh?ri » seed-pod {of the p^oppy), an ear-orna*
meni ; 05^1 « fjheka » push (cf. ^Jt^1 « dhakka ») ; C13^»T « dheman^i* a ivanton
or characterless person ; C15^5l, -^1 « dhemca, -sa » musical instrument, beside
*!t^^\ « dhag^sa » ; Cl;^ « dher^ » ;;/'7^i7^, ej'censire, a heap; Q^^l «f.hGra»
scrawl; Oy\ ^ ^oho » remove ar fides; cUt^ « dhol^ » //r7o« (i/^dv (Jbolla) ;
cut®! * (Jljol^ » surname (cf. Saur. A p. (Jiolla- lover) ; etc.
Medialk, [dfi = rfi] of OB., reduced to [d > 1], comes from —
OIA. « -th- » (generally < « rth *) > MIA. « -db- » : '^i^ >
« p&rhe > plire » (pathali < v^prath) ; ^ITt^ > ^t^, f?^
« *kurhall > kural^, kurul » (kutbara- < ^kultbara, cf. Latin
culter) ; > « \/i?arb, gar » //a7/(y, fihajje (v/gatb,
0L\. « -dh- »: MB. ^ffFi « ^arha » (gadba-) ; Jf^ > <c daph^ >
dara » (drdha-) ; ^t?l > "^T^l « arba > ara » a grain weasnie
(adhaka-) ; *C^ft > fj^'^t « ^serbi > siri » steps > (sredin-) ;
OIA. * -st(h> * > Early MIA. * -ttb-, >tb_>> Second and Late ML\.
« -dh- »: ^t?1 >^t^ « \/karba > Y/k^V^ » snatch nivay, raise {a
shout) (kj->ti-); *fT% > ^f^ < ^kurni > kuri » (kustba-); trt?1
>Vffv5l « darba > dara » (danstra-); ^ft'it > ^ft^'t « darbi > daii »
tonv/ (danstrika); C^^l > C^^1 « berba > bcra » (vesta-) ; >
« niarba > maral » in which rice is hoil^d (mrsta) ;
?(vft « lurl, nurl » pebble (lo-ta- : see p. 307) ; etc.
OIA. « -fdh-, -rdh- » > Ma^^adbl MIA. « - /.b- *: > ^t?^
« ar(h)at^ » ^/or^', 7napazine (rddha- : ef. ajbya) ; > ^TtT^
500
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER V
« b5r(h)e » (va .^dhai, vaniliafce) ; > « bur(h)a »
(vfddha-) ; ^tC^ > ^U"^ « g:ir(h)e » y)//^v A(f// (*saf Vhahi <
sardha-) ; -^^^t^ > ^f^t * ^arhai > arai » 2i (^a^Jdha-titlja,
ardba-trtlya) ; « ar<^ », probably from *^t? « arh^r » (atjdha,
ardba-), as in '5i'|^-5iT;5i?f| « ar^-m5t^la » half-drmik^ ^t^-^l't'll
« nr^-pagfjtla » half -m ad y ^j^-ft^t^ « ar^-cibSii& » half*chev)edy
etc. ; > ^T?^ «barhai > bariii » (vardhakin) ; > ^'pf^
«barhana > baran^» broom , as in the street-cry %v5l-^i^5T « blra-
baran^ » pnl^resfs {of straw = vita-) brooms (vardhana) ;
etc. The word ^ « %hv\\k », NB. « w&r^ » seems to
be from a ' Mas^adhl ' or Praeya « ^s^a.ha » < OIA. « *crfdha »
(whence possibly the Vedie and Skt. « gfha, geha », due to
Prakritisations) = Indo-European <t *gb}'dho- », ef. Slav « gradu »
2'o?(7;?j etc, (Cf. C. C. Tlhlenbeek, * Etymologisches Worterbueh
der altindischen Spraebe/ Amsterdam, 1899, under «gfha»;
T. Bloeh in the ' Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of
India for 1006-07,' p. 126, foot-note; A. Walde, * Lateinisches
etym. Worterbueh/ Heidelberg, 1910, under « cohors »).
The « -;>h- » in * radha » is obscure : a conneetiou with a « ^radCba
< rattha < rastra » does not seem convincing. 5^ * -^/earh » r/V/^*, is
found in Hindi, and seems to he due to aspiration of 5^ « s/^hX » (attested
in the SaurasenI Apabhransa fragments in Hema-candra's grammar) =
« -v/cat» in Skt. (< crta ?).
Ts, words have « r-h- » and « -^Jh- > -rh- » : « diiakka », ^5
« murh^ », ^??I^T?1 * naborha '^it^^ « arurha », etc.
(4) The Dental Stops and Aspirates [t, th, d, dfi].
273. The dentals do not present any difficulty. Barring cases of
cerebralisation (which was native MagadhT), and palatalisation in connexion
with « -y- » (which was non-llagadhl), and a few instances of labialisation
in connexion with a labial or denti-labial (which also was non-Magadhi),
the dentals have had a uniform history. The non-cerebralised forms in
SOURORS OF NEW BENGALI 'T' iOl
eases where we have precedins: « r » in OIA. are apparently old loan-words
from the Midland and Western dialects.
Bengali [t] .
Initially, [t] is from MIA. « t- », coming from —
OIA. «.t-»: MB. ^ «t&r4» (tata, ^fta)! « tal^I » (tala);
^'^!9 « t&r^su » (tirah-svah) ; ^1 « ta » (tapa), also « tao » ;
« tat^ » (tantra, tantu) ; s « tat^ » (tapta) ; vsjC^ « take *
(tarkayati) ; < taje » (tarjati) ; « tan » (tala-) ;
fs^ «tita » (tikta-) ; f^^T * tilgl * (tila) ; C^^i « tel^ » (taila) ; Cotcq
« tdle » (tolayati), etc.;
OIA. « tr- » : f^^ « tin = tin » (tlnni, trTni) ; « te- » (tri-, tray-) ;
C^iU5 « tore » (trotayati) ; C^f^ also c5t^ « tori, tori » « Baginl
(trotika, tocjika) ;
OIA. « tv- » : « tiii » (tvaya-, tva-) ; ^fw^ « turit^ » (tvarant-) ;
OIA. « y- », by analogy changed to « t- » in MIA.: ^ft « tumi »
(tumhe, *tumhahi = yusma-, yusmabhih).
In the interior of words, [t] is from —
OIA. « -gkt- » > MIA. « -nt- » : "^ftf^ « pati » row^ a line, an
opt fi ion (paijkti) ;
OIA. « -tt- » : ^^^^ < utlire » (uttarati) ; spfs « mat^
« matalqt * (matta) ; #5, fs^ « bhit, bhit » (bhitti) ;
OIA. « -t- » with accent following > MIA. « -tt- » : 1%^ « jit^ »
r/c/orj/, also f^^ < ^/jiit » u'in (jitta, jita) ; cf, « pit&l^l »
(pittala > pita) ;
OIA. « -t- » with spontaneous nasalisation > ^IIA. « -nt- » : C^t^
« s8ta » current, OB. « sonta- » (sonta, siGtas) ; « puti »
strl^ifjed in ormanenfs (? pontia = "^pr5tika, prota) ;
OIA. « -tr- » > MIA. «-tt-»; ^t^f^ « arati » (aratrika); ^^t^
« karat^ » (karapatra) ; C^t^, CT^ « khet^ » (k:etra) ;
«kh&nta» (khanitra-); ilB. -sft® « gat& » fgatra) ; §t^, f5^1
« clta, cita » leopard (citmka-) ; 5T^^ « earit^ » (caritra) ; 5t^1%
« catuti » suniaide (catta-putra) ; ^nsI « chata » (chatra-) ; MB.
^t^^ « jayatl » horoscope (jata-patrika) ; ^t^1> ^'t^l « jIta »
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTEK V
(yantra-) ; MB. « elmtar^ » (siitra-dhara) ; « net^ »
Ji/ie clof/i (nefcra) ; « pai'ta » sacred thread (pavitm-) ;
« pat^ » (patra) ; 'J^:® «c put?t » (putra) ; « bet^ » (vefcra) ;
MB. ^f^^, C^f?^ « buhita, bohita » (vahitra) ; sftf^s « mahut?l »
elephant 'driver (raahamatra) ; g;^ « mut^ » (mutra) ; ^tf^,
« rat(i) » (ratri) ; « -tls^ » (-trinsat) ; etc., etc. ;
OIA. « -kt- » > MIA. * -tt- » : ^t^v5l « al^ta » (alakta-) ;
« chatu » (saktu-) ; fN^^I « tita » (tikta-) ; « bhat^ »
(bhakta) ; C^ft^ > MB. « moti > muti » (mauktikaj ; ^f^
« rati » (raktika), from the Hind. « ratti » ; ^t^) « i-ata », ^t§«T
« ratulj^ » (rakta-) ; C^^t^ « setan& » moistened (sikta-) ;
OIA. « -ktr- » > MIA. « -tt- » : CSrt® « jot^ » /am, ^\5l « juta »
.s/^o-? (yoktra-) ;
OIA. « -tt- » > MIA. « -tt- »; « chibttis^* (sattriusat), beside
the ds^ ^fef^^f, ^fe^ « chatt(i)ris^ ».
OIA. « -nt-, -ntr- » > MIA. « -nt- » : -^t^ « at^ » (antra) ;
« urut^ » //u*^// (p. 325) ; MB. #tf% « kiti » (kanti) ; « tat^>
(tantra, tantu) ; tf^ « dat^ » (danta) ; « bahut^ » mitch^
excemve^ many (? bahu-vant-) ; MB. ^tf^ « bbati » (bhranti) ;
Tts^^l « saotal^, saotal^ » Santa/ = horder-lribe (samanta-pala) ;
^t^^l « slt^ra » a surname (samanta-raja) ; f^Y^ « slti » (siiiianta-);
etc. The locative affix ^5, C« « -ta, -t^, -te » (< anta, anta + hi) ;
the dative post-position « t&re » (antara + hi); etc. The
MIA. affix « -anta » o£ the present participle has given « -it- »
in Bengali : see pp. 132, -^35. Cf. 2rt|f% > ^ifT^^it « maiti <
mahiti » a surname (mahanta- + -ika : Oriya mahiti) ;
OIA, « -pt- » > MIA. « -tt- » : sitr% « nati * (^nnptrika = naptf ) ;
fi?^f% « nisuti » (nisupta-) ; l^fs « bin&ti » (vijnapti-) ;
« sat^ » (?apta^ ; ^C^^ « saterS, » (sapta-dasa) ; (in «satt&t^»,
til^^ « ekattar^ » etc., we have « -tt- » in NB. for OIA.
« -pt- ») ; « ^/sut » -^leep (supta) ; etc.
OIA. « -rt- » > MIA, « -tt- * : MB. « kati » (karttika) ; OB.
«'gati » (garta-) ; ^tf% « bati » (vartika).
SOURCES OF NEW BEXGALI ^T^
503
In %^ « clmt^ » poUation, nntonchaljiliff/^ we have [t] through
unvoicing and deaspi ration of « -dh- », from OB. « ehudha » (ksubdha),
with influence of i/^^, * cho »
In C^t^^sl < bol^ta » wasp, it seems we have [t] from « -t- » or « -U »
(okt. varata, varala; Hind, bavra).
[t] is intrusive in ^^^^1, ^^^1, f^^!^, ^t'f^''^1, SftsitN^^Sl « jath-t-uta,
khur-t-uta, pis-t-uta, m5s-t-uta, mama-t-uta » comins, children of fatherh
elder brother^ ijounger Iroiher, cnid sisier, and of moilier^s sister, and brother
re^jyeciirelij, side by side with C^^^1; f^^^l etc. « jeth-uta, khur-uta,
pisu-ta » etc. (<* jethauta, khurauta, piusiuta: j \ estha-tata*putra, ksudra-
tata-putra, pitr-svasrika-putra^ etc.)
[t] is found for « st * in a few MB. : fvsf^ « tiri » (stri),
« t§in§ » (stana).
[t] occurs in -v/,v. forms, e.g.^ ^^f^ « 3«gati >, also ^f^< « j^gi*?'' •
(yukti); ^t^j^ « batas^ » (vata-) ; MB. ^Y^-^ * v'patiy^- » (pratyaya-).
It is found also in some is. affixes, liket^ « -ita- » : e.g., «!|f^^ « th&k-it& »
(v/th&k to he at stand'Still). In /-v. words, there is * doubling ' of the [t]
in the groups « -tm-, -ty-, -tr-, -tv- », also in « -thy- » : 6?.//., [dtta],
, ^^J1 [fiotta^], ?IT1^^ [rattri], f^^ [ditto], mjl [niitthie].
In the word f^f^f^fil « bitikicchi » i^^;, (=r vicikitsa-), we have
an uncommon change of « -e- » to [t], to avoid repetition of the « c »
. sound ; cf. also folk-Bengali f%1%C^ « tikieche » (= cikitsa).
Intervocal [th] tends to deaspirate, and a number of forms like
« hat^ » (for eMB. « hathli ») have dropped the aspiration quite early.
The English alveolar [f] is normally represented by the cerebral [t' in
Bengali, but we find the dental in a few cases : ejj., \5tl?t^ « (Jaktar »
doctor; ft^^t^St^ « hSspatal > hosjntal ; ^t^f^i? < larpin » tiuyenii^ie, etc.
. For [t] in loan-words from the Persian, Portuguese, French, English,
see infra.
274. Bengali [th]. Initially, [th] is from—
OIA. « st-, sth- » : * tb^r^ » (stara) ; MB. « lhah& » (stagha) ;
MB. « jlhana » (stana) ; ^l^Jl « thana » (sthana-) ; « tham^ »
(stambha) ; ^tC^ « thake » remainf^^ tf/vv/s/.s one-s-elf (^/stha?;
504
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
v/stabh- + v'^kr y * ^^^^i » (sthira) ; * thal^ » plafe (cf.
sthall) ; C^V^ * thoy * (stLapavati) ; C^t^l * thora » (stoka-) ; siss.
f^^l « thita » .suLsiile, f^^ « thitu » establUIied (sthita-) ;
In the word ^^^?r « th&r^thai^ » irewUiny^ .shaUuf/, cf. MIA. « thara-
harai » tremblea^ the origin of Ihe [th] is not clear. In « thuk^ »,
^> * thut(h)u » xpiifle^ it is clearly onomatopoetic, [th] is of unknown
origin in the following (probably de'sl) words : « thata-mata » taken
aback (conn, with « stabdha » ?) ; « tbiil », « tlias », //^^ idea of
Jlabbinesfi (prob. onomatopoetic); « thaba » with which are connected
«^rt^1 « thab^rS ^t?f^ « thappar^ » xUip, etc. ; f^l^ « thik » 0/
teemuf/, as 0/ ?ria////o(s (onomatoj)oetic ?) ; ^^f^ > fs « thiit(h)i
« thut^n! » c7/2';7, C^t^1, C^t^^ * th6t(h)a c/an; ^] « ^/thui-a,
^thura » (af^y h/eaf) ; «thubra » to tinnhle down face fonvardy
iotterutfj old person ; C^xst^ « th?tana extended to « thet^lanfi. »
po7mt, to mash : c?^t^1 « thoba » ^«wt// (< stabaka ?) ; C^ft^ « thor^ » /7?w^r
0/ the jjlantaui tvee^ etc.
In the interior of words, [th] is from —
01 A. « -tth- » : « asathgt » (asvattha) ; tc^ « itbe » (ittha-) ;
^|<^f, * ka(ye)tb^ (kapittha) ; « kul^thl » (kulattha-);
^'T%^1 « tutiya » from ^^^R^l « *tuthiya * (tuttba-).
OIA. * .tr- » : C^^^l * hetha » (atra^), c^^?rl « jetha » (yalra-) (?).
OIA.«-nt-»: f^TR, f^f^^l « slthi, sitha beside fjffe, pTnSI « siti,
sita » (simanta-) ; cf . Maithili « karathi, bhanathi » etc. = MIA.
« karanti, bhananti ».
OIA, « -rth- » > MIA. « -tth- » : 'Si\% Jptt^ « sath^, sathe » company,
in company with (sftrtha-) ; C5t^ « c&uth^ » (eaturtha), a non-
Magadhi form.
OIA. « -st(h)- » : * nath^t » (nasta) ; ^t^t^^ « athant§.rgl »
(avasthantara) ; MB. ^tn. ^t^^ifl « ab&tha » (avastha); ^tl^<^,
?FtC5^ « kayet(h)?l » (kayastha) ; ^t^^ « path&r^t » (prastara) ;
^f^r, \\'^\ «pufeln, piithi » (pustika; seep. 19-1); [MB. X'^^V^
« p^ithan^ » (pada-sthana) ; ^t'^ft^ « bathan^ » cov:-pen (? vasa-
sthana) ; ^iiofj « matha » (mastaka-) ; ^51 « mutha » (musta-) ;
SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI ' D ' 505
MB. * hatha » > NB. * hat^t » (hasta) ; *sithan?l ^
(siras-sthana) : etc.
[th] occurs ia is, words : « katha », <S^^^ « pratham^ ^^1
tha » [jgotha], etc*
In foreign words : the English spirant sound of [tf] regularly becomes
in Bengali.
275. Bengali [d]. Initially, it is from —
01 A. « d- » : MB. C^f « de » ( = deva, deha) ; Wt^ « dSt^ * (danta) ;
?rt^ « dap^ » (darj)*) ; i^tv^ « dSr^ » (dan^a) ; MB. fwiS « dithi »
(dfsti) ; H « das^ » (dasa) : MB. CW^ * deya» sk^, clotid (deva-)^
« dukh^ » (duhkha) ?ft^ * dara » (danstra-) ; C^?t
« deuti » (dipa-vartika) : C^f^ « ^/dekh » (drks-) ; «dlghal^ »
(dirgha-la-) ; %^ « dudh^ » (dugdha) ; C^ft^l « dona » ieaf-pacM
(damanaka-) ; etc.
OlA. « dr- » > MIA. « d- » : /Tfh? « x/^aur » (drava-da : see
pp. 34*5, 348) ; « dam^ » (dramya < Greek drakhme) ;
OIA. « dv- » > MIA. « d- » : ^ * du- » (dvi-) ; ^*ff^, sfc^f « dudia,
dude » qiutrrehome, maderfid, -sfronf/ (dvandva-); ^Hl « duna »
(dviguna-) ; - iftfl, -C? « dia > de » (dvlpa-).
In the interior of words, [d] is from —
OIA. « -dd-, -dr- * > MIA, « -dd-, -nd- » : C^t'ft^ « kodal^ »
(kuddala < ?) ; ^srtwl « ada » (ardraka-) ; ^Jf in ^5f-f^N5t^ « ud^-
biralgt » otter, Yit. ' otter -cat'' (ndra);%, H^?f « nid^, nind^ »
(nidra) ; OB. * bhada » (bhadra) ; MB. ^Jfft « mudari » rz?2^
(mudra-) ; ^^«t * halud^ » (haridra) ; C^C«f1 as in NB. C'ltOfI
^ofrtH sod6-bhasan§, » a fedival^ when toy boats with lights are
floated in rivers or fanls (*saudua < *sawuddua < samudra-+
-uka- ?) ;
OIA. « -dm- » > MIA. « -dd- > : « chad^ » roof (chadma ? see
infra, next page).
OIA. «-dv-»: lt?^l, C^'^^l «chad^Ia, ehet^la » sli'*e
(? sadvala- : see under C^^^1, p. 181).
OIA. « -bd- » > MIA. « -dd- » : OB. « sada » (sabda) ;
64
506
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
OIA. « -nd- » : Ct^f « chad^ » (chanda) ; « nanad^ » (nananda) ;
f^"?? « sldur^t » (sindura) ;
OIA. « -ndr- » > MIA. « -nd- » : « chSd^ » (candra) ;
OIA. « -rd- » > MIA. « -dd- »j a non-Magadhi change:
« ada » (ardraka) ; ^t^j ^t^?l * kada, kado » (kardama) ;
« kude » (kurdati < ? ) ; « cftudd& » (catardasa) ;
^ « pad^ » (parda) ; ^t?^ « bad&l^ » (vardala < ? ) ; Tt?^
« madal^ » (mardala); etc.
[d] is intrusive and euphonic in ^fvt^ « badargt probably borrowed
from the Hind. « bandar » (vanara); of. Wt^^^ « jSdrel » /iii(/e, hig =r
Hind. « jandral » < English general.
[d] for [ J5] we get in SRtt « daoiii * fo** * ja^^i * ( =
jan&rdana); ^t^f^ « gad^Ia », probably for ^t^^l « gSj^la » scum, froth
Chittagong ^t'ftt^ « rad^t-bls^ » for ^t^|t^ « raj^-hSs^ » ; and
probably Tt^fl « dagga » /^/^Z, is a variant of Persian « jang » hattle.
Through voicing of [t(h)], we get [d] in a number of words: e.g.,
^^^f « asud^ » = < as&th^ > (asvattha) ; « kad^-bel^ » for
^C?^-C^ * kayeth^-bel^ » (kapittha-bilva), through progressive assimi-
lation ; « chad^ » roof seems rather to be from the voicing of the
dental in « chat^ » (chatra), rather than from a form like OIA.
« chadma » (see above, under « -dm- »). NB. [d] through deaspiration of
final and intervocal [dfi] is exceedingly common.
In tss,, [d] is retained : and in « -dm-, -dy-, -dr-, -dr- ; -dhm-, -dhr-,
-dhy-, -dhv- the stop is lengthened in tss,
[d] in foreign words: see irtfra, English spirant [8] becomes [d].
276. Bengali [dB]. Initially, from —
OIA. « dh- » : «R « dh&n^ » (dhana) ; ^ « dhSn^ » (dhanya-) ; MB.
« dhire » (v/dhr) ; « dhune » (dhunoti) ; « dhftnl »
woman (^dhanika) ; OB. •« dham^ > (dharma) ; ?fj^ « dhay »
(dhavati) ; « dhoy > (dhavayati) ; « dhua » (dhuma-) ;
« dhlila » (dhavala-) ; C^Tt^, C^TW « dhokha > dhQka » to
he weary y to pant (v^dhuks-) ; ^ « dhar^ » iorm (dhfta-) j C^tfl
« dhosa » « looollen stuff (dhusa-) ^fe « dhuti » (dhotra-) ;
SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI ' DH '
507
^*t^ « dhadha » (dhandlia- < ?) ; ^ * dhuna > (dhupana-) ;
^1 « dhula * (dhuli-) etc. ;
OIA. « dhr- » > MIA. « dh~ » : ^1 « dhua » refrain (dhruva-) ;
01 A. * dhv- » > MIA. « dh. » : ^f^T « v/db&s * (dhvas) ; MB. ^
« dhuni » (dhvani).
Medially —
OIA. « -gdh- » > MIA. « -ddh- » : ^^1 « dudh^ » (dugdha) ;
OIA. « -ddh- » : MB. ^^«( « abudh& > (abuddhi) ; MB. « budhi »
(buddhi) ; %X.^ « udho » (uddhava); ?rf^ « dhar^» loayi (uddhara);
t*t^ * V^pindh » (apinaddha) ; « sadh^ » ^/^*2>i? (sraddhg) ;
^f^, ^f^, « sudh(i), sudh(i) » hioideclge (suddhi) ;
OIA. * -dhr- > > :MIA. « -ddh- » : MB. f^f^f, f^tft^ * gidha, gidhinl*
(gfdhra, g-rdhrini) ;
OIA. « -ndh- » : * adhar^ » (andha-kara) ; « adhi »
dust'Storm (andhika); « kadh^ » (kaudha, skandha) ; fV^^f
« v/bldh » (vindh, vyadh); « badh^ » (bandha) ; OB.
« sadhi « (sandhi), etc.;
OIA. « -bdh- » > MIA. « -ddh- » ; OB. < ladha » (labdha-) ; OB
« chudha » impure NB. « chut^ » (ksubdha-) ;
OIA. «-rdh. »>MIA, « -ddh- » : 'srfsf « adh^ » (ardha) ; ^s(;{1
« b§,dhglna » water -pot with spout (vardhana-) ;
[dfi] through transference of aspiration is not uncomtnon : e.g,,
« gadha » (gaddaha-, gardabha-) ; 7\% beside « sS,nd(h)a » (sandeha) ;
dialectally ^?fT [cJoiddfiD] = C^W « caudda » < « eauddaha » (eaturdasa).
[dfi] interchanges with the cerebral [dfi] initially in some cases : e,y,,
DtFl, « dhaca, dhaca » = also ^ « dhag » ; dt^1 « dhSra » beside
C^t5l « dhOra » (= dundubha, dundabha) ; ff§, beside « (Jhlt^, dhlt^ »
(dhfsta); c5^^, C^^^ « (lierasat, dh?rasgi » regeta/jle; « (Jhaus^^
dhaus?t » huge (= *dhab-u-sa < dhaba, cjhibi mound, hillock^.); etc. A
number of « -dh- » words in Bengali (as in other NIA.) are obscure : e.g., ^
« dhum^ » pomp, splendour, hugeness (cf . ^s^Jfl ^ dhum^-sa » /a^^) ; ^ft^^l
« dhakka », « dhakal^ » strain, beside MB. Oj^I « (jheka » push ;
sft^rl « dhamS » basJcet; 5ff:^ « dham^sa » squeeze, beat, press, cf. «rW«ft
508
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
« dhSmal! » sporty orgy^ revelry ; ^tft « dharl » grown-up animal^ leader \
« dhiggi * tvanton, full of spirits, bad ; « dhuc&ul » ia^^^^ wask
grain ; C^T^^ « dhokar^ » ra*/? ; 5ft^^ « dhaggar^ » a sweeper < aboriginal
or loW'Casle man from the Kol and Oraon land ; ctf^ « d(h)et »
exclamation of disgust y etc., etc.
[dh] occurs in is, words.
(5) The Labial Stops and Aspirates [p, ph, b, hfi], and the Bilabial
and Denti-labial Spirants [f, u ; f, v].
277. Labialisation of the OIA. groups of dental stops (or aspirates)
-f « m » or « V » is a phonological development which is quite noteworthy
in MIA. (see Jules Bloch, ' Langue Marathe/ §129), Two kinds of
treatnaent are found in MIA. : (i) assimilation of the labial nasal or
semi-vowel to the preceding dental (e.g., atma > atta) ; (ii) labialisation
{e.g.y atma> atpa> appa). Judging from the evidence of As5kan MIA. (in
which the dialect of Girnar normally uses « -tp- » for « -tv-, -tm- » and
« -db- » for « -dv- »), from a Greek transcription like « Barakhe » =
« Dvaraka », and from Modern Gujarat! and Sindhi {e.g., « be, bbe » two)
it can be very well inferred that the labialisation with « v, m » characterised
the dialects of the Gujarat side in the First MIA. period. Labialisation
was absent in the East (and possibly also in the Midland) in the Early
MIA, period, but it was found in the North-western speech : €,g., the
equivalents of < dvadasa » in the Early MIA. dialects were, as can be
inferred from the Asoka inscriptions, « dura^asa, duvadasa » in the
East and the Midland, « dbadasa » in the South-west, and « badaya,
=:*badaza » in the North-west ; and those of « atman » were, respectively
in the East and the Midland, in the South-west and the North-west,
« atta- », « atpa- », and « atma » (as in Mansehra : the Shahbazgarhi «ata-=
atta » seems to be a ' Magadhism The North-western speech also shows
change of « m, v » to « p » after a sibilant : e,g,y « pravasaspi = *prava-
sasmin = pravase », « spasuna(ra) =svasrQam », « spamikena = svamikena »
et<5. This is a change which is not found in other parts of India, but it has
NEW BENGALI ^P': ITS SOURCES
509
a parallel in the Iranian change of « sv » to « sp », as in « spa-ka^ aspa » =
« svan, asva ».
The labialised forms are very few in Bengali and in other Magadhan
(see below). These forms can very well have come to the Eastern dialects
(and to those of the Midland) from the dialects of the West where they
seems to have originated. They were early established in the Northern
Indian koine based on the Midland speech, which became the Pali language :
and their acceptance in the various forms of MIA. was due to the influence
of this koine,
278. Bengali [p].
[p] is a sound which tends very easily to be pronounced without
contact of the lips, and in Old Bengali, some groups like « naH-^/par » not
to he Me became =Tt^ « y^nar » in MB. through a stage « *nawar- », which
is preserved in Assamese as « no war- ». Apart from the spirant pronuncia-
tion of the aspirates [ph, bR], the stop [p] is pronounced as a bilabial open
consonant or spirant, [f], in the Eastern Vagga dialects ; and in Noakhali
and Chittagong, the lips are frequently so far apart as to reduce the [p]
into a sound almost like a voiceless [h] : e,g.^ Sylhet Bengali *tt*t < papgt »
= [i^a:r] , ^1 « puja » = [fuzu] , ^^Tl « paysa > pice = [FDeJa] ; Tipperah,
Noakhali and Chittagong ^ « put^ » mi^\Y\vX, hu:t], C^t^ « pola » chihl
= [rola, hola], ^tt^ltW « puti-maeh^ » a fish — [FU(Jias, hu4ias],
« pet^t » = [F&:t, hs:d], ^t^^tff « paiyaehi > I have received = [haisi],
^^t^ffC^ « palaiyache » has run away= [halaise], etc. One can compare the
change of [ p ] to [ f, h J in Japanese, in Modern Kannada, and in other
languages.
Initially, [p] is from MIA. « p- », from —
01 A. « p- » : « pare » (patati) ; ^ « pa » (pada) ; ntH « pan^ »,
*1t^ * pangt, pan^ » (pana ; parna) ; f«1^^ * pie » (pibati) ;
^ * put^ » (putra) ; V^Xa « pisi » (pitr-svasrka) ; « puche »
(pfcchati) ; ^fl « pu5 » (pupa-) \ C*fh?l « p&une» (padona-);
^ «p&re», MB. ^t%^ « ^ §,hre, pahire » (paridhlyate) ;
^J<^^ « pukur^ » tank (puskarin) ; ^^\5l « pikita » (pavitra-) ;
MB. -^I^, ^ <pahu, p&hu» (prabhu) ; « pab^rl » jse/a^
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
(parva-) ; « p&rakh^ » (parlksa) ; ^^T? « pure » bunin (putati) ;
MB, ^i^, t^t*11 « paD§,i, pana » (upanah-) ; etc., etc.
Also in deal words, e.g., C^f> «pet^» belli/^ C^t^, CtW «pok(a) » z^yorw,
♦tt^ « pSk^l » f^m^, tc/iirl, C^tt^ « pSta » enfrat/s, ejcudation
from nose, ^J^t^ « p&tol^ » a vegetable , etc.
OIA. « pr- » : « puti » heads (^ponta-, prota-) ; « piya ^
(priya-) ; « pijalgt » (priyala) ; « p&rgl<par& » (prahara);
l^^l, ^tFTl « p&hela, p&;^1a » (pratha-illa) ; MB. « y^pekh »
(preks-) ; 'ftft^ « paell^ » (pracira) ; ^tt<^^ « put! < puthi ^
(prosthika) ; C^Cf « pSehe » (pronchati) ; MB. (j^^ « pemft *^
(pemma, preman) ; MB. C^«1 « pele NB. c^-m « phelti »
(pella'i, prerayati); MB. *tt^ « paus& » (pravrsa) ; *ff^f*I
« p&risi » (prativesin) ; MB. 1\ft^ « p&rieha » (pratlksaka-) ;
*tt^ > tC*t « p&ise > pase » (pravisati) ; ^^g{ « p&itha » .^/am,
foundation (pratistha-) ; etc., etc.
In the interior of words, [p] is from —
OIA. « -tp- » > MIA. « -pp- » : « »paje » (utpadyate) ; ^^ttC^
« upare » (utpatayati) ;
OIA. « -p« » > MIA. « -mp- » : K^nSI, H f^^l « plpCi)^ OB.
« pimpida » (e£. Skt. pipilika) ; 'ft'l « sap^ » CJ/r*^' (*sampa =
sapa : cf. abhisampata) ;
OIA. « -pp- » : rl^q * pipul^ » (pippali) ; ^f^^« j&l^-pipi» a kind
of bird (pippaka, pippika) ;
OIA. « -py- » > MIA. « -pp-, -mp- » : ^^1 « rupa » (rupya-) ; C^^l,
C^*t1 « khSpa, khopa » hair done into a knot (*ksupya- ? or
ksumpa- ?) ; « jhapan^ » (yapya-yana) ;
OIA. « -pr- » > MIA. -pp- » : T^^ « ehip^ » « ioflr^ (ksipra;
or < desi sippa ^//^^Z ?) ; « bap^ » father (vapra) ;
OIA. « -mp- » : !rf<l1 « eapa » (campaka-) ; ^t'f « kSp^ » (kampa) ;
NB. « sapura > basket, pot (samputa-) ; •
Also in desi words : C^*f^ « top&r^ » helmet, « tupi » kat ;
5t^, f^'t, 5^ * \/ ^^P^ ^^P^ C"P • i^^'^*'^ (cf • ^aur, Ap. eampij jaY=
akramyate) ; Ft^ « eap&i^ » slap (ef . Skt. carpata < ?) ;
SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI ^P, PH' 511
«x/chap» to pntii) « h&r^pi » basket ^ snake'c/iarmer^s
basket \ t»t<1 « sip^ » libation'-pot {deht sippa=5/^^//, oyder shell),
etc. ;
OIA. ^ -rp- » > MIA. « -pp. » : * kap?t, khap^ » ^yJ^^M
(*skarpa, karpa > MIA. khappa, kappa) ; « kap&r^ »
(karpa-ta) ; « khSp^ra » ^z/e (khappara-) ; ^ttT « kapas^ »
(kSrpasa) ; OB. « kapur^ » (karppura) ; Tt^ « dap^ » (darpa) ;
« sapgt » (sarpa) ; « sape * (samarpayati) ; etc. ;
OIA. « -sp. » : ^t't « bbap^ » (bhappa, "^bappha, baspa), by trans-
position of aspiration.
OIA. * -tm-, -tv-»: ^t'l^ « apan^ » (appau-, cf . Girnar Asokan
atpa- = atman) ; the affix -^'s^ « -pan^, -p^na » (MIA.
« -ppana- < -tvana ») ; 5t^^ « chapar^ » bedstead with frame for
curtains (chat vara).
Cases of [p] by deaspiration of [ph] are rare intially in Bengali,
but quite common intervoeally and finally. Through unvoicing of [b]
we get [p] in a few eases : e.^., ^t^i^ « papyri* beside 1t^^ «pab^ri »
(parva-) ; the curious sis, ^?srflvftC^ « SdopS > at all, in the least < *«rtl?tl^
« adobe »<« Sdowe » for Sanskrit « adSu » [adou] 4-loe, ajff. « -e» ; etc.
[p] in fs. words is doubled in the groups « -pr-^ -pl-^ -py- ». In some
sIhs,^ « -sp- » has given [p] : e.g.y « p&r&s^ » (sparsa)^ ^| « pas{a »
(spasta) .
In foreign words, intervoeal [p] frequently is from [f] of Persian,
Portuguese, English : see infra.
279. Bengali ^ [ph, f, f ] .
Initially, it is from OIA., MIA. « ph- » : ^ « ph&l^ » (phala) ; ^sitiT
« ph&lar^ » feast (phal^lhSra) ; ^^ll « ph&la » (phalaka-) ;
* phag^ » (phalgu) ; ^t^^l « phagun^l » (phalguna) ;
« phal^ » (phala) ; C^5f| « phena » (phena-) ; ^ « phu > -?07/«t/
bloxijing with the mouth (cf . phutkara) ; ^ « phul^ » flower
(phulla) ; ^tPP * phiki » empiiness^ laziness^ < negligence
(phakkika<?) ; ¥T? « phSr^» circumference < belly (phan^a < ?),
etc.
612
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER V
Also from OIA. « p- by aspiration : ^t^l « phata » float of quill in
angling line ( ? patra-) ; ^\7\ « phSs^ » (pasa) ; ^%9f
«pharig(g)^» grasshopper (patagga) ; MB. Wfsp « phal&gg& »
jimp, leap (? plavagga : sh,) C¥C^ * phele » < MB. C*IC^
« pele » (pellai, prerayati) ; « phaur^ » {/jamboo) stick tcith
hig joints (? parva) ; etc.
OIA. « sp-, pph- » > MIA. < ph- * > Bengali [ph] : as in
« phas^ka » fo ^i^^-a^^, to lose touch with (conn, with
\/ sPfs ?) ; f cfe « phute » (sphutyati) ; « phate » (*sphltyati,
phattai) ; 5ptC^ « phare » (sphStayati) ; (TFt^ « phora » (sphota.) ;
^Ff^ * phal^ ^jxmp (sphala) ; W*t1, * ph&r^sa, pb&r?tcha »
clearing of darkness, dawning (v/sphar, v^*phur); « phau »
e'x^rm, additio7i, extra on little articles sold (sphati — *sphatuka) ;
stss. « phatik^ » (sphatika), « phurti » (sphurti), etc.
[ph] in the middle of words is from —
OIA. * -mph- » : C<t^ * g5ph^ » (gumpha) ; « laph^ » (lampha) ;
OIA. « -rph- » : MB. ift^^ « naphae » for ^It^t^ii « laphae » coquettes
(ef. v/raph, rarphati^ ramphati, raphati = goes, moves) ;
OIA. «-tuph- > ^-tph- > > MIA. *-pph-»: OB. « kaphala »
(kapphala, "^katphala, katuphala) ;
OIA. « -sph* > > MIA. « -pi^h- » : MB. « aphale »
(asphalayati).
Some words in [ph] are obscure in Bengali : e.g., c^^l < ^t^sfl
« phero, pharua » gohlet, ivafer^pot {originally = zi??^// a brQad bri,n ? cf.
y sphax-a) ; f%^, < phika, pheka » ^^/^^ ; fi(^-^J^1 * phik-byatha »
sudden pain in the chest, side or stomach (< paksa?) ; c^j^q^ c gopha > cave,
also ^^-^pl « gumpha » (cf. guha); c^^ « pheu » jackal, jungle dog (cf. pheru :
onomatopoetic ?) ; * x/phir » /wm; « phal^to » ^ar^s^; c^CTfl
< cphlso < phasiia* fibre (conn, with « ansu » ?); t%??1
* Phig(g)a » « bird ; ^f^^l^ 5^'^^ « ph&ria > phore > middle-man, a
dealer who hup np from the producer i'VS\ ^ ])hB.Ysi^ impending danger;
¥ * phSp(h)&r9t » confusion (ef. OB. bhabharL, Skt. bharbhara) j
etc., etc.
SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI ' B '
513
In the dialectal word «lt¥?rl * laph^ra », beside ^t^^ « lab^i-a » vegetable
hotch-potch tvith pumplcin, there is [ph] from « -p- < -b- < -u- » (« alabu,
lau. lau + da > *labr/a » : cf. ^tC^ftC^ « adobe » from « adaa + e p. 511).
[ph] occurs in foreign words, for « f ».
280. Bengali [b]. Initially, it is derived from —
OIA. « dv- » > MIA. (non-Magadhi) * b- » > OB. « b- » : ^t^
« bara » (dvadasa), ^t^»t « bais^ » (dvavinsati), etc. ;
OIA. «-p-» > Second MIA. «.v-» > OB. «b-»: ^tc'f, ^C*!
« b&ise, b&se » (^uvai'sai, upavisati) ; « baitha » -5?^
paddle for forcing ^ > « b&Ithi > botl » /<2ry^ ^Vi?y!?
wooden seat-kandle for slicing vegetables (upa vista-) ;
OIA, <« b- » : MB. « bah& » (bahu) ; ^^Fifl * b&k§tr& » (barkara-) ;
« bujhe » (budhyati) ; MB. « budhi » (buddhi-) ;
« bel^ » (bilva) ; ^ « bud^ » (bindu) ; ^jf^^ « bahir^ » (cf .
bahya) ; MB. =^t^ « bala » youth ^ boy (balaka-); f^fe «biei»
(bija ? ; vf tya- ?) ; « bilgt » marshy holloio (bila) ; ^t*t
« ban^ » (bana) ; ^t^fff, ^t^^ll « babulgt, bab^la » ffcacza /r^e
(barbula) ; tVi « badh^ » (bandha) ; OB. < bahira » (badhira) ;
« b&hera » (MIA. bahedaa, OIA. bibhitaka) ; etc. ;
OIA. «br-»: '^•{, ^T^s? « baman^, bamun^ » (brahraana) ; c^tC^,
Al^ « bole > b&le » (braviti, MIA. bollai) ;
OIA. « m- » : C^t^ « bol^ » (mukula); « \/buj, buj »
6*/(?A'€ {as ey€s)^jill f.p (^/mudr-y- ?) ;
OIA. « V- » : « b^u » (vadhu) ; « bay < babe » (vahati) ;
^ « ba » (vata) ; ^1 « ba » (vama) ; ^j^^r « bSk^ » (vakra) ;
<c baj^ » (vajra) ; ^t^l « ban^ » (vanya) ; « baul^ » (vatula) ;
f^fl, « biya, be » (vivaha) ; « bis^ > (vinsati) ; MB.
« bis&re > (vismarati) ; « ber^ » (vesta) ; ^Sft^jft « btaar&si »
(vSranasIya) ; etc., etc. Also in 5^*. and ts. words, Skt. « v- »
becomes [b].
OIA. « vy- » : ^j, « ba, bSo » (vyama) ; ^t^t^ « bakhan^ »
(vyakhyana) ; « bagh^ » (vyaghra) ; C^S^I « beora »
(vyapara-); MB. C^W^ « bauhari » wife (vyavaharika slave*
65
514 PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
woman) J see pp. 34f5, 384? ; « beg^ » fro^i (vyagga); sis,
« bag^ra » (vyaghata-).
Interior [b] represents —
OIA. « -4v- * > MIA. « -bb- » : 5t%1, 5tR*f « cha(b)bi3^ » (sa^vin-
sati) ;
OIA. « -mb- », mainly in sCss, : (7?^ « nebu » (nimbuka), (see
pp. 366, 367) ;
OIA. « -mr- » > MIA. « -mb- » : J * 5b^ » (amra) ; J^^l
« tiba » (tamra-) ;
OIA. « -rb- » > MIA. « -bb- * : %^^\ « dubal(a) » (durbala-) ;
« ab^ » ^z^wor (cf . arbucla) ;
OIA. « -rv- » > MIA, « -bb- » : « gabanS. » lo vaunt ^ to boasl
(garva) ; ^f^T'^, f^^t^ « caban&, cibana » to chew (v/cavv) ; \5t^
« dab^ » round 2^ot, green eoco-md (cf. darvl) ; « s&b^ »
(sarva) ;
OIA. « -V- » in 5^55. : ST^^, ^l^^ « nabbai, n^bbui» (navati) ; MB.
C^t^*? « job&na » (jobbana, yauvana) ; etc.
Euphonic [b] from « w » : ^lUHtC^ « adobe » all (« adowe = adaii
+ -e » : see p. 511).
[b] through deaspiration of [bfij is common in medial and final
positions in NB.
By transference of aspiration, we have C^t^, « bon^, b§,hin »
(bhagini).
In a few eases, there is au iatrusi\re [b] after < m » in 08. and MB. :
see p. 367.
Intervocal and final [b] in a few words has become vocalised to « u » :
^'9*i ^t^^l « phaura » a big stick (< pab^ra < parva-) ; as in ^t^^
« bauri cul^ » long fiair in curls (Pers. « babr » lion, « babri » tion4ike
= witk wavj/ mane).
In ^55. and s/^^f., [b] occurs for both « b » and « v » ; and the sound
as usual is lengthened (or doubled) before « r and in the groups « -bhy-,
-bhr- ».
For [b] in foreign words, see infra.
SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI 'BH' 515
281. Bengali [bfi].
Initially, [bfij represents —
OIA. « b- by aspiration, spontaneous or transferred : e,g,^ ffjf
« bhtisi » (busa-); ^"s^, * bhut(u)rl » entrails, contents (as
of the jack fndt) (busta, MIA. buttha) ; « bhukha » (MIA.
buhukkha<bubhuksa) ; « bhap^ » (baspa) ;c£, « bhisti »
water 'Carrier^ from Persian « bihiStI » ;
OIA. « bh- » : « bhat^l » ^(?z7^rZ ;7>^ (bhakta) ; N»t^ « bhal& »
(bhaclra-) ; f^^^ « bhin^ » separate (bhinna) ; \5t^ « bblj^ »
(bhanja) ; f^-^t « bhikh^ » (bhiksa) ; ^«t^ « bhara » m//^, hire
(bhataka, v/bhf) ; ^*t^ « bhSr^ » (bbaiitja) ; 'ft « bhfii »
(bbumi) ; « bharasa » liope^ reliance (bharavasa-) ; C^^^
magic (cf. Skt, ^/blial see^ v^bhel see) ; etc., etc.;
OIA. « -bhy- » : f%^^ « bhit&r^ » (abbyantara) ; fe^ « \/bhij » he
dremhei (abhyailj) ; « bbir^ » (? abhyat-) ;
OIA. « bhf-, bhr- » : C^f^, « bh5l^, bhnl^ » mistahe^ confusion
(bhrama + MIA. -alia, -ulla) ; C^^l « bhom^ra » for *^§^1
« *bh&6ra » (bhramara-); ^tl « bhai » (bhratr-) ; « \/bhaj »
/^j^ (v/bhrajj) ; '©t^ « bbaj?l » (bhratf-jaya) ; etc. ;
OIA. « m- », through the transposition of followino^ « h » :
bhais^, « bbaysa » Pmbalsa, mahinsa, mabisa) ; c^l
« bhera » (^mheda-, melia-da-, mesa-), beside C^l « mera »
In the interior of a word [bfi] is derived from —
OIA. « -bhy- » : ^t^t^ « sabhar^ » place-name in Dacca district
(sabhydgara) ; 'Slt^t^ « abbag » smearing all over the hody^ as oil
(abhyagga) ;
OIA. « -bhr- » : « abh^ » //^//^ f'/f^wr/, w/^y/, ^t^^ « ab^eha »
for "^^t^^j « *abh&-cha » //fl-?^ (abhra) j
OIA. « -rdhv- » : MB. ^^1 « ubha » ^;*(?(?/, standing (ubbha, non-
Magadhl, < urdhva) ;
OIA. «-rbh-»: ^f%^ ?f^^1 « ubhiya jawa* disappear, as camphor
when left in the air (ubbhaa, udbhf ta) ; « \/ ubhar » iff in
excess, descend (ud + y/hhv, bbar) ; fft^^ « gabhur^ »
51G
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
ifomg man («:arbha-rupa) ; 5tt#7f > ^tt^ « ji^abhin^, gabln^ »,
used generally of cattle (garbhini) \
OIA. « -rv- » > MIA. « -bb- » > « -bh- » in fs?^^ « nibhay » beside
i^<;1^ « nibay » (%ibbavei, nirvapayati) ; MB. Jfo « s&bh& »
beside « sabli, sarva » > « sabba » (influence of U, « sabha » :
see p. 319) ;
OIA. « -hv- » > MIA. « -bbh- » : <« jibh^ > jib^ » (jibbha,
jihva) ; « bibh&l^ » (bibbhala, vihvala). The old traditional
pronunciation of Skt, « -hv- » in Bengal was [bbfl], e,g.^
[abbfian] = « ahvana », now=[a6Rttn], and [JSibbfia] as a U.
word IS now yielding to [^giuGa].
OIA. « -mbh- » is reduced to [m] in Bengali ; but an intrusive [bR]
after [m] is found in some cases in Bengali (see p. 367) : cf.
OB. (Sarv&nanda) « bambhana- » = NB. '^^^^ ^t5^ « bSm&n^,
bamun^ » (brahmana) ; eMB. (SKK.) HtC^flt « eambhell > for
\>W^ « eamell » a flower^ Hind. « camell » ; Oriya « ambhe,
tumbhe » = "^fsf, < ami^ tumi » (amha-, tumha-).
In * bhita » homestead, mound, ruhi-monndy from « ^bhitta »,
beside OB. « hitta, hitti, vifci », etc. (see p. 66), the « bh » seems to be
falsely restored, on the analogy of « v^bhu > ^/ho », « -bban^a- > -hancjl »,
etc., also probably influenced by tlie word * bhitti The word ^ bhanji »
Siieezing in OB. (Sarvfinanda), = NB. « had » (from an earlier
« *hanci cf . Skt. « hanji which is onomatopoetie), also seems to show
a falsely 'restored' « bh- ».
A number of « bh- » words in Bengali remain unexplained : €.g,y
citWl « bhoda » a Imnhering feUov\ fat and foolish ; ^ « bhuri */'it hi the
hdly\ C»<P^, C^^^t « bhek&t^, bhek^ti » a fish] « bhir&g beside
C®t^5f, C^t59f « b(h)or&g » iriimpet ; OB. « bhabh&rl » eoqtietry^ cf. Skt.
« bharbhara » co«/2^.^/o;z=NB. ^t^^t^ « bhab^r*"^ * contused;
« bhati » wine-stiU ; s5t^ « bhSta » « hally the egg- fruit (*batta-, vf tta-?) ;
N©ttt, ^t^t « bhatI, bhata beside ^ttt, ^t§t « bhiti, bhata » ebb-tide^ loxo
la7idy down counirj/ (v/bhf ?) ; ^^Plfl « bhauliya * n kind of boat ;
« bhura » potoder ; « bhesta » mix-vp^ etc., etc.
LOSS OF INTERVOCAL ' D '
517
[bR] occurs in fa. word? ; and in foreisrn words, it commonly represent?
the [v] of Portusfuese, and occasionally of English.
(6) Dropping of OIA. Intervoeal Stops in MIA.
282. This has been described before, pp. 83-85, 252-253, 338-345,
433. In a very large number of eases, the genuine tbhs. with elision have
been replaced by tss. and stss,^ so that in most NIA., and especially in
Bengali, the elision as a characteristic thing in the phonology of the native
element is generally lost sight of. Examples need not be given here : they
will be found in the pages referred to, and passim.
Loss of intervoeal « -p. » in a case like •Ttt^ « nare » is not ahhy
Assamese « noiyare » (na parayati), is Old Bengal!, the « -p- » being changed
to « -V- » or « -w- » in Late MIA. Sporadic cases of loss of stops occur in
MB. In a few words in MB., [d>r] is lost : <f.y., v5t^«?, 5t^« taul^, caul§L »
< earlier « tarul& » (in the * f^unya-Purana ( = tan4ula) ; MB.
« p&il^ *fell for ^f%^ « p&rilfi, » (padia + illa, patita-), through the analogy
of « m&il§., Iv&iU », and ef. also ' Bihar! * « dhail » caught (dhfta -f
-l-alla) ; and tt^fHt^ « hirlsala » room for cooking-pots, kitchen > Late
MB. tt^t^ « hasyalqt = haisal^ » > NB. ctCT^ « h?sel^ » kitchen.
Elision of intervoeal consonants of NB. in the Chittagong dialect
has been noted before, e.g., at p. 454.
The reduction of the single intervoeal aspirates to [R] in Bengali
is illustrated below : see under [fi],
[II] The Nasals: New Bengali [g, n, m] ; Old axd
Middle Bexgalt [d, w, ji],
283. The five class nasals of Skt., « g n, n, n, m, », as well as
« anusvara », figure in Bengali orthography, but in the language they
have passed through many vicissitudes. OIA. and MIA. « anusvara »
has disappeared from Bengali or has resulted in a mere nasalisation (see
pp. 358-359). In tss. and stss.y Skt. « anusvara » figures, but it has taken
up a [g] pronunciation now : probably in Magadhi Apabhransa it had
518
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
become [W] (see p. 244-). This [g] or [w] pronunciation was current
in Bengal in the 7th century : witness, for example, the spelling « sag^cala »
for « samscala » in the Tipperah inscription of Lokanatha, and also « vaijse »
for « vanse » in the inscription of Madhava-varman of Koggoda. The
use of « g » for the « anusvara* oceasionallv crops up in inscriptions in other
parts of India, but it seems that there it was only sporadic^ and the [g]
value was the one which early became established in Bengal^ and in Eastern
India generally. The « anusvara » thus having developed the [g] pronuncia-
tion in the East, it ceased to be used in Bengali-Assamese and Oriya ortho-
graphy for class nasals, a practice which is continued elsewhere in India. A
Bengali wil! read 5?^?f = as [nogdo] and not as [nondo], *f^f^ = ijfecf as
[pog4it] and not as [pondit], ^t^«^=^>^ as [kagbol] rather than [kombol];
and a recent attempt at spelling-reform in Bengali by simplifying com-
pound consonants like ^, ^, % ^ etc- to V^, m, VB^ K% ^W,
according to the pan-Indian usage, has failed.
284. « -g-; -n- » occurred only before their corresponding class
consonants in OI \ and « -gg- » is also found. MIA. « fi- » initial, « -nn- »
intervoeal occur (^.y., Pali nana = jfiana, afina = anya), but initial « g- »
and intervoeal single « -ii-, -g- » as well as « -gg- » are not found. In Old
Bengali, the sound of [g] occurred only before the guttural stops and
aspirates, and probably also for « anusvara » in tss, ; and « n » Qi] was
found, only as a reduced nasal before the palatals in t6As,^ and as a full
sound in iss. In New Bengali, [g] occurs in final and intervoeal positions
only : it is derived from MIA. « -gg- », and is written intervocally as 5F, \§,
* -gg-i -g- » and finally as ^, t « -gg-^-g* -^i *• What is \g [g] in New
Bengali was*^, ^ [^g], [-gg-] cr [*i?g] in Middle Bengali (see pp. 3G0, 361,
363, 364).
The modern value of the letter \g is [g]. But in MB., the value was
that of a nasalised bilabial semi-vowel or spirant — of [w] or [^u] . The
Modern Bengali name for the letter i§, which is [ua, uo, 8a], is on the
basis of this old pronunciation. In MusalmanI Bengali (see pp. 210-212),
« wan > wS » in Persian words, and « w » of HindostanI, are written \§,
following the MB, usage: e,//., CTtC-fW^I « noserSga = noserwa Persian
OIA. INTERVOCAL 'M' > - Y '
519
« NoSerwaa » ; tt<§ « P^ga = * =Hind. « pSw^ pa^ », This intervocal
« w » of OB. originated from a single intervocal « -m- » of MIA., in the
Late MIA. period, and it is a development to be noticed in all NIA,
languages except Sinhalese. In MB.^ this « w » became a nasalisation
of the contiguous vowel, and the glide element remained in Early MB.
— a « w » as before, when the contiguous vowel was a back sound, and a
« » sound when it was a front one. Possibly this palatal modification
of the glide, from [w] to [j*^, or [ji], took place as early as OB. times.
The [w] pronunciation was not indicated by the historical spelh'ng with
3( « m » in OB.: e.g., OB. ^t^5( « sagkama = [JakowD], whence NB.
[Jako], and OB. ^ft^ft « sami » = [/awi, Japi ?], whence NB. :Ttt [j<^i]-
In Early MB., as in the SKK., either the « candra-bindu » was used,
C#tWt, C#t5ft « kSj^&rl (for % see p. 34-1), kS&ri = kow&rl » (kumari),
C#H^j « kSalT, kS^^ll = kowali » (komala-), C^T'^J^ « s54ra =
sowlira » (sumara-, y/smar), beside a Sanskritised "Sf^^ « smaari- », and
C^'srf^ « pSara = *p^Lwar&, » (prabala) ; or si m » was used, following
the old spelling, e,g,^ Jft^'t « sami = sawi = saiii » (svami) ; or the ^
« n, n*" » was introduced, as in C^t^^ « suuor- » (sumara, ^/smar), C^J^tf^
« gosaiii » (gosvami).
As yet there is no use of S « g » for the « w » sound in the SKK.
In MB. orthography from the 15th century, (S « g » and ^its « n » became
established for the sounds of « w » and « w > "'y » respectively, in addition
to the « candra-bindu », and the employ of ^ « m » fell into desuetude. NB.
has lost the glides entirely, and uses \S and ^ no more, and simply employs
the « candra-bindu ». Cf. Middle Oriya of the 15th century, as in the
inscriptions, « saanta » (« samanta » : also New Oriya « santani » iiile of
re^jpeet for ladies)^ « c&ar& » (camara).
Examples of change of OIA. single intervocal « -m- * to nasalisation,
with or without the glide element, in Bengali :
^^^il « $613 », beside ^tl^l « am^la » (amalaka-) ; ^tl^ « as^,
ais^ » (amisa) ; ^t5t^ « Scay » i?//>iS > washes motif It after eating
(aeamati); MB. (SKK.) §vft§ « udaS » (uddama); the affix s « -8 », as in
MB. and dialectal Bengali (North), 1st person, present tense, < MIA,
520
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER V
« -ama, .amu=rai^a, -a^u » = 01 A. « -amah » : e.g,, '^t^\ « k&rS » (kararaa,
*karamah = kurmah), ^\ « c&lS » (calSmah), ete. (there may be some
influpnee of cfl, ^ « hg, *hau » < * aham* in this); MB. f^g^, c^s^
« kuwir^, kow^r^ * prince, NB. C^t^t^T, Cft^^ « kogargl, k§ar^ » a surname
(kumara) ; MB. c#t^q, C^tS?! « kow&la^ » (komala) ; MB. « kawur
OB. « kamaru = ka^^aru » (Kama-rupa) ; ^vS^i, ^tS^t, beside ^^1 =
*kaol^, kaola, kam^la » (kamala-) ; MB. ^^1, NB. « khuna-,
khue * cdff silk stuff (ksuma, ksauma-) ; -sfl « ga » (grama) ; ^tt
« gai » (gramika) ; MB. C^\gt^ « gowai » 2^^^^<^^ {time) (*gamapayati) ;
C^'tt « gosii » /o/-^/, a Vaisnara guru (gosvamin) ; MB. 5\S^, cB^I^,
NB. «e&i«r&k^, e&uk^ (p. 848), eam&k^ * (cf. Skt. camat.) ;
^tTt^ « jamai », commonly pronounced [j5aoai] (jamatr); C^M^ « joan^ =
joan^ » (yamaul) ; MB. (SKK.) i^U^ « jhaoe » a pnmice-stone, cf. NB.
^ * jhamS p. 480 ; Stt m thai » (sthaman) ; tl «da » ^ ^wrwawie beside
5rpr « dam^ * (< « -daman » in personal names like « Rudra-daman, Indra-
daman *, etc.); ^^1, « dhfla > dhSa » (dhuma.) ; ^(1 « na = ni »
/wrf^^rf (nama), e.g., as in C^.sjl ^HT ^N^tfif sfl C^t?( ^^\ (p. 266), t<i?7rt
ifl * es6 na » //o come in (= avisata nama) ; C^fni, c^lt^l « ^n5a, nijwa »
(namaya-) ; MB. CR^t^t * neali = newall » (navamallika) ; OB.
« paua ^ paua » (Second MIA. paiima- < paduma = padma) ; <1t^,
ifttsf, « pan! = pa(i)n pSni, pa(i)a» « surname, beside the Sanskrit
fora * pramSuika » ; ^ « hi » (vama) ; % « b$, bao » (vyama) ;
« bhfli » (bhumi); MB. NB. ^"tft « bhuiiS, bhuiya» (bhaumika-) ; (?A
^m5 = m5» (mama); c^'l « r5 » (loman, roman), beside at^ *rSa»;
* sape » (samarpayati) ; MB. C^^^^ « sow^re » (sumarai, smarati) ; MB.
«sa^&la» (syamala); * siko < *sakS », OB. * sagkama »
(sagkrama) ; ^'f^, ^'f^ * sit(h)i ^ (stmauta-) ; ^sSt^i-s » a surname
(samanta-raya) ; jf t^^t^ ^ saotal^ » « Santal (samanta-pala) ; %t * sSi »
/orr?, (svamin) ; MB, (§KK.) cft^ « s5a » (sama-) as in
« kan5-s5a » touching the edge ; Jc^^^; * heob * (hemanta) ; etc., etc. The
* candra-biudu » is normally omitted when the word has a nasal : seep. 362.
There is loss of this nasalisation from « -m- » in some words. The
reason for this cannot be determined, and the language is rather capricious :
INTERVOCAL '-W-' IN BENGALI
521
e.y., ^tfl^ i^iWi « kada, kado » (kardama) ; the affix ^ « -i » of the verb
1st person (<« *-imi = -ami, -ami* : « e&li » < « caliwi, ealimi,
calami » : see p. 351) ; ^t•^Wt•l1 * an5-gona » coming and going^ OB.
« awana-gawana » (agamana- + gamana-) ; ^t5^, ^t^, "^^^ > '^gt? ^t^t,
(see p. 372). C£. ^^{^S^tf)', C^^Mtt « b&nwari, benwari » a
(vana-mali), from the Hindi.
The reverse process of nasalising spontaneously a « -w- » sound,
either original (i.e. = « -v- » iii Skt.) or derived {e.g,y from « -p- » ofOIA.)
is also founds in both f^/^v. and vte. This trait is one inherited from MIA.
by NIA : see p. 368 ff. Examples : ^tf^'f * kachim^t » (kacchapa) ; MB.
f^fsf « gim§, » (griva) ; ^tf^^ « chatim^ » (saptaparna) : an intermediate
stage is found in MB- ^tfV^^t, 5t^^ « chafiijana, ehatiana » (as in the
SKK.) ; \X.% Cl"t^ « chue > cb§y » touches (^chumvai, chuvai* =
sprsati) ; MB. 5t^ft « chamani, chawani » beside NB. ^t^ft « chauni »
awning (< *chawani, *chadapanika) ; « clra » fiaiiened rice (*ciwidaa-,
eipitaka-) ; OB. (Sarvananda) « jamala » for « *jowala = jowala NB.
C^^t^H C^W^, CWT^ * jSal^, jotil^, jol^ * j/^>/(-^? (yuga + -ala) ; MB. (SKK.)
Ctt^^ « p5ara» (prabala) ; bU, f^ft^f « pidim^ » (pradipa : p. 357) ; 8ts
« bastum^ » (vaisnava) ; MB. *tt\§»^ « Sawana » (sravana); etc., etc. Cf.
Western Hindi « puhami = pfthivl », Old RajasthanI « gemara, hemara =
gajavara, hayavara Maithill « nenoeha = nepathya » adornment, etc.
Intervoeal « -m- » of NB., from MIA. « -mb-, -mm-, -mh- even
tends to be pronounced as « -w- » in NB., and the « -w- > sound is actually
arrived at in a few instances (cf. ' Brief Sketch of Bengali Phonetics,' §31) :
€,g,^ ^\§T*^ beside ^'It*^ * uana, uwan^, uraana » heating^ warming
(^mhavana, = Skt, usma). The Chittagong dialect characterises itself by
changing the derived « -m- > of Common Bengali to a nasalisation : e.g.y
^1 [ai] = « ami » I, [tiii] = « tumi » you, c#t^1 [kora] = « kum^ra »
pnmpJdn ; etc.
In ilB. tliere was also change of intervoeal « -b- » to « -m- », for
which see below, § 288.
^§ « I] » is used f or « w" » < « m » in MB. : this fact brings about the
interchange between t, \§ [g] and sf [m] in some cases in NB. Generally,
66
322
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
where an [m] or [g] closes a syllable, one can be used for the other in
NB., or a nasalised vowel can be used for either. Thus, ^t^^l, ^§^1
[amla, a5la] beside a rather rare ^v§^ [ctglci] ( = amalaka.) ; ^t55(^, ^IR^I
[acfomta, Qcfoijlia] suddenhj \ C^t^1, C^t^^ [gRomta, gRogta] veil, cf.
Hind. «ghugghati»; [gRumfi, gfiugji] coloured thread ivoru
round the tcaist ; ^f[, ^^ft [thumri, thuijri] a kind of mdody ; ^S?^^
«rtf^N [cipim, apig] oxjiiim (Perso-Arab. « afyum ») ; OB. ^t^^ « kamani »
a grain, NB. ^R^f, ^tstt [kanini, kagni] (Skt. kaggu) ; CFSlbl, CIjvS^
[dfiemcfa, dfieg/a] a drum (also with ^ < dh- »J ; f^^^ [bfiimrul] Aornef,
for *f^9p^^ [bRigruI] ( = bhfggaro]a) ; etc. Cf. C^t^t^, C^t^tS [botara,
botag] but toil (Portuguese « botaS » [butau]), etc.
285. The [ji] sound in Bengali.
Just as « g » denoted the sound of « w » in MB., so 'ip « ii » [ji] was
used for the nasalised palatal glide, « '"y which, after all, is acoustically
not very much different from the palatal nasal « n ». flip « ni « would stand
for « I », or « yi »^ as well as for « w » when fronted to « '*'y » in connex-
ion with « e » or « i » : words like « mui *, « bhfli », « sli »,
« khuiya « gSi », would be written ^fip « muni », ^T^P, ^t^,
^tfip, as well as « muyi », '^"f^, ^itf^, ^t^, etc. -sftC^ « gayen^l »
singer is also found spelt as ^t^'ifa^ « ganen^ ». Even initially, we find,
in rare cases no doubt, <^ for tf) , ^ « I- » : f.^., in a 17th een. MS,
(VSR, p. 665), occur C<^^t^^, for t'^^tC^T = NB. ^"^tr^ «ihSke» io
hiw, he (honorific); vSt^fl [dcigci] forms its adjective Cvg^l [dego], and
the [g] is first changed to the palatal [ji] through the influenee of the
preceding [e] to CnSC^I, which is now written Q^tM and C\5^, pronounced
[4eo], <?.^., Q^l^ Pf^^l « fJ§yo pipra » i^acii « bhay^sa »
made of huff alO'7nilJi, horn « bhais^ » « mahisa », is found as ^^ip^
« bha,n&sa » ; and we get even f^«il3l « mifia » beside 1 « miyft » «
title of re-'^jjecfy a common term of address for Mohammedans i\:om the Persian
« miyan, miyS > a title of respect. The conjunctive participle afiix ^ « -i »,
^^j « -iya » is nasalised in West Bengali ; and one way of writing this « -I,
-iya » is with tffa — fip, ^^ipt, which spelling is plentiful in MB. MSS. :
e.g,y'^M'='^iK^\ having eaten^ ^^1=^f^if1 having done, etc. The use
'S, N' IN BENGALI
523
of ci|3 « 11 > is a noticeable thing in the graphic system of the SKK., as
of most MSS. from West Bengal : and we even find the « candra-bindu »
superscribed on ^ — ^t^t^a* « kanhafil » for « kanhai » (kfsna), where
the syllable « ai » gets its nasalisation merely through the preceding « n ».
« same » > « "^sawe » > « sane » instrumental post-position = with ,
now occurs as « sane » [Jone] in NB.; and Stt^^ * thiiye » > ck^
« theye », « theue » ^/i^ place aear-ly = ?rzV/i, has become, by the
reverse process^ (^x,^ < thege » in the Calcutta Colloquial.
In eMB., as it is clear, ^ had lost its [ji] value, and had become a
mere nasalised frontal vowel, or a nasalised frontal semi* vowel [e, i] . The
name which the letter tils has in NB., namely [15, la], preserves its old
value. The use of ^ has all but disappeaied in NB., being found only
in a few words like f^cifsl, and in some old-fashioned spellings like C^fWf^
« gosafii >; and in the ts. word ^T1p1 * }acnu », the unique and unfamiliar
group «cn » is pronounced as « -eig(g)a» for *-cina » [J5cLCjig(g)a,-e].
286. [n] in Bengali.
The letter for [n], is freely used in Bengali orthography, not only
in tsH, but also in thh, and foreign words, although no Bengali can
pronounce the sound properly without training. Its occurrence in ihlu
words is due to two things. Firstly, it occurs as a relic of an earlier state
of things when the [n] pronunciation obtained in MIA., and probably
also in Old Bengali ; and secondly, where the «1 has been restored, with an
eye to the spelling obtaining iu the Skt. prototypes — e.g,^ in words like
^r*1^«l « kak&ii^ ^t«l « kan^ », C^t^1 « sona », ^t*tt^ * banan^ » BpelUng
(=kagkana, karna, svarna, varnana) ; and in a few instances, it is purely
arbitrary, as in « ran! » queen (but cf. Oriya « rana, rani », Marathi
« rani »), beside « rani » (rajiil) (see pp. 2:^6-ji:i7). In foreign words,
supposed affinity or actual resemblance in form with native or ts. words
having «| is responsible for spellings like ?^^t^ « hayiaa » troiitjledy ^^3ft®l
« pharman » roj/al order, C^t^t*l * koran » the Koran ( = Persian « hayran,
farnian Arabic « qiir^an- »), ^'^t'^ * narmmSn » (English Norma n), etc.
The fact that Bengali orthography is modelled on that of Skt., which allows
only groups like « -nd-, -rn- », and not « -nd-, -rn- » (and « -st- », but not
524
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER V
* -st-, -st- is responsible for our writing « gab(h)arn^ment^ »
government^ ^t^l^ « ig(g)?^la^i4?' * England etc. with « n
In Late MB., there is always confusion between «1 and JT, as in NB.,
which indicates that the cerebral sound was lost, [n] has been dentalised
in the Bihari dialects, as well as in Eastern Hindi and Typical Western
Hindi (Braj-bhakha, Hindustani) ; also in Assamese. The use of ["r]
for [n] is confined among scholars and Sanskritists in the Bihari and Hindi
tracts, and [*r] with the audible flap is the result of an attempt to pronounce
[n] through Sanskrit influence. Oriya alone of the Magadhan languages
preserves this sound. It seems likely that Bengali possessed it in the Early
MB. period. The Ofiya name for the letter « n » is « an& » and the Bengali
« an& » [ano] : the prothetic « a » indicates the glide sound that came
initially in pronouncing « n ». The name « ana » is now getting to be
old-fashioned in Bengal, the schools now teach the learned name « murdhanya
n» » which the Bengali-speaker ordinarily reduces to [moddfianno no : ] or
[moddfian(:)o].
It is difficult to determine when the [n] pronunciation became
obsolete in Bengali, There is no regularity in the matter of « n » and
< n » in the Caryapadas j nor, again, in the J§KK. But the MSS. of these
works use « n » with a persistence which is quite remarkable. The SKK.,
for instance, writes the Bengali equivalent of the « \/jna » with « n » —
« jan », 124 times, and with « n ^t*^ « jan only 7 times. The
Carjapadas have the same root with <« ii » 8 times, with « n » 3 times.
Oriya has the cerebral, « jan ». Can it be taken to mean that in OB.
and MB., to the end of the 14th century, the [n] sound existed, but there
was a general confusion in its employment, as a preliminary to its dis-
appearance frem speech ? Doubtless there was some established phonetic
habit in the matter of the use of [n] and [n] in OB. and MB., but the
iFregularity of the orthography in the MSS. misleads us. Sarvananda
spells a number of words with « n » : this, as Rai Bahadur Yogesh Chandi-a
Vidyanidhi suggests (VSPdP., 1326, pp. 87-88), most probably is in
accordance with Old Bengali pronunciation. But no law regarding the
occurrence of « ii » can be deduced from it : e.y.^ « upalaiji = udvartana » ;
' -N- > -I^r- ' IN INDO-ARYAN
« kamana = ^kawana = kaggu »; « 3hampana= vapya-jana » ; « telavanl»,
but «pithavani>; « trimana » = NB. dialectal V^^^ * tig(g)au^ » ;
« babhIbQT-abhl = brahmanika-yasti- » ; « rasauiia = Skt. Iasuua»; «tina =
tfna»; « biyaiia = NB. C^sfl beaa = Skt. virana » ; besides a few other
words.
In the absence of other evidence, Oriya cerebralisation should suggest
for US some clue as to the habits of OB, and !MB., and certainly of Mag.
Ap. But although Modern Oriya is pretty definite, Middle Orija spellings
as in the I5th and 16th century inscriptions (see p. 107), is not fixed in
this matter. Thus, for example, the word « mana » = pl/^ral affix (<man-
ava), is mostly spelt with dental « n », but occurs with « n » in the inscrip-
tion of 15i2 ; we have « suni » Jiaring heard in inscr. of 14:85, but « suni »
in one of 1499 ; and both « maniki, maniki » in that of 1466. Judging
from Modern Oriya, the principle of cerebralisation appears to have been
this : infcervocal « -a-, -n- » of OIA. (in ilks,) occur as « -n- » in Oriya ; but
where a double nasal of MIA. (from earlier consonant groups) results in a
single inter vocal nasal in Oriya, it is a dental nasal, except in a few words
like « rana, rani » kiug^ queen, where the cerebralisation appears to be
irregular and obscure. ^lagadhi Apablirausa may reasonably be expected to
have had the cerebral intervoeally only. There is no indication of cerebra-
lisation of OIA. « -n- » in As»lkan Prakrit, or in Pah*, or again in the
Brahml and Kharosthi inscriptions. The cerebralisation of single « -n- »
took place during the Second MIA. period when there seems to have been
manifest a tendency towards it (as well as towards cerebralisation of
« -1- *) in all Indo- Aryan. This tendency has died out now in Western and
Eastern Hindi, in the Paban speeches, in the 'Bihari' dialects, in Bengali-
Assamese ; but it is still present in Lahndl and Panjabi, Sindhi, Rajasthanl-
-Gujarati, Marathi and Oriya. According to the grammarians of literary
Prakrit, « n » in all positions became « n » in most of the Pkts. But in
the Apabhransa stage, it would seem that initial « n- » was once more
dentalised, but intro vocal « -n- » remained. In some eases, through
Sanskrit influence, flk. forms of inherited words like « mana (manas),
jana (jana), dana (dana), dina (dina), thana (sthana), pani (paniya) etc.,
526
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
would tend to have the « n » ^eoiTected' to the dental, at least in spelling,
and in later times even in pronunciation^ as it seems to have happened in
the case of the Oriya « man& ». But so long as the cerebral normally
continued to be the intervocal sound, popular speech would certainly treat
tss, with intervocal « -n- » in the tLL way ; just as at the present day, in
Oriya, in Marathi, in Gujaratl-Rajasthani, and in Panjabi, intervocal [n]
in Sanskrit, Persian and even English borrowings frequently becomes [n] in
the speech of the uneducated masses (at least according to the observation
of the present writer). Similar conditions can reasonably be expected to
have prevailed in Early NIA,
It seems that eerebralisation as in Oriya prevailed in OB. and Early
MB. But this is a mere assumption ; and it cannot be said to have held
good for all the forms of Early MB. It is very likely that only the
Western Bengal area, including West Bengali and Oriya, preserved
eerebralisation in NIA. times. The genuine cerebral [n] (and not its Upper
Ganges Valley substitute [*r]) seems to be still found intervocally in the
dialects of extreme West Bengal (cf. LSI,, V, Parti, pp. 91 ff. : in the
transcriptions of specimens from this dialect, by Bengalis in the Bengali
character, ^ « *r » has been used for [n], just as v5 « r » has been used for
[!] — a common mistake found also in the Bengali attempt at representing
phonetically the Oriya [n] and [1] : e.^,, \V5^ « muris^ » [munij] man-
servanf, ^^fs « suri » [Juni] havinf/ heard, wf%7[ « jlris^ » [jgiyi/]
article ( = Persian « jins »), « ara » [ana] atnuif ^t^^^^ ^t^^^ « mSrusgl »
[manuj] man, M^jsTt^ « ap^rir^ » [cipnar] of self, v5^{^" « takhara »
[tokhon] then, < jara » [jg^n] iiermn, « sur^lek » [/uniek]
lieanl^ ^tfe- « ari » [cini] having brought, etc. ; so « sakar^ » [J^kol]
all, '^rt^t^ « akar^ » [akal] famne, f^T^f% « nik^ri » [nikli] haviug come
out, etc.)-
In parts of Bengal, in the Proto-Bengali and OB. periods, [n]
seems to have developed a [nt] pronunciation. A form like « dronta > for
« drona » in the Lokanatha Inscription from Tipperah probably indicates
the presence of this pronunciation as early as the 7th century. The
occurrence in NB. of [t, "-t] for [n] in some s/-?. words seems also to show
' N > T, ir IN BENGxVLI : SOURCES OF ' N '
527
that : ejj.y s(s. f%'^51 « kipc'jfta » miser (krpana-) ; T5^fel, as in ft^^l sittt
c cik^ta mati » (eikkana mrttika) ; « ph^ta » (phana-) ; c^l « kest& »
^t^PPtSl « kal^-kista * ^^^^/; l^ae/ij (also as a name f I" « krist(y)a »
(krsna); C"5ll « testa » (trsna) ; [bo/tum] < ^[boijtlowo] (vaisnava) ;
« bistu, bistu » (visnu). In the pronunciation of tss., the « n » in
« sn » becomes [t"-] in the old-fashioned pronunciation, e.p., [tujtl]
(tusni), ^ [ujto] (usna), etc. ; and this leads to confusion between |« st »
and ^ « sn » in writing — e.r/., the common enoucjh inscription in tobacco-
dealers^ shops in Calcutta — f^l 'jj^^ ^^^^ ^^t^ « bistupurer^ utkrsna
tSmak^ » for f^^^^ ^^ll « bisnu-..., utkfsta » ///^ best tobacco from
Vishnuj)nr. The school is now changing the Old Bengali pronunciation
[Jti, Jt"', Jt] to a new [jn]. (Cf. the common pronunciation of « sneha»,
^ snana » as [stefio, std:n]). Possibly [n] is the source of the [r] in
5itN5 « sar^l » consctottsness ^OB, « sana = sana » (saihjua, MIA» sanna) (but
cf. NB. « san^ » gesture), and 'Spt^lvft « anari » foolish, ignorant
(an nan!, ajnanin) (but ef. ^t»Tt^ « anar^ » in frequented , luiknoioiy as a
place, which is probably from « annaa-da-, ajnata- »).
Taking all these facts into consideration, it would be allowable to
think that [n] existed as a phoneme in the Bengali language upto the
middle of the eMB. period, at least in parts of West Bengal. From the
beginning of the I5th century, probably, it ceased to exist as a cerebral.
287. Bengali ' dental ' [n] is really an alveolar sound. The cerebrals
in Bengali are rather advanced : they are retroflex palato-alveolar sounds,
i.e. sounds produced with the curled tongue-tip on the hard palate slightly
above the teeth-ridge, and not exactly on the dome or arch of the palate :
so that the change of the nasal [n] to alveolar [n] was a matter of course.
Initially, Bengali [n] comes from —
OIA. « n- » : ^^1 « na » (na) ; ^1 « na = nS » (nama ea'jjletii-e, see
p. 519) ; « nai » I am not (na + ^/as) : MB. * nlikhata »
(naksatra-) ; J?t^ « nat^ » (nattha, nasfca) ; •ft1% « nati » (naptr-) ;
« nac^ » (nptya); ^Tt^, « «ag(g)a * (nagga- < nagna-) ;
tt> < nid^ » (nidra) ; sts. C^Tt^^, « notun^ < MB. Ci{\^^
« nautuna » ("^nava-tana, nutana); « naya » (nava-) ; etc., etc.
528
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
The OB. and eMB. spellings with initial «j « n- » seem only to
be a practice taken over from MIA, orthography : the pronun-
ciation was that of [n] .
OlA. « jn- » : dialectal Bang, ^tt^, ^t^W, ^t^^, « naihar^,
nai(y)ar^, nayer^ » (also ^t^C?t^, ^t^^ « lai(h)(3rfl ») married
woman^s father*^ home (jilati-grha) ;
OlA. « sn- > > MIA. « nh-, nb- » : Jfl, Jft^ « na, naha » (-y/nha,
v/sna), ef. -^A?. ^tr^^ « napit^ » (ultimately from « y/^na »^ of.
Pali « nahapita ») ; MB. « neha NB, C»?t « nei » affection,
indulgence (sneha) ;
Initial [n] in Bengali interchanges very frequently with [I], and occa-
sionally intervocal [1], for which see under [1], below.
In the interior of a word, [n] is from —
OIA. « -jn- » > ^IIA. « -nn- » : ^t*^t^ « anar^ » (annaa-da, ajnata-
ta) ; ft»?f% « binati » petition (vinnattia, vijnaptika) ; T^-f^ as in
Tt^ « hat^-san^ » gesture with the hand (sanna, sarhjna) ;
OIA. < -n- »: often written «1 « n »: ^\^\% •Tf^t'T [naran] (narayana) ;
f^Fl^ « kine » (krinati) ; ^t^l « kana > (kana-) ; « ksan^
= khan^ » (ksana) ; ^^^t « g«?e » (ganayati) ; 'I*! « pan^» (pana);
« lun^, nun^ » (lavana); ^ejl « phlina » (phana-) ; *f«l
« san^ » (sana) ; *rt^ « san^ » (sana) ; « sune » (srnoti);
*tt\S5(, ^^5^ « sawan^, sa- », 5t^^ « eh(r)ab§,ngl »
(sravana) ; etc, etc. ;
OIA. « -n4. » : see p. S65 ;
OIA. « -ny- » : J 'jp « pun^ » (punya) ;
OIA. « -n- » > MIA., OB. < -n- > > LMB, « -n- »: ^t^f^T « ag(g)a-
n^ » (aggana) ; * ane » (anayati) ; WtC^ « jane » (janati) ;
^rf^ « pani » (panlya) ; 5|ft « n&nl » (navanlta) ; « panfi,i »
(upanah) ; « mlin^ » (manas); sftS^, « manus^, munis^ »
(manusya) ; c^i? « hena » (^aihana, aisana = ^etadrsana) ; STH?
« nan&d^ » (nananda) ; etc., etc. ;
OIA. « -nt- » > Late MB. « -n- > (through influence of pronominal
forms in « -n- ») : « k§ren§l », « e&len^ », ^f'C « jan^t »
SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI ' N '
529
etc. (= MIA. karanti, yanti) ; t£|5R « emao^t » beside
« emat^t » so, %uch, tints, ef. Oriya « emlbnt& » ;
OIA. « -nd-, -ndh- » : modern reduction, see p. 366 ;
OlA. « -nn- > : 'Sit^^t^ « anaj^ » .(7/'^^«5 < grain (annadya) ;
« unui < una! » ^/J^'Uiy (unna-) ; fl^t^ « chinal^ » w;»^7?e of
loose character (chinna-) ; ^ « bhin^ » separate (bbinna) ; MB.
^It^^l « sana » corslet (sannaha) ;
OIA. « -ny- » : ^t*T « an^ » (anya) ; « dhan^ * (dhanya) ; ^I^T
« ban§t » (vanya) ; ^\T,*{ « mane » honours, oheys (manyate) ; MB,
^ « stina » (sunya-) ;
OIA. « -m- > > MIA. OB. * -w- » > OB. « -n- » : ^ s&ne »
26*^7//, OB. « same » = [Jj3we] (sama) ;
OIA. « -rn- » > MIA. « -nn- often written <=| « n > : ^t^, ^t*l
fka:n] (karna) ; ^JTS « kanar^ » (kamata) ; ^J?, [cju:a]
(eurna); ''It^ [pci:n] beteUeaf (parna) ; OB., MB. ^f^^^,
^f^?(tW « k§,niara, kaliara » (karnibara) ; ^t^H, ^^^T « banan^,
banSn^ » spelling (varnana) ; f^X^ < binaoa » to make a plait of
hair, to spin out a long tale (^variiapana + vinyasa), f^5^
« binuni (^varnapanika -f vinyasa) ; (J\\^y C^«|1 [jona]
(svarna-); t'tc
OIA. * -.sn-, -sn- » > MIA. * -nh- » : « kana,
kan-u, kan-ai » (krsna) ; ^JTR « unan ^^Tf^ « unani » c;r(?«
(^imhavania, "^asnapinika) ; ^R, C^W^ « j^^Q^ jona-ki »
light > fire--^lf/ (jyotsna-) ; ^iRt^f « panan§ » cause milk to flow
into the udder (prasnava) ; (itc, etc.
OIA. « -hn- » > IIIA. « -nh - » : f^^ < cin^ » (cibna) ; and denomina-
tive CS^Tl * (iihndk > to know, recognise, adjectives ^f5^, ^^'^\
^ acin^ aeena » unknown.
For the reduction of intervocal « -n- » to a nasalisation, see p. 373.
^ « dhuni » (o/V<r yogi) (^-dhupanika) has a form « dhfli »
(= *dhumika?). OIA. « -n- » is lost before « -t- » in « -ant- » of the
present participle. Loss of « -n- > is noticed in ^f!S^t « pasurl » < "^^RC^rft
« pan^seri » fice seer.^, and ^^t^t « pasari » shop-keeper, ef. Hind,
530
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
« pansar! » (« panya-sSlika » : dropping of « -n- » possibly through influence
of « prasara » a spreading -out).
In some unexplained words, we find « -n- », e,g.^ s^fsl, C*{^1 < nara,
nera » shaven-hearl ; C^^, C^^l « tena, tena » rag a ; cJif^ « thona » « i^<3i«7
tf»i^r chin (of. drt^, «ythok, Y^thuk » strike gently) ; « uari »
; WJ^y ^f^^t^ « nolen^ < naliyan^ » //W^ date-molasses (navala- ?) ;
^ « n&nna » cf. Hind. « nanha » ; ^(ffk^l « najiua » = *fF^^1
«Sijina» a tree (sobhanjana-) ; « nula » /(^r^am, Aatid-less;
etc., etc.
Final « -n, -g » occasionally interchange in foreign words : e.g., ^t^t'?^
« saban, sabag » -!f0^i/) (Portuguese « sabao ») ; ^illff^^ « estakin »
= stocUngy fBf%5{ « tikin » a kind of stout cloth = ticking ; ^ff^?, ^tf^if,
'^f^ « apig, iipin, apira » (Perso- Arabic « afyum ») ; etc.
[n] in foreign loan-words : see below.
288. Bengali [m].
Initially, [m] comes from —
OIA. « m- » : 5[1 « ma » (mata) ; « man » (madhu) ; ^ « mangt »
(manas) ; fi[^1 « mita » friend (mitra-) ; « mara » (mfta-) ;
3?t^ « majh^ » (madhya) ; f^fl « micha * (mithya-) ;
« munis^lr » (manusya) : ^ « mu » (mukha) ; « mug^ »
(mudga) ; etc., etc. ;
OIA. « mr- » : STtC^ « makhe » smears (mraksati) ; 5(t^5{ « makh&n^l »
butter (mraksana) ;
OIA. "« sm- » > MIA. < hm- » : ^*\\^ « masangt » (smasana) ; (T^t5
« moch^ » (smasru).
In the root « v^much » tt?ejt?<?, [m] is probably from « pr- » (beside
-x/CtfS « P§ch » = « pra-unch »). Initial « b- » has become [ra] in Rfsi
« mini » = f^f^ « bini » toitkoiit (< bihma- = vihina- ; or bina=vina). In
« muc^kiya hasa » ^-^^^Y^, probably we have the [m] from
« sm- » in OIA. « y^smi ».
In the middle of a word, [m] represents —
OIA. «-nm-»: MB. ^sf^s « um&ra » (unmarda); MB. ^i^X^
* umana » to toeigh (unmana, unmapana).
SOURCES OP NEW BENGALI ' M '
531
01 A. * -p. » > MIA. < -V- » > IMIA., OB. « -w-, » : ^f^sj
« kachim^ » (kaeebapa) ; ^tfS'T « ehafcim^ » (saptaparna) ; sis,
« pidim^ » (pradlpa).
01 A. « -mb- » : OB. « kamall » a 7iame ( = KambaIambara-pada) ; fifij
« nim^ » (nimba) ; ^t'f « j5ai^ » (jambu-) ; JC^ <c cume »
(eumbati) ; sts. ^9f5[ « kadam^ » (kadamba) ; etc., etc. ;
OIA. « -mbh- » ; « kumar^ » (kumbhakara) ; « kumlr^ »
(kumbhira) ; ^Sft^ « khamar^ » (skambh^gara) ;
OIA. ^ -mm- » : MB. 5t^« chamu » (sainmukha), whence NB. sfs,
« sumukh^ » ^
OIA. « -mr- » > MIA. « -mb- » : ^t^f « am^ » beside « £b^ »
(amba-, amra) ; ^t^l^ N^f^l « tama, taba » (tamra-).
OIA. « -m- » > MIA. « -mm- » : « kam^ » (karma) ; ^
« gham^t » perspiratio)i (gharma) ; « mam^-rl »
(marma-ta-) ; OB. « dhama » (dharraa) ; etc. ;
OIA. « -sm-, -sm- » > MIA. «-mh-»: « gum^t^ » stuffiness
(gi'isma ?) j ^t«? « umaaa » to be hot (usmapana) j ^fn,
« ami, tumi » (asma, yusma-) ;
OIA. « -hm- » > MIA. « -mh-, .mbh-»: ^tl^ « baml^n^,
bamun^ » (brahmana) ;
OIA. « -V- » : see p. 5^ 1 .
Intervoeal « -m- > -w- when turned preeonsonantal io NB., became
« -m- * optionally, beside « -g-, -w- * : this has been noticed at pp. 521-52a.
In MB., there are eases of change of intervoeal « -b- » to [m], through
an open nasal [w] stage. Thus, in East and North Bengali, the affix ^, c5l
« -bu, -bS for the 1st person fufcure oE the verb, regularly becomes ^, CTj,
3J « -mu, -mo, -m^ » : e.g., Sadhu-bhasa ^1%^ « karib& » I shall do, earlier
Bengali ^f?r^ ^^'Z/^, wilt, shall do, ^f^^j « karibS » / ^(?= East Bengali
^f^^, ^f^^ karimu, karum^, karim^, karam^, karma » ;
5^5. « b&stum »= « vaisnava », MB. form [bDi/tob(o)] ; MB. Jft^ a ^f ^
beside ^ftt^^t^, ^H^^t^ « sayemani, sayebanT, sahebani » canopy, umbrella <
Persian « sayah-ban » ; « s^b^ » (sarva) is found as ^ « samli, » Jfs^
4c sikma » in MB. This change of « -b- »> « -m- » is found in Early Oriya :
532
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
e.g.y in the 15th and 16th century inscriptions, we have « nema=neba »
to lake J « baisn&m§, < baisnaba » ; and Modem Oriya has « -mi » for « -bi »
in verb forms^ e,g,y « dekhimi = dekhibi » / %liall nee. The Biharl dialects
also know this change : e.g, Magahi « calraa=calbaj lema = leba » you
will go, you will take, etc.
[m] occurs in ii. and forms : e.g,, C^^R « pennara^ » (pranama),
MB. "^H^, « punima, punami » (puraima), etc. For [m] in U,
consonant groups^ see p. The nasalisation in which this [m] results
is frequently dropped.
In some compounds, there is an intrusive [m], which is euphonic in
origin: e.g., C^T^1-^;^f& « khola-m-kaei » m pot^skerd (< C^\^\^tile, ^1% =
piece) ; ^^-^-C^l'B (<^tf^^t) « phula-in-pere (< pariya) » a dhoti loith floral
(phul^) border (par^) ; '^^-^^-^t^ « mut(h)u-m-hat^ » icith closed fist;
^^t^*5 'f^^ * m&ra-n-ce, moru-il-ce » < « *m&da-m-ciya < *mada-m-
avaccia- » (mrta f m + apatya -h-ika) cJiildren always die]
English bat + ball becomes ^Tt§^^ « byat-bal » [bsetbol], beside ^^ifS^^
« byatlt-m-bal » [bsetombol] (probibly here the [m] originates from
English itself — hat and ball [b^t anrf bad, hddt il bo:l, bie;^ m bo:!]) ; Skt.
« jalamaya » becomes ^^^^ « j&U-m-m&y^t » all covered with wafer
(here the ^doubling' may through emphasis : see p. 448). In ^tt^f^;
Itsf^ « pata-m-ci, pata-u-ei » mat, we have influence of ^^f^ « s§,tar|i,uci »
carpet, cotton ritg^Yexs, « Satranjl » chequered rug. In reading multiplica-
tion tables in Bengali, [m, g] is used, instead of the locitiv^e-instrumental
[e] : e.g., « bar§, eke bara », or ^Wl^ « barakke bara » =
12x1 is 12, 5f%*t « bara dugune elbbbis^ » twice twelve are
twenty-four, but ^t^^ (^f^'s) WT^*r « tin^ baram (barag) chi^ttri^^ »
3 X /S are 36, beside, rarely, f^5{ ^t^^ ^f^*f « tin^ baray chattrisa » ; so
^t^^ (^t^t) *t ^?ITT%^ * bara baram (barai)) ek^ §a cualHs^ * 12x12 =
144. This [m] recalls the euphonic « -n- » oE Dravidian ; and a similar
euphonic [m] is noted in MIA.. : e,g,, Pali « ekka-m-ekka », « ekauca
jeyya-m-attanam » conquer self alone, Jaina Ardha-magadhi « gona-m-
ai » oar a^f?., « anna-m-anna » reciprocally, ahara-m-alnl food etc, « dlha-m-
^ddha » » distant^ lit, with a long way, etc.
THE BENGALI SEMIVOWEL GLIDES
533
For [m] in foreign words, see below.
[Ill] The Semt-vowels [e, o].
289. OIA. « y » = [j, i] and « v » = [u, w, Vy v] when initial
became respectively [fg] and [b] in Bengali, and medially between vowels
they were dropped in Second ]MIA. Later they originated as glide sounds
inter vocally^ to avoid hiatus : in Bengali the 01 A. and ML\, values of
semivowel [i, u] and of spirant [j, j ; \d, \] were replaced by those of
semivowel [e, o]. These sounds did not have any phonemic value : their
nature and origin between « udvrtta » vowels has been discussed in
pp. 338-34'^. The letter ^ (!|) « y » is much used in Bengali orthography,
but it does not often indicate any sounds and ?I (?) in MB. MSS, is only a
vowel-bearing consonant in words like ^ = « agga ^'^'^ = "^^-^
« ananta », ^(fsi = ^tfsf « ami » = ^:qS( « uttama = f^^t^
« ihar^ » /As* etc. ^ « ya » in the middle or end of words normally stands
for the sound of [e] in NB. : e.^., ^^f^ beside [^^P^e] (upaya),
='^^^ [koroe] (karai, kardti), ^ni^t^^ = ^il^tsrlt [moenamoti] a name
(Mayana- == Madanavati), etc. ; the locative Jf^IC^ [ Jomoee, Jomoe] is
written « s§,maya », and ^?[^, « bayasa, paylbs§, » commonly become
[boej, paej]. Final postvoealie [e] in tbh. words is ordinarily written ^ in
MB. : e.g., ^It^ [khae] eats, 5t^T^ [cfalae] can^ses to go, (M [diee] giveSyQi^^
[gRorae] toith, on or bjj a horae, etc.
In NB., with a preceding or following [ij sound, the front glide I [e]
is not audible, unless a distinct syllable is uttered, [e] occurs in NB. finally
after [o, a, e, te, o], and in the interior of a word between [o] and [a] only :
e.g,, ^ [fiDe] u, [khae] eats, [pfiae] heljp, -^i^^ [nicfee] doivnstairs,
(m [daee] gices, C*ft^ [joe] sleej^s ; ?ff1 [doea] mercy, ^^^f [bDeoJ] age,
[ma§a] ilhision, #rtf^ [naeok] leader. These are really diphthongs in NB, :
see supra, under New Bengali Diphthongs,
The English or Persian sound of [j], as in Tori- [joik, jo:k], '//es [jss] ;
Europe [joJ^p], Persian « yar » [ja:r, jo:r], etc. is unknown to Bengali,
and the Bengali substitute is [i]: t^^t#^ [iork], [ies], ^?tC^t*f, l^t^
534
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER V
[iorop, iurop], t^t^ [icir] etc. : the Skfc. spelling with ^ = as Gft^,
C^^, C^^f^j ^t^ would not emphasise the initial semivowel.
The modification of post-consonantal « -ya, -ya » in ts, words has
been discussed before : see under ^ Epenthesis/ pp. 381 ff,, and under
'Bengali [ad, ffi:]/ pp. J?10 ff. A spelling like « prattarthl » for
« pratyarthi » in the Manahali Grant of Madana-pala (see p. 185) shows
that the dropping the subscribed « -y- » in pronunciation of Skt. was the
way in the beginning of the l^th century : but in the 7th century the
« -y- » was fully pronounced ; witn ess the spellings ^sit^J, ft^J « arrya,
vlrrya* [arrin, uirrao] in the Lokanatha inscription of Tipperah, and not, as
in MB. and NB,, ^^iJ, « aryya, vTryya » = [a:rJ5(i)D, bi:rJ5(i)D].
290. [o] has also been discussed before, side by side with [e].
In MB., Skt. subscribed « -va-, -va- » was pronounced as [oo, oa],
and this pronunciation came to be written as vgfl, ; but [oo,
00 > 0:] and [6q] became to some extent interchangeable: sts,
C^?rt^ [Joath], beside (s, cmmi^, [ /oasti, Joosti, Jo:sti] j)eace
(svasti); CJfW5f, ^sf [Joad, /o:d] (svada), see p. 403; CTtWtSf^ Lfoami]
(svami) ; C?W5f% [doadoji] (dvadas^^ ; ^fC*tW^ [ajoajj (asvasa), etc.
These pronunciations are now old-fashioned and are getting out of use.
Subscribed «-v» in initial syllables is now ignored, ^ [/ctrd] (svada),
[da:r] (dvara), [/okio] (svakiya), etc. ; and medially it becomes a
simple consonant-doubler, in Skt. as well as in the spelling of Ferso-Arabie
borrowings : [fotto] (svatva), [p^kko] (pakva), [oJJd] (asva),
etc. ; ^¥^^5 WS^^ « mapha(ii)sval?t » [mDphoj/ol] coun try-side, away from
head-quarters = Perso-Arabic « mufassil- ».
Skt. influence has restored the ^ « -v- » subscribed to some thhs, in
Bengali orthography, which lost it in pronunciation long ago in the First
MIA. Period : e,g,, = « \/jvaI » = [j^ol] to burn. There has even
been some scholastic attempt to restore the 01 A. value of ^ = « -v- »
both inscribed and isolated, but it has proved a failure : ejj,, "StTCT^, 'Sff^lW^
« ^vanvek^ * = the German name Bchtvaribeck, which the uninitiated would
read as [Jannek] or [Janbek] ; ^t^f « Hventh&-sagg& » = Hwe^i TAsang
the Chinese pilgrim ; C^^^^ « Vev^r^l » - IFeber ; ^^t^ « Val&ntina
«
THE ^O' GLIDE: 'R, LMN INDO-ARYAN
585
Duval^ = Valenim Duval ; C^i{ C5fe»? « Sven^l Hedin^ » == Seen Hedin, etc.
[6J glide often in intervocal positions lost the vowel following it, and
formed a diphthong with the preceding vowrel : "sjt^^sj [aota] shade
from MB. [aoo:ta] (*awata < aavatta- < atapatra-) ; sometimes it was
changed to [u] through influence of following [i] (see p. 398) ; sometimes
it was assimilated with a preceding vowel, e.g,, '^^TtC^ffJ^I [anagona] <
[ao(o)Da gi)o(o)na] coming and going ; and in a few cases, it changed to [b] ;
e.g., ^srtWt^ [adobe] (see p. I ] 1), ^t^^ beside ^T«^ [fiabm, Raom] Ue
town of Hoicrahy etc. [oa] in the affix « -wala » borrowed from HindostanI
(= Bengali < -ala ») became [o] in Bengali : ^\|t^^t^j [garioala] >^^^Q'l1
[gariola] cabman, beside native Bengali ^tt^^t«11 [gariala].
The glides in foreign loan-words : see ivfra.
[IV] The Bengali Alveolar Flapped or Trilled Sound [r], and
Alveolar Lateral [1].
291. In has been surmised that the OIA. dialects fell into three
groups in their treatment of [r] and [1] sounds, and that ' Pracya ' or
Eastern OIA., the source of Magadbi and the modern Magadhan speeches,
was an [1] dialect. (See p. S^-, pp. 484-485.) Sanskrit shows its composite
character as a literary language in its [r] and [1] words occurring side by
side : e.^., « rohita : lohita ; sri-la : sli-la ; roman : loman ; rekha : lekha ;
ksudra: ksulla; rocana : loeana ; raghu : laghu ; rabh : labh ». This
occurrence in Sanskrit of the same word in two forms is at the basis of the
dictum of the Indian grammarians, « ra-la-yor abhedah » there is no
distinction between « r » and « 1 ».
This line of isogloss was present in OIA. and First, Transitional and
Second MIA. periods, at least so far as the Magadhi dialect is concerned,
as it can be seen from the evidence of the inscriptions and of A^'ararnci. We
can see from the inscriptions how the North-western dialect (which in the
Vedic period was an « r » dialect) fared during the First MIA. period :
it took up the «1 » sound, apparently through 'down-country ' influence. The
Midland dialect (the source of Sauraseni), and the South-western dialects
536
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
(the sources of the ancient speeches of Malwa, Eajputana and Gujarat, and
of Maharastrl), seem to have always had both « r » and « I ». The modern
representatives of all MIA. dialects show disagreement with Sanskrit at
times; and developments in them in Second and Late MLl., and Early
NIA.. times, as well as the intiuenee of sister and cousin speeches and of
standard languages, have made it impossible to trace the continuity of the
history in the matter of « r, 1 ».
Bengali as a Magadhan language ought to have only one sound
representing the ^Vlagadhl single liquid « 1 ». But Bengali has both « r »
and « 1 » in thh, words as well. Bengali has « r » words, ^/^f^ « dhar »,
«>^k&r», «Y/mar» etc., in addition to what may be called its
inherited Magadhi forms in « 1 > and in « 1- > n- » initially (= Skt. r), like
*ftft¥ *salik^» (= sarika, Magadhi Pkt. '^salikka), ^tft^ « pleil^ »
(^paficlla = Skt. praeira), and MB. srt? «naeha», OB. (Sarvananda)
«laccha» (Magadhi laccha = rathya).
The predominance of « r » forms over « 1, 1- > n- » ones in the Eastern
Magadhan speeches would belie their Magadhi origin. What are these
« r » forms due to in Eastern Magadhan ? Either it was the result of a
tendency in East IMagadhan, in the Apabhratisa and Early NIA. periods,
(a tendency which characterised Central and West Magadhan also, and
West as well), to change at a later time. Early Braj-bhakha in the
original, inherited « 1 » to « r » ; or it was due to the presence in Bengal,
during the formative period of Bengali, of speakers of « r » dialects from
Northern India, who had a great influence in the evolution of the language.
Both the factors may have been present together : but the « 1 > r »
tendency does not seem to have been so wide-spread, as a number of original
« 1 » words have survived : in any ease, it had received a check quite early,
Bengal had received settlements of Brahraans from Northern India from
the time of the Imperial Guptas, and probably even earlier, as we can
see from inscriptions (see pp. 76-77). These Brahmans^ it may be
expected, brought their own Prakritie speeches with the * r» sound, before
they accepted the ^lagadhl Ap. of the land where they settled : and their
class dialects would certainly have the « r » sound. Above all, with the
^R' IN MAGADHAN & IN WESTERN HINDI
537
Brahmans came the tremendous influence of Sanskrit. The speech of the
BrShmans^ as that of the aristocracy of culture, would certainly modify
the language of those communities which accepted their lead. The influence
of Skt, grew greater and greater. The result was that the « r » words
from Skt., as the forms employed by the most intellectual classes, were
largely established in Bengali at the time of its differentiation from the
Central and West Magadhi groups, i.e. before the 1 0th century. By that
time, what may be called the * lambdacism ' of early Magadhi, i.e. the habit
of changing « r » to < 1 which characterised it in the 6th or 3rd century
B.C., or 4th century A.C., had worn itself out. « r » words are found in
Old Bengali toponomy, as in the inscriptions, and in the remains of OB.
prior to 1200 A.C., just the same as in NB. Initial « 1 », whether tbli. or ^s.,
tended to become « n- » in all Magadhan, probably at this juncture.
The * Bihan ' speeches, however, although they possess both « r » and
« 1 are more faithful to their Magadhi origin in preferring one sound
only. The single « 1 » sound of Magadhi (in non-initial positions generally)
seems to have become an « r » in the Central and Western forms of
Magadhi Apabhransa (see p. 96 ; Hoernle, ^ Gaudian Grammar/ pp. is, 13,
14, 63). Western Hindi (Braj-bhakha), as well as the literary form of
Eastern Hindi — the latter coming between Western Hindi and ^ Bihar! ' —
also changed « 1 » (and « r ») to « r » (see p. 156). Bengali-Assamese and
Oriya, on the other hand, never developed as a characteristic this tendency
to confuse « r » and « 1 », or to have a special preference for « r ». Change
of intervocal « -d- > -r- » to « r » in Western Hindi occurred in late times ;
the change of intervocal « 1 » to « r » seems to have been through a « -}- »
stage— « -1- > "^^-1- > ^-r- > -r- ». This < -1-, -d- > r » is not found in
the Old Western Hindi of Cauda Bardai, nor is it much noticeable in Kabir ;
but in the Braj-bhskha of Sura-dasa and Biharl-lsla, and the rest, it is very
much in evidence. Modern HindostSnl is not characterised by this,
although it has some words with ^ r » for « 1 », mostly borrowed from
Braj-bhakha. It seems that intervocal « 1 » which became « 1 » in most
MIA., changed to « r » and then this « r », and « d > r » both became the
« r » in the Braj-bhakha, Bundeli and Kanauji tracts (Upper Gangetic Doab^
68
538
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
excepting the Hindostanl area) : in Panjabl, RSjasthanl-GujaratT, Marathi,
this remained « } ». In the West and Central Magadban area, this « -1- »,
or « -1- », became « r ». Eastern Magadhan kept the dental « 1 », but
probably through Skt. influence, « r » was frequentl}^ brought in.
292. The « 1 » sound is now absent in the Upper Ganges Valley ; it
is not found in any of the Magadhan speeches, except Oriya. In most
Second MIA., single intervoeal « 1 » of Early MIA., whether original (i.e.,
found in the oldest I A.) or derived (i.e., developed out of « r », as in
Magadhi) was cerebralised to « 1 MSgadhl of the Second and Third
MIA. periods probably had this « 1 ». But it became a dental or alveolar
«1 » once more in all Magadhan of the NIA., period, excepting in Oriya,
Oriya has cerebral < -1- » which corresponds to OIA. single « -1- » (and « r »),
and alveolar « 4- », which corresponds to MIA. « -11- ». In the eastern
alphabet which was current in the present-day Magadhan tracts prior to
the 13th century, there was no separate letter for * 1 ». Oriya used the ordinary
^1=^ for the « 1 » which occurred iater vocally, and developed as early as
the 13th century a letter ^ with a diacritical mark, for the intervoeal
alveolar « -l-<-ll- ». It seems that in the Magadhi Ap. stage, alveolar « 1 *
occurred initially, and medially only when doubled ; and cerebral « 1 »
occurred singly intervoeally only : the same letter apparently could do
for both, as their position in speech was fixed, and together, they formed
one phoneme. The same thing seems to have been the case in Early
Marathi (Jules Bloeh, ' Langue Marathe,' p. 148). One can recall the
usage in the orthography of Second and Transitional MIA. with reo-ard
to the representation of both the voiced stops and spirants by the same
letter (see pp. 253-253). Bengali (as well as other NIA.) shows « r »
for « 1 » in a few words, e.g,, « tarl » fermented palm-juice ( = tala, tala),
« mir^ » (v/ mil) : this « r » is undoubtedly derived from the cerebralised
« 1 », and the « r » formations can be called sporadic relics from the Mag. Ap.
stage with the « 1 ». In any case, judging from the evidentie of other NIA.
like Panjabi, Bsjasthani and Grujarati, and Marathi, as well as from
Oriya, the presence of « 1 * in Magadhi Apabhransa can very well be
assumed. One need not ascribe the « U sound im Oriya to Dravidian
PALATALISED ^Li, Ri ' : SOUKCBS OF NB. 'R' 539
influences exclusively, as Beames has done in his Comparative Grammar
(I, p. 245).
la Old Magadhi, before the Asokan period, « 1 » before « y » was
palatalised [li, Ij > i> jj], which gave c -yy- » in ASokan Prakrit. There
is no trace of it in Later Magadhi : the resultant « -yy- » has become
« -j » in Bengali in a solitary example (see p. 476) A slightly palatalised
«1» [li] is found in dialectal NB. in cases where an original « i » is
dropped (see p. 380) : ^.y., ^Vl [kali ] <^ [kali] (kalya), ^ [gali]
< ^ttf^ [gali] (garha-). In dialectal (West Bengali) forms like ^
[Rair, Bari] [mair, mari] a heating < Ttf^f [hari, mari],
there is similarly a slightly palatalised [ri].
The cerebral « 1 » is now absolutely a foreign sound in Bengali, so
much so that a Bengali speaker confuses the Oriya « 1 » with his own ^
« r». To make fun of Oriya articulation, specially on the stage, W^, C^ft^j
^NS^t^f, < jara, gopara, blirarama, karlikata etc., are used
for the correct Oriya forms with « 1 » ; and this « r » is further extended to
words which do not have [1] — e.g., « jagltr(a)nutha » (Jagannatha),
^5v5 « abadhar§, » (avadhana), « subh&r(a)dara » (Subhadra), etc.
293. Sources of Bengali [r] .
Initially, Bengali [r] represents Skt. « r- » which probably ousted
Magadhi « 1- » in most cases : ^tf^ « rati » (ratri) beside the dialectal sts.
?rff%^ « nattir^ » = ^tf%^ * rattir^ » — « nattir^ » being for « *lattir^ »,
influenced no doubt by a Magadhi « "^latti » > thh, < *lati » ; « rag »
(ragga) ; « rupa» silver (rupya-) ; « rui » a fish (rohita); ft© « rSr^ »
(randa) ; ^ « ra » (rava) : « rise » (risyati) ; « rSnl » (rajni) ;
f?r^ < ritha » (aristha-) ; C^t^ « roy » (ropayati) ; « reri » (eranda-) ;
etc., etc.
The words cfl, dt^l « r§, i"8a », cf. Skt. « loman », NB, is. C^\^
«lom^»; ^^^T « r&sun^ », OB, (Sarvananda) « rasauna », beside Skt.
« lasuna » ; ^t?) ^t^ « Rar(h)^ ^ », beside Jaina Ardha-magadbi « Laijha »,
^ The Skt. ' Radha ' is probably based on a vernacular form with * r ' occurring side by-
side with the from in * 1 ' (attested from the Ardha-mugadhi and Tamil) in the Second
MIA. period,
540
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
Tamil (Tirumalai inscription, 10£4 A. C.) « Iladam » ; and a few others,
probably seem to be due to an « r- » tendency in some tracts at least of
West Bengal,
In the middle of a word, [r] corresponds to —
Skt. « -r- », either through the influence of Skt., or through spon-
taneous change within the language itself: €,g,y
«akh&r^» (aksara); « ar^ and, (Mag. avala=:apara) ;
« ar^si » (*aalasT, ^aarasi =*adara§a-, adarsa-) ; « Idur^ »
(indura) ; MB. « y/xx^: » come down^ descend (ava-tar-, v/tr) ;
^voC^ « ut&re » (uttarati) ; the affix % m « -r&, -eri » for the
genitive (-kara, -kera=karya); t(?P?rl * kera » clerk (klraka-) ;
Q^^^ « kerani » clerJc (klraka 4- karanika) ; « k&re »
(kar5ti) ; C^^tlt * keyari » bed round a pla^ii (kedarika) ; ^ttW
« kh&yer?t » (khadira); MB. -^tf^^ * g&hir^ » (gabhira) ; C^ipH
« gerua » (cf. gairika) ; CMt^l « gora » (gaura-) ; ^ « gh&r^ »
(grha) ; « care » (earati) ; « cur^ » (of. curna) j C5t^
« cor^ » (caura) ; « dumur^» (udumbara) ; (75^5 * terach^ »
(tirasea-) ; "srt^^ « nayar^ » (nagara) ; *p&re» (paridhiyate) ;
^ « pur^ » (cf . purna) ; ^ « bir?l » (vira) ; ^Ttl^ « sayar^ »
(sagara) ; etc., etc.
Skt. «-]-»: ^ « nagg&r^, laggar^ » a«d?/«or ( = liggala);
f^^, <?n?t^ * V^nihar, nehar » jJo (ni -hx/bhal) ; MB. C^t^
« pSara » (prabala) ; ^?r^1 « phir^ka » «///^/^? (phalaka-) ;
CT^t^ « mehar(i) » a palace^ a place-name (mahalaya-) ;
etc.
It represents also —
OIA. «-t-» > MIA. «.dl-»: ^t^5T ^ paruU, OB. « paralf »
(patall); « jarul^ », OB. « jarali » (jatali); ^^q,
« 3&rul^, jarul^ » (jatula) ;
OIA. « -d- » : C^^q * beral^ » (vi4ala) ;
OIA. « -t-, -d- » > Second MIA. « -4- »j in the numemls esp. :
^t^ « bar& » (dvadaSa) ; « satt&r^ » (saptati) ; 'TC^I
« s&res?l » hedy good (*sa]isa, *sa4isa, sarisa=sadfsa).
DROPPING OF PRE-CONSONANTAL ' R '
541
Change of [d > r] to [r] is eharaeterstie of East and North Bengali,
and also of forms of West Bengali. The standard dialect has a few
words showing interchange of [r] and [r] : e.^., ^Tf^, ^Tt^l « lab^lra,
laph^ra* (seep. 513) ; ^t^, ^t^^ « kath?lra, -m » lu?nber (ksstha);
« tuk^ra » piece, beside Hind. « tukra » ; C*?5^, CfS^ « pet^ra, -ra »
(^petita, *penta-=petaka.) ; OB. « kadakaea NB. « k&r^-
k&e^ rock salt ; ^^5^1; « k^raca, k§,raea » biographical notes (cf. Hindi
M\^v\\\dk^ war-sorig, sofig of heroism: kadakkha=:kataksa ?) ; MB., West
Bengali sit^f^ « maruli » mopping the front of the house-door (? ^Tf^
« marill » < I
294. Bengali phonetics is still Prakritic enough to drop a pre-conso-
nantal [r] and double the following consonant by way of compensation,
in both tbL and ^5. words (see pp. 448-449). This habit is present through-
out the history of the language : e.g,, in the OB. period, in the Kamauli
grant of Yaidya-deva (p. 184), we have the sts. and tth, spelling « nninaya>
for «ninnaya» (= nirnaya). These modified stss. occur principally
in the speech of the masses, and frequently they are written as pronounced,
especially in the drama and in the conversational passages in fiction : e.^.,
M kamma », beside ts, « karma *, sts, "^^^ « kar&m^ » and tbh,
« kam^ » ; (TfN^ « sam&tti,, somatta » grewn-iip {as of a girl)
(?samartha)j ^^1 « k&tta » waster, 'governor^ (karta) ; f^tf^ « ginni >
(*girni=:gfhinl) ; S^tl'f^ * ciinnamett& » (c&r^namerta=caran&mfta) ; MB.
af^l « n§,tta » < 5^-?ltf^^ * na-i'atiya » festival on the 9th day after birth
of child ; l^ft * puskltnni » (puskar^nl, puskarini) ; « uttinna »
(uttlrua) ; C^lft^^ [pojker] clear (porsker^ < *p&irskar^ < pariskara) ;
^^^1 * b&nnftna » (varnana) ; ^Tt^ [malle] beside >»t^lC^ [marie] =
Standard Bengali « maril& » he struck ; ^'c^ [koccf(h)e] beside ^'^CI
[korcf(h)e] t5 </o^w^ = Standard « kariteehe > ; Persian « girlnl » >
« sirni », « sinni » 52<;t^e/5 offered to a saint ; etc., etc. Cf . the
assimilation of « f » in MB. stss,, p. 357. Exceptions, where the [r] resists
assimilation, have been indicated at p. 449.
This dropping of [r] characterises the speech of the uneducated
classes, of women and of children ; and for common words, educated
542
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
speech is not unaffected by it. As there is the impression that
the [r] forms are the learned oaes^ we find, in the attempt to be learned,
forms like ^ft^^ [/<ificLrJ5o] (sahajya), f5^# [cjintarnito] (eintanvita),
f5«r [cprno] (eihna), etc., in both writing and speech. MB. has a
false restoration ^ jkrmh » for ^ « j§nml^ » : see p. 376. The
Perso-Arabie « muqaddamah » has given the Bengali Cspf^Psf^fl « mok&d-
d&ma beside a * learned ' C^^^sil « mokardd^ma » law-suit ; and C^^^
« behlkdda » heyond limits Persian « be-hadd », at times figures as
[befiordo] ; and Ar. « baqi » > « baki » remainder has even been
Sanskritised to « bakri ».
Intervocal [r] as a rule is not dropped in Bengali, except, of course,
the NB. dropping of an original intervocal [r] which becomes pre-
consonantal through epenthesis : e,g.y ^T^i:;^ « k^rite ^ to do > ^'^Q
«kotte » (through ^^^^ « kairte »). But in a few instances^ intervecal
[r] seems to . have been dropped without being pre-consonantal : cf. OB.
(Sarv&nanda) « biyana », NB. « bena » (virana-) ; s[Wtt « m&rai »
Biore for rice i c^?r;^-/o/i^ (Late Skt. marara) ; «chai» aslie^ (?ksara);
« pheu » jungle dog (pheru), etc. On the other hand, euphonic [r]
to prevent hiatus is sometimes met with : e,g,^ ^t^^ * ka-r-u-rgL » beside
Tf^^ « kaur^ », « karu »=^tC^j « karo », genitive of indefinite pronoun
C^^j C^^ « keho, keha, keu » some-bod i/ ; f^^t% * bi-r-asi » (dvi +
asiti); f^t5T(^)t « bi-r-a-na(bb&)i » (dvi + navati) ; « hat-u-r-e »
from ^t^f^fl = ^^fet^ll « hafc-a-r-iya, ^hat-a-ija » belonging to the
market ; so ^^t^fV^I, ^t^^ « kathariya, kathure » wood-cutter (the last
two through the analogy of 5T^fij?rl « n§.gariya » belonging to towti, ^<^f^^l
« patb&riya » s^o/ijr, etc. ?),
But initial [r] is sometimes dropped, and there is equally a protbesis
of [r]. This omission, as well as prothesis ef [rj, is found pretty frequently
all over Bengal, but in the speech of the masses in North Central and North
Bengal this seems to be most common : e.g.y ^tC^^ « ramer^ §s^ » for
"^W^ ^ « amer^ ras^ » mango-juice ; ^t^l for ?ft^1 « aja < raja » etc.
One or two words in Standard Bengali seem to have this prothetic [r], e.g,,
C^^l « roja » snake-doctor, witch-doctor for ^^1 « ojha » (upadhyaya) ; and
SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI ' L ' 543
in the Calcutta Colloquial, = « ite » is frequently heard for flil, f^^
« rltha, ritha » Boaji'tiut.
For [r] in foreign words, see infra.
295. Bengali [1] : initially, [1] in all cases may be said to go back to
ilagadhi « 1- » which corresponds to —
Skt. « 1- » : ^ « lahe, lay » tal^es (labhate) ; ^t^ « lag^ ^ (lagna);
cfl « la » (laksa) ; « l^ikh^ » (laksa) ; ^it^ « laj^ » (lajja) ;
« ^luth » (v/lunth) ; ^ * lun^ » (kvana) ; C^t^l « lo^a »
(lauha-) ; also « lau » (alabu) ; etc.
Skt. * r- » : OB., eMB. ^t^ « lacba MB. s^t^ « nach& » (rathya) ;
*citfe * lati » > ^i^tf^ « nati », which influenced a dialectal sts.
5?tf^^ « nattir^ » (ratri) ; C^^^ lejur^ » i'^zY {of paper kite) (cf.
Skt. « y- » : ^tlt « lathi » (yasti- ?) ;
In the interior of words, [1] < Magadhi « -1- » (or « »), and « -11- »
equating —
Skt. « -d- » : C^t^ * kol^ » (kroda) ; « eul^ » (cf . cuda) ; \5tf^sf
« dalim^ » (dadimba) ; C^t^ « soU » (sodasa) ; cf . « khel^ »
(^■^skrid, krid) ;
Skt. «-dr-» > MIA. « -11-, -dd- » : ^ « bhalS, » (bhadraka);
5(t^ « m§l^ » tvrestl€r,ji(jhier (malla, madra);
Skt. « -r- » : 5tf^»t « calisgt » (catvarinsat) ; « plell^ » (praclra) ;
*1t^^ « palay » (palayate, parayate) ; Ct^^, « pele > phele »
(pellai', prerayati) ; itft^ « salik^ » (sarika) ; ^fif as in ?tft
« hali mug^ » y w?^ vioong puhe (harita-) ; « h&lud^ »
(haridra) ;
Skt. * -rn- » > MIA. < -II- > : « ghol^ » (-v/ghurn) ; C5t^, p
« col, cul » /(? (curna-) ; etc. ;
Skt. « -ry- » > MIA. « -11- »: « pala » (paryaya), Hind.
« pari » ; *tt^t « palai) » (paryaijka) ; tt^fe « palat^ » (paryasta)
Skt. « -rh- » : ^tf% « gali » (garha-). f*tc|^, f»t^«!$ < silat^, silefc^ »
Sylhet (« *sirhatta = srlhatta » : in DeBlaeu's map, 16th century,
we find < Sirote ») ;
544.
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
Skt. ^5t»! * agalgt » (argala) ; ^vgq « agul^ » (agguli) ;
^€ci1 « aola » (amalaka-) ; * aul?l » (akula) ;
* al^ta » (alakta-) ; '^T^^ * ali, ail » (ali) ; ^Tt^l^ « alas^ »
(alasya) ; « ukh^ll » (okkhala-, udukhala-) ; « v/ola »
(ava-labh) ; * k&la » (kadala-) ; ^t^^l « kaj&l^ »
(kajjala); * gile » (gilati) ; MB. C^fil * cheli » (ehagala-) ;
^ *tha]a» (sthala-); « tula » (tulaka-);
* dubal^ » (durbala) ; < pitlblgt » (pittala) ; *ft^^
«pakh3le» (praksalayati) ; MB. STt^^Tt^ ^maulSni^^ (matu-
lani) ; « mal^l » (mala) ; »rt^1 * sala » (syala-) ; fl^i « sil^ »
(sila) ; ^t«^, ^t^^ * lagS-^, nag&l?t » (laggala) ; sts.
« pila, pile f^f^3^1 « piliha » (pllha), etc., etc. ;
Skt. « 4y- » : ^ « kali » (kalya) ; « kula » winyiowing fan
(kulyaka-) ; MB. ^ « miil^ » (molla, mulya) ; (M ^ (s811a,
salya) ;
Skt. « -11- » : ^?r^ « k&rela » (karavella) ; * kol^ » A^o^ irihe
(KoUa, ^^^Oi ^ «ch§U (challi); ^»t^ « bhaluk^ »
(^bhallukka, ef. Skt. bhalluka) ; ^Tt^ « mal^ » (malla <
madra) ;
Skt. « -1 V- » : ol^ » (olva) j C^^ « bel^ » (bilva).
In borrowings from HindostanI, « -lb- » becomes [-1-] in Bengali : ejj,^
^ « kolu » oil-presser (Hind, kolhu = oiUnill) ; * jola *
{Mohammedan) weaver (Hind. * jolha beside *ju]aha» < Persian
« julah » : the Bengali word may have been borrowed straight from the
Persian).
[1] occurs in words of desi origin : e.g,y f«1^, « pila, pile ^ as in
C5C»lf^, -flf^ * chele pile, -pule » children (cf. Tamil « piljai », Oriya
« pila » : or is it the ilh, form C^H * polS * as in East Bengali, <
« pota-la- » ?) ; 'It^t^ « palan^ » udder of cow (cf. Telugu « palu Tamil
« pal » milk) ; *rt^«, *tt^ « pal&g, pal&m » ; etc.
[1] figures in onomatopoetics.
There is dropping of [1] in C^t?t^, C^W^ « po(h)al^ » straw
(5= palala) ; also in ^' [^0:] for FT [^ol] (= Skt. eala) eome thou.
INTERCHANGE OF ' L ' AND ' N '
545
Intrusive [1] occurs in N©t«jt ^ talui » beside ^t^t « taui * brother or
fiinfer^s fafhet-in-hir (< ^^f^^? *^©t^ « ^ta&i, *taaii » < « tatagu »), to
prevent hiatus.
[1] in foreio^n words is discussed below,
296. [I] becomes [n], mainly initially. This tendency is common
to all Magadhan speeches, and probably characterised the Apabhransa
Magadhi dialects. Conversely, there is change of [n] to [1]. Examples :
[I] > [n] : MB. as in NB. ^^t^Ottnt^ « naeh^-doar^ » street door
(laeha, laecba^ rathya) ; 5rt<§^ « nagltl^ » (laggala) ; 5Rt^ « nau »
(alabu) ; 5ft « nuci » thin wheaten cakes fried in bit tier (cf .
Hind. « lucuT »); « naru » (ladduka) ; « nun^ » (lavana) ;
C^^ « nej^ » /'^zY (cf. lafija) ; sfs. '^^^ « n^kkhi » (laksmi),
•?T^^^ « niikhind§,r^ » a name (Laksmindra) ; sts. c^t^ « nok^ *
(= l5ka; nakha); ^Tt^tt « natai » reel for thread,
« nattu, natim » beside forms with cll- « la- » ; s?!^ « nal^ »
beside cTt«1 «lal^ » m/ ; etc., etc. The forms with initial [n], rather
than [1], are used, so far as the Standard Colloquial is concerned,
more among women and children than among men, and are
not regarded as standard forms.
The plural affix ^53^ « -gula » becomes «guno»; and -g^
« -lum *, affix of the past tense first person in the Standard
Colloquial, is found in certain West Bengal districts {e.g, Husjli)
as 5 « -nu », €,g,, « konnu » / did < « kornu » < ^fil?
« karinu » = ^T^^*, ??fij^ « k&rilu, -lum * sadhu-bhasa '
^1%^t^ < karilam » ; so 5^ « connu » / < « ealinu *
= sf^i^t^ « ciililam », etc. This « -inu » affix is much employed
in poetry.
[n] > [1] : « la » (na, nava = nau) ; « lat^ » (nasta) ;
* lagCgja » (nagga-, na^ga-, naorna-) ; J^tl^^, ^tt^^ * laihor^,
laih&r^ » beside ^Jt^W, « naiyav^, nayer^ » married woman\s
father^s home (*naihara, jnatigfha) ; « v^lS-r * for
« v^n&r » ^0 move (see p. 497) ; Jcj^ « lay^ » for « nay^ » 7?if'/ie
(nava), '/s (nli + hay) ; etc., etc. It is found also in a few
69
546
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER V
foreign words ; C^^^t»( * loksan > Jo-s^ (also C^t^^t^ « loskan »
by metathesis) (= Perso- Arabic « nnqsan ») ; « lak^ »
////•<?^J (Persian « nax ») ; +r,9rffe « lot » = En<^lish w/;/^', laah-nofe,
+gjg*f « lutis^ » = English notice, « Umb§.r^ » = Engh'sh
number, etc. This change of [n] to [1] is looked upon as a
rustic trait, and although one or two [1] forms have been
accepted as standard, e.g,^ and C^^^t^T, they are generally
regarded as vulgar. Certain tracts, especially in Central Radha,
are noted for the preference among the masses for the [1]
sound initially.
[V] The Sibilants: the Palatal [J], axd the Dental [s].
297. Bengali has one sibilant phoneme, the palato-alveolar [JJ
and the dental or alveolar [s] is only a subsidiary form of it — [|] normally
becoming [s] when oceuring before [t, d, n, r, 1] . In East and North
Bengali, of course, [cjh] is reduced to [s]. The pure palatal sibilant is
preserved in Bengali only among the Magadhan speeches (see pp. 58-59,
92, -245) : in Oriya, the [J] has been slightly dentalised and is very like
[si] rather than like a pronounced [J] sound. In the ^ Bihar! ' speeches, the
palatal is not used now, only dental [s], although spelling (in the Kaithi
script) employs « s », which possibly shows the occurrence of the palatal
pronunciation in early times. The dentalisation of the sibilant in the
Western and Central Magadhan tracts probably is due to the overwhelming
inflnence of Upper India under which these tracts have been for some
thousand years : and besides, the [s] sound was probably never absent in
Magadha itself, at least dialectally. In Early Assamese, intervocal [J]
became [fi], and in recent Assamese single [J] initial or intervocal is pro-
nounced as the guttural spirant [x], although written *f, ^, « s, s ».
East Bengali partly agrees with Assamese in turning [J] to [fi] (see p. 79).
It is only in West Bengali that the original Magadhi value is kept intact.
In this point, more than in anything else, Bengali has remained faithful to
its Magadhi character. It is not impossible, however, that the dental sound
THE SIBILANT IN BENGALI WRITING 5i7
occurred ia class dialects even in the Western Bengali area itself^ among
comaiunities originally of Kol speech, and among other communities which
immigrated from the contiguous Bihar. In fact, [rf] rather than [J], is still
found among certain communities in Western Radha and elsewhere,
although it is regarded as very vulgar in the Standard Colloquial speech.
In writing [Jj, Bengali orthography has always employed all the three
letters *f, ^, Jf. In Old Bengal epigraphic records, s, s, s » are confused,
demonstrating their levelling to one sound which was that of [JJ : tf.y., in
the Bangarh inscription of Mahipala (p. 183) occur spellings like « saila-
sikhara, saulkika, punya-yaso, parasara, raadhusudana-sarmma-, visuva-
sagkrantau»; in the Kamauli grant of Vaidyadeva (p. 184), « santi =
santi, visayilla = visayillaj sima, vayavya-Jisa etc. ; also in other inscrip-
tions similar interchanges are found. In Early Bengali and Assamese
MSS., as well as in the Oriya epigraphical records, interchange between
the sibilant letters is very common, and there is ordinarily no deference paid
to the ts, or foreign words. But in the hands of educated scribes, ts, words
generally would be spelt as in Skt., and the (ss. would exert a certain
amount of gaiJance in spelling the easily recognisable tl/k, derivatives :
'^^.j C?fn « sols, » (s5dasa) ; f « sSrgt » (sanda) ; ^ « sath^ » (?asthi) ;
« au-^ » (a-vfs) ; %(t)^ « a(i)s?l » (amisa) ; «sikalat » (sfgkhala);
*f^1 « Sara » (sarava) ; »r « sa » (sata) : c*fj « seth » (sresthin) ; ?ft
« s4i » (sakhi) ; tl^ « hls^ » (hansa) ; ^t*f * bas^ » (vansa) ; etc., etc. A
similar modelling of tl^/i, spelling on that of the tss. also took place in
Oriya.
Padre Assump9am uses only «x»=[/] in his transcription of East
Bengali : e,f/., '^f^m « aixe » comes, « xurzio » S7in, 5f=ST « xoito »
tndA, ^t»f « baix » lweuti/-ttvo (also=:^fj[ stale)^ c^q « xolo » dxieen,
T5l « yansa » trae^ ^^^1 « xoia » having slept, 'sjf^ « axtha » faith, Tff^
« xantona » condolence, *rt^ * xaxtro » scripture, etc It would be seen that
Padre x4ssump9am uses « x » [J] for the sibilant before « t, th » also, as in
« axtha, xaxtro » ; in NB. in this position we have [s] normally (see p. 297) ;
but « s » is used in the works of the Padre for 5^ ^= [ts, s] only ; see ^^///j/a,
pp. 461- 105.
548 PHONOLOGY : CHAPTEE V
298. Sources of Bengali [J] .
OIA. « s, s, s » regularly changed to « s » in all eases in Magadhi >
Bengali, and it is not necessary to give farther examples.
Groups of «s, s, s »+a semivowel, or groups of «-rs-, -rs-», etc.,
become « s-, -ss- » in Magadhi, which remained as \J] in
Bengali, written »f, ^, 7[. Examples —
« -rs- > : « ar^si » (adarsa- : see p. 256) ;
« -rsv- » : 'tH * pas^ * (parsva) ;
« rs, rs » : « cas^ » iM/i (? ears = Y/kfs) ; « v/ghas » r?i6
(y/ghrs); « aus^» (a-vrs) ; MB. ''Tt^^ «paus§[» (pravfsa-) ;
« -sm- » > « -ss- » : « ras » m« (rassi, rasmi) ;
« sy » : *rtffTt « aala » (syala-, syala-) ; »tff « sam^» (syama) ; MB. »lt^^
« sawlbl^ » (syamala) ; OB. « disai » (dfsyate) ; C?^T^ « besati »
conmerce ( < vaisya-) ;
«sr»: MB. »ftv§»? « saw&na » (sravana) ; C*t^ « seth » (sresthin) ;
« misal^ » (misra-) ; '*tt^^ « sasuri » (svasiu-) ;
« sv » : MB. « suna » r% (svan) ; '^^^j spelling, ^ [JoJur]>
(svasura) ; C*tt^t^, [Joa/, jo:/] (svasa) ; «rt^>it « sasuri »
(svasru-ti) ; ^?r^ « p&r^su » (parasvah) ;
* -sy- » : 3lt5^, * manus^, munis^ » (manusya) ; « ris^ »
(risya-, irsya) ; ^ « tuse » (tusyati) ; ^ « ruse » (rusyati) ;
« -sm- » MB. f^^C< « bis&re », ^IfTC^ « pSs&re (*vis§alai,
^passalai = vismarati, prasmarati).
« -sy- » ; ^srt^l^ « alas^ » (alasya) ; « kasa » (kansya-) ; «lt^
« las^ » (lasya) ; « has?l » (hasya) ; « sis^ » (sasya) ;
« sr, sr » : 'Sft^ as in « as^ pas^ » (asra) : f^l^, « pisi,
masi » (pitfsvasr, matfsvasr) ; « s8ta» (sonta-, srotas) ;
« sv » : ^*tt « s4i » (svaml) ; C^jf « gosSi » (gosvami) ; « sur^ »
(svara) ;
« -Mv- » : MB. pr*rrt « nisas^ » (nihsvasa) ;
« -hsv- » : MB. "MTft^, fjr*tt«^ « nisan^, nisan^ » w^/m/c (nihsvana).
A sibilant preceded by « an us vara » is preserved (as a palatal sibilant
as usual) in Bengali : ^rtf « mas^ » (mansa), ft^T « bis » (vinsati), ^t*f
CHANGE OF SIBILANT TO ^ H ' IN MIA. & NIA 519
« dis^ » gnat (dansa), T*t® « sisu » (simsapa), ^t*f * bas^ * (vansa), %V\
« has§^ » (hansa), etc., etc.
299. Bengali, in common with other NIA. languages, presents
cases of change o£ single intervocal sibilants to « -h- », This change is a
MIA. one, and came in vogue in the Second MIA. period^ and was rather
prominent in the Apabhrafisa stage, and is carried down to recent NIA.
The nature and extent o£ this modification are not clear. It affects a
special group of words and inflections, the numerals (the decades
and the septuagintades), the genitive affix -asya > -aha > : but cE. « -s »
in Kashmiri, and in European Gipsy), the future affix (« -isyati > -ihai »,
etc. : but cf. « -s- » in Rajasthanl-Gujarati and in Western Panjabi).
Isolated words in all NIA. also show this change : for Bengali examples,
see below under [fi], §302. The change of the i;enitive « -sya » to * -ha »
in Late MIA. may have been due to the intluenee of the locative and instru-
mental plural affixes « -hi, -hi » ; and for the change of the future « -isy- »
to « -ih* », there may have been the intluenee of a periphrastic form like
« dataham »>Seeond MIA. (Ardha-Mag. and Jaina Maharastn) «dahaiB >.
(See below^ Morj^holocf^, under *Noun Tntiexions : Genitive/ and under
''Verb : Future Precative and Future Tense'). The « -h-» form for these
inflections is found in a fairly wide tract, and came to be well-established
only lu the Third MIA. period^ although a few cases or this change occur
sporadically in earlier Pkts. The Southern Pkt. of the Transitional MIA.
Period, as in the Andhra country, shows this change initially as well as
intervocally, « hiru = srI, Hadakani = fSatakarni » (E. J. Rapson,
'Catalogue of Coins oi the Andhra Dynasty in the British Museum,' London,
1908, p. xx). But this seems to be isolated, and not to have had any con-
nexion with the change in the Northern Indian Prakrits. The « -h- *
words, including the numerals, possibly originated in some Panjab dialect,
whence they were early adopted into a koine like Pali, and then were passed
on to other forms of lA. : witness Panjabi forms like « har = asadha, puh =
pausa, dah (also « das *)=dasa, vih == vinsati^ tih (trih) = trinsat, eallh =
eatvarinsat, paujah = paiieasat, ikah^th = eka-^asthi, tra(i)h = ^tras, baih
s^upay/ vis, pih= y/ P^?> sauhra = svasura-, tifth =snusa », etc.^ as compared
550
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
with other NI A. forms in «s»; ejj,, Hindi «asarh^ pos, das, bis, tis,
calls, pacas, iksath, (taras), bais, pis, sasura » etc. In Bengali thk.
forms which have normally evolved from 01 A,, inter vocal [/j is kept :
^'9"i "^tc^, "silCJf [aije, a/e] comes (avisati) ; MB. « ulasa » (iillasa);
^t^, [cii/, a:J] meat famisa) ; ^STtf ^t^% [ak(u)/i] (agkusika) ;
Pf«t « das^ » beside OB. (Caryas) « daha », NB. vf^c^l « dahala » c^arrf (^Z' /f^/i
(dasa) ; 5f^, 15^^ [cfoli/, tsoloj] (calasi) ; ^lf^, ^v5% [por(i)/i] (prativesi) ;
^t^^ [bajor] (vasa-grha) ; fs^^f^ [ nijuti ] (nisupta-) ; spfl [ rao/a ]
(masaka-) ; the emphatic enclitic particle V\ « -si » as in MB. (^KK.),
^.y., (?f-Pf « so-si » ^^a^ indeed, NB. « -s » as in ^tf^fl^^* bhagyi-s »
[bfiaggiX] < ^C^J f^T « ^bhagye-si » luckily indeed, JNB. PR « sin » <
earlier « ^si-ni » mlher (ef. Vedic « sim ») ; etc., etc.
The occurrence of « -h- * in Assamese, ^.y., « hahi » .ywz//^', laughter (y/has),
« bihi »y/?^/<? (vansi), « manuh » (manusa), « Aham » Ahom, written '^spp^
«asama», is isolated, and connected with it is the change of both intervocal
and initial [/j in East Bengali dialects (see p. 79) : and the « -h- » words in
Bengali, noted in §30::i below, are not at all connected with x\ssamese
or East Bengali specially : they are mostly pan-Indian, The East Bengali
tendency to use « h » for is noted in Bengali literature as early as the
16th century, and it can only have arisen considerably earlier. But in West
Bengal it has always been ridiculed. Kavi-kagkana in the ' Candl-kavya^
(c. 1580) makes the ' BaggSl ' or East Bengali sailors say « harbli » for
« s^rba » all, « haklil^ » for « slbk^l^ » all, « hukuta » for ^^^t
« sukuta » {dried) condiment, beside deaspirated forms like « bai » for '«t|
« bhai » brother. Earlier, we learn from the biographies of Caitanya that he
used to make fun of the East Bengali pronunciation after his return from
Vagga (East Bengal) to Nadiya. The old Sanskrit verse describes this
character of East Bengali articulation —
« asirvudam na gfhnlyat purva-desa-nivasinam :
* satayur ' iti vaktavye, ^ hatayur ' iti bhasinam. »
Accept not the Ucsuikjh of the dwellern in the Easteni /(Uid-s ;
When satayuh {jaau yon live a hundred years) in to tie uii.l, thetj my
hatayuh {jnay your life be ended) !
INTERCHANGE OF AND 'CH'
551
This pronunciation is not noticed by Padre Assumpcam, and 1 have
not found it represented in the Perso-Benj^^ali MSS. from Chitta*?ong
(pp. 228 ff.), where ouly i» fo"°<i although the « h »
pronunciation is fairly common.
The Upper Indian pronunciation of « s » as « kh » is found in a few-
Bengali borrowe{l words : see pp. 460-461.
300. The use of the palatal [J] for « s, s, s » is the crux of Benorali
articulation : the Skt. word « savisesa », in a Standard New Indian
pronunciation [sA^ii Jetja] , but in Bengali [JobijeJ], is quite a good Shibboleth
to find out a Bengali speaker. Bengali [J] tends occasionally to pass into
the aspirated palatal affricate « eh » [cfh] : see pp, 465, 472, 473. A
pronunciation of [f\ as [cf(h)] is a common speech defect in Bengali,
found especially among the masses. Cf. also MB. (SKK.)
« eh^chlinda » (svacchanda) ; ^i-^. ^t^ * c(h)an^ » (snana) ; sfs.
« ehakki,r^ » hachiey carriage (sakata) ; fsff ^ « miehri » mgar cand^ { —
Perso-Arabic * misri ») ; Calcutta Coll. C^t^^^t^ [mocjorman] for ^5Rt#{
[mujolman] (musalman) ; Portuguese « pires » [pirij] > f^f^^ « piric »
saiicer; Hmdi ^ ahg-se * tern at }i?'/ig distinct^ without ^owf/^ ^5rt«TC5ttC5
« algoche ».
Conversely, there are a few cases of [J] for « c, ch » : OB. « kaeehu » :
NB. > "^^y C^n « kh^su > khans > khos » itches', MB. (SKK)
f^Pf^^l « nisi bo » 1 shall offer, shall sacrifice, shall cast ate ay as a sacrifice
(see p. 266, supra) for « niehibS » (cf. Hindi « nichawar » sacrifice, offering^
MB. fs^^l « nicha », fs(lH « niehani > oferiag or casting something to avert
the evil eye\ < ? : cf. « ni-ksip » throic, or « ni-ksap » fast, do penance, or
« niseataya » as in the ' Atharva Veda ' = to scare or drive at^ay) ; OB.
(Sarvfinanda) « gukra » for « *8uka » vinegar (cukra).
301. An intrusive sibilant occasionally characterises the vulgar
pronunciation of some ts. words : e.g,, [duJTj(h)u] (duhkha) ; ^»6T^*^
[ujcjaron] (uccarana) ; [tujcfo] (tuecha) ; (il^, [[ekostro. -tor]
(ekatra) ; ^t€t^ Cg^>gg<istir] (gagga-tTra) ; t North Bengali ^st^ [gsesta]
(jnati) ; etc. In certain parts of East Bengal, the form «rt^ « ast& »,
doubtless a similar form with intrusive « s », and influenced no doubt by
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER V
the Skt., for fhh, * », is much used. These groups, « sk, sc,
st, st » recall the existence of similar fjroups in Magadhi Pkt. Nothini^
can be more against the trend of MIA. phonetics than such s^roups : and it
cannot be known whether the « sk (sk), st, st » of the Prakrit gram-
marians were in actual agreement with spoken Magadhi. « sc » might be
only a way of indicating the affricate sound of [cj], like « yc » (see p. 248).
Or it may be that the « s » forms were actually heard in Magadhi^ as in
present day Bengali, as 'learned ' ones, in folk-speech: in NB., the forms
with the sibilants are certainly due to a desire to appear learned. Cf. the
intrusion of « r », p. 542, supra. So it may have happened that the
attempts of some Ma^adhT speakers to emulate the Skt. gave rise to forms
like « gascadi, laskase, peskadi, puscadi, mast age, bhastillage » etc. for
« gaeehati, raksasa, preksate, prechati, mastaka, bhattaraka », which were
generalised in the AVest as Magadhan peculiarities.
In the form ^fW^ « jastuta » for C^^^,, « jethuta, jath^tuta »
(see p. 503), the intrusivs sibilant is due to the analogy of similar forms
like « mas^tuta « pis^tuta » etc.
[J, s] in foreign words : see infra.
[VI] The Glottal Fuicatives, Voiced [R], Unvotceb [h].
302. Bengali [fi] is a voiced sound, as in OIA. Initially the [fi] of
01 A. has generally been preserved in NIA., except in certain dialects,
in East and ^orth Bengali and occasionally in Assamese. Intervocal [B]
of OIA. is in origin always a derived sound, having been weakened from
Indo-Iranian « ^gh, ^zh », and also partly from «^dh, ^bh », In MIA. of
the Second Period, all OIA. single intervocal voiced aspirates except
« -dlh- » became [B], and this [fi] fell together with the OIA. [fi]. Medial
[fi] continued undisturbed down to eMB. times : after which it tended to
drop off.
Initially, Bengali [B] in ibhs, comes mainly from OIA. « h- », €,g,^
« hat^ » (hasta); ttT < has^ » (hansa) ; ^t^l « y^hama » to crmvl (MIA. dial.
« ^hamm > craivl) ; f^*, « hig > (higgu) j f\^\ « hira » (hlraka-) ; ft^
SOURCES OF NEW BENGALI ' H '
553
« hiya » (hfdaya-) ; « h&Iud^t » (haridra) ; MB. ^ « hune » sacrifices
{y/ hu) ; etc., etc.
« bh- » in some words gives [fi] in Bengali. An early example is
« Y/bhu»>« \/h6 found already in Asokan MIA. It seems that « bh->
h- » first originated in the middle of a sentence^ and in compounds where it
would be in an intervocal position. Then from occurrence in compounds
etc., the resultant « h- » would be established initially. Thus, « hSrl »
poty beside « bhlr^ » (-bhan^a) ; ^ « -v/'^^t^ * r^c^'rftf < « bhrasta- » ;
« hun » a miling ship beside ^ « bh&rgl » a /ar^^ ^oa^ (? bhrta) ; OB.
« hela-ka » beside Skt. « bhelaka » r^/if ; OB. « hadusa » beside « bhadusa »
yb(?rf half 'dressed ; NB. ctt^ « hsd&l^ ^ pug -faced ^ ugly and uncouth beside
C^tfl « bhSda » /a^ flwf? ugly ; ?t*r?r « hap&r^ » smiWs bellows^ beside
« bhap^ » Similar change of « kh-, gh- » seems to occur in ct^5t^
« hiral^ » crocodile beside ^fwt^ « gh&rlyal^ » ; ^ « ham^ » measles beside
« gham^ » < sun-shirie J^Tt^ « bamar^ » farm^ granary beside
^tTlT « khamSr^t » (skambh&gara, ? harmyagara).
In the middle of a word, [fi] comes from —
OIA. « ks- » : ^1 « la » <«1t^ « lah§, » (laksa) j « -ke dative post
position (*kahi, "^kakhi, "^kakkhi, kakse ?) ;
OIA, « -kh- » : in some cases the [fi] is dropped early in MB. : €,g,y
OB. « aheri », MB. ^^f^T « aheri > hunter (akhetika) ; ^« mu »
(muha, mukha) ; 5(^*5? « n&run » (naha-haranT, nakha-harana-) ;
MB. C^^ « reh& » (rekha) ; MB. f^Rl^ « lihe » (likhati) ; ftsS^
« sior^ » (Sihara, Sikhara) ; « s&'i » (sahT, sakhl) ; OB. « suha »
(sukha) ;
OIA. «-gh-»: ^^'^\ «halka> (laghu : cf. p. 315) ; MB.
« bahure » (vyaghutati), also OB. « bahudai* printed ^
^ in CaryaSj OB. * thahl NB. -t th&i, thai »
bottom (stagba-) ; also in C^?l1, ?t^^ < ^Tfm <
« deh§,ra ; bas^r^ < bas&-har& ; nayer^ < naih&r& », respec-
tively = temple, chamber for bride and bridegroom^ a married
woman^s father^ s home (deva-ghara, vasa-ghara, jnati-ghara, <
-gf ha) ;
70
554
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
MIA. « .4b- in MB. (SKK.) ^rt^ « ahatb& 1MB. « Sut^ »
3i (a^dhuttha, ardha-caturtha) ;
OIA. « -th- » ; ^C^, ^ « k&he, k&y » (kathayati) ; ^fMt « kihini »
(*kathinika) ; ^5 ^« g«, g« » (g^ba, gutha) ; the imperative
affix as in MB. ^«c&I&h&, c&I&hu »=NB. 5^^51711
« C&1&, e&lo » (OIA. « -atha » of the present indicative + « -ata »
of the imperative, 2 plural) ;
OIA. « -dh- » : [R] frequently dropped : MB, > t£lC?1 « aihft »
>eyo» (avidhavS) ; 5pr « gim^l » f or *^tf'> *C^' « *gWi
[go«^u], *g&hu, *gohfl » (godbuma) ; « dai » (dabi, dadhi) ;
« b&u » (bahii, vadhu), 3^^, « m&u » (mahu, madhu) ;
^^fti C^f \ « m&url * (madhurika); ^t^<^rtft « rai<rabi »
(Badbika) ; ^, ^ « sa, sahi, saba » merchant (sadhu) ;
OIA. « -ph. » : > NB. « ^sih&ll > siull » (sepbalikS) ;
OB. f»t?^ « sibara » (> NB. f»f^^ « sikar^ ») (cf. Skt. sipba,
see p. 457); OB. « manahala » (maanabala = madanapbala) ;
OIA. «-bb-»: 9tfhJ «g&hir?l» (gabbira); MB. f^TfW, f^l^
« nibare, -le » (nibbalayati) ; 'If? « v^pibnch » r^'a^'A (pra + bbii
+eeha: seep. 473); MB. ^ « pihu, p&bii » (prabbu);
C*tt5rt « pobay » (prabhati, *prabhatayate) ; ^C^Nb&hera»
(MIA. babe4aa-, vibbltaka-) ; f^^t^T, ^Jt^ « bibSn^ > byan?l »
dawning (vibbana) ; > ^ « l4be, liy » (labbate) ;
« la(ha) » a mirname (? labha) ; ^ > '5^, (TTl « suha > suo, so »
(subbaga); similarly ?[^>^\8, (?f1 «duha>du5, do » (<*dubbaga
= durbhaga) ; CfM^ * sohag^ » affection, ?insban(Ps love (sSu-
bbSgya) ; f^«i1w « bilan^ » leaning (abbilagna) ; etc. It is lost
in forms like ^spfft, « Smi, tumi » (ambabi, tumbabi =
asmabhih, yusmabhih) ;
OIA. « -b- » : generally lost to NB. : « ahar^ OB. « abara »
(Shara) ; ^Tt% « tebir^ » (MIA. bShira, cf . Skt. bahis, bShya) ;
MB. ^ « bah& » (babu) ; « b&he, b&y » (vabati) ;
*b&but^«^ (*bahu-vant-); MB. ($KK.) fff^ *bShuk&», NB.
^ * biJk^, bik^J » carrying pole, Hindi « babai|gl »
NEW BENGALI * H ' FROM A SIBILANT
555
(vihagga.) ; ^ « rui carp fish (rohita) ; C^rt^, (?rt5l, (?^ « l5ha,
noha, no » (lauha-) ; ^ « s4he, s&y » (sahate) ;
OIA. « -s- ; -sy-, -sy- » : this change has been discussed
before, p. 549. Examples : the numerals cQ^ff^, c^^, CSN^
1CS(^, ^lit?l * egar&, barfi,, ter&, e&uddlb, p&neri,
s6l&, s4ter&, 5thar& »=ii, 12^ 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 respectively
(< -aha < OIA. -asa); ^^m, ^t?m, fsm^y g^^^,
^It^t^^, 'Ttfet^^ « ekatt&r^, bahatt&r^, tiyattftr^t,
cu&tt&r^, pacatt^r^^ chiyatt&r^, satatt&r^, atatt^r^ »=7ij 72,
73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78 (< eka- etc. + hattari, = -saptati), but cf.
^spf^iT « un&'S&tt&r^ » 69, which preserves the sibilant ; the
genitive affix, \5t^, v©l « taha, ta » he, it (tasya) ; ^ « eh&, e »
ihu (*eaha, edassa, etasya) ; ^Q^, ^ « oh&, 5 » that (*oaha, *avuha,
^^uha, amussa, amusya), etc., etc. ; the OB. locative affix f^,
« -hi, hi » represents probably a blend of a Magadhi « *-assi,
*-assim<-asmin >H-an OIA. « *-dhi, *-dhim >, attested from
the Greek locative affixes « -thi, -thin » ; the future preoative
affix « -ih&- » (-isyatha) ; the verb substantive ^ « v/hi = v^
*&h » (-x/as), confused with « v' » < « v^bhu e.g., «asti,
*asati >*dhai > « h&y « na-H *ahai » > « n&h&y » >
« n&y » not, « na + asit » > #?tft « uahi » > sft^ « nai » was
mt > does not exist (cf . ^tt « se k&re nai » he did
not do), etc. ; the pronominal adjectives (^^, C^, c?R « heni,
kenli, jena » < ^i:?*^, C^^, C^^^^ * eheua, kehen&, jehenft »,
cf. Mai thill « aihan, kaihan, jaihan », beside other NIA.
« aisan, kaisan, jaisan » = « etadfsa-, kldfsa-, yadrsa- » etc. ;
and a number of "isolated words, like ^^sj « kah&u^ » (Pali
kahapana, Skt. karsapana) ; C^t?t*l « gohal^ » (gosala) ; MB.
(Sunya-Purana) sts. Hf^W «biharam4» (visrama) ; C^TSl «mera»
ra»i (meha-da- = mesa-) ; OB. (Caryas 35, 50) * daha^iha »
(daaa-diaa), Cf. Maithill, Hindi « puhup » (puspa), and « dihara,
dahara» rf'ay (Saur-Ap. diaha-da- = divasa-)^ found in Hindi,
Bajasthanl-Gujarati, Panjabl. In the present-day Bhojpuriya,
556
PtiONOliOGY : CliAPtER V
« .st-, -St- » becomes [-fit-, -fit-], e.g,y [afite] =« aste » slowly
(Fcrs. « ilbistah ») ; [dAfituri] customary commission = Persian
« dasturi » ; ; ifitisAn] = English station ; [mifitiri] =« mistrl*
masouy artisan, from the Portuguese.
The reverse process, changing « -h- » to « s », seems to characterise
the Carja (no. 19) word «kasa]S» for « kahala, kahala»j NB.
« kah&I^ » ^rz^7».
The groups « -sn-, -sn-, -sn- » became « nh, nh » in MIA., and their
resolution in NB. has been to [n], the aspiration being dropped: see p.
529. OIA. « -sm-, -sm- » > MIA. « -mh- » have become [m] in
NB.; seep. 531.
303, A prothetic [fi] occurs in Bengali. The eastern dialect of Asoka
has a similar prothetic « h- » : « hevam, hida, hedisa » (« evam, idha
idfsa » : the second one by metathesis ?). Examples from Bengali : ^t^f^I
« hakuli » he full of anxious fear (akula-) ; ft^ « hatu » knee (cf . OB.
«andu », Skt. « asthivant- ») ; OB. « harifcha » soap^nitt (arista) ; MB.
« haibas^ » yearning (? adhi-vas : by metathesis) ; MB. sis, ?Tfwt^ * habi-
las^ » = « habilax » in Assumpgam (abhilasa) ; MB. « hullas& »
(uUasa) ; C^^^ <« hetha » >4^r^ (cf. ettha, atra) ; cts^l « hec^ka » pull, Hindi
^ Blcnsk ^ to prill ( = « a-kraks- >, ace. to Hoernle) ; C^^^H « hofcha » there
(amutra) ; MB. ^tWt^if « hararaad^ » Portuguese pirate-shi}} (Portuguese
« armada ») ; etc. South-Eastern Bengali of Chittagong has a large number
of words with this intrusive initial « h- ».
For euphonic [fi] .in MB., see p. 341. Cf. Skt. « vikagka », MIA.
« ^viagka ^ but OB. <c bahenci MB. tt^t « bliici NB. ctt5 « bSc^ »
a fruit.
[fi] occurs in a number of words of obscure origin : tl^ « v/hat »
zi?^;^, trudge (cf. Gujarat! « h§(Jvu », Skt. « v^hind ») ; « bar^ka »
slippery (? bhrasta) ; « hor^ » competition ; « v^hura » ; ^^<^1
« hur^ka » bolt {=:iiat which is pushed in ?)y also timid] J^sf « hurum^ »
r«(?tf ; « hutom » screeching or hooting ozol; « hul?i »
0/ or bee; tffl * hSd^ foolish, idiotic ; ^1%, * hali, hall » /i^/w,
also group of fonr {or five) ; tt¥ * hiph^f » t^^^^ «r^aiJ>l (onomatopoetic ?) ;
MNAL 'H' with nasals and liquids 65?
« \/hag » pass stools ; Jff^ « haja » i»fl<?« rotten through heing placed in
water; ^t^^ < hag(g)§.r^ » shark 5^t»^ « hulan4 » p?/*/^ about ; « hol^ »
testicles, « hula » male; « bai)(g)41a » [Bsegla] glutton, famished \
Ctt^^l « hStka » cr//^^ ; C^^l C^t^^l-C^fl^t « hom^ra, h6mgli*a-
com^ra » 4^^, 5ey people ; etc., etc.
304. [fi] cannot occur in Bengali as a final sound in a syllable : it
must either have a vowel to prop itself up, or it must be dropped : and
occasionally, it is changed to a semivowel [e], or to [i], when it terminates
a syllable : e.g,^ « sadhu > sahu > sah > Jfl « sa », beside ^Tf^ « sah& », or
Jfti^l « saha » a merchant, a wine-dealer ; ^ITt^ « b&rah& » > « ^barSh » > ^1
« b&ra » boar ; « sneha » > C^^^ « neha » > C*T^ « nei » ; *ff^^1 « p&hila » >
« *pah-la » > « p&ela » ; « mukha > muha > \ mu » ; « deha » >
MB. C^f^de*-; « grahana- » > ^5^, ^^Tl [goGona, g^^xia\ oryiaments ;
« pitamaha » > f*tC^ « pitemi » for « * pitem&h^ » ; etc., etc. The same
thing also happens in foreign words : e.g., Persian « jahgah, jai- » > ^t55|1
[jgaega] place; * §ah » > % »ft^1, ^, [jo, Jafia] king ; « dar-mah » >
ifi|S(t^j [dorma, darmafitt] monthli/ pay ; « dih » > fe, fvsl^ [di, diRi]
district ; « tahsil » > ^5?^*! [tojil, tofio^ 1] cash office, treasury ;
« pahlwan » > ^tC«Tt^1^ [paloan] wrestler; « Ahmad » > ^t^5f,
^srt^t^if [amed, afiommod, ahammod] a name; « Rahman » >
[roBoman] a name ; etc., etc.
The loss of infervocal [fi] and deaspiration of aspirated stops
characterise Late MB. and NB. This has been noted in connexion with
the NB, diphthongs. In interjections, however, intervocal [fi] is retained :
e,g., '^srf^, f^f^, ^^1, ^ [afia, fiifii (hihi, 9ici), oEo (ofo), uBu(ufu)].
In Is, groups, « -hm-, -hi-, hn-, -hn-, -hr- (= hr, hf) the [fi], if it
obtains in pronunciation, comes after the [n, m, 1, r] ; but generally it id
dropped, with accompanying doubling of the consonant : e.g,, ;5t^«|
[bramfion, brammon], ^srf^t? [alfiad, allad], f^^ [^inBo, c^inna],
[rfiidoe, ridoe], [fitojjo, i fiojjo^ rojjo], ^ « hm » has become a convenient
ligature for writing [mm] in present-day Bengali orthography as it
obtains among Musalmans, e.g,y = [mofiommod], ^sTf^W [afiommod],
and even [kommor] = C^t'f^ [komor] tvaist, etc.
558
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER V
305. Unvoiced [h] in Bengali : this, however, is found at the end of
a syllable, after a vowel, when it would be written with the « visarga *
(also after an unvoiced stop or affricate, [kh, cfh, th, th, ph], forming an
aspirate). This voiceless [h] is like the English sound in hat, liappy etc.
It is found in a few exclamatory words, and is optionally changed to the
voiceless velar, palatal or bilabial spirant according to the nature of the
preceding vowel = e.g.i [ah:, ox:], ^: [ih:, i9:] (also P/0)>
(2): = [eh:, 69:], ^s: = [oh:, oi:], %\ = [uh:, UF:].
The linal « visarga » in Skt. words has the proper unvoiced [b] value
in Bengali : « lamah, sumaoah, muni^j sadhuh, kaveh, guroh, raih, gauh »,
etc. are pronounced by Bengali speakers as [rarmoh, /umanazb, munih,
ja:dfiuh, kobe:b, guro:h, roih, gouh], and not as [ra:mafi9, suniAna:fia,
muniRi, sa:dfiufia, kADe:fi®, guro:fio, rAifii, gAuB"], as for example in
Northern India. Final « visarga » in a number of naturalised ^m. is not
now pronounced in Bengali: e.^., ^^1: ibofiuJV)], fur [bofiujob] ; 6"?^
[cjckkhu] rather than 5^:, C^Ttf^ [^otij rather than C^Jtfs; = « cak§uh,
jyotih ». « Visarga » in Skt. words merely ' doubles ' the consonant
following: e.g.^ [dukkho], ^;^^«| [ontokkoron], ^S^J^^s [punoppuno],
f5f:'tt^ [^^ilWl (uihsvasa), etc. : hence in writing Perso-Arabic words,
instead of using a double consonant ligature, or two consonants, the
« visarga » is sometimes employed (or the group of consonant -h « -v- »)
generally before sibilants : e,g.^ '(^•^ (also 'Jf S'!^, ^1^^^) « m&ph4hsv&l& »
= [mophoj/ol, mof o/jol] country district = Perso-Arabic « mufassal » ;
[tomo^uk] bond^ receipt = « tamassuk », etc.
In foreign names, « visarga » is occasionally used for the unvoiced [h]
at the end of a syllable : e,g,, ^Tt^s « nam&h » = Persian « namah *,
ft: ^tt « luyan Sil^ Kai » Yuan Shih K'ai etc. Foreign [b, B,] (as well as
of Arabic) become [fi] in Bengali.
CHAPTER VI
PHONOLOGY OF THE FOREIGN ELEMENT: PERSIAN
306. Arabic words have come into Bengali through the medium of
Persian,* after these were naturalised in that language and had conformed
to its phonetics : as such, they are to be treated as Persian words.
Some Turki words were no doubt borrowed in India direct from Turki
during the early, years of the Mohammedan conquest, in the 12th and 13th
centuries, and a few more may have come in with BEburin the 16th, But
a large number of Turki loan-words occur in Persian also, and subsequent
accretions of Turki words seem to have been through the medium of Persian,
as the Turki speech quickly fell into disuse in India, but Persian maintained
its predominance all along.
The sound system of Persian as a living speech now is not what it was
iq the 13th and 14th centuries. In Persian itself there are dialectal
differences. Standard Persian as spoken ,in the western and central
provinces of Persia— especially Ears and 'Iraq-'Ajami — has deviated
considerably in its phonetics from * Classical ' Persian of 400 years ago.
The literary form, of New Persian which was brought to India by the
* Bengal was never settled In by any considerable body of Arabs from whom Arabic
words might be borrowed by the people of the land. The article * al,* so characteristic of
Arabic ndons and adjective formations, was dropped when Arabic words were borrowed in
Persian : and Persian received most of its Arabic element more tbrough books than through
contact with Arabic speakers. Arabic words in Bengali and other Indian langnages have
not preserved the * al.* The people of Spain, for instance, came in intimate touch with
the Arabic-speaking Moors, and loan-words from the Arabic in Gastilian and other
speeches of the Peninsula have the Arabic article^ and the orthography indicates an
attempt to represent the Arab pronunciation ; thus, the Arabic * aUqSdi, al-qur*Sn, al-qurban,
at-tabal, al-qal*ah, al-burg (bur j) ' are found in Spanish (Old and Modem) as * alcayde,
alcoran, alcorban, atabal, alcala, Alborge,* while the Bengali (and HindoatanI) forms are
Ttsfl * kajf ' judge, C^W< * koran ' the Koran, C^\M\^ * korbSn ' sacrificey * tabliS ' drum,
(Tf^ * kelia * fort, * buruj * turret, bastion.
4
560
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
Turks and the Tajiks (see pp. 193, 202) was New Persian as spoken
in Eastern Iran ; and the dialects current here, especially the Tajik dialect
of Afghanistan, at the present day show the least divergence, both in
phonetics and grammar, from 'Classical ' New Persian, i.e., New Persian
as used by the Islamic writers of Persia, from the 10th century downwards.
The Tajik! dialect specially is but a local from of literary Persian and not
an independent Iranian dialect (cf. * Grundriss der iranischen Philologie/
Part T, Vol. TI, p. 407 : ' Bemerkungen iiber Tadschiki Tajik pronuncia-
tion will be regard as archaic in Western Persia. The archaic pronuncia-
tion is still followed in India, and in studying the phonology of the Persian
element in Indian languages, we are to take that into consideration.
Turki pronunciation modified Persian phonetics to some extent in India
because in the dissemination of Persian, Turki speakers had some hand : 'as
the kings of India were for the greatest part Turanians, the immigration
of Turanian Mohammedans was constantly kept up. It is for this reason
that we find so many Turfinian peculiarities among Indian speakers and
writers of Persian. We may in fact say, that the Persian of Indian writers
is Turinian/ (H. Bloehmann, 'The Prosody of the Persians according to
Saifi, Jami and other Writers,' Calcutta, 1872, pp. xv, xvi ; cf. also H.
Bloehmann's notes on 'Isti^mfil -i- Hind,* or Indian peculiarities in the use
of Persian, in the JASB., Vol. XXXVII, No. I for 1868, pp. 32-38.)
Turki words in India, again, came to be pronounced in the Persian way
when actual contact with that speech was at an end. The pronunciation
of the two languages thus affected each other in India to some extent.
A large percentage of the Persian words in Bengali has been borrowed
from HindostanI, including many of the hybrid forms, half- Persian, half-
Indian, or Persianised Indian, like « kotwal » with dental « t » = Indian
« kotwal » (in HindostanI), c^t^t^T « kotal^ » (in Bengsdi)^ ^ead of city police,
which sprang up in Northern India during the Mohammedan rule. But it
would be a mistake to suppose that most Persian words in Bengali came
through HindostanT. Persian was brought to Bengal before HindostanI
bad developed into a lingua franca, much less as a culture language, after
becoming the home-language of the Mohammedan ruling houses and town
THE SOUNDS OF EARLY MODERN PERSIAN
561
people of Northern India. Persian was widely studied in Bengal. But it
is now impossible to determine what words were directly borrowed from
Persian and what words were borrowed through HindostanI : specially when
Hind(3stanl (when exactly we do not know, but probably from the time
it became the language of the Moslem emperor and his court in Delhi)
adopted the foreign sounds of [q, x, g., z, f]. In the present study, Perso-
Bengali w^ords will be taken in connexion with the Persian originals,
without any reference to HindostanI (or Turki) : and the pronunciation in
the Calcutta dialect, as well as transliterations following the pronunciation
in the original language in early times, will be indicated.
307. * Early Persian,* by which term the older phase of the New
Persian or Post- Islamic Persian can conveniently be indicated, had the
following sounds :
Vowels.
Front
Central j
Back
High
i:, i
1
u:, u
Mid
e:, e
(^) i
o:, o
Low
a
(a) !
i
1
a:
Diphthongs...
ai
\j
au
Consonants.
Glottal
Uvular
Velar
Palato-
alveolar
Dental
Denti-
Labial
Bi-
labial
Stop
{')
(q)
t d
P b
AfEricate ...
Nasal
(g)
m
Lateral
1
Trilled ...
Fricative ...
h
S 5
s, {$), z, 3
f V
Semivowel
3
w
71
562
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
The sound system of New Persian is not much different from that
of Middle Persian (Pahlavi). Of the consonants, it may be remarked
that the uvular stop [q] possibly existed in Early Persian as an imposition
from Arab.c (and also from Turki). [tj*, dg] =^ ^, were probably tongue-
tip alveolar or palato-alveolar affricates, as now ; [t, d] were interdental
stops ; and [ij] occurred only before [k, g], bein^ written « n » ; and [m]
w^as written ^ « m as well as « n » before « b », ejj. [gumbaz, Jamba ^h)]
being written « gnbSJ, §nbh ^^iowery sabbath. About the fricatives, [h] was
probably an unvoiced sound, but intervoeally it was probably voiced ; [x,
9-] = t £ velar spirants, and [x^] , written was a [x] pronounced
with rounded lips, which has become a simple [x] in Modern Persian pronun-
ciation. And the fact that in the traditional Indian pronunciation [xw] is
frequently [x] shows that this simplification is some centuries old. [6]
probably existed in the earliest form of New Persian (witness a
name like « Gayomard »), but by the time that Persian was introduceil
into India, it was altered to [s] or to [t] . [8] developed afresh in New
Persian in intervocal or final position from an earlier [d] : it occurred
in Early Persian of the 13th century, but from the 14th century,
however, this [S] tended to be reduced to [z], and in verb forms it was
frequently restored back to [d] (cf . P. Horn, ' Neupersisehe Sehriftsprache/
p. 81, in 'Grundriss der iranischen Philologie ' ; JRAS., 1895, p, 237).
The Persian words borrowed in India show both a [5] and a [z] basis in
their modifications.
In Modern Persian as now spoken in Persia proper, esp. Western Persia,
some innovations have come in which are not found in India. The velar
stops [k, g] have advanced considerably, and have become the palatal stops
[c, j] ; except when they occur before back vowels [o, u], when they retain
their old values. The New Persian unvoiced stops are now-a-days very
strongly aspirated, y, being pronounced [ph, th], and^ [kh, eh] ; and the
voiced stops ^, ^ [b, d, g(j)] as a consequence are often unvoiced, becoming
almost [p, t,] and [e, k], paralleling what has happened in some Germanic
languages, and in most forms of Chinese. The Arabic sound of [q] has
become a voiced guttural spirant, intermediate between the uvular and
PERSIAN VOWELS: 'MAJHUL' & 'MAcRUf '
563
the velar sounds, which can be conveniently represented [9.]. And the
Arabic l^] occurs as the « hamzah > or glottal stop, [^], in Persian (cf.
*L'Ecriture nhonetique internationale,' 2e edition, International Phonetic
Association, London, 1921, p. 15).
As regards the Persian vowels, it is to be noted that the short « a »
is a front sound, [a], even approaching the South English [le], in Modern
Persian of Persia ; and the long « a » is a back vowel very much withdrawn ;
it is an [a:] which resembles in acoustic quality the English [o:] ; and
before [m, n], it even becomes [u] (cf. JRAS., 1895, p. 238; Platts
and Banking's Persian Grammar, Oxford, 1911, p. 13). Modern Persian
short « a » [a] has developed a long form [a:], which occurs side by side with
[a:] , and this [a:] in its turn has developed a short [a] in some eases. In
Early Persian, the short sound was probably equally a frontal [a] , or perhaps
a central sound, and the long [a:] was a back vowel. The short vowels « §, 6^
I, u » were found in Early Persian, as they are in Modern Persian of Persia.
The long vowels [e:, 0:] existed in Early Persian : they were very close
sounds, and in Modern Persian of Central and Western Persia they have
been altered respectively to [i:, u:] , thus having fallen together with the
original [i;, u:] of Early Persian. The [e:, o:] sounds are known as
« majhul » or unknown sounds, and the [i:, u:] sounds « ma'^ruf » or known,
as the former did not occur in literary or Classical Arabic, [e:, 0:] still obtain
in Eastern Iran, in the Tajik dialect (cf. T. W. H. Tolbort, * Rabinsan Kruso'
in Persian, in the Roman character, London, 1878, pp. xi, xii) : thus the
original Early Persian distinction between « Ser » lio7i and « Sir » milky
and similar forms, is still preserved the Eastern Iran, whereas both have
become « §Ir » in Central and Western Persia. Persian of India has
faithfully retained the « roajhuU sounds of Early Persian. The diphthongs
[ai, au] of Early Persian roughly corresponded to the similar groups in
medieval Skt. pronunciation (see p. 24^) : in Modern Persian, they are
pronounced as [ei, ou].
Stress in Modern Persian is ordinarily on the final syallable (cf. F.
Rosen, 'Modern Persian Colloquial Grammar,' London, 1898, p. 8);
and in all likelihood, the final stress obtained in Early Persian also (cf.
564
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER VI
P. Horn, ' Neupersische Schriftsprache/ § 47, where we have cases of loss
of initial syllable in New Persian). The initial stress system of Bengali
has had its way with Persian loan-words, ignoring their original stress.
308. The sounds which were peculiar to Arabic were altered to
their nearest equivalents in Persian, and only Persianised Arabic words
are found in the Indian speeches. A study in detail of the sounds of
Arabic is out of scope here. Arabic presents a literary form, based on the
old speech of Hijaz (specially of the (iurayS tribe of Mecca), and modified
later by scholars on the model of the purer dialects of the Bedouins
of Nejd or Central Arabia : and besides, there are the dialects, extending
from Iraq to Morocco. It was the dialect of Iraq with which Persian
came in contact mainly, and some peculiarities of 'IrSql pronunciation
are possibly to be found in Persian {e.g.^ the Modern Persian pro-
nunciation of the Arabic J « q » as that of the voiced velar spirant [g-],
— Arabic of Iraq turned the [q] to a voiced sound, the uvular stop [g],
quite early). But Arabic words seem to have been borrowed into Persian
more from books than from contact with Arabic speakers : so that a consi-
deration of the phonetics of Arabic would not, be so very important in the
study of the Arabic loan-words. Still, some points will be of interest as the
Arabic element is said to lake up over two-thirds of the vocabulary of New
Persian, and consequently of the Persian loan-words in Indian languages.
Classical Arabic, as in the pre-Islamic literature of Arabia, in the
Koran, and in the literature of the first few centuries of the Heglr?, has
preserved more faithfully than any other Semitic language the sounds and
forms of the Primitive Semitic speech, although its oldest document
does not go beyond the 4th century A. C. (barring a few insignificant and
problematic remains some centuries earlier in date). The sounds of Classical
Arabic, as spoken in Hijaz, and in Central and Northern Arabia in the
7th-8th centuries, were in all likelihood the following,^ using the symbols
of the International Phonetic Association :
* The souiid-system of Old Arabic of the 6th-8fch centuries can be reconstrucfced
through a stady of (i) the Phonetics of spoken forms of Arabic of the present day, e.?., of
THE SOUNDS OP OLD ARABIC
565
i
!
1
1
1
veolar
Alveolar or
Dental
Denti-labial
Glottal
Uvular
Velar
Palatal
Palato-al
Velar-
ised
Simple
Inter-der
Bilabial
\ Stop
Nasal
Lateral ...
Trilled ...
Fricative...
Semivowel.
9
1
q(?g)
(N)
(5)
(x
(?c) }
(?)
}
1
r
X
i
t d
n
s z
0 IS
£
b
m
i w
Vowels • . .
a, a: (a,
a:); i
u, u: ; (s, e,
O).
About the above sounds^ the following points may be noted.
p], the glottal stop, is the sound oE the « alif-hamzah » of Arabic.
As a rule it was dropped in Persian, but was retained only between two
similar vowels. Only in learned pronunciation the glottal stop is sought
to be retained in Perso-Arabic words in Urdu.
Arabia Proper (Hijaz, Kejd, Oman, Hadramaut, Yemen) and of Iraq, of Syria, of Egypt, and
of Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria and Morocco ; (ii) the phonetic theories of the medieval gramma-
rians of Arabic, beginning from the Sth century, as embodied in treatises on pronun-
ciation and rules for intoning the Koran (qira'at, tajwid), as well as the traditional method
followed in reading the Koran by professional readers (qari) among Islamic peoples ; (iii)
early transcriptions of Arabic names and words in foreign languages (Greek, Persian etc.)
and vice versa ; and (iv) comparative phonology of the various Semitic speeches. Cf.
• Encyclopsedia of Islam,* article * Arabia (Arabic Languaore)*; 'Comparative Grammar of
the Semitic Languages * by De Lacy O'Leary, London, 1923 ; Grammars of different dialects
of Modem Arabic ; W. H. T. Gairdner, * Egyptian Colloquial Arabic,* Cambridge ; Lumsden's
Arabic Grammar, Calcutta, 1805 (for Old Arabic phonetic theories) ; cf. also the papers
to the VSPdP. for 1324 and 1325 by S. K. Chatterji and Muhammad ShahiduUah.
^ The symbol [%] is used in the IP A. script for the unvoiced uvular fricative. For the
voiced uvular fricative, the IPA. symbol is a modification of [r], indicating its connexion
with the (French) trilled uvular [b] : in this table, the Greek letter [7] has been employed
instead.
566
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
The unvoiced uvular stop, [q] — Jj, is also pronounced dialectally (in
Arabia proj^er and in Iraq) as the voiced uvular stop, [g]. It is described
by Arab phoneticians as a voiced soand (majhurah), apparently taking into
consideration this [g] value. In New Persian of Western Iran, [q] is
commonly modified to a voiced velar spirant, [9.], based on the stop [g]
value : e.g., [iqra:r-] agreement = [cg.ra:r]. In India, the normal value
is a velar [k], though the uvular [q] is heard in Urdu among city i>eoples
through the influence of Arabic scholars.
[k] =^ : this sound has become the affricate [tjfj, like the sound of
ch in English church [x^ sitjj, in Syria and in parts of Arabia proper, as well
as in Iraq. A voiced affricate value, [dg] is also known. It is not
unlikely that in Hijaz in the 7tli century its value was that of the palatal
stop, [c] : the change apparently from the oldest Arabic [k] to the modern
dialectal affricate sound of [tjj was through this [c] stage. In Early
Persian, the [k] value was the one that was adopted, and this [k] has now
become [ej as in native Persian words. The voiced velar [g] was in all
probability the sound of ^ in Muhammad's time, but by the 8th century it
seems to have been advanced to the palatal stop [j] in Arabia proper and
Iraq. Old transcriptions of Greek words in Arabic employ ^ (as well as g =
W) Greek « gamma ». The [g] sound is still preserved in Egypt.
The palatal stop [j] has further become the affricate [dg] over a great part
of the Arabian world, including Arabia proper, Syria and Iraq. It is the
[dg] value which obtains in Persian, and in India also it is [dg (jg)].
For [t], and other velarised sounds, see next page.
[t, d] were blade-alveolar or blade- teeth sounds. An aspirate [th] =
8, seems to have occurred as the feminine affix : it became normally [fi]
in a final position.
The nasals : [x] and [g] , as well as palatal [ji] occurred before their
corresponding stops, and were represented by the letter for [n] =
The fricatives : [ft] == ^, is the characteristic ^whispered h' of Arabic.
[B] = was a voiced sound. Both fell together and became one com-
mon « h » sound, an unvoiced sound in Persian, [h], and a voiced one in the
Indian languages, [fi].
^cAYN'; THE *EMPHATICS* OF ARABIC
567
= g^, the ' intermitteut voice/ is i/ie special sound of Semitic,
about the exact organic chamcter of which there is difference of opinion.
It is a continuant sound produced in the glottal region. Many Arab
dialects are now dropping it. In Persia, a cheek in the voice, or the glottal
stop, is substituted for it, e.^,, [(f*>^ gam^ > jam^j collection becanae
[dgam^]. In India, [^] is ignored: it simply lengthens a connected «a »
vowel : but Arabic scholars often affect it in Urdu, and many merely
substitute the glottal stop for it.
The letters ^, g respectively had the uvular sjjirant sounds [x, y],
and these are the values commonly found at the present day ; but the
more advanced velar spirant sounds of [x, g.] are also found dialectally,
and probably they existed side by side with the uvular ones as variants
of the latter in Old Arabic.
like the English s/t, [s, z]:=u* j, as in English. [0,^]=^
^, respectively = the M in English t/iin, ihen\ in Persia and India, they
become [s] and [z]. [f] denti-labial spirant as in English, but it is
likely that in Muhammad's time its value was that of a bilabial [f],
coming as this sound does from Primitive Semitic [p].
The sounds of [t, z, s, ^ ^ the so-called 'emphaties/ form a
ehai-acteristic group of Arabic. They are distinguished from the ordinary
dentals by their [u] or [w] quality. The old Arabic grammarians called
them ' covered ^ letters (mutbaq), apparently referring to the raising of
the back of the tongue towards the soft palate in pronouncing them : this
gest gives to these sounds their ' thick 'or * dark * quality, as compared
with the simple dentals. Of these, 1^ is commonly the stop sound (Sadldah),
unvoiced, [t] ; but it has also a voiced stop pronunciation, a [d] sound, from
early times. The Arabic grammarians call it voiced (raajhurah) : ^ therefore
agrees with ^ = [q, in representing both a voiced and an unvoiced stop.
In Persian, in Turki, and in the Indian languages, the 'dark' or ' emphatic *
quality of ^ is ignored, and its voiced from is unknown, so that ^=[4]
has become a sin) pie dental [t], indistinguishable from ey=[t].
is an [s] with the [w] quality : in Persian and in the Indian languages,
it becomes a simple [s], the same as ij*. -fe are two Arabic letters
568
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
the exact sounds of which in Old Arabic cannot be determined for certain.
^ seems originally to have been a ' covered ' or * velarised * form of the
spirant [ff] — a sort of [^^j^ but it had become a voiced sound (majhtirah)
by the 8th century, as we can see from the old Arabic grammarians : it
probably became a velarised [S^]. ^ is the spirant (rixwah) form of ^,
and like ^, it apparently had in Old Arabic both a voiced and an unvoiced
value [6^ , S^]. Both of these are now heard in dialects of Arabia proper.
A common modification of ^ in Arabic-speaking lands is to a velarised [z],
= the voiced form of ^ [s]. The Persian (and Indian) approximation of
Jo is a simple [z], and this is apparently based on the [z] value. The nature of
in Old Arabic is difficult to make out. It was a voiced sound (majhurah),
velarised (mutbaq, musta^lijah), spirant or continuant (rixwah), not a
sibilant (safirah) : it was a unilateral alveolar, pronounced by striking or
placing the tongue against the alveolar region to the left or right : u« would
thus be a kind of unilateral velarised [1], as in English icell [we!]. This value
is not unknown even at the present day in Arabia itself (Hadramaut),
and the Malay pronunciation of as [1, dl] points to the same
thing. But the dialectal pronunciation now in the Arabicspeaking lands
makes (in addition to the [i]) either a spirant [8^], or [z] (like ^) ; or
a mere stop [i] = the velarised form of the dental [d] ; or a * salcal * sound,
the tongue being made into a groove (through which the air passes) and the
blade advanced beyond the edge of the teeth ; or makes a unilateral, alveolar
continuant, a sort of combined [di] , for which the single letter [d] also can
conventionally be used. This last was apparently its value in Old Arabic.
Persian turned it to a simple [z], which was thus based on a dialectal [S^]
or [z] pronunciation, [z] is the basis of Indian forms of the Perso- Arabic
words with Recently some Arabic scholars in India tried to introduce the
pure Arabic sound (non-sibilant alveolar unilateral) of this letter in reading
the Koran, but ordinarily it results only in an approximation [dw |,*
* Some time ago there was a heated controversy among Indian Mohammedans on
t> e proper pronunciation of u° in reciting the prajera in Arabic, one school declaring
that the pr nnnciation of this letter as ' z/ as in the word ^^U, would make the prayer
ARABIC VOWELS : THE SOUNDS OP TURKl
569
[IJ was the ordinary ' clear 1/ as in Southern English lean^ land ; but
it is very likely that a subsidiary form of the phoneme, a velarised * dark 1 '
[i], occurred in Old Arabic, as it does in some of the modern dialects.
The semivowels [j, w] were like English and «? in ;^e8 and wet [jss,
W6t].
About the vowels, there were three types in the Oldest Arabic, [a, i, u] :
[a] probably also occurred as a central or palatal [a, a] ; and [a, a], [i] and
[u] were modified respectively to [s, e, o], [e], and [o], taking their
colouring from the contiguous consonant. The long forms, [a: (a:), i;,
u:J, originated in Old Arabic (specially in the HijazI dialect) from earlier
combinations of [a, i, u] with ['^J. Modifications of the vowels in Arabic
need not be discussed. Diphthongs like [ai, ei, oi, ou, eu] etc. were
unknown ; but the combinations [aj (aj), aw] resulted in the diphthongs
[ai, au], which are preserved in Persian.
The special Arabic sounds which were modified or suppressed in Persian
were thus q, j, % (gw), fi^ 5 (d't), 0, (S)], which became
respectively [zero, g (or k), dg, t, z, h, h, ^ x, 9., s, z, s, z (5)].
Influence of Arabic afEected Persian orthography to some extent by
bringing in the use of u'j ^> S other pure Arabic letters in writing
some native Persian words : but this of course did not in the least affect the
pronunciation.
309. The sounds of Turki may also be briefly reviewed, as Turkl
influenced the Persian of India to some extent, Turkl of the West,
Osmanli Turkl of Asia Minor and Constantinople, is a younger dialect
with which India has had nothing to do. The Turkl of the Mohammedan
conquerors of India of the House of Ghazna, of the House of Ghor, and
fanltj and so null and void before God, and that the faithful should try to pronounce jji
properly, which was as * dw,' according to the notions of many, Bengali MuUfts and
MaulavTs had their share in this ' d(w)allin-zaUin ' controversy, which has now been set
at rest by making * z ' allowable for the unlearned ; but it of course had no bearing on the
pronunciation of Bengali loan-words from Perso- Arabic, which show «f * j ' f or ' z * in the
place of the original sound or letter.
72
570
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
of the Slave Kings like Qutbu-d-din Ibek and lltutmiS, of the early rulers
of Bens:al like Bakhtyar-i-Khaljl, Ha§amu-d.dm Euez Sultan Ghiyasu-4-
din, Nasiru-d-din Mahmud, Saifu-d-din Yaghantat, Malik 'Izzu-d-din
Togbril Tughan Khan, Qamaru-d-dln Tamur Khan, Mughisu-d-din Ozbek,
^Izzn-d-dXn Balban, and of personalities like Ulugh-i-'Azam Zafar KhSn
Bahram Itagin (one of the earliest patrons of Musalman learning in
Bengal and India, in the 13th century), as well as that of Sultan Babur and
his Moghals, was the Eastern or Chagatai (Caqatai), or so-called Uigur
dialect, which is now spoken in Central Asia (Turkistan, Baikh, Herat,
Khorasan). Typical Central Asian Turki of the 10th-13th centuries, as
spoken by a large percentage of the Mohammedan invaders of Northern
India, seems to have possessed the following sounds (cf. A. Vambery,
'Cagataische Spraehstudien,' Leipzig, 1867 ; R. B. Shaw, ' A Sketch of
the Turkl Language,' Calcutta, 1S78 ; the ' Kudatqu Bilik,' a Turki
didactic poem of c. 1069, editions by A. Vambery and by W. Radlofif ;
Vilhelm Thomson, ^ Inscriptions de TOrkhon,' Helsingfors, 1896 ; I.
Nemeth, 'Tiirkisehe Grammatik,^ Leipzig, 1916; the works of W.
Radloff on Turki Linguistics ; Gibb, History of Ottoman Poetry, Vol. I ;
etc., etc.) :
Consonants.
Glottal
Uvular
Velar
Palatal
Palato-
alveolar
Alveolar
or
Dental
[labial
PQ
Stop
q (g)
k g
t d
P b
Affricate . . .
Nasal
(N)
n
m
Lateral
1
Trilled
r
Fricative ...
X (j)
s z
Semivowel ...
h
i
w
TURK! VOWELS : HINDOSTANI SOUNDS 571
Vowels
Front : unrounded, [i, e, s, a] ; rounded^ [y, commonly written
in the Roman character as « ii, o » respectively ;
Back: rounded, [u, o, o, a] ; unrounded, [ui], commonly indicated in
Roman script by « y » ; and probably also [v]=an unrounded [o]»
There were properly no long vowels.
These sounds of Turki need not be described fully: they are simple
enough. The [f] of Persian and Arabic normally became [p] in Turki,
but the bilabial [f] probably existed as a Turki approximation. The special
vowels of Turki were easily simplified in Persia and India to [a, i, u, e, o, a] .
Turki words in Indian languages in later times, even when they were
borrowed direct from Turki, conformed to the Pei-^ian way of pronunciation
{e.g,, [ordu] > [urdu:], [<^zbekj > [uzbag]) ; and some Turki words seem
to have come by way of Persian. They will be regarded as Persian words
in all cases (see pp. 212, 2lS).
310. From the 17th century, after Hindustani took shape and grew
in importance, Persian words entered into Bengali through that language,
and older borrowings direct from Persian were probably made to conform
to HindostanI forms. The sounds of Hindostani were the following :
Verals : [k, kh, g, gfi, g] ;
Patatal affricates : [cj, cjh, Jg, JS^]> Palato-alveolar affricates —
[tj, t>, dg, dgfi] ;
Cerebrals : [t, th, d, 4^] ;
Dentals : [t, th, d, dfi, n] ;
Labials : [p, ph, b, bfi m] ;
Liquids : [r, 1] ;
Sibilant : [s] ; Aspirate : [G (h)] ;
Semivowels or Fricatives: [j, w (i?)].
Vowels: [a, a, a:; i, i: ; u, u: ; e:, o: ; (e, o)] ; Diphthongs — [ai,
Au], which became respectively [see, ae:, S:] and [oo, o:, 6:].
The vowels can all be nasalised.
Thb» sounds of Persian (including Perso-Arabie, and Turki) which
did not have equivalents m Western Hindi (HindostanI) (and in other
572
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
Indo-Aryan), were therefore [q, g ; x, x^, g, ; j", 5 ; z; "6; f] . The normal
equivalents in naturalised words were [k] for [q], and very rarely [g] ;
[g] for [g, ^] ; [kh] for [x, xw] • [s] for [J]; [jg] for [z, 5] ; [fg, d]
for [SI ; and [ph] for [f]. The OIA. Ji, ^ [/, J*] were lost to Western Hindi
(including HindostSnl) in the MIA. period: in reading Sanskrit, [s] was
normally substituted for ^ [J, q], and [kh] for ^ [f] in all Northern India
excluding Bengal (see p. ^43), according to the medieval tradition. But
throuo;h the influence of Persian, its [J] sound, slightly different from both
the [/] and [J] of Indo-Aryan, was engrafted on Hindostani, as well as on
Sindhi and on the Panjabi dialects : and it is this [J*] which is now
employed by speakers of Hindostani and Western Hindi generally, as well
as of Panjabi etc., for both the [J] and of Sanskrit, as a newer and
seemingly more correct pronunciation than the older [s, kh]. [J] is used
in Persian words as well, — but the unlearned masses frequently turn it to
[s]. Like [J], the sounds of [f] (or its approximation [F]), [x], [g.] and
[z], may be said to have been introduced into Hindostani, through the
presence of a large number of Persian words with these sounds ; and what is
more, [f, x] are actually found to have been imposed on some native Indian
words, in Hindostani and in Panjabi.
31 !• In Hindustan proper, Persian words have generally remained
faithful to their original forms, in the matter of the vowels, making
allowance for the slight alterations necessitated in naturalising words into
a foreign language. The words have in the main preserved their full forms.
But the peculiar phonetics of Bengali, especially its system of accentuation,
has wrought a sad havoc with the Persian sounds, both consonantal and vocal,
and with the Persian forms as a whole. Thus it would be difficult to recog-
nise Persian « sarriStah » in C*tC^^1 [jeresta] court office, < xarldar » in ^'l^^
[khodder] diij/er, * bunyadi » wtt& a basis in ^'C5?f^, ^'fs?f^ [bonedi, bonidi]
well established y respected (as a family)^ « qi$sah » story in C^5?l [keccjha]
scandal, « tuqqah » in [Bukoj a hookah^ « muharrir » in ^^ift [mufiuri]
clerk, * be-wuquf * in C^^^ [bekub] fool, « tasarruf » in [tocfhrup]
tampering {as with money), etc., etc. Certatin irregularities in'phonetic
alteration from the Persian to the i^engali forms, however, are to be
TRANSLITERATION OF PERSIAN : PERSIAN VOWELS 573
noticed : this is due to the intermediary influence of HindostanI in most
instances.
In the transliteration of the Perso-Arabic and Persian words (given
within brackets as source-forms of the Bengali words), the following is the
system employed: *, | =^ (Persian t = a); ^ = b;v = p; «^=tj ^
= 0 (Persian = s) ; ^ = j (International Phonetic Association symbol =
[j], for Arabic) ; ^ = c ; ^ (IP A. symbol : ordinarily « h » is used) ;
^ — x; 0 = d; i> = 3 (Persian = 5, z) ; j =r ; j =z ; J =X (IPA.
symbol = [5]); u* = s^ = § (IPA. symbol = \J]) ; a- = s; u^ = A
(Persian =z);^ = k;^ = %; ([s, 5, t, z] for u^, ^, are the IPA. symbols
used here in transliteration also: in transcribing Arabic, « s, d, t, z, »
are employed commonly, and in this book, in the narrative, these, as well
as « h » for ^, have been used) ; (IPA. symbol) ; i =9, (in Arabic, an
uvular guttural spirant, the IPA. symbol for which is [x]) ; ^ = f ; 3 = ^y
^ = k; ^ = g; J = l; C^^y ^ = n; j=w; u, o; « = h; Lf = y, I, e;
J =ay (Arabic), ai (Persian) ; y =aw (Arabic), au (Persian).
Treatment of the Persian Sounds in Bengali. Tife Vowels.
312. Persian final vowels, as a rule, whether long (a, !, u), or short
(a), normally are not dropped in Bengali, as Persian words came in mainly
in the Late Middle Bengali period.
Vowels in iniiial syllables are also preserved without much modification.
It is the vowels in the interior of words which suffer from the greatest
alterations.
[I] Short vowels.
(I) Short* a
313. Short « a » of Early Persian was probably a central vowel, with
leanings towards the frontal [a], and possibly it was [a] when unstressed.
The noiimal North Indian value of Persian « a » is [a], and [a] in
unstressed positions.
574
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
(i) In Bengali, Pei*sian < & » when initial became [a], written ^
(see p. 314). Words with initial « hamzah » from the Arabic drop
the « hamzah ». Examples : ^^5t^ [akcjhar, J aksar] always (aksar
< Ar. 'akdar) ; ^5^t^ [ac^kan] loou coaly tunic (ackan) ; ^t^?f, ^
[agar] grapefruit (angur) ; [an^irj fig (anjir) ; ^=Wt^ [andaj%]
casting y determining, deliberating > approximation (andaz ; but
cf, N©t^^t^ [tirondaJ5] archer < tir-andaz) ; ^^rt^rt^^ [amanot] deposit
(amanat) ; ^'^C'tM, ^T^C^t*! [ap(h)/o/] sorrow, regret (afsos) ; ^t^g>f [abluj^
ebony (abnus) ; "^^t^I^t^ [aboab] heads (of taxation) (abwab) ; ^sft^^
[amir] prince, nobleman (amir) ; ^spt^t^ [anar] pomegranate (anar) ;
«rf^^(t)^ [albot, albat] certainly (albattah) ; ^sft^ [alia] GW (Allah);
'srM^ft [ti/ropC^ji] « 0<^M' ^'0^*^ (a§raf-|-I); ^^Tf^^ [a/ol, ajol] genuine
(a»l) ; ^srpffft [ajami] {one in a list of) names > a rent^-paying cultivator ;
a culprit (asami) ; ^PTTT^ [djbab] fttrnitnre (asbab) ; "^sft^tW, ^t^^
[afiammok, -mukj /bo/ (atmaq-) ; ^Tft^W [ciaiejs] shade, faint trace, nuance
(amez) ; etc., etc.
When in Arabic words the ^ [*^] occurred initially, it was changed
to the « hamzah »= in Persian ; and in Bengali ['^a > ^a:, a:] normally
became ^ = [a]: ^srf^q [akkel] wisdom > seyise (*^aql) • [c^Jgob],
strange (*^ajab) ^T^^ [ciraj5] petition (*^arz < ^^ard-) ; M B. ^srpf't^, ^W*f
[ardaj, addaj] petition (*farz-dast) ; [aba] a loose coat (^^aba) Jf
[aej] comfort, luxury (*^ay§) ; etc,
(ii) Persian «a» in initial syllables after a consonant generally becomes
[o] in Bengali. This [o] is amlauted to [oj through inHuence of a
following [i] or [u] (see pp. 3516.397). Ji,g., '^W^[kd(}iom'\foot''pnnt,
step, pace {of a horse) (qadam) ; [kador] merit, value (qadr) ;
[kobojg, kobocf] receipt, voucher (qabz < qabd-) ; [kobar]
grave (qabr-) ; [knobor, khopor] neivs (xabr) ; ^^t^,
[korar, -ar] condition (qarar) ; ^^C^Pf [khorgoj] hare (xar-go§) ;
[korj^o] debt, loan (qarz < qard); [khorocfj expense (xarc) ; ^
[ko:m] less, small quantity (kam) ; 5fSf [gO:J5] yard {measure) (gaz) ;
[gojgol] a metre, a khid of melody (g^azal) ; ^^Sf [gorojg] interestt, concern
(garaz < Jarad) ; [garda] dirt, lees (gardah) ; [^akmoki]
INITIAL CONSONANT + 'A' OF PERSIAN
575
fiinUsime (Turki eaqtnacj) ; [jgakhom] icound (zaxm) ; ^^t^ [JS^bcui]
%vor(l (zaban) ; [JS^'^d] ([uick movement in mvsic (jald) ; ^ [jgoma]
gathering (jam^ < jam^) ; [tokma] badge (Turki tamga) ;
[takto] throne (taxt) ; [tonkha, togkha] jE?^^, homrarium
(tanx^ah) ; Wt^^ [todarok] arrangement^ enquiry (tadarak) ; (tobla)
Bmall drum (tablah) ; vs^^, [torop(b)] side (tarf) ; [nokaji]
carver y engraver (naqqa§4-T) ; [nogod] cash (naqd); [n^B^r]
channel (nalir) ; JRT^ [nomaJ5] prayer (namaz) ; ^| [porda] ^c/^^w
(pardah); <1*t^ [po/om] wool (pa§m) ; [phote] victory (fatlij ; ^^^^fft^
[borkondajs] matchlock^mauy armed attendant (barq-andaz) ; ^^1, ^C^^l
[bok(h)ea] hack-Hitchy setcing with long st itches ^ stitched and repaired cloth
> something not new and good (baxyah) ; [b^Jsae] in pi ace y intact
(ba-ja-e); C^^JJScl^] '^'ioious (bad-zat < -3at-); [boRor] ocean^
extent (batr) ; 3f^^^ [motlob] intention (matlab) ; [ropha] arrangement^
finishing (raf^) ; "P^^ [J-^fi^Jr] city (§ahr) ; 3F|^^ jpfpfW [/ardar, /oddar] chiefs
headman (sardar) ; [R^^k] truth (taqq) ; ^^J^, [horap(h)] letter
of the alphabet (liarf) ; etc., etc.
Cases of change of « a » > [o] to [o] : [kom] lesSy but ^ [komi]
smallness in quantity (kami); '^A^ [kobul] admitting [qabul]; ^ffirf
[khorid] buying, ^'C^lf^ [khodder] buyer (xarid, xarldar) ; ^(%Fl [khoHp(h)a]
caliph, (slang) a clever man (xalifah) ; [gorib] poor (^rib) ;
[cforbi] grease (earbi) ; ^ [J50f»ij l^'f^^ (zamin) ; ^ [jgori] gold
lace (zarl) ; [JSoIdi] qtnck (jaldi) ; ^T?^^ [top(h^j^il] details (tafsll) ;
[tombi] threatening (tanbih, tambih) ; [doHl] document (dalil) ;
[dostur] orr/<?r, or^e/' bnsi?iess (dasttir) ; [noJ5ir] precedent (nazir) ;
?i5N|| [photui j a short coat (fato^i) ; [bokrid] the Baqr-^Id festival
(baqr-^'id); [bonduk] rijie (banduq) ; [fiokukj tnitk, facts of a
case (fctquq) ; etc., etc.
Also words with initial [m], like [mofiol] suite m n large house,
quarter (maM), occasionally have [o] for [o] although there is no
following [i] or [u].
Post-consonantal « & » in initial syllables, however, becomes ^ [a] and
not ^ [oj in some cases. We have [a] when one of two consonants
576
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
following is dropped : e.g,^ [khaji] a castrated goat (xasi, xassi) ;
§t?1 [^ada] subscription (caodah) ; 5?t^l, 511^^1, STW^Il [naojra, nak(Q)ra]
keWe-drnm (naqqarah) ; JTt^ [mamud] a vame (mabmud-) : ^t^^rW^f
[paloan] ^vrestler, professional athlete (pahlwan) ; ^«^t^ [kaoali] a
tune (qawwal + i); [khata] note^hook^ blank-book (xatt-ha) ;
[malltt] for *art«11 (mala) sailor (mallali) ; vft^t^ [dalal] broker (dallal) ;
[tibu] tent (tambu) ; ^t^^ [janok] china or pewter dish used by
Mohammedans (satnak) ; etc.
But quite a number of other words show [a] instead oi [o] . These
[a] words are due, either to the influence of native words of similar sound
with [a] ; or to post 1 8th century influence of HindostanI : HindostanI
[a] now is normally represented by [a] in NB.. but in Late MB., ^ [o]
would be used, [a] forms in Bengali thus are generally recent. Examples :
^rfsffsf [kaman] bow >cannon (kaman) ; [kabab] roast meat (kabab) ;
^t?t'? [badam] almond (badam) ; ^t^'H^t^ [capkan] tunic (eapkan) ;
[^aBajg] ship (jahaz) ; ^^^^T [jgaRannom] hell (jahannum) ; vStf^^
[takia] holster (takyah) ; ^$t^t^ [tamam] all, end (tamam) ; ^^Tt^, also
vSt^tf [talak, tallak] divorce (talaq) ; vSt^rtft, ^^tft [tamadi, tabadi]
barred by limitation (tamadi); voW, ^ot^l [toro, tara] manner (tarah) ;
ift^rW [damama] drum (damamah) ; [/ciJSci] punishment (saza) ;
^ft^^ [khalaj] freed (xalas) ; srt^^l [mana] prohibition (mana^) ; ^^t«1^
[kalandDr] mendicant (qalandar); ^t^f^ [kanat] awning (qanSt); ^^ft^f
[lagam] rein (lagam) ; 3^^, ?t^^> ^i^^ [fiab(e)i, fiauli] palace
(tawell) ; Cf^Tsi [Baram] forbidden (liaram) ; ?t^t^ [Ba^<i«'] thousand
(hazar) ; ^g?1 [fialua] a stoeetmeat^ pudding (talwa isr^) \ ^^^1 [fiaoa]
wind^ air (hawa) \ ^% [Bcibfi] Negro^ Abyssinian (l^abS!) ; ^t^^ [bafiar]
spring > beauty (bahar) ; [bafiadur] brave (bahadur) ; ^tWW
[Saijgama], (also C\^f\^\ [fiaeijgama], see p. 32 £) disorder^ riot (hangamah);
etc., etc.
The frontal [a] pronunciation of Persian is represented by [e, ^e],
written tfl, in some words ; but these [e, se] forms are rare, and occasionally
they are brought about through influence of a contiguous [e, i].
Examines : (?^y ^W^^ [selam, saelam, /elam] salutation * (salam) ;
^A' IN INITIAL SYLLABLES, & INTERIOR ^A' 577
C^W^ beside [rejgai, rsej^af, raJSai] q?nlt (razal) ; {?Rt?. CT^,
beside ^'t^^f [phgejad, phse-, phd-] difficulty, turmoil, troubled situatiofi
(fasad) ; (M^A [phereb] deceit (fareb) ; C^^t^^ [mseramot] repairs
(marammat) ; CW^ [j^era] a little (zarS < Sara^) ; [rejga] a name
(raza < rada^) ; (TF^t^"^ [kseramot] miracle (karamat) ; C*lCi1<Sl [Jeresta]
court office (sarriStah) ; C^m^ [Restonesto] fnal settlement (hast-nlst) ; (7?^(t5f
beside ^^\^, [nemajg, niBmaJ5, nomajg, namajg] prai/ers (namaz) ;
C^^] [nsekra] trickishness, coquetry (naxrah) ; C^#rW [j^enana] beside
[jgaaaua] ioomerC% apartments, women (zananah) ; MB. beside
NB. [ekobbor, akbor] Akhar (c\kbar : of. the Portuguese transcrip-
tion of the Moghal Emperor's name, « Ecquebar ») ; vufsj^f [eJSid] a namcy
Tazul (Yazld).
< a- » in initial syllables also occurs as [i, e] : e.g., 1%^^ fkiijkhab]
brocade (kam-xwab) ; f%^>CWl [killa>kella] (qal^ah) ; <jW^ [nemok]
salt (namak) ; f^ff^ [mihi] fine (mahin) ; T*t^^5 [J^i"P^cfj cre^t tvorri on
turban (sar-pec) ; t3^<[^^ [^j^bgul] seed of the fleaicort (asb-g-ol, isb-g.ol) ;
[ripu] seicing (rafii) j etc. Also as [u, o] in [fi^^^S^r] presence
(6azur<liudur) ; > C^t^t^ [pulaOj polao] dish of rice and meat with
butter (Early Pers. palaw, Modern Pers. [phila:v]) ; and in a few other
words, which thus show a special modification of the « a » of Persian in
India. Cf. also C^t^T^t^ [romJSan], beside ^^l^t^ [I'^i^JScrn] Ihe Ramadan
moatli (ramazaa < -dan); C^N5fT^f [bogdaJ] Bagdad (Bag^dad) ; 'S{^'^
[mokbul] a name (maqbul) ; [komor] %caist (kamar), etc., which
show [o] in NB,
(iii) Interior « » normally becomes [o] in Bengali, and owing to the
phonetic habits of Bengali (see p. 400j, this [o] is liable to be changed
to [o] : ^S^t^^ [okalot] advocacy fwakalat) ; ^^(^ [b^gol] arm-pit (bag.al) ;
> C^t^ [komor > komor] icaist (kamar) ; [mojkora] joke
(masxarah) ; ^fJ^Vf [rojodj supplies (rasad) ; csft^^t [moulobi] Persian and
Arabic scholar (maulavi) ; [fiolop(h)] oath (halaf) ; f^^^ [rijbot]
bribe (riSwat) ; ^t^^ [l^<ig^J5] P^P^^ (kag^a^), etc., etc. But in a few
instances^, through the influence of a preceding [a], we find [a] rather
than the expected [o] in the interior of words : e.g,, ^t^Tt^ [acfkan] loose
73
578
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER VI
funic (aekan) ; ^«Rt^ beside -^-^^x [albat, albot] ceriainly (albattah) ;
^srt^r^fW [aradani] importation (amadani) ; ^tittt [rDptani] e.rpnrt (raftani),
on the model of the preeedino^ word.
« & » connected with [*^] figures as [a] in the interior of words in
Beno^ali : 5ftlt [dabi] chim (da'^wl) ; ^tft [jcrdi] « {the celebrated Perman
poet) (SaMi): s^T^ [na:!] hor^e-^hoe (na^l) ; [la:l] rvhy (la^l) ;
[kaba] temple aJ Merca (ka'^bah) ; [ha:d] snd tract io?i; after { = post
position) (bTiM) ; [j^a-.V forgery (j-i*?!) ; ^f^fl [tajgia] .^irine (ta\vah) ;
^5t^^ [^^iJJS^b] ^sfra^tf/e (ta^jjab) ; :5tf^^ [talim] inMrnvfion (ta^^llm) ; iTtW
[mane] meaning (ma^aiii) ; "stf^^Fl [talika] liM (ta^liqah) ; etc., etc.
Influence of « y » ehanu^es « a » to [e] : [kaeem] entahli^hed, fixed
(qayam, qa'im) ; -^^^ [aSen la] cmninff (avandah, a^indah) ; C?J^stW<^
[kephaeet] nvfiiciemy, proHt (kifayat), etc. ; in tfft [iRndi] Jew (yahudT),
we have [i] for « ya ». Initial « wa- » similarly becomes [o, u] : e.g.,
[okto] ti fip (waqt) ; [ojged] a uuitie ( Wazld) ; ^#t^ fukil] pleader
(wakll), etc. « a » in connection with [x^] changes to [u, o] in Bengali :
^'ff'i "^tl^ [akhunjgi] a Mohammedan title = tear/ier (axwand-jl).
A preceding [i, e, e:], through Vowel Harmony, modifies «a» to [e]
(cf. p. 400) : C^C^sJf^ [jekendor] a name, also f^^^ [fikondor] (Sikandar
= Alexander) ; C^^ftfH [rebencfini] beside C^^ftf^T [reboncpni] {China)
rhubarb (revand-g-clnl), etc. Through Vowel Harmony, we have change of
interior « a » to [u] : e.g,^ C^^ft beside [moulubi, moulobi, moubbi]
Mohammedan ^^cholar {m2L\\\^\\) p. ;392);^t^ [Runur] art, cleverness
(hunar) ; M^ft beside ^^^t [cfakuri, cfak(a)ri] service (cakarl) ;
[raufiuri] cleric (muWrir) ; ^5?^ [u^^buk, uzbuk] idiot, fool (uzbak) ;
CTf^^P^ [mokruri mourii/i] perwaneni and hereditary tenure (muqar-
rarl, maurusi < mawru^-) ; "^^^ [murubbi] patron (murabbi);
[muccjhuddi] accountant, controller of a (mutasaddl); etc., etc. In
[tagut, taut] strength, beside ^t^^ [takot] (taqat), and MB.
'IC^t^f [Jogollad], ^qt^ [/akolat] a costly stuff (saqalat), we have [u, o]
for [o] in the place of « a ».
There is loss of interior « -a- » tlirough the dominant initial /stress of
Bengali : see below, under * Dropping of Vowels.'
* A MN FINAL SYLLABLES : PERSIAN ' KASRAH ' 579
(iv) Final [a] of Persian^ written with the « ha-i-muxtafi » (i.e. the
imperceptible final « h »), becomes ^\ [a] in Bengali : e.ff,^ ^t^l [banda]
slave (bandah) ; twf^ [kinara] ed^e (kinarah) ; ^^(t)^rl [khaJ5(a)na]
las (xazauah) ; [kholip(h)Q ] Caliph ; a clever man (xalifah) ; C^5t^
[bec[ara] pitiable permit (bee5rah) ; [kha^a] a title (xwgjah) ; etc., etc.
This « ha-i-muxtafi » frequently represents the Old Arabic feminine forms
in * (-at-, -ath- ?). Persian « -ah^ » [a] > [a] is the normal change in
Bengali which is found by the score — no other change being admitted.
Final « -a^ » of Arabic words, pronounced [a^] in Persian, normally
becomes [a] in Bengali : ejj., m\ [JS^nia] collection (jam*^) ; 3?t^ fmana]
prohibition {mSkVi'^)', 5[»ft^ [mojal] (maS^al) ; ^tf^^ [t<ihi^] atnidel
(ta^wiS), etc.
Apocope of « -a » : see below.
(2) Short « 1, e » of Persian ( = kasi'ah, zer).
314. The « kasrah » in Early Persian, as in Modern Persian, had
the sounds of both short [i] aud short [e]. Modern Hindostani prefers
the [i] sound. In Modern Bengali, there is oeeasionally an attempt to
bring in the close sound through Hindostani intluenee, but iu the bulk
of the words naturalised, we find [ej. Examples: vH^t^, t^tW, tc^^
[ejfgar, i^ar, ijger] tromeri^ (izar) ; t^T^1, ^M^l ©jfeara] lease
(ijarah) ; t^<; [ijJS'^t] honour (*?izzat) ; ^^\^, [enam, inam] present,
^i/^ (inam) ; ^^{^l^, [en/apb, in (insaf) ; t^jp? [imamj
religiom guide (imam) \ cil^W. [erada, irada] desire (iradah) ; cfi^Tf^
[elahi] &W(ilahi); ^% [illot]//M (^illat); t*ft*ft [ijadi] idhiess (iShadi) ;
]\los^bec]ioning (iSarab) ; ^C^5(^t#t [estemrari] permanent (istimrarl) ;
t^t [estopba, istophaj resignation (ista^fa) ; f^^^t^ [ni/anj banner
(niSan) ; f^f^ [micjhil] procession (mi>l < midi) ; ikf^^ [^in^ir] chain
(jinzir); f^^ [kisti] boat (kiSti); C¥«) [k^ta] section, measure {i^{i^2Ax)
f^ff^Kjki/miJ] dried raisms (ki§mi^) ; [nika(fio)] marriage (nikah),
also (A^'i^) [ueka(ho)] ; ^f^^T^ > ^^'t^ L^l^tiar, ektar] command, power
(ixtiyar); [eJSlaf] court (ijlas) ; OJ^^T^ [ekrar] agreement (iqrar);
580
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
t^ir^t^ [eJSafiar, ejgefiar] deposition (izahar) ; ^S^V^i ^T^^
[et(t)ela] newSy information (itala*?) ; [elaka] jurisdiction (*?ilaqah) ;
C^t^ [ketab] look (kitab) ; C^B^ [keccfha] story > scandal (qissab) ;
[kbelat] present , robe of honour (xiPat); C^^^ [khejarot] damages
(xisanit) ; [jgela] district (zilali <dilali) ; [demag, -k] brain,
intellect J pride (dimag.) ; [peak] cup (piyalah) ; C^^^rWft [beloari]
crystaly glass (billauri) ; GR^t^^ [^ej'grab, -p] pletrum (mizrab <
midrab); CT?, (M'^^ [sre:ph, jerep(h)] unmixed, onl^y merely (sirf) ; Ct§
[Bedu] Hindu (bendu), beside f|^, [fiidu, Bindu] (hindu) ; C^sTl [fiena]
the Hennah plant (hina) ; Co^% C5(j^\ [cfehara, cjehera] portrait, fgure
(cibrab) ; C^^^t% [meherbani] kindness (mihrbani) ; f^f^ [bbisti] water^
carrier (bibiSti) ; etc., etc.
^^f^j ^^t%^ [oakipb, -b] knowing (waqif ) ; ^?rtf^^ ^^^"X]
(waris < wari^) ; ^f«f*f [kurnij] sahitaiion (kurniS) ; ^ttf^^ [khatir] regard,
respect (xatir) ; v5tf^^ [tarikh] date (tarix) ; +^^[^^[5 [Rares] a name (Iiari^);
^ftf^ [jalij] t^iird imrty, arbitrator (salis < ^ali^) ; ?t W [dakhil] entered
(daxil) ; ^fi?W [naJ5ir] supervisor (nazir) ; •Ttf^l^t [nalij] complaint (naliS) ;
Vl{«r«1 LplittJSil] excess, superficial, impertiyient (fazil<fadil) ; ^f^^ [B^^jfeir]
present (adj.) (liazir < liadii;); [kader] a name (qadir); (?rt^t^^
[moJ5afiem] strict (muzaliim) ; '^rtW^f [alem] scholar (^alim) ; etc., etc.
The « kasrah-i-izafat » = [i, e], is rendered by [e] : *ttC^ ^
[jttBerum] Emperor of Turkey (§ah-i-Rum), vs^^ vSt^Jf [tokte tauj] peacock-
throne (taxt-i-taus) j (TftC^ TtC?^ [jobe /adek] true dawn, early dawn (subt-
i-sadiq), etc., etc.
In a few cases, we find [o] for the expected [e] or [i] : e,g,, ^^»f
[jaj^o^ collusion (saziS) ; ^Tt^^ [nabalok] minor (nabalig.) ;
[jbnakto] identification (Sinaxt) ; (^^, (^^, [moujom, mou/um,
morjum] season (mausim), etc. Cf. also ^^ttf^'f [JupctriJ] recommendation
(sifari§), with [u] for « i », and '«rt'^ [ator] otto (^itr), with [a] for
« *a<i ». In^!^^ [J53b<ii] beside 'SrC^, [J5obe(fio)] killing an animal
hy ctitting Us throat (jabih), we find change of the « kasrah * to [ai].
For Aphseresis, Syncope and Apocope of [i, e], see infra: also
for Anaptyxis of [i, e] in Bengali.
PERSIAN 'PB§' (SHORT 'U, O*) IN BENGALI 581
(3) Short « u, o » of Persian ( = zammah, pe§).
315. The remarks made with reference to « i, e » of Persian are
also applicable with regard to « 6 *. Bengali prefers the [o] sound, but
[u] is also known : but unlike the [i, e] forms, [o] and [u] are kept apart,
the same word not ordinarily appearing with both the vowels.
MB. [urudu] ca^np (urdu, Turki ordu) ; ^^^=5, [kudrot] power
(qudrat) ; [kulup] pad-lock (Indian Persian qulf < qufl) ; ^ [khujki]
dry patk, dry chaff (xu§k-) ; ^^^Tt^^ [gujgran] passivg', {as time) (gu^Jran) ;
^ [Jguda] separate (juda) ; [jgulum] tyranny (zulm) ; [jS^^pi]
hanging side-locJcs (zulf ) ; v^<p^ [turuk] T^rk, Mohammedan (turk) ;
[dunia] (dunya) ; [dujmon] foe (duSnian) : ^ [dumba] sheep
(dumbah) ; ^^^i^ [phurjot] leisure (fursat) j ^5?P^ [burujg] bastiori (burj) ;
[bulbul] nightingale ; [muccfhuddi] accountant, partner of frm
(mutasaddl) ; ^^tWt^ [murdaphoraj] remover of corpes {mnxdi^Lh-^'i^xol) ;
[mun/ep(h)] a judicial officer (munsif) ; [mu(l)luk]
country (mulk) ; [ruj'^u] filing of a plaint (ruju*?) ; ^?rf^ [jurki] red >
hrick'dust (surx-); [Rukum] comynand (hukm); ^f^^l [Bulia] description
of man wanted (hulyah) ;
^^1, ^5Rt? [omra(R)o] ^loblemoi (umra^) ; >9^5f [ostad] master,
especially in the arts (ustad, ostad) ; [or(o)phe] alias (**urf) ; ^sspf^
[omor] a name (^umar) ; ^^t*J [ojman] also % [osman] a name
C^usman < ^^u^man) ; c;^^ [kro:k] attach {property) (Turki qurq) ;
[kho:d] self (xwud) ; C^W [khoda] God (xuda) ; c^tmi [khob/a]
clear (xulasah) ; C^t^Tl [gona] sin (gunah) ; C^t^1, C^=^ [goja, gojja]
anger, fit of sulh, dudgeon (g-us^sah) ; C^M^ feolcrp] ros^ < rose-ivater
(gul-ab); C5t^ [cfosto] ^'wzV/?', iGell-set, elegant (cust); C^t^t^ [jgo'crp]
a purgative (julab) ; C^Tf^ [JSobba] a loose garment (jubbah); c^t¥l
[topha] splendid, heautiful (tuhfah) ; (?rt^ [nokta] a dot (nuqtah) ;
C^rt^^^j (?!t^t^ [nokjan, lokjan] loss (nuqsan) ; c^tt^ [posta] plinth
(pu§tah); Cfr^ [boeka] hindle (Turk! bug^eah) ; C^ft^'W [moSommod]
(Muhammad); C^t^'^Rl [mokoddoma] also W^JTt [mokoddama] lawsuit
(muqaddamah) ; (?rtWl [molla] Mohammedan priest (Perso-Turki muUa
582
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
< Ar. mawla) ; CTh?^ [mokkhom] strengthemdy secure, unambiguous
(mufekam); CTt^^ [mogol] Mogul (mug-al); Cft??^ [morog] /owl, cock
(murg.).
[bujgruk] impostor, tniracle-worker (buzurg great) ; ^TtC^^fl
[nakhodal captain of a ship > a Mohammedan trading class (naxuda) ;
\ko^\iT\fanlt (qas^ur < qusur) ; [cfabuk] ivkip (cabuk).
In a few wordsj we find % ^ [o, a] for « li, o » of Persian :
[gaoa] witness (< gawah=:guwah) ; W:^«T [mophojjolj country district
(mafa^al) ; ^T^T^ [nobab] Nabob, prince, ruler (nawab^ nawwSb <
nuwwab) : [Jabud] as in >ft^ ^fjf [jakkhi Jabud] witnesses (subut <
^ubut); [monib < *mouib] beside [raunib] master (munib) ;
3^^^ [moJSur < *moj§ar] labourer (mazdur < muzdur) ; ^^^^ above ;
^Ptf^ [orjano] to cleave to (us a fault) (^urs) ; vS5fT^^ [todarokj enquiry
(tadaruk) ; ^5ff ^ [togollob] cheating, forgery (tag^allub) ; ^^^^ beside C'ff^s
[JofiDrot, /ofiorot] publishing {as by beat of drum) (Suhrat) ; Jf^^^ [jofiobot]
companionship (fimlibat) ; etc.
Syncope of « u, 6 » : see infra, Anaptyxis of [u, o] in Bengali :
see also infra,
[II] Long Vowels.
The quantity of Persian has entirely been modified according to
Bengali phonetic habits. (See 'Brief Sketch of Bengali Phonetics/ 53ff.)
(1) Long « a ».
316. Persian « a normally occurs as [a] in Bengali, initially,
medially and finally : e,g,, 'srff^l [ain] law (a^ln) ; ^t^f^ [adob] politeness
(adab) ; ^^rpRl [admi] man (adami) ; ^T^^t^ [abkari] excise, relating to
intoMcants (abkfirl) ; "«rt^ [a:m] piiblic (**am); [abruj ho^nour
(ab-ru); [alia], -^^f^ [elafii] God (allah, ilahl) ; ^t?5( [kanun]
law, custom (qinun); ^5}^ [kagojg] paper (kag^aS) ; ^tC^.^ [kapher]
infdel (kafir) ; C^at^ [ketab] book (kitab) ; f^^f^l [kinaraj edge (k^narah) ;
^T*( Ll^harap] bad (xarab); C^W [khoda] G^o</ (xuda) ; C^J^r^tiT
«
PERSIAN ^A' IN BENGALI
583
[khondr>kar, khon(d)kar] render > Mohawmedan snrnayne (xwand-kar) ;
OTiT^^, C5t^^ [g(e)reptar] arrest (o^iriftar) ; [J5^b<^^i] ^^^^ (<?/'
kofwnr) (zaban) ; [J5<i^ga] place (jaegah) ; [jS^b^Jb] replj^
(jawab); sfSftC?^ [^omaeet] gathering (jama'^at) ; ^t^H [jgaphran]
(za^fran) ; ^fPT'f [talla/; .s^fr/r^?// (talaS) ; ®t^tWl, [takada,
taorada] call or demand for paipnent (taqa^a) ; vStC^ [tabe] dependent, mferio-r
to {in grade) (tabi^) ; ^t^l [tala] as in "Sit^t^t^ [alla-tala] God is exalted
ihe Emlied One (ta'^ala), also ^T?t^ [taala, taeala] ; Tft^^t^ [daroga]
iiuperinlendenf of jioffce {d^vo^^h) ; ^'^\ [dnnia] tJte world (dunya) ; STt^lg
[nakocf] {to make) defective, to cancel (naqis) ; C^T^t^ [^oran] the Koran
(qur^an); M\ [b<iJS^^] (bazu) ; ^ft^ [ma:t] dead, finished (mat < ma^ata
he died) ; ^rtS [malla] sailors (mallat) ; [/oetan] rfi?/://, Satan (Saltan) ;
^^t^ [ficrl^ar] thonmnd (liazar) ; [fialal] lawful, properly hilled
{animal, for meat) (lialal) ; ^t^^1 [fi^l^a] siveehneit, 2^'^Mivg (lialwa) ;
ff^^l the [fii^ra] flegira era (hijra) ; etc., etc.
Change of « a » > [a] through Umlaut and Vowel- Harmony to
[e, o, 0, i, u] is found in a few instances : tc^^ HJS^f j trousers (izar) ;
tC*nrt [ijera] gesture (iSarali) ; f^^^ > TaI^-^ [bilcrt > bilet] Europe
(wilayat); T^JfT^-f^^t^ > %^^-f^C«^ [Gijab-kitab > fiijeb-kiteb] books
and accounts (liisab, kirab) ; W»f5? [ni/en] banner (niSan); filC^ [nike]
wedding (nika^) ; ^'^^ff^ [khodder] buyer (*kh&irdar < xarldar) ; ^^ftT >
[toiar > toer] prepared, ready (taiyar) ; Vf(Ui [diste] quire (distah) ;
C^t^'fl [kholoja] clear (xulasah) ; [gunogar] compe?isatton
(gunah-gar) ; [gomosta] agent, rent^collector (gumaStah) ; ^pfl
[jSudo] separate (juda) ; [murod] potrer (murad) ; ^^ft^T,
[turpon, turpun] aid (turfan) ; f^^ftft >f^^^ > ftf^f^ [Rijabi > fiijebi>
fii/ibi] clever at accounts, niethodical (hisabi) ; f^t^ > t^^fs [bilati >
biJitil foreign, European (wilayat I) ; f^5ft > f^^tft > >f¥f?rf5f
[phiroggi > phiraggi > phireggi > phiriggi] Etfropean, Eurasian (firangi,
firSngi); etc
In sg^^ [toepha] nautch girl (ta^ifah), we have change of the group
« -a^i- » t(v [oe] ; so t^sit®! [poemalj destroyed , crushed (= pa^i-mal). Cf.
^^^1 [Rorkora] peon^ post-boy (harkarah); [borgi<*borgi] a Maratha
584.
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
raider (bargir light cavalry) ; and [pholja] a fruit (falsah), through
influence of ^ « phal^ ».
Persian « ya, ia^ ea » in the initial syllable after a consonant become
[se, flee] in Bengali, in a number of words (see pp. 412, 421) : e,g,^
C*W^t, *tJt^ [peala^ psela, paeela] cup (pyala) ; C^^W, llW [peada,
p8e(e)da] /oo^waw (piyadah) ; CWtWl (JS^ada, J50e(e)da] much (ziyadah) ;
OTr«1 [deal, dee:!] %oall, beside (?fvs?[t^ [deoal] (diwal > ^dial) ; C^ft^,
[peaJ5, p2e:j§] oniom (pyaz) ; ^Jt^ [mead, mse:d] term^ imprison^
ment (miyad); (M^, [kheal, khse:!] wish (xySl); OTt^K ?Tt^,
^Tt^i^t^ [bearam, bae(e)ram] disease^ illness (be-aram); ^t^^ [Jaekot]
impelling, urging (siyaqat) ; etc.
For Syncope of Persian « a », and Anaptyxis of [a] in Bengali iu
Persian loan-words, see below.
(2) Persian « I, e ».
317. The « ma*^ruf » and « majhul » pronunciations of c^, which
obtained in Early Persian, are both found in Bengali, as [i, e]. Initial
or medial [*^] is ignored.
« i » > t, ^ [i] : t^rt^ [iman] faith, honesty (iman) ; [iran]
Iran^ Persia (Iran < eran) ; tvf, ^ff [i:d] the ^Id festival (^id) ; ^^1 [i/a]
J^*7i5 C^Isa) ; :ft#1, [mirjga, mrijga] Pttnce, Mirza {mlvz^h) i
[amir] prince (amir) ; [qfi'JS] (elz) ; [jgirn] saddle
(zin); [ti:r] arrow (tir) ; 4^, V^m\^\ [pi:l, pilkhana] elephant^
elephant-stahle (pil, pil-xanah) ; ffsfl [bima] instirance (bimah) ; pp^^|^j
[phirojga] light blue colour (firozah) ; f*f^ [/i:k] iron spit (six) ^ fif^%, fif j%
[Jirni, jinni] stveefs, milk etc, {peered to a mint) (§irni, glrlni) ; [ocfhi]
tedator (wasi) ; [ain] laiv (a^in) ; ^^#t [akhunjgi] a reader, a teacher
(Sxwandji) ; [bajsij sport > trick, magic (Uzl) ; [amin] survey-
officer < a trusted one (amln) ; ^ffvft [ko/ida] a >J^;2rf qf embroidery
(kaSldah); ^^tlt [kajgi] a Mohammedaii judge (kazi < qadi); J^ffjf
[khobij] eml (xabis < xablfl); ^tl^^ [^aegir] W ^/w J?'^^ /^^
service (jaegir) ; [toJSbiJS] investigation (tajwiz) ; n5%5 [tobiot]
PERSIAN a, B, U, O ' IN BENGALI
585
constitniion {of the body) (tabl'^at) ; ^Jl^ [tojbir] picture (taswir) ; ^^^T
[tobil] funds, treasury, cash (takwil) ; ^fsf^! [tcrmil] execution of an order
(ta*?mJl); ^f^f?^, 5jf^^, 5jf5t^ [noJ5dik, nojgik, nogicf] near (oazdik) ;
[fiokim] doctor practising the Arabic system of medicine (takim) ;
[bok/i£j present (bax§i§); ^I^T^, 5ffi{^ [munib, monib] master (munib); ^^^^t
[^omi] land (zamTn) ; »f^^ [Joi^it] sharer (Sarik) ; Hf^H, Rc^*f [jiri/,
^ re/] ^^wtf (siriS, sire§) ; etc., etc.
« e » > c£i [e] : ^srf^^f^ [ciniejg] shade, faint trace, nuance (amez) ;
^tC=Hl [aade|a] reflexion, concern (andeSah) ; tsC^^ f'B^'^JS] ^^'uglish
(ingrez, ant^rez, Arabic inklls-) ; C^r^ [JS^^b] pocket (jeb < Ar. jayb) ;
C^^ [te:Jg] sharp, quick (tez) ; CH^ [Je:r] lion (§er) ; Vf^C^H [dorbe/ ]
Dervish, Mohammedan religions mendicant (darweS) ; [p^:/] presenting
{as a suit in laid) (pe§) ; ^f^^^ [dostabejg] papery {171 a law-suit)
(dastawez) ; Prf^?r [daer] pending {laiv-sitit) (dayer) ; C?^?t^ [deoan]
minister, manager^ office master (dewan), also C?^t^ [dean] ; [ne:k] good
(nek); [peja] trade, occupation (peSah); C^^^ [phereb] deceiving
(fareb); [be:] prefix of negation (be-) ; [be:J] loell, good (be§); C^*W
[rejom] ulk (reSam) ; Jf^W [Jophed] white (safed) ; ftC^^ [Rabeli] mansion,
palace (taweli); 5tWfl [fiameja] always (hameSah) ; >f^^^ [Jarkhel]
commander of a troop (sar-xel) ; etc., etc.
In ^^^t^ Dg^t^JSlj *s a variant of [igr^JS], we have an irregular
change of « e » to [a] : cf. a phrase like t'^t^-^^ Pg^^JS-i'criS]
English rulers, in which the jingle is responsible for the change in the
vowel.
For loss of Persian « I, e and insertion of Bengali [i, e] in Persian
loan-words, see below.
(3) Persian « o ».
318. Like Ks, Early Persian j had two sounds, which are both
preserved in Bengali, as [u, o]. Examples :
P^sian « ii » > Bengali ^, ^ [u] : ^?«J*f [ablu/] ^-^o^y (abnus);
[iunani] Greek > Arabic {system of medicijie) (yunani) ; [oJ5u]
U
586
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
iMutmv^ (wazu>wu(Ju) ; [urdu] the Urdu language (urdu) ; [ifindi]
Jeio (yahudi) ; [kanun] Inio, cvdown (qanun) ; f ^f^H [kurnij] low
{before a prince) (kurni§) ; [khiiji]>j. (xu?^ + l); ^5 [khu:b] mvch (xub) ;
^ [khurii] bloorl, wnrder (xQn blood) ; ^^t^ [torajgu] (tarazu) ;
[durbin] telescope (dur-bin) ; [na:r] //y// (nur) ; [rumal]
handkerchef (ru-mSl) ; [/urot] (surat) ; [juru]
leginmng {hivn"^) ; Tt^vf [barud] /^^^^j^^^'^^^?^^ (banld); [/u:d] fw^^pre^^ on
7n07iei/ (sud) ; =^^^, ^^^1 [Jurua] *?-<?iJA, (§urwa < §orba, §urba) ; ^
\?infl\xv^^ presence > lordship (Itaziir > Iiudur) ; ^St [Ruri] /72>^, hearenlf/
nymph (fiuri) ; etc.
Persian « o » > Bengali ^3 [o] : C^t^ [kopta] pounded meat-balls in
soup (koftah); -STtW-fT*! [apCh)^;] ffrief (afsos) ; ^t?f^^5|1 [kanun-go]
registrar of a district (qanun-go) ; C^t^f , -(?rt^f [khojamod, -mod] flattery,
fawning (xoS-amad) ; C^^ [gosto] meat (goSt) ; C^^ [go:r] grave (gor) ;
C^tt^ [s;o:l] crowd, noise (^ol) ; C^t^T [j5o:r] (zor) ; [to:k]
collar (for pimishment) (*oq < tawq) ; C^t^ [tola] parrot (tota) ;
\tQ\y)\ca7inon (top); [toba] repentance (tdhB,h) ; C®t^^ ftojok] mattress
(toSak); Wt^^t^fl [daroga] super intendefit (of Police) (daro^ah) ; CTt^
[dokan] shop (dokSn < diikan) ; C^W^ [poddar] money-changer
(fdtah-dar) ; [bondobosto] arrangement (bandobast, band-u-bast) ;
[mo:m] 2^tf.r (mom) ; C^t^, C^1, ^ [boe, bo:, boe] smell, perfume (boy) ;
C^t^ [ro/ni] illnmination (roSani) ; C^t^ [ro:J5] ^% (roz) ; C»tT^ [/o:r]
din, tunudt (§or) ; etc., etc.
[d] and [o] being interchangeable, in a few eases we have [o] for [o]
in Bengali : €,g.y = C?1 [boe, bo:] above ; [loban] gum^ incense
(loban < Ar. luban); c^^^ [mouro/, mouro/] hereditary (maurus <
mawrufi) ; [bondobosto] arrangement (bandobast, band-u-bast) ; etc.
For changes of a general nature of * u, 6 », see below.
[Ill] The Diphthongs.
(1) Persian « ai
319. Persian « ai » becomes [oi] in Bengali when the next^syllable
has [i, j] in the original form : e.g,, ^f%^<; [koiphiot] explanation
PERSIAN ' AI, AU ' IN BENGALI
587
(kaifiyat) ; ^^ft [goibi] .'iecrel (g.aibi), but ef. [gaeb] secref (g^aib) ;
vSC?[^ [toiar, toer] ready, prepared (taiyar) ; ^^f^ [Joiod] ct
descendaiit of the Frophet of Arabia, an Arab Moliamutedan, a class among
Mohammedam (saiyad) ; etc.
In other cases it becomes [oe], [ai, ae], or [e] : e.g.^ ^?[^t^ [khoerat]
charily (xairat) ; ^ [khoerkba] ^oell-tcis/iitig^ loya/ (x'a.ir-x'^Bii) ; siwt
[moeda] Jfour (maidah) ; "HWpi [moedan] Jiekl (maidan) ; ^:^Pf [koed]
imprisoiiment (qaid) ; [boet] verse, couplet (bait) ; *f^^st*^ [J^etan]
Sata7i (Saltan) ; "W^^ [phDejoIa] agreement (faisalah) ; ^^^^1 [bogoera] and
the red (wag^airah); f?^^ [^Delap] iaundation (sail-ab) ; 5^t^ [fioeran]
worried (hairan) ; etc.
5tT^ [gaeb] hidden (^aib) ; -^^T^^l, -^ITt^t^^l [paekhana, paikhana]
water-closet (pai-xanah) ; ^tt^^j ^tC^^ [paikar, paiker] wholesale dealer
(paikar) ; ^Ttl^ [baena] advance money (bai^anah) ; etc.
^U«1C^l5? [alekom] as in ^t^^C^f? f^^^' Molunntnedan salnfafion
— peace he with you (salam *^alaikum) ; "^l^l^^^ [poegombor] , beside
[pegombor, pa^gombor] prophet (paig^ambar) ; cH^ [je:kh] a title
(§aix) ; etc., etc.
Instances also occur which show the transformation of « ai » to [a]
and [a], by syncope of the second element : e.g., sffa^ [gaeb] hidden, also
5tt*t [ga:p] (^aib); #ttt [kacj'i] scissors (Turki qainci) ; c^^^ [begor]
without (bi-gair). The case of C^St^^Tf^ [tokmari] the seed of ocymvw
pilosnm (tuxm-i-raiban) is due partly to folk-etymology (cf. srt^ « mar »
kill), through intermediate forms like [*tokmerean, ^tokmared],
(2) Persian « au >.
320. Persian « an » commonly occurs as [ou] in Bengali : it is also
found as [oo], and occasionally also as [au, ao] and [o] : e.g., C^Tfif [toujgi]
a description roll (taujih) ; C'ft^'^ [doulot] prosperity (daulat) ;
[phouJS] troops (fauj) ; C6t<T65l [cfoubaecfa] tank, cistern (eaubaeeah) ;
C^<^ [pbout] death (faut) ; [moujom] season (mausim) ; c^-^\
[moujga] area, district (raauza*^ < mawda^-) ; (^^^, (TJt^Jf, [moujgud,
588
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER VI
mo^ud] existing^ present (maujud) ; CHhp% [mouruji] inherited (maarusl <
mauru^i); (?rt«!ft, CSTN^ [moulobi, mouloiji] Mohammedan scholar
(maulavl) ; C^^, [rougDn, roogon, rogon"' fat^ polish
(rau^au); C^\«|5? in C^V*R C^t^ [roujon ^ouki] Indian vinsiml hand
(rauSan-); ^^^^ [J^ogcit] present (saug^at); C^Pfl, 5^>8Wl [Jouda, Jooda]
purchase^ articles (saudah) ; ^«if1 [fiaoda] hoivdah (haudah) ; C^^% ^^'^'^
[noubot, noobot], also [nofiobot < noobot, noobot] Indian musical
band (naubat) ; [fiouJ5] cistern (liauz < hawd-) ; C^\^ [joukhin]
desirous {of fancy things)^ amateur^ ff'^^'/J {articles) (SauqTn) ; ^5»9P^^,
isrtvQW^C^, etc. [ourogjgeb, aorog-, oorog-], also ^^^^^
[^J'^SJS^^] ^ name — the emperor Aurangzeh; etc., etc.
In a few words, « au » occurs as [o] in Bengali : e.g,^ [J3'k(h)]
pleasure {in fine things), good taste, luxicry (§auq); si^Jf [mojgud <
moJsud], see above; [jS^>Bor] precious stones, gems (jauhar); ST^^,
C^^^, C^^^ [nokor, noukor, nokor] servant (naukar) ; etc. This modifica-
tion is based on the Hindostani value of « au » as [oo, a:].
Bengali C^^t^t^ [beloari] made of crystal or glass (billaurl) is based
on an Indianised form « ^bilawari ».
[IV] Changes of a General Ch.vracter.
(1) Combination of Two Separate Vowels.
321. Two distinct vowels or syllables separated from each other
by a semivowel or the « hamzah » in Persian ( = « harazah • or « ^ayn »
in Arabic) combine into a diphthong in Bengali : e,g,, [aenda]
coming, future^ nejrt (a^indah, ayindah) ; "^^^ [aena] fnirror (a'inah) ;
^^\^] [aema] land given in {charitable) endowment (a^immah) ; ^T*Rt$
[a/nai] friendship > love intrigue (a§na^i) ; [kolai] plating, gilding
(qala^^l); ^Rtt [kojai] hntcher (qasa^i) ; ^ft^^l [kaem] standing, fixed
(qa'im); [kaeda] rule, mode, manners (qo^idah) ; ^5t^ [tan/]
peacock (tawus, ta^us) ; [laek] worthy, fit (la^ik) ; ^rtC^^ [naeb]
agent, sub-agent (na^ib) ; ?Ff^tf1 [phaeda] profit (f a^idah) ; [balai]
calamity (bala) ; C^l^^tt [merjgai] a short coat (mlrza^i) ; :sprt [muddoi]
DIPHTHONGISATION: LOSS OF VOWELS 589
claimant, suitor (mudda^) ; at*W^ [roiuai] Uliminaiio?i (roSanai) ;
•twl [janai] a pipe [in music) (§ah-na^i) ; ^^tl [J^)rai] inn (sara^) ; ^t^,
^fff^ftt [Ralui, fialoai] pastri/ or sweetmeat maimer (halwa^i) ; [fiaui]
rocket (hawa^l) ; etc., etc.
Within Bengali itself, when there is hiatus after the dropping of an
intervoeal [fi] < Persian [h]= Persian « h », Arabic [Ii, fi], the two
« udvftta » vowels combine into a diphthong: e g,, C^^\% [J^po-i] soldier ^
sepoy (sipahl) ; Cft^Tt [jorai] "earthen jar to cool water (suralii) ;
'Srt^t, [Jeai, jaei] ink (siyahi) ; [Joi] iignatarey valid (salilli) ; ^\T^,
[Ja(fi)eb] master, European (satib) ; C^W^ [kheaj] dei^ire (x^ahiS) \
etc., etc.
(^) Dropping of A'owels.
(i) Initial Vowels (Aphieresis, Aphesis).
322. Dropping of initial syllables is extremely rare in Persian loan-
words. The word ^^^t^, (TlW^ [J^oar, Joar], noted at p. 313, is an
Early MIA. borrowing from Old Persian (of. « asavari • in the Bharhut
inscriptions < Old Pers. « asabari »). In C^^t's [teat] caution, tcariness
(ittiyat) there is loss of initial « i- ». Other examples are not found.
(ii) Vowels in the interior of a word (Syncope).
323. There is dropping or assimilation of interior vowels to a
considerable extent.
[a] « -a- » : [muecfhuddi] accountant, office -master (mutasaddi) ;
TSi^^X [nio/la] ma^jcim^ judgment (raasalah) ; M^^T^^ [cjakran] ft'e(^ land
for servants (cakaran); ^\^^ [matbor, madbor] respected person, elder
(^mu&tabar < mu'^t^bar) ; ^tS^K [taenat, toenat] appointment,
dnti/ (ta^^ayyunat) ; i^tt^W^ [natoan] iveak, feeble (natawSn, natuwao) ;
^Si^ [nimki] salted (namakin) ; ^tt^^^s, ^t^^, C^^^ [raiot, raeot^ reot]
tenant fanner (ra'^ayyat) ; ^^^^ [tocjlirup] embezzlement (tasarruf) ; C^j^^
[mokror] confnmed (muqarrar) ; (?pt^t^1 [phoara] /ow/i/'^///^ (fawwarah);
CsrTS^^^r [motphorka] scattered^ miscellaneous (mutafarriq) ; ^^J^
590
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
[romj^an] Mohammedan Lent (ramS^dan) ; etc., etc. There are cases of loss
of internal « a (a) » by assimilation : C^^t^ [reat] protection^ ahatemeut
(ri^ayat) ; «r^!c«r^?t^ [ Jgomijgerat] laud and property (zamin zira^at) ; N5^5»tfe
[toenati] relating to service (ta*^ayyunatl) ; [bilat] foreign laivd^
Europe (wilaySt) ; C^t^tC^ [motajjge] favorable (mutawajjah) ; CT^5tC15!
[motaen] appointed (muta*?ayyin) ; c^t^l [modda] the thing asserted, matter
under discussion (mudda^^a) ; [mane meaning (ma^anl) ; ?t^^
[Gaidar] a sxirname < milifary or civil officer (liawalih-dar).
[b] « -e- » : generally after « a » : e.g., ^^rfffj, ^«TfffTfl [alada
< ala(R)ida] separate (^alahidah) ; c^l^t^ < c-ife^f^ [ektar < ektiar]
authority (ixtiyar) ; ^t«^t^ [kciwaJ5] regulations, parade of troops (qawa^^id);
'srtC^ [aste] slotvli/ (ahistah) ; [jg^Borot] jetoellery (jawahimt) ; ^jf^
[j^asti] excess (^zyazti, *ziya3ti < ziySdatI) ; [bBisti] water-carrier
(bihiStI); etc.
The « K, e » of the « izafat » is dropped in some cases in Persian
itself : e.g., ^^^\'^[ [khaojamo] butler (xan-i-saman) ; ^t^t^'l [raeraea]
a Persianised titles chief (ray < raja) of chief s (ray-i-rayan) ; etc.
Cf. also ^^C^ [Bti^re < *Ra^ira] attendance (bazir < badir), Jc^tC^
[morcje] a song of lament of the Kerhela day (marsiyyah < marWyyah),
etc., through Bengali contraction by Umlaut and Vowel -Harmony.
[c| «.u-, -o-»: 5rf3J^l [mamla] law-suit, affair (mu*^amlah) ; sftf^^
[maphik] snitaljle to, agreeing %cith, in measure with (muwafiq) ; ajc^tf j
[mokkel] client (mu^aqqal) ; Sft^^ [matbor] elder (mu^tbar) ;
[toenat] appoint mf^al (ta^ayyunat) ; Wt's [tophat] distance (tafawut) ; Cot^t^
[toakka] reliance {y^.'^zsj^^)-, sff^l [maena] vitio, inspection \y[iX3^2i:ym)a)',
[kabli] beside ^Pt^ [kabuli] of Kabul (Ksbull). Cf. MB. v5*tt^
[topaj] search, NB. ^t^^ in ^^-^t^t^ « t&ttw^-tabas^ » enquiry after
well-being {}oith 'presents of sweets) : see footnote, p. 213.
[d] « -a- » : ^t^^l [khaJ5Dd], rent tax (xazanah) ; \^f[ beside iv5?rtft
[toiri< toiari] prepared (taiyail); ^t^sfl [baena] advance money (bay^^anah) ;
^rt^rt [mo/la] ingredients^ spices (masalafc < -lit); ^rf??:^?, ^^T^JA [ma(fi)ine]
monthly pay (mahanah, mahianah) ; [roona] departed (rawani^) ;
[Baui] rocket (*hawl < hawaJ) ; etc.
LOSS AND ACCESSION OF VOWELS
591
[e] « -e- » : after Epenthesis and Harmonic Chanore : 5ft^ <
5ttf^^ [ojalcfe < galicfa] carpet (galleah) ; ^-^sjt^ beside ¥^^t^^
[phorma(i)J] order ^ comwisnon (farma^iS) ; ^fC^F^ [khodder] buyer (xaridar) ;
^Pjj:^ > ^fefSl [polte < polita] wick of a lamp (fatllah > *falltah) ;
ft^^ [fiabli, fiauli] mansion (tawell) ; etc.
[f] « -U-, -5- » : loss rare : ^f^^ ^H^f [ap(h)im] opium (afyum) ;
Wt^^f^ [dadkhani] a kind of rice (da^ud-xani) — here we have change by
epenthesis to 5ftf^^ [daidkhani] first : see p. 379.
(iii) Final Vowels.
324. The Anal short vowels of Arabic forms were dropped in Persian.
Exeeptin;2^ « -&h > -& », final short vowels are non-existent in New Persian.
Bengali as a rule preserves tlie final vowels of Persian. The words ^spf^f^^
'srf^^t'^ [albat, albat] certainly (albattah) and C^Tt^ [bebak] all (be-baql)
are among the very few instances in Bengali where a final sounds
expected to be retained, is dropped.
(4) Addition of Syllables,
(i) In the interior of words. Anaptyxis.
325. Persian versification recognises a short vowel, the « nim-
fathah * or half-faihah^ between consonants (a liquid, aspirate, nasal or
sibilant, or semi-vowel, followed by another consonant). A short anaptyctie
vowel was thus present in the Persian speech in early times. In some
cases^ this indistinct glide vowel has developed into a full sound in
Bengali : e,g.^ ^tt^^ [ncrjgeBal] extreme tronhle (< *naza^-hal < naz^-hal) ;
"^t^rt^ [ofiammuk] a fool (*ahomaq<ahmaq); (?it^<s \^o^OT^i'\ publishing y
as news (*8oh9rat < Suhrat) ; sj^^sfl [mofiokuma sub^division {of a district)
(*mafokumah < mahkumah); C^l?^^ [mefionnot] labour (*mgfianat <
mihnat) ; OT^tft [beloari] glass^ crystal ("^billawarl < billauri) ; etc.
Anaptyxis of short vowels characterised the Persian transformation of
Arabic words (cf. P. Horn, ' Neupersische Sehriftsprache/ pp. 39-41, in
592
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
the * Grundriss der iranischen Philologie *). Anaptyxis is also found in
Bengali : also intrusive vowels between two stops ending a word. (See
pp. 874 ff.) Forms like « qarz, wazn, naql » etc. of Persian were not
tolerated : they were modified to « qaraz (or qarza), wazan, naqal » before
becoming Bengali.
Insertion of [a, o > o] : J^t*^*i**?l [akolmondi] cleverness (« '^aql-
mandl » : but of, ^Ic^cl [akkel] se7ise<iM *?aql ») : ^sit®^ [ator] oito ("^atr <
^^itr) ; [oJS'^o] weight (wazn) ; >8^^ [oJs^r] objection^ excuse (^nzx <
'adr)] ^^^^ [oakoph] religions trust (property) (waqf); [k^bo^] receipt
(qabz < qabd) ; [k^rojfg], also [korjf^^j] borrowing (qarz > qard) ;
^7fa( [kojom] oath (qasm) ; [kobor] grave (qabr) ; [kodor] value,
worth (qadr) ; [khorDc^ expense (xare) : [khojora] hisband (xasm);
[gorora] toar^,/i (garra) ; 5*Pf [cfojbm] eye (ea§m) ; [^gakhom] wound
(zaxm) ; [J5<>l^>d] {i'fi music) (jald) ; v®^^ [toi-oph] side (tarf) ;
if^ [dorod] (dard) ; [norom] soft (narm); [nofior] channel
(nafcr) ; '1«f5( [po/om] wool (pa§m) ; [boroph] ice (barf) ; [bafior]
seay width (balir) ; 3(5t^ [wiOgOj§] brains (mag.z) ; [moton] text, reading
(main) ; CTt^ [mofior] seal (muhr) ; [rokom] sort (raqm) ; "|IJ?f
[/oBor] city (§ahr) ; ^?f?( [j^dor] headquarters (sadr) ; [/orom] shame
(§arm) ; [fiorop(h)] letter of the alphabet (liarf) ; etc., etc.
[i, e] : ^sftC^q [akkel] sense {in man) (^aql) ; [elem] learning
('ilm) ; ^fil^ [^§inijj o^rtiele (jins) ; f^^^gir] courage (jigr) ; X(^m{
[jgeled] [leather) binding of booh, volume (jild) ; f^1%^ [nirikh] scales^
balance (nirx) ; ^p^v© < [phote < ^photefi] victory (fatfe) ; fipf^^
[phikir] trick, ruse^ plan (fiqr) ; f^f^^ [micfhil] procession (misl < mi^l) ;
W^^^t^ [mefierbani , kindness (mihrbanl) ; etc., etc.
An intrusive [i] occurs before the suffix « -anah » in Bengali forms
of some Persian words : e,g., ^T%t^1 > sfff^, sjf^ [mafiiana, mafiina,
maine] mmithly pay (mah-anah) ; Jftf^t^ beside ^qt^ [Jaliana, /alana]
annual (sal-5nah) ; "ttf'f^^rl [/ttmiana] awning (§am-anah); >rtC?f^^
[jafiebiana] affecting European ways (sSMb-anah) ; etc. Cf . also ^fipjt^rt
[^orimana] fine (jar-manah), Hindostani « jarlmanah » (so HindostanI
« ganjifah » playing cards = Persian « ganjafah »).
ADDITION OF FINAL VOWELS
593
[u, o] : f^f [kulup] pa<ifock (qulf < qufl) ; C^tCWt^, C^t^ [korok,
kro:k] ' attachment of property (Turkl qurq) ; [fSulum] oppresnon
(zulm); ^^ [buruJS] hmtion (burj); C^m, CTtC^t [morog] cocfc (murg.)j
[hukum] order (hukm) ; etc., etc.
(ii) At the end of words.
Final groups of two stops, or of a fricative or sibilant plus stop, ordi-
narily take" the [o, o > o] vowel finally in Bengali (see p. 304)^ E.9.,
[okto] time (waqt); C^tT^ [gosto] flesh meat (goSt) ; C5t^ [^osto]
clear (cnst) ; C^M^ [khondokar], beside C^H'Pttl, [khonkar,
khDnkar] n title reader) (xwand-kar); % ^5 [JSoggo], beside ®t [J5og]
battle (jang) ; ^ [takta] i!/5ro«-9 (taxt) ; tf^^Tt^ [dorkhosto] i?<5r^jVjo?J (dar-
xwast); tfr^?im [doriapto] enquiri, (dar-jaft) ; tns«r« [dostakhot] signature
(da^t-xatt) ; CftS^ [dorosto] right, fit (durust) ; [poqfhando] choice
(pasand) ; C>m [pokto] ripe, seasoned, cooked (puxt) ; [phordo] //si!
(fard) ; [phasto] bleeding, opening a rein (fasd) ; ^^Vft^ [bordasta] ifo/era^tf
(bardast) ; [mak/a] JC/'iVn/^- e.*v?r/se (ma§q) ; [ropto] practice, habit
(rabt) ; Sf^ [fgabda] punished, punishment (zabt<dabt); ^It^^ [lojgbardo]
lapis lazuli (lajaward); ^[^r^ [janakta] ideritijication (Sinaxt); "t^
[jarta] condition (§art) ; (.-^m^ [Joparadda] charge over, hand over (supurd) ;
^ [fiodda] limit (liadd) ; C?^^ [fiestanestal final settlement (hast-nlst) ;
etc. In r?f?tf% [phiristi] (fihrist) li.'<t, [J5«lpi] (z^'f)'
^t^lt^ [balai] calamity (bala), we have a final [i] added.
Some of the above words, with liquid or nasal, ought to have taken a
vowel in the interior rather than at the end.
"Words with a final « -h », which was pronounced in Persian, either
drops the « -b », or retains it and takes a final vowel [a, a] after it (see
p. 557); e.g., ^T?i [rafia] imy, journey (rah).
Nasalisation of vowels : this is treated under the Nasals, below.
The Consonants.
[I] The Glottal [h], and [«] of Arabic.
326. The Persian [h] sound represents also the Arabic B].
75
594.
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
Bengali, Persian « h » becomes ^ [fi] : but except where initial, Bengali
[fi] is a very unstable sound, and is frequently dropped.
Initial « h- » : ^'Sf'H [fioJ5om] fligestiou (hazm < hadm) ; [Ropta]
week (haftah) ; 5t^^ [fiaoa] air (hawa) ; tft^t^ [Rci^af] thousand (hazar) ;
^*ri [fiameja] alwap (hameSah) ; ct5, [Redu, fildu, RinduJ
Hhidf' {BmAn) ; -^^^ [Runur] ^klll (hunar) ; [fiork] truth (Iiaqq) ;
[R^JSr^t] inesence = e.raffed person (liazrat < hadrat) ; ^tf^
[fiakim] judge [ftakim) ; [Roddo] limit (liadd) ; [fiDlop(h)] oath
(half) ; [RapheJ5] pndeetor^ one who has the entire Koran hy heart
(Iiafiz) ; [RaJSOt] loch^vp (liajat) ; ^t^t^ [Raid] laivful {meat)
(halal) ; [Rarala] attack, raid (hamlah) ; [fiuka] hookah
(huqqah); f^fT [Ri/ab] accouuis (hisab) ; ^ft [Ruri] heavenly nymph
(hurl) ; C^\^ [Roi^ Jg] cistern (hauz < hawd) j etc., etc.
In parts of East Bengal, initial [fij becomes [^] : see p. 269.
Interior « h » :
(i) Intervoeally it generally remains, although its articulation is very
much weakened : e.g., ^t^t%1, [alafiida, alada] separate
(*?alaliidah) ; ^f^^t^, t^^^^ [esteRar, ista-] notice (iStihar) ; ^S^t^
[oJ5uRat] causes, grounds (wajuhat) ; c£i?itf^ [elafii] God; magnificent
(^ilahl) ; C^^t^f [jgeRad] religions war (jihad) ; »ft^t^t^ [/ajsafian] the
Emperor Shah Jahun (Sah-jahan) ; ^ft?f [JSafiir] rnanifest (zahir) ; t^,
^t^t^ [boRal, baRal] confirmed (batal) ; C^t*f, C^^> [beRs/, -Ruj^ senseless
(be-ho§); C^t^'Slff [moRommodj Mnhamniad (muhammad) ; C^Tf^^^T
[mofiorom] the Jfuharram festival (mutarram) ; ^^Tft^ [eJ5aRar] dejwsi-
tion (izahar) ; C^f^t [refiai] excifse (as a fault or de6t) (riha'i)j (7?^t(?)*?.
[neRa(e)t] excessive^ (nihayat) ; t^U^^ [/aReb, /aeb] gentleman, European
(sahib); [boRoj^ argiinte>d, dispute (bahs<bali^) ; etc.
Intervoeal [b] in Bengali frequently disappears : see p. 552. Examples
from the Persian loan-words — C^?[t^ [kheaJJ desire (xwahi§) : ^t^tWl
[alada] separate (^alaliidah) ; Jf^ [Joi] signature (Sahih) ; ^srf^^ [aste] slotcly
(abistah) ; ^tWtt [Ramrai] succouring, eager to help (ham-i-ahl) ; etc. In
[bRisti] ^^^z^^z-.tv^mW- (bihiStl), we have aspiration through contact
by loss of intervening vowel,
INTERIOR & FINAL 'H' OF PERSIAN 595
(ii) « h » forming the first element in a consonant nexus (a) either
requires the prop of an intrusive vowel to remain ; or (b) is dropped,
modifying in some cases the preceding vowel ; or (u) ii is changed to
[i, e] : e,g,y (a) [tofiojil] beside [tojil] trea^snrif (tafesil) ; f^f^f^f^,
f^f?[f^ [fi([ii)risti] lid (iihrist) ; CH?^^ [mefionnDt] lalour (mihnat) ; C^^1,
[cfehera, -ara] y//7K/^, (cibrah) ; (^\^ [mofior] aeal, a gold
coin (muhr) ; ^^ft^, ^ff^^ [tofiobil] j^iirse, ireasvrij (taliwil) ; ^^^^ [bohor]
sea, wiiUh (balir) ; [JoRobot] associaliod (sabbat) ; *f^^ [JoRoi'] ^-'if^/
(§ahr) ; ^^^\ [mofiokuma] a pari of a district (mabkumah) ; etc,, etc, ]
(b) C^W [topha]//^^? (tubfah) ; [dolijs] portico (dahllz) j ^(t)C^Tfr^
[paloan, poloan] beside ^^5^^?t^ [pofioloan] a-restler, alhlde (pablwan) j
[bollom] lance (bahlam) ; [jauai] pipe {mvstc) (§ah-na^i) ;
^^(5^, [Janok, JankiJ plide (sabnak) ; sjj^^ [ma/ul] tax^, podage,
fare (mabsul) ; 5(|^ff [mamud] a name (mabmud) ; (Tf^^l [Jetkhana]
water-chj^i'f (sabt-xanah) ; C^f^t^ [mierap] iempurar// roofuuj [of mats)
(mihrab) ; etc. ; (e) "^^^ fdoijot, doejot] alarm, fear (dahsat) ;
'^V^ < ^t?t5?1 [baena < bafiana] excvise, plea, demand (^bahna < baha-
nah) ; etc.
In C5f^^ [miethor] prinrf* > s/rcrpcr (mihtar), theie is metathesis
followed by aspiration.
« h » forming the second element of a consonant group is dropped :
[ijcidi] fritness (iShadi) ; 'm^^ [molom] ninti,H'n( (marbam) ;
[/areg] master of xmall dean/er (sar-hang), etc.
Final « b ». The « ha-i-muxtafi » of Persian is changed, with the
preceding « a to [a] in Bengali : see p. 579, <h/ff\ ^ [ta:] vZ/^r/
of paprr (tah) ; x©t^j [tajga] ./ /vV/ (tiizah) ; fft^l [dana] grain (danah) ;
etc. Final « h » after « a » where it was pronounced in Persian, is
generally letained in Bengali, with the prop of a tinal vowel : f\g., ^rl^(l)
[jafio, -fia] beside "fl [ja:] hing (5ah) ; ^t^1 [rafia] iniu (rah) ; 3!^^^t(?)
[Jorbora(fio)] -vfpjjlj/ (sar-barah) ; ^t^WHt" [rafiaJ5ani] IngJi-wa// roUer//
(rah-zani); f^T^tCf) [nika(Ro)] marriage (nikab), etc. In other eases « -b »
is merely dropped : /V/,, ^ [Jo(R)^j (^ablb) ; \5f^ Ttombi]
chiding y threatening (tanbih) ; Cs^f^ [toujgi] disinrt (taujih).
596
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
Final « h > ( = Arabic « li» after a consonant) normally becomes [e] in
Bengali : e.g., [phate] vktorjj (fatt) ; <M^, C5t^^ [Jole, ^ole, sole]
agreemeat (suit) ; (TrtC^ [Jobe] lUura (subh), but cf . =^^1 [Jubtt] prnvitwe
(subah: &ubah-i-BangaIah = ^t^^l [/ube bagla]).
327. Arabic [^], in Persian resultinc^ in the glottal stop p]. This is
lost to Bengali, normally : /\//., 'sit^^ [ajgob] ^Iniugn C^ajab) ; [ator]
otto (*'^atr < ^'itr) ; vs?t^ [ocrJS] pmidf'uig (wa^z) ; 'srt^^ [af^>J5]
petition (^arz < ^arA) ^?r^ [arbi] Araljiau, Amhic (^arab-); [ijJS^^t]
liouour (*?izzat) ; ^ff [i:d] fJ/e ^Id fast ii-rf (^id) ; N8^i5f [ojgor] wnsr ('^ozr>
*^udr) ; 'srf^ [aeJ]yyAY/^7^/v^, mwfort (*^ai§) ; [oku] /'/7/<vv^ ^///
event took phict^ (waqu^) ; ^^sf [iuam] largc^^xe (in^am) ; ^\©t^ [etala]
nffmmoiii^ (itala*^) ; c^^t^ [khelat] rohe of hoitonr (xil'^at) ; [JSoma]
coUedioii, (Jeposit (jam''); C?t?(1 [doa] prajfei' (du^a) ; C^ft*?^1j ^^^^1 [monopha,
munDpha] prup (munafa^) ; C'Tf^l [moujga] ill-sfyiH (mauza*^ > mawda^) ;
[tdbe] in a anljorditiate jmition (tabi^) ; etc.
In a few eases, however, interior > when pre-oonsonantal or
intervoeal, or final [^], has developed into a palatal iJemi-vowel, « y » (=[e]
in Bengali) : ^tWW [taedad] funfmrraliou, .s7/>;/, npproxi nudion (la^dad) ;
[JSOmaet] guthn-iag (jama^^at) ; f^ift^ [bidae] fan'fndl (« wida"^ » :
commonly regarded as a Sanskrit formation = « vidaya ») ; ^^t^ [taeala]
the Ejcaltetl Okc (Allah taeala G(fd m* (waited) ; X\^^\s[\ [niamot, neSamot]
grace, gift (ni^mat) ; ^TfC^, >rf^^ [faeet, Jait] tihu*, ivatch (sa^^at).
[II] The Uvular stop [q], and the Velars [k, g ; x, x^^ g,].
328. [q] of Arabic, = both [k] and \_^{^)\ in Early Persian, and [q]
of Turki, occur normally as ^ [k] in Bengali, but there are a few words
which show 5] [g].
[q] > [k] : Initial : ^C?l? [koed] itDprimiuiund (qaid) ; ^tftsf [kodam]
ixiccy ^tep (qadam) ; ^t^=W [kalondor] mendicant^ ^ ra/eifder^ (qalandar) ;
C^t^ [koran] the Koran (qur^an); C^t^^t^ [korbani] xncrijirr (qurbani) ;
[kulup] ix/r//oc'X; (qufl) ; [kobajg] receipt, hoiul (qabz < qabd) ;
WIWl^, C5Ft^ [k(o)rok] aitochmeni of properly (Turki qurq); ^srjff|
PERSIAN ^ Q, K ' IN BENGALI
597
[kojai] /^///c'/^^v (qasa'I) ; C^^ [kella] fori (qil^^ah); ^tf^^ [kalia] hieai
cvn-i/ (qaljah) ; [kudrot] nughl (qudrat) ; etc.
Medial: "srtc^^f [akkel], also t«rt^ [akol] sense, frlsduni C^aql) ; <ii^^t^
[okxax] (f<'k,ioir[f'(hjh/riit (iqrar) ; cfi^t^l [eloka] y/'/vsv/Zt'^'^^/-' (ilaqah) ;
[okto] fhife (waqt) ; [Ruka] Iioohdt (tiuqqah) ; [fiokukj fad-^
(baquq) ; [baki] retuaiuiuu (baql) ; C^^t^ [bebak] iriihorf rrtuditnler^
all (be-bSqi) ; [monokka] dried yrajjcii (munaqqa) ; 5^5f?pt [gokmoki]
Jliat fifihie (to Hirlke <( Jur) (Turki caqma(i) ; [cf^ku] kai/e (caqu <
Turk!) ; etc.
Final: ^ [fio:k] fr/f///, frfff, rif///f//'/ (liaq<j) ; [t^bok] ///v//^ '^^'/'V^
,s-//v/////// (tabaq); MB. C^t^ [to:k] for the uecli {for pun ix/t me df) {io^i
>tauq, tawq) ; vS^ft^ [to/dik] p>oo/, rvnfcafioa (tasdlq) ; ^C^^ [laek] jU,
irorfhjj (la^iq) ; 1^ [mokjo] cop^jhuj (maSq) ; [/^^^(h)] ilrxh'c nr tasfr
forfuiuvj adk'le^^ (§auq) ; f^I^^, [Jind(fi)uk] clu^st, Ijikv (sinduq) ; etc.
[(J > Persian [9.] > [g] in Bengali : vst^W beside ^t^tWl [tagada,
takada] demand for paf/uient (taqadah) ; ^tlS'^ beside ^t^^ [tagut, takot]
drengiJf {W]:At)] [nogod] cash moneu (naqd) ; ?^Nt^1, ^rt^?^!, ^Tt^^l
[nag(a)ra, nakaraj kdilvdrom (aaqqarah) ; beside ^t^tft [tagabi,
takabi] uHWjj advanced to farmn'-s- (taqawl) ; MB. 3?it^t^tf beside Jf^^t^
[/ogollad, j'okolat] mn'lrf <:UAh, aodlif ^ffjj' (saijalat).
[q] is found as [kh] in a few words: = [Jo:kh, /o:k] <
« §anq see above ; ^srf^^^ beside ^t?t^^ [aRaramukh, -muk] fool
(ahmaq) ; ^^^fs^lH [Jukhmunia] -^canhuouf/ {a druy) (suqmunya).
In the word ^t^^ [taut], as a variant (rather rare) of 'St^^!,, ^t^^
[tagut, takot] drcntjih (taqat), we have loss of intervoeal [q],
329, Persian unvoiced velar stop [k]. There is no trace in Bengali
of the Modern Persian aspiration of this unvoiced stop to [kh] .
Initial: ^sf [ko:m] h^^, small amonnt (kam) : C^tgf^ [ketab)
Ijook (kitab) ; ^^^1 [kolma] Ih^ Mohammadaa creed (kalmah) ; TfC¥^
[kapher] infdcl (kafir) ; ^t^t^ [kagajg] puper (kaQaS) ; ^tl^^^ [karigor]
arfimtt, arh'sl (karrgar) ; ^T^tST [kanian] ^jmr > gnn (kaman) ; f^t^Tl
[kinara] • edge (kinarah) ; C^ttil [kopta] meat halls in sfeiv (koftah) ;
etc., etc.
598
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
Medial : ^T^^^ [akbor] Ahhar ; [ukilj phcuh^r (wakil) ; ^^^t^
[tokrar] argnwent (takrar) ; c^^t^ [rekab] xfirrfj) (rikab) ; 5t*t^^ [capkan]
^?^/z/V (capkan) ; ^t^^ [eakor] rserraftf (cakar) ; ^^^t^ [Jorkar] f/ovprnmen(j
admiimlmtion (sarkar) ; [fiorkot] rommofinn^ dawufjc (liarkat) ; etc.
Final : [kha:k] earlh (xak) ; ^?rt?r^ [todarok] stfjierrlsion (tadaruk) ;
C^t^^ [tojok] motfref^a (to§ak) ; 5t^^ [cabuk] irJtij^ (cabuk) ; C^^^ [nemok]
salt (naroak) ; ^ft^f^ [Sarx^V\j)Iaie (sabnak); etc,
[k] is softened to [g] in % C^^^f^ [ khod-fiaj^imi] arrofjatirr (xwud-
takimi), \»TT^t^f [tagid] prp-^-siire, rehuinlrr (takid), and J?^^, [nogijS,
nogicj] uelf/Jfboffr/wod J ucnrm'ss (nazdik).
In C^ttTl [khoja] Ijeardh'HS mail we have [kh] for [k], from Arabic
« kusah » scoid'hranled,
330. Persian [g] remains in Bengali.
Initial : [gorom] irtwu^ (garm) ; 5f^1 [gorda] df-st (gardah) ; +^^^1
[gaoa] irif//e'S.s (guwah) j C^t^t^ [golap] rose (gulab = gul) ; C^fW [gontj]
si^i (gunah) ; "^^p^ [guman] p/'i/Ie (giiman) ; [go:^] i/ravp (gor) ; C^tt^
[gosto] J/es/i-h/mt (go§t) ; etc.
Medial : ^t5^^^ [kanungo] disiricf oj/icer, keeper of records (fj[aQun-go) ;
[kborgoj] /tare (xar-g6§) ; fef^ [JS<gi^'] eitcovnifjetDeiit (jigr) ;
Tf^^n [dorga] shrine of a sa'nit (dargah) ; ^t^'R [lagam] rein (lagam) ;
^^^*t1 [porgona] of district (« parganah » : Persianised Skt, word =
« pragana ») ; etc.
Final : Persian words with final « -g » are very few in Bengali,
beside ^[J^^ [buj^ruk, -rug] impostor^ miracle-worker (< buzurg
greai"^ shows hardening of « g » to [k]. There area few words ending in
« ng » [gg]; which either preserve the final [g] by adding a vowel at the
end, e.g.y as in ^^-s^W [jgoggo-nama] the history if the fight {at Kerhela)
(jang-namah), or reduce the [gg] to [g] : e.g.y [/areg, -rog]
master of small steamer (sar-hang).
A few cases of hardening of [g] to [k] are found : e g,^
[buJSruk] for « buzurg », as above ; ^t*^^ [khanki] froman of ill-fame
(xanah-gl heloagivg to the hovse > a mistress) ; f%f^^ [jgikir] beside ^f^ff
[if5»gir] < * jigr » above.
PEKSIAN 'X, XW IN BENGALI
599
331. Persian [x], representiug both native [x] and Arabic [x],
normally becomes ^ [kh] in Bengali, which intervocally, finally and pre-
consonantally is deaspirated to [k] as a normal thing, the aspiration remain-
ing only initially.
Examples : initial : [khobor, kbopor] news (xabr) ; ^tlTt^
[kharap] lad (xarSb) ; [khoerat] chanfi/ (xairat) : ^ [kha:] a title
(xan); ^\)s}\n:xx\ bivrder {^un blood) ] c^tfl [khoda] God (xuda); ^Tf^^
[khatir] re^jjevt (xatir) ; ^ss [kho:t] letter, icrifiug (xatt) ; ^t^(t)^?1
[khaJ5(a)na] tax (xazanah) ; ^ [kho!j, khu/i] glad, liai^pij, leantifal
(also nouns) (xu§, xu§!) ; ^ft^ [khala/] empttj, freed, finhlied, (xalas) ; etc.
Medially: ^fC^t^l [nakhoda] cajjfaiu of shij) (na[w]-xuda) ; ^C^,
^C^fl [bok(h)ea] (jack stifcJi, siifcJied and darned > had (baxyah); ^^|%«f >
^^fiin [bok(h)JiJj lar(je^><e (bax§I§) ; ^^if^ [ak(h)ni] hroth of 'meat (yaxni) ;
^tC^^ [akher] //^^7/ (axir) ; sp^^l [mo/kora] yW, yoX-e' (masxarah) ; etc.
Final: (?T^, m C>T^ [Je:k(h)] Shaikh (Saix); f^T^, fif^ r/i:k(h)]
♦V^/^ roast meat) (six) ; cj:^ [lo:kJ thread to fy I'ttes (nax) ; fi{^% firf^^
[nirik(h)] sea/es, weighing (nirx) ; etc.
Persian « -xt » becomes [kt] ; ^t^l [akta] castrated (axtah) ; tufe^,
ismt^ [ekt(i)ar] anthmtij (ixtiySr) ; ^fW^ [boktiar] a name, Balchti/ar ;
[kombokto] I nckJ ess person (kam-baxt) : [tokta] (taxtah);
C^t^ [pokto ; seasoned, cooled (puxt) ; C^t^ [moktar] pleader (muxtar) ;
"f^ [Mto] //7>v/, A-///(saxt); »f^t^, [Jonakto] identification
(Sinaxt) ; etc.
332. Persian [xw] : the character of this sound has been described
at p. The labial element is preserved in a few words : <?.^., ^^f^
[akhunjgi] teacher > a surname (axwand-jl) ; [kho:d] self (xud <
xwad, xwfid); [khoda] God (xudS); C^^Ft^, C^t^^^, ^T^,
[khoDd(o)kar, khonkar, khonkar, khogkar] reader, teacher > a surname
(xwand-kar) ; ^%^t^ [khuncfipojj iray^cover of doth (xwancah-po§) ; c^j^t^
[khoar] contemptible, base (also noun) (xwar); ic^tft^^tl [khoabga] sleeping
chamber (xwab-gah) ; [khoab] sleep > dream (x^b) ; etc.
[w] dropped : also e.g., [khaJ5a] a title of respect (x^ajah), also
C^T^ [khojga] ; ^fl [khoer kha] loyal, ivelUviisher (xair-x^ah) ;
600 PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
^^^1 [tonkha, togkha] mlai-y (tanxwah) ; [dorkhasto] appJicniion
(dar-xwast) ; [khasta] iJenml, trisheil fot\ mre^ difficult to get (xwastah) ;
^Tt^^, ^ft^^ [khamok(h)a] wUhi>ai irasoii or <lefif)erafii}ii (xwah-ma-
xwah) ; [borkhasto] di-wiimd (bar-x^v&st) ; C^^t^ [khea/] desire
(x^ahiS).
333, Persian [9.% representing the native sound, as well as Arabic
[y]. This spirant seems to have been pronounced without much friction, so
that the Indian equivalent became ^ [g], and not ^ [^R] which would have
paralleled ^ [kh] for [x].
Initial : ^fSrSf [sTO^ol] « ^if^^f ^if rerxe^ a fj/My (g-azal) ; [^ciJSi]
a warrior for IsJam > a name (g-azl) ; C^W [goja] (nifrf\ stffks (9.ussah) ;
^^ft [goibi] secret (g.aibi) ; [p^onb] p<^<>r (g-arib) ; C^t^t^ [2:olam]
servant, slave (g.ulara) ; ^tf^5l [galicfa] carpet (g^alieah) ; etc.
Medial : C5t^ [c^oga] a loose rohe (cogah) ; ^^^^ [togollob] eheatimj,
emhezzlemiit (tag-allub) ; ^TC^t^ [daroga] a police officer (darog-ah) ; ^^t^
[bogol] armpit, side (bag-al) ; ^t^t=^ [bagan] garden (ba^wan) ; ^tl^j
[bagicfa] {pleasure) garden (bag^-cah) ; m'^'^ [poegombor] prophet
(pai9.ambar).
Final : C5Tt^f [^erag] lamp (cirag.) ; ^t^ [ba:gl garden (bag.) ; Of^^,
also [demag > demak] jjride (dima^) ; cspf^^t [morog] cock (mur^) ;
etc.
There are a few eases of hardening of > [g] to [k] : 5|t^tl^
[nabalok] minor in age (nabalig. : ef. ^t^^ « bal&k^ » *^//); Ctt^l
[bScfka] bundle (Turk! bug-cah) ; [tokma] badge, crest (Turk!
tamg.ah) ; ^^t^ [Jurak] /j/a//, trick (surag.) ; OTt^ [demak] above ; Q[%
C\55f [de:g, 4e:g] caldron, big 2^ot but C^ft [46fecji] small pot to cooi (deg.,
de^-el), also (deg) ; etc.
[Ill] The Palato-alveolar AfPricates, [tj, dg].
334. Persian ^ [tj], transliterated « c», remains practically unaltered
to Bengali 5 In East Bengali, this is regularly altered to [ts].
Examples : Initial : 5t^^ [cjakor] servant (eakar) ; C5t^ [cjoGto] qnieJc,
■fine^ smooth (cust) ; C^^t^^ [cjoubaccja] cistern (caubaceah) ; ^ft [cjorbij/Jzi',
PERSIAN 'C, J' IN BENGALI 601
greme (carbi) ; Ft^^ [cfabuk] tvhip (cSbuk) ; C5^t^1 [cfefiara] figif^Py portrait
(cihrah) ; etc., etc.
Medial: ^^Tt^^t^ [acfkan] tunic (aekan); ^t^f^ [khajfgancfi]
trmsnrer, acconntatit (xazau-ci) ; #tft [kSLcJi] scissors (qainci) ; etc.
Final : [bu:cf] viarc/i {of froo2Js) (kue) ; [khorocj] expense (xarc) ;
C*te [psecj] twhi (pec); fM^i;'^;^ [Jirpec] gem on tui-han (sarpec); etc.
In f^f^^l [cjhilim] earthen eup for tobacco and fire in the hookah
(cilam) we have aspiration of [tj] in Bengali.
335. Persian [dg], representing the native Iranian affricate and the
Arabic palatal stop, is retained as ^ [jg] in Bengali. This [jg] regularly
becomes [dz, z] in East Bengal.
Initial : SRi [fsoma] collection (jam^) : [jgain] tife (jan) ; ^fll
[fZ(Xxsx(xy coat, shirt (jamah); i^t^^^ [J5^egir]/(/ Ci^^^SjIr) ; [JS^^bab]
repli/ (jawab) ; C^H [JSella] bright nr^^s (jilla) ; [jgoluj] splendoirr^
bright nesi^ (jalnS) ; C^W*? [i5o<inj //on ng, strong (jawan) ; [jgci:!] /b/^'t^/'y
(ja*?!); csft?^1 [Igobba] a loose rolje (jubbah) ; [jgifiudi] Jew (Persian
jahudi < Ar. yahud : ef. also Bengali [ifiudi]) ; c^^ [j'gerb] packet
(jeb, jaib) ; etc.
Medial : ^t^ff [fiajgam] tjarber (hajjam) ; ^st^^ D^iJJS^b] wonder
(ta*?ajjub); [dojJSnlj ricions (dajjal Satan); ^^tH [anj^am] arrange,
ment (anjam) ; [khonfgor] dagger (xanjar) ; f^fi?^ [JS^^fSir] ^'^^"'/^
(zinjir) ; ^^^^ [ofgufiat] e^rcnsen (wajuliat) ; til^?t^ [ej'gmal] joint
possession (ijmal) ; etc.
Final : ^tf^^ [kharijg] separated (xarij) ; \stW [tatjg] crown (taj) ;
Q'S(^•^[mtf%Q'^ tenqjeraineni^ pride (mizaj) ; [fc^^rujg] ha-'idony twrret
(burj); etc.
In ^^^f^ [J^t(o)roncJi], beside ^TS^f^ [ j^K^)i'0DJ5i] etdtmi rug
(Satranji), we have optional hardening of « 3 * to « e ».
C^^t^t^f^ [j5Robba;f5Rnbbi] loose robes^ robes and trappings pc-^ibly
shows aspiration of C^t^l [jgobba] jubbah » /oose robe,
[IV] The Persian Dental Stops [t, d], and Dental Fricative [8].
33S. Persian « t » repioscats, in addition to the native oound, Arabtu
76
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
[t, t] (as well as Arabic [th] ia a HQal position : see p. 56<i). In Bengali
it remains as the interdental ^ [t] .
Initial : [tokta] platik (taxtah) ; [tDbok] Mratntti (tabaq) ;
[tobla] drf'tfi (tablah) ; vS^^I [torJ5oma] frandafiou (tarjamah) ;
C^t^ [tota] parrot (toti) ; ^M^, [<^^Kl)ctq] (talaq) ;
vj^^ [tur(u)k] Tnrk, Mohamtdedau (turk); [ti:r] arrotr {tlx) ^f^^
[tarikh] date (thne) (tarix) ; etc.
Medial: ^t^^ [ator] otlo (^itr) ; ^tM^t^ [trto/bajgi] Jire-worh
(ata§-bazi) ; 'STt^^t^ [albat] cerlaiu/// (albattah) ; tfl^t^l [ettala] summoita
(itala*^) ; »f^t5? [Joetaa] devil (Saitan) ; C¥t^ [kopta] namtJjalls i,f gravji
(koftah) ; C5tm^, C^tCf ^t^ [g(e)reptar] nrreHt (giriftar) ; [kelab]
book (kitab), etc.
Final: [mout] ihaili (maut); [doubt] riches (daulat) ; ^^rf^ff^
[okalot] plmdituj (wakalat) ; [takot] strength (taqat) ; ?f^^
[dostokhot] -vgnature (dast-xatt) ; ^Rt^^F [Jonakto] identification (Sinaxt) ;
[borat] <vj/>^//zm^/^j (bara^^ f^^T^ [bilat] Evrope (wilayat);
^t^^ [marphot] iatermediaeij (ma'^rfat) ; {m\x^h.^i]free of cost (mufat);
[fiajgot] jail, nfHiody (tajat) ; »tvQ [Jorto] coddition (§art) ; etc.
Final « t » is optionally softened to [d] in a few words, e,g,^
[bttbod] //m/.v, /y/vy//y/^Av (babat) ; ^C?f?f [boed] verse (bait); [moj^bud]
^troinj, eadnriiuf (mazbut) ; [g'^bd] favJt^ mistake (gaU) ; [jg^bdo]
punished (zabt < dabt) ; [Jabud] witnesses (*sabut < ^ubut) ; etc.
337. Persian « d » occurs as [d] in Bengali.
Initial: mA [dopha] ouf^ time (daf^ah); If^^t^ [dorkar] necessity
(darkar) ; ^f%1 [doria] rirer (darya) ; ?ft^ [da:g] mark, stain (dag.) ; Oft^
[dokan] shop (dokan, dukan); c^f^H C?Rt^ [demag, -ak] brain > pride
(dimag.); [di:n] religion (din); [dorajs] long (daraz) ; Jft^
[daru] v'ine (daru) ; ^^S{ [durbin] telescope (dur-bin) ; etc.
Medial : [khoda] God (xuda) ; ^5f^ [adob] polished manners
(adab) ; [urdu] Uip Urdu speech (urdu) ; ^tWt [tamadi] i^w^
limitaiioic (tamadi) ; ^q^?f^ [kalondorj mendicant (qalandar) ; t^Htft [i/adi]
//•///^^.^.^ (i§hadl) ; ^Ff5T [bodol] ^.r^>?^//^^ (badal) ; Ih^tdxiBt^'] tolerate
(bar-da§t); ^ [bonduk] rife (banduq); WTl [moeda] (maiSah) ; etc.
PERSIAN ' D, DH (Z) ' IN BENGALI
603
Final : ^if //^^ 'Id festivals (^id) ; ^ [fiocldo] HhuI (liadd) ;
CW, f^^ [jSe;d, J^i:d] inrportuaacy (zidd < 4idd) ; ^t^Ff [barud] rjini-jmcder
(barud); C^^W [buniad > boned] fonndatlon, pf i nUi (bunyad) ;
^pf^ratW [phoriad] pdiiion, appeal (faryad) ; ^Ff [ba:d] svhtraciiod (ba^d) ;
^ [phordo] (fard) ; [koed] impnsonmeiit (qaid) ; ^^Jf [ro/id]
m*^'/)?^ (rasid) ; iTTf [roj^od] mtioih% food-sfuff (rasd) ; ST5f5f [nogod] cash,
ready money (naqd) ; «Tt^^^ [lajsbordo] lapis lazvV (lajaward) ; ^ [/u:d]
iateresi on money (sud) ; [roddi] worthless {as (f good^ (raddi) ; etc.
In fif^^ [Jindfiuk], beside f^p^^ [Jinduk] ehes<f^ hnx (sinduq), we have
aspiration of « d
Pinal « d » is unvoiced in a few eases : [tait] anl, cunchtr (ta^id) ;
[phosto] hleediiKj hy rnttuHj a /vv/^ (fasd); + 5??f ^ [madot] help (madad);
[mojit] beside [mojid] mosipie (masjid) ; etc,
« d » is eerebralised in fef^ [difii] a frarf (dih), C^%, CvS^ft [de:g,
dekcfi] metal an^kitifj pots (deg-, deg.-el, ^^g)-
« d » is dropped in some words ; ^"ST^ [ostagor] n)n.^t<'r rraff.^uuht >
a tailor (ustad-gar) ; [nogicjj nearness (nazdik) ; C^^(^t^ beside
C^5?f^^ [khonkar < khDnd(o)kar] teacher > a ttth- (xwand-kar) ; C^^irf^
[reboncjini] China rhvhart) (ravand-eini). It is assimilated in
[bojjgat] tirion-s (bad-zat < -^at).
An intrusive [d] is found in [tuudur] om/ hi Ijnh- JoiircK (tauur,
tannur).
338. Early Persian « S » either became « z », or was restored to
« d » in later Classical Persian and Modern Persian (see p. oivl). It has
had a two-fold treatment in the Indian languages, either as a [J5] (for the
« z » value), or as a dental stop (for the « d, 9 » value).
Examples : « kagaS » papier gave an Old Nepal form « kayagada »,
Hindi, Marathi « kagad », Assamese « kak^t », Bengali ^t^^t [kagoti]
a paper-making caste, beside Bengali [kagDjg] ; « xiSmat » serrice
is found as C^^SRn© [khejgmot] in Late Middle Bengali, besides C%5f^^, f^'^t^f^
[khidmot, khedmot] : ef. Anglo-Indian « kitmutgar » xercant, table serrant
= « xiSmat*gar » ; « guSar, guSastan » fo pass fin/p gives Bengali ^^^t^l
[guJ5rauo], beside Marathi « gudarn? » ; « ziyuSatl » /'.av ^s through a
604
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER VI
stage « ^ziyaz^t! » is the source of [jS^sti], also found in other
Indian languages, Aryan and Dravidian ; ^ qawa*^id > qawa*^i5 » /v//<^s%
jjroce^fses is the source of ^vS^t^ [^^^o^^JS] w/V/V///*// {/rill. In Late Middle
Bengali, we have names of places like ^IfTt^t^ [Joedabajg], f^ffs^spt^
[/ilimaba^], ^^5^t^ [photeabajs] etc., beside forms in -Vf [-d],for
« sayyad-aba?, salim-abaS, fath-abaS ». The Arabic word « taqadah »
seems to have become « taqa^ah » in Persian, whence we have NSt^tt^fl
[tagada] demcuffl for impuent in Bengali : « d > z > would have given
*^5t^tt^ [*t<igci^ci] ; similarly the name « FadI » occurs as [phoddol] .
in MB., now = [pho^ol], and « Khidr » as f^f^^ [khidir].
[V] The Persian Labial Stops [p, b], and Denti-labial Spirant [f ] .
339. Persian « p » remains in Bengali.
Initial : rpi:r] n mint (pir) ; f*t^^t^ [pilkhana] ehpluuif dahle><
(pil-xanah) \ C^^% [polao] >vVr ami meal wit/i. Imfler (palaw) ;
[pofom] wool (pa§m) ; MB. ^tf^*tt(^) [patiJa(fio)"j e,nperor (pati-§ah) (the
NB. ^*t1 [badja] is from the Hindostani modification of the Persian
word) ; ^^^S?t»ll [poroana], beside ^^^Tl [porona] mandate, o^v/^r (parwanah) ;
*f^^ [pouir] rheexe (panir) ; ^^^^^ [paegombor] prophet (paig-ambar) ;
[pJc^JS] (piyaz) ; etc.
Medial: J«5t^ [ocip^J] reiffrtnttr/ (wapas) ; C^t^^l^ f/oporoddo]
coJhuttal, hruidifip over (supurd) ; ^t^^f^ [nojpati] ^id'a^- (naSpatI) ; f*f^C*^5
[jirpecj] ge}ti on tiirbaa (sar-pec) ; etc.
Final : C5t^ [to:p] caanoti (top).
340. Persian b » remains.
Initial: ^t^l [banda] sA/r^^ (bandah) ; [bDsta] /^/c/t^/ (bastah) ;
[bofior] xea > mdth (bahr) ; [bo-ki] retna'uuler (baqi) ; ^tf^
[bagicja] garden (bag-cah) ; ^t^t^^ [bafiadur] Lrare (bahadur) ;
[berador] brother, caste-fellou) (baradar) ; Wt^^ [borabor] in front, straight up
to (bar-a-bar) ; C^tft^ [beloari] ghm, crj/stal (billauri); etc.
Medial: [bulbal] nightingale \ C^^^ [khobani] apncot (xobani) ;
[borbttd] wanted y ruined (barbad) ; C^t^ [JS^^bba] a loose robe
PERSIAN ^ B, P * IN BENGALI
605
(jubbah) ; ^^^^ [jS^ban] i<jjeet'/i, ironi (zaban) ; ^t^^ [kabab] road neat
(kabab) ; [abru] (ab-ru) ; ^^^^ [akbor] Ahbar\ '^'^ [kobor]
grace (qabr) ; [jg-^bdo] pvahkment (zabt < 4abt) ; etc.
Final: ^t^^ [ciJS^b] dmutjo ; [ba:b] door > head of e.rpenditure
(bab) ^t^Tf^ [ajbab] fundtiire (asbab) ; 5{^t^ [nabab] Hahoh (aawab) ;
[jgobab] reply (jaw5b) ; [i^^>nab] yovr hotiour ! (janab) ;
[fiijab] accoifiils (liisab) ; C^^t^ [ketab] Look (kitab) ; etc.
Final and medial « b » in some eases becomes [p] : ^t^l [khamp]
Lad (xaiab) ; beside -^A^ [khopDr, khobDr] neics (xabr) ; ^ff^ [gtt:p]
beside ^TfC^^ [g<ieb] necref (gaib); C^M*f [golap] rose (gulab); »t^*1
[Jorap] wine (Savab) ; C^^t^ [maerap] ieuiporarij roofing of mats (miltfab) ;
beside [tobp, tolob] iragen^ fi/nntnuns (talab) ; cf . also [ropto]
liaLit^fam iliariti/ (rabt) .
Final « b » is found as [m] in a few words : ejj,^ MB. 5ttfilSf [galim]
ronqveror, *^iiewy (g^lib) 5 f^C^itf^sj [bimojjgim] Ly reason of (bi-maujib).
« b > is assimilated in ^T^^^ [nojipur] uftu/e of a place (Naslbpiir) ;
and it is probably dropped in the personal name [nojiram] ( =
na&ib-ram ?).
In [Jurua] sanp (Sorba), we have vocalisation of « b ».
341 • Persian «f». Initially, medially and finally, it became ^
[ph] in Bengali : but initially, [ph] often chanojes to a spirant [f] or [f] ;
medially, it generally remains [ph], but occasionally it is deaspirated, and
[f, f] modification of intervocal [ph] is also quite common.
Examples Initial : Wt^, ^^t^ [phorak, pha-] distance, space intet'^
vening (farq) ; ^T%^ [phokir] mendicant (faqir) ; ^Ft?^ [phanuj] paper
lantern] glass dome of lamp (f aniis) ; ^ffft^l [phalana] so-and'SO {ixxl^n)
f^^t^l [phiroj^a] light blue colon r (firozah) ; C^tlt^Tl [phoara] artificial
fountain (fawwarah) ; [pboujg] army (fauj) ; [pbojol] crops
(fasl) ; ^l%^tW [phoriad] petition (faryad) ; [pborman] mandate^
order (farman) ; f^f^fs? [phirig2:i] Portuguese, Etirasian (firangi) ; etc.
Medial : ^f^?f, ^f*ft, "^TtH^, [ap(b)ig, -im, -in] opium
(aff urn) ; "J^f^?^ [koiphiot] encenses (kaifiyat) ; ^tW^ [kapher] infidel
(kafir) ; ^tlC'it^, ^t^- [ap(h)JoJ] regrets (afsos) ; [kholip(h)a] the
606
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
Caliph (xalifah) ; [fcuphan] storm at sea (tufan) ; [turpun]
awl (turfan) ; [topha] fine, excellent (tuMah) ; ^?fl [kha(p)pa]
angry (xafa) ; C^^W [lephapha] envelope (lifafah) ; C^j^^l [monopha]
gain (munafa^) ; ^^¥t, [borp(h)i] cream ice, sweetmeat of sugar and
cream (barfi) ; 1%^, f^T'J^ ["p(h)u] sewing (rafu) ; [kulup] padlock
(qufl); ^ttfirt Lfupari/] recommendation (sifariS); MB. [topa/j
search, enquire (tafatitus) ; etc.
« f t » becomes [pt] : C^C^^^, C^^tW [g(e)reptar] arrest (giriftar) ;
[doptor] book (daftar) ; ^^t^ [roptani] export (raftani) ;
[bopta] woven stuffs a ki?id of silt stuff (baf tab) ; >5t^ [tctp^ti] ^ /^^^ ^^^^
or woollen stuff (taftah) ; ^T^^^^ [bajgeapto] confiscated (b3z-yaft) ;
^ff^^^ [doriapto] enqiiiri/ (daiyaft) ; \^ [fiopta] tveeh (haftah) ; etc.
Final « f » > [ph] is commonly found in NB. as [p], and at times
as [b]: e.g., n5W, ^5^^ [torop(h)] side (tarf) ; [oQkop(b)]
religions trust (waqf) ; C^'^ [khelap] contrart/ (xilaf) ; C^^, C^^,
[gelap, gelab, geleb] covering, sheath (g-ilaf) ; ^s^fq^ [toklip(h),
toklib] trouble, suffering (taklif); [borDp(h)] ice, snow {}Q%xi)\
[bekub < "^beukuph] foolish, idiot (be-wuqf); C^Jt^^ [mokub] settled,
fixed (mauquf) ; ^t^, 5|H [Jtt:p(h)] clean, pure (saf) ; C^»t, CTOT^,
[Jerep(h), sre:p(h)] only, merely (sirf) ; ^^'t [fiolop(h)] oath (half) ;
'^'^',%y^^\^'^x^^^)'\ letter of the alphabet (fcarf); ^srf^ [J^>n,K^b] border,
fringe (sanjaf, sajaf) • etc.
In the NB. word v5t^ as in vg^-^^t^ [tottofcabaj] enquiries with
presents of sweety fruits, etc. — ^l^, vS^Jf [topa/] search, we have change
of « f » to [b] (tafalihus) : see p. 213, foot-note.
In the word ^ft as in ^N©ft [/ob(fi)ori a:m] 'pear, gnara, lit.,
7nango that has travelled, we have change of « f » intervocal to [b(B)] in
Eastern Bengali (safari).
Persian « v »: see infra, under the Semi-vowel [w],
[VIJ The Nasals: Velar [g]. Alveolar [n], Labial [m].
342. The sound of [g] occurs in Persian only before « k, g ^ and
« q and it is written tj « n ». [g] as a rule is preserved in Bengali. '-^
PERSIAN NASALS : ^ N ' : NASALISATION 607
« ng »=[gg] of Persian is ordinarily reduced to [g], and before another
consonant, in a few words, this [g] is altered to [n]. Examples: ^<§^,
^5rt^?r [agur] grapes (angur) ; f^f?rf^ [pl^iriggi] Portuguese, Eurasian
(firangJ) ; Iot^ [^gi*eJ5] English (ingrez, angrez) ; 'SThS^JC^^, ^W^C^
etc. [aorogj^eb, ourogjgeb] beside ^t^^C^^ [aoron J5eb] Aurangzeb ; ^?rR1
[^^>g-n<inia, ^oggonama] He Jang-namah, a poem o» the Kerbela battle ;
etc.
343. Persian « n » ordinarily remains in Bengali, but there are cases
where it nasalises the contiguous vowel and is itself no longer existent as a
separate sound.
Initial : C^Tt^^ [nokor] serva7it (naukar) ; 3Wt^ [noma^] prayers
(namaz) ; [norom] soft (narm) ; [no/ib] hick (nasib) ; C^Tf^l
[nokta] a dot (nuqtah) ; s^tCxst^H [natoan] iceak, feeble (natawan) ; STf^
[najf^ir] overseer (n3zir) ; I^WH [nijan] banner (niSan) ; etc.
Medial: [kbonJ5or] dagger (xanjar) ; ^55^ [tundur] oven
(tannur); [panjsa] hand %vith five fingers, grip, mark with the hand
(panjah); JRf^ [Jonakto] identification (Sinaxt); C^^t^ [monopha]
gain (munafa*^) ; ^fs?^ [dunia] toorld (dunya) ; etc.
Final : [iman] faith (Tman) ; ^t^pT [kanun] laws, customs (qanun) ;
^\^\^ [kaman] bow > gim (kam3n) ; ^ [khu:n] blood > murder (xun) ;
Cf^^t^ [deoan] manager (dlwan) ; etc.
Persian « n » also becomes [1] in a few words (see pp. 545, 546 supra) :
^ [lo:k] thread, twine (nax) ; C^^PTR [lok/an] loss (nuqsan) ;
[ablujj ebon?/ (abnus).
344. Nasalisation of Vowels from « n In Arabic, the « tan win »,
or « n » affix of indefiniteness which was added to nouns, probably early
became a nasalisation (although the full « -n » is still preserved in Central
Arabian dialects) : i.e. « -un, -an -in » became « *-u, -a, -I »; but this is
not preserved in Persia or India, as the short final vowels of Arabic were
dropped. Nasalised vowels are unknown to Persian and Turkl. In India,
in the HindostanI area, long vowels of Persian (Perso- Arabic and Turk!)
when fqjlowed by « n » are optionally pronounced as nasalised, i,e,, either
as « -an, -In, -un or as -S, -I, -ft ». This « nun-i-g.unnah », or nasalising
608
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
as a rule is not found in Ben^li, but there are a number of words in
Bengali which are based on a Hiadostani « g.annah » pronunciation : e.^,,
f^^l, (M \ [mia, mea] a tide of respect > a common term in addressing
a Mohammedan (miyan) ; ^ [kha:] a title (xan) ; '^WRl < ^tttl^fl
[Jgafiapona < Jgafia-] refuge of the world (jahan-panahj ; [jgomi <
*j5omI] land (zamin) ; f^lft [mifii = *mifii < ^mifil] Jine (mahin) ;
^^Jrt^ll [khaojama < -Jama] butler (xan-saman); ^t^ctW [abrSa]
running water > a fine muslin (ab-i-rawSn) ; fHtt [Jiri < Jirl] Shlrln, the
beloved of Farhad (§Irin) ; #tft [kacfi] scissors (qainci) ; etc. The group
« -wan » of Persian became [wa, oa], written v§1 in Late MB. : e.g,, the
MusalmanI Bengali spellings C^W^vSl [nojerwa, -wa] = the Persian King
Nds'rwan-, ^'St^ [row-ana -wa] departed (rawanah).
A pre-consonatal « n » after a short vowel also nasalises the vowel :
e.g.y Ft^n [cfada] sjibscription (candah) ; f^'w, ct^ [fildu, Gedu] Hiridn
(hindu, hendu) ; C^^f^f, ^^#^f [golkod, gul-] candied roses (guUqand).
Spontaneous nasalisation is also found in a few words : ttfil^ [fia/ia]
hem, border, edging (liaSyah) ; [Ru: J] senses (ho§) ; ^*fiT^^ [fiusiar]
clever (hoSyar); [fiuka, fiuko] /^(?o>ia/^ (huqqah) ; C^<^, C^!t^,
[go:t, g6(t)ta] ^plunging {as of a paper kite in the sky) (g-aut,
^utah) ; [p«-qfj ^^^^^^^ wrench (pec) ; C^^Pl [bo^ka] baggage
(bu^cah) ; C#t^^1 [kStka] big stick, citdgel (qutqah) ; C%f^, [pSaJg,
pS:|5] onion (piyaz) ; [pfilejad] danger, difficulty (fasad) ; ^tf^
[pa^a] brick-kiln (pazawah); C^tt^^l [goara] the taziyahs in the
Muharram festival (gahwarah cradle), also C^tt^t [gomra] ; cf. also
[jonondo] beside [Jonod] letters-patent (sanad) ; 3(55)5^ [mocfhlondo]
embroidered rug (*machnand < masnad) j and [jonigcrb] border (sajaf,
sanjaf).
345. Persian « m » remains, [m] before [b] is written ^ « n » in
many words in Perso-Arabic.
Initial : SfWl [moiga] /?m (maza) ; [mogofg] brains (mag^z) ;
[moeda]/w<? flour (maidah) ; [minor] minaret (rainar) ; Wl
a title (miyan) ; [mofiol] quarter, wing of house (mahal) j
[malek] proprietor, king (malik) ; etc.
PERSIAN ' M ' AND ' R ' IN BENGALI
609
Medial : ^SftSf [imam] reli(/ious guide (imam) ; [gumbojg] ioioer
(gumbaz, i^unbaS) ; ^Rt^l [kaman] bow > gun (kaman) j ^St^rW [tama/a]
fun Joke (tania§ah) ; ^t^fft [tamadi] barred by limitation (tamadi) ; ^t^^Tt^
[pDemal] destroyed, crushed (pai-mal) ; ?Rt^ [rumalj handkerchief
(ru-mal) ; W^^^v^fl [mokoddoma] lawsuit (muqaddamab) ; etc.
Final : c^T^t^ ^tC^^ [jelam alekom] the Mohammedan salutation, 'Peace
be with you' (salam ^^alaikum) ; ^^t^^ [fiokim] jo/^y^Rva^i (taklm) ; l^t^
[fiaram] forbidden (taram) ; ^tC^ [kaem] established, fixed (qa^im);
[^ulum] oppression (zulm) ; C^it^tH [mokam] abode (muqam) ; etc.
When ifc occurs with [h], [m] is doubled : ^'Sl^f [afiommod] the
name Ahmed (alimad) ; '^^t^^ [afiammuk] fool (afemaq).
In ^Tn [kha:p] sheath (= xam ?), we have a possible case of change
of [m] to [p].
Nasalisation through [m] : C^Tftft [khSari], also C'^fWft [khSari]
lassitude after hard drinking (xumarl).
[VIl] The Liquids, [r, 1],
346. Persian [r] remains.
Initial : ^^t^ [robab] a stringed instniment (rabab) ; [ropha]
settlement (raf*^) ; ^^^^ [romjganj the Ramadan festival (ramazan <
ramadan) ; [ra:/] reins (raa : ? MIA. *rassi < OIA- rasmi) ; f^^, flf^
[rip(h)u] sewing, daraimj (rafu) ; [ruJ5a] placing a complaint (ruju*') ;
C^t^ [rorjg] day, daily wages (roz) ; C^P^ [rejom] silk (re§am) ; etc.
Medial : -«1 [iran] Persia (Iran) ; ti)^^T^ [ekrar] acknowledgment
(iqrar) ; C^^t^ [pherar] absconding (firar) ; [p(h)cirji] Persian
(parsi, farsl) ; 5^^1 [cfork(h)a] spinning wheel (carxah) j [norom]
soft (narm) ; *t^^, [/orom] shame (Sarm) ; [borgi] Maraiha raider
(bargir) ; etc.
Final : ^STf^rT^ [anar] pomegranate (anar) ; ^rtf%^ [khatir] respect
(xatir) ; ^^t^ [tokrar] discussion, wrangle (takrSr) ; ^®?t^, [toiar,
toerl rt^dy, prepared (taiyar) ; €t?r [ti:r] arrow (tir); ^ [pi^r] saint
(pir old person) ; etc., etc,
77
610
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
In a few words, Persian « r » occurs as [1] : e,g.^ f5?*ft?^ [nijaaol]
sal-ammoniac (nauSadur) ; '^^^ [molomj oinimai (martiaco) ; C^f^T^I [deal]
toall (diwar) ; =^t^1 [jgala] hnge earthen jar I o hold water ft c, {\^vv^h)]
5rt^ as in +5|t^«l-C5t^ [ma/ul cjor] noforious thief (raaShur) ; I^^T^^
[kojlot] beside [ko/rot] phi/sicnl exercise (kasrat) , etc.
Persian « r » also oceurf? as ^ [r] in some words : e,g.^ ^5t^^ [^ctgci?]
masonh lime-pit (tag-ar) ; C«T^1 [torn] pbnne, erre^f^ nosegay (turrah) ;
[kho/ra] rongh draft if a dormnent (xasrah) ; C^T^C5, C^T^^5 < '^T^^
[morcje^ morcje < "^moricja] rffd (raorcah, murcah) ; ^^t^ beside ^^t^
[korar, korar] agreement (qarar) ; C^Rt^ beside C^M^ [khoari, khSari]
morning effects of hard drinking (xumari) ; etc.
There is dropping of the « r » in a number of words, in a preeonsonantal
and final position (see p. o-tl) : e.g., ^^frt^ beside J^^t^ [Joddai, Jordar]
chief, head (sar-dar) ; [mod da] man, atrong man (mard) ; ^^f^,
^^Wttt [kaddani, kardoni] praaficabiliti/^ power, skill (kardani); f^^t,
f*t^^ [jinni, ^rni] siveets, milk etc, offered to a saint (§irni) ; OT^^ [jeresta]
(sar-ri§tah) ; Cft^^^ [mofiorom] the Mnharranf festfval (muharrara) ;
[mufiuri] clerk (muharrir) ; Clt^^^ [mokror] permanent (muqarrar) ;
etc.
An intrusive [r] also is found : C5(|^^ beside [mokordoma,
mokoddoma] lawsuit (muqaddamah) ; s^^^sf beside C^^^s^ [mor/um,
moujum] season (naausim) : see p. 54^2.
347- Persian « 1 » remains in Bengali.
Initial : [lo/kor] troops (laSkar) ; ^Tt^t^ [lagam] bridle (lagam) ;
^t^:^ [laek] worthf/, fit (ia^iq) ; ^t^ [la:] ruby, red (la^l); ^\7\ [la:/]
corpse (la§) ; ^^t^ [bbejgan] hardpressed, at the last ga,^p (HinddstanI
lab-pai jan life at the lip, Pers. lab-hjan) ; [loRoma] a twinkle, a
moment (lamliah) ; etc.
Medial : [alia] Good (allah) ; ^p^!, [illofc] dirt, impurity (*?illat) ;
^yjcrtsj^ [islam, eslam] the Mohammedan religion (islam) ; [dalal]
broker^ middle-man (dallal) s^tf^ [iicrlil] (complaint (nali§) ; Nst«Tt^,
[talaj; tolla^] search (talaS) ; f?5f?t^ [philfial] at the present 'day^ now
(fi-l-tal) ; [kolla] boasting, quarrelling (kalah) • [kolma] the
PERSIAN 'L' AND ' S, § ' IN BENGALI
611
Mokrnt/niethni creed (kalimah) ; [kullel in its Sfnn total , in all^ all told
(kull-, kiillihi) ; etc.
Pinal: ^srfifci [amol] rtde, f enure ("^amal) ; [kobul] admitted, agreed
(qabul) ; W^, [di:!, de:l] heart (dil) ; ^^It^ [fialal] laivful (fealal) ;
^t^ [fici:I] condition (}\dX) ; '^\^^ originaly pure ; [kheal]
ivJitm (xiyal); 5(5?^ [g^JS^l] '^o^^9i inelodi/ (^.azal) ; etc., etc.
[1] and [n] are interchangeable ia Bengali (see pp. 5-t5-546) :
beside ^M^, ^MC^^ [ncigat, nagad, naga(e)t] to the end of\
iuclusire/i/y appro.rimately (li-g-ajat > lag.ayat) ; sj^^ beside [no/kor,
lojkor] troop^i > a surnauie (laSkar) ; ^TSf^ beside «15f^ ['^^sCg)*^!'? I'^SCg)*'^]
anchor (langar) ; etc.
[VIII] The Sibilants: Palatal [f, 5], Dental [s, z],
348, Persian [s, J] fell together in Bengali, in which they normally
become [/], written *tj « s, s ». In numerous instances, [c^h, c[]
were arrived at by the Bengali [J] (see p. 551). In the nexus « st
however, the dental sibilant remained, and Persian « §t » [Jt] was changed
to [st] in Bengali (see p. 546). Persian [s] represents not only the native
Iranian sound but also Arabic [s, 6, s] .
Some Mohammedan writers seek to bring in the Persian dental [s]
sound, and following the East Bengal pronunciation, they write it^ « ch =
s » : e.g., NS^sit^ for '^^^\^ = ^'^usman *, iTC^f^ = C^tC^ Ttt?^ =
« subli-i-i&adiq » (see p. 580), etc. This is against the spirit of Bengali
phonetics, especially when naturalised words and names with [j] are
interfered with.
Initial: [Janod] deed (sanad) ; [J^>:n] i/ear (san) ; Jf^^ l/orai]
(sarai) ; ^C^^ [jabek] old (sabiq) ; [Jepai] soldier (sipahl) ; ^^^\
[/aJ5a] punishment (saza) ; [/urkij hrich-dust (surx red) ; Ttftf
[JaliJ] third party > artntrator (sails < ^ali^) ; JfVf^ [/odor] head-rp/arterSy
metropolis {'S3,dv) ; [Jobur] waiting (sabr p//tierice); [Janok] plate
(sahnak) ; [/oi] signaliire (sahlh) ; *[t(^) [ia(fia)] king (§ah) ; »f^sf, ^-^^
[jorom] shame (5arm) ] ^Tt^t^ [J^b^^J] ' (§aba§) ; 7\-^^% [Jorbot] sherbet
(§arbat) ; [JoR^r] city (5ahr) ; etc, etc.
612
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
Initially we have [cjh] for the Persian sibilant in a few words : ^f^
[cfhobi] portrait , picture (§ablh : cf. Sanskrit chavi beauty) ; ^Tf^ beside Tffii
[^hani, jam] second {hecLring, revision) (sani < ^ani) ; ^FTK [cfhoelab]
inundation (sail-ab) ; f*f^^, f^^^ [/irka, cjlairka] vinpgar (sirkah) ; etc.
In [sre:p(h)], beside Lferep(h)] only (sirf), we have change to a
dental sibilant before [r].
Medial : ^t'RtTl [khanjcima] bviler (xan-i-samSn) ; ^3^f^t*T [mujDimar*]
Mohammedan (musalman) ; [tomojjuk] loud (tamassuk) ; sf^f^^j^fl
[madrajd] Arabic ami Persian school (madrasah) ; '5f|yf5[t^ [ajman] sJcf/
(asman) ; (^'^^ [mouruji] heredilary {tenure) (maurusi < mawru^-) ;
"9!^ [a/ol] true, pure (asl); ^»rtt [kojai] bufeher (qasa^l) ; f^3T<^ [phurjot]
leisure (fursat) ; ^^f^f [ro/od] rations (rasad) ; ^t'Tt [kha/i] castrated goaf
(xa^l) ; t*tt?ft [ijadi] tvitness (iShadi) ; 3(»ftq [mojal] torch (maSa^l) ;
9^ [poj^na] ivool (paSm) ; ^tW^ [fiameja] always (hame§ah) ;
[peja] business, trade (pe5ah) ; ^*t?Ppt [^frop(h)i] a gold coin (aSrafi) ] etc.
[cJh] for [J] in the interior of a word is also found : e.g,, ^T^5t^
[akcjhar, Jaksar] frequeritly (aksar < ak^ar) ; GRt^^TR, C^T^Tt*?,
^5^^ [mocfholman^ mocforman, mucjurman] a Mohammedan (musalman),
beside forms with the palatal and dental sibilants ; f5(f^ [roiehil] procession
(mi-1 <mi^l) ; ^ [ocfhi] testator (wasi); ^f^^ [ocfila] excme (wasllah) ;
C^F^ [keccjha] story, scandal (qissah); ^f^^l [tocftirup, tosruf] embezzle-
ment (tasarruf) ; [mocpilondo] embroidered velvet rug, ' musnud '
(masnad).
Persian « st » remains [st] in Bengali : >8=^ [ostad] master (ustad) ;
instalment {G^\sk\)\ Pf^^^ [dastokhot] signature (dast-xatt); ^ff^
[oasta] intermediacy, connexion (wastah) ; [istopha] resigyiation
(ista^fa); Cft^ [dost(o)]//Z(??i^^ (dost); ^ [bostaj packet (has tab) ; c^CH^
[fiestonesto] final solution (hast-nlst) ; etc.
Persian « 8t » become [st] in Bengali: c^t^ [gosto] meat (go§t); 1^#t
[kisti] boat (kiSti); ^ift^ [bordosto] endurance (bar-da§t); ^ [kusti]
wrestling (ku§tl) ; etc.
Final sibilant : '«rr^[ablu/j ebony (abnus) ; [la:j] body (1§§) j ^
[fiodi/] tradition, cue (tadis <hssMi) ; «ft^ [oarij^ heir (waris < waritf) ;
PERSIAN 'S, S' AND ^Z' IN BENGALI 613
^^ [kha:j] private (xas); [khala^] free (xalas); [ki/mij^
raisins (ki§mi§) ; [khorgoj] kare (xar-g6§) ; <r^^ [bok(h) jij] largesse,
tip (bax§i§) ; ^t^C^t^ [balapoJJ qui/fed shawl (balapoS) ; etc.
[^h, cj] for final sibilant : ^^^^ [nakocj] cancelling (naqis) ; ^JJ^
[to^(h)nocf(h)] ^r(?/{-^w aud scatfprcfl (talis-nats) ; MB. ^^5, -C^ [torkocf,
-kocf] for arrow^^ (tarkaS), beside the form with the sibilant. In
Musalmani Bengali, Persian [s] is written ^, and generally pronounced
[s], following the East Bengali habit ; and Persian [J] is written »f, ^,
The difference in the original sounds in Persian loan-words is thus sought
to be maintained, through the influence of the Maulavis, but common
West Bengali and Standard Bengali ignore it. The % orthography
is partly responsible for introducing the [cjh] rather than [J] pronun-
ciation in a few words in the Standard Colloquial, in which the [s]
value of 5 is unknown.
349. Persian [z] representing both the native sound, and Iranian
as well as Arabic [z,^, % ( = 5 (==fi)] becomes ^ [J5]^ in Bengali;
In East Bengali, this [jg], as well as [J5] from Persian ^ [dg], becomes
[dz, z].
Initial : [jgokhom] wonml (zaxm) ; [JS^ban] speech, word
(zaban) ; [JSorai] land (zamin) ; ^ft [jgori] gold lace (zarl) ;
[j5e:r] prohmgufion, canfinvation (zer) ; [jS^lpi] side-lock (zulf) ; C^Wl
[jgera] a litilp (zara<8ara^) ; f^^1 [JSimma] cndodij {zimmah<bimmah) ;
f^^l [JSila] district (zila^<4ila^) ; [fS^lum] oppression (zuim) ;
[j'goruri] fO-ge^it (zariirl < darur) ; C^U [}^o:r] force (zor) ; etc.
Medial : [ijjg^^t] honour (^izzat) ; [of^ou] weight (wazn) ;
[jciJSada] prince (§ah-zadah) ; [ujgir] minister (wazTr) ; ^t^t^^l
[khaJ5(a)na] taxes (xazanah) ; C^^t^ [mejsajg] spirit, temper (mizaj) ;
[ojgor] excvse (*?uzr<^ubr) ; [kaJSi] >^7^^' (qazl<qaai); OT^^
[merjgab] ^^^f^i^/^r/m (mizrab< miflrab) ; [no^or] (nazr) ;
\hi%\r\ present (hazir<!ia5ir) ; etc.
Final : ^^^ft^ [andajg] approximation (andaz throicpr) ; [ba:^]
falmi (baz) [jfeafialg] ship (jahaz) ; C^t^ [ro:J5] day > daily
wages (rozj ; L«°iogo^] t^rains (mag^z) ; ^ [kor^o] debt (qarz<qard:);
614
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
^5f^ [kcLgDJ5] paper (kagaz < kagaS) ; [Joedabajs] a foira
(saiyad-aba3, -baz) ; etc.
There is hardening of final ^ [jg] < [z] to ^ [cj] in a few words :
beside [kobocf, < kobojg] howl, receipt (qabz < qabct) ; ^f^f^ beside
^^t^ [kcrgoej, -ojg] ^j7/;d'/- (kugaz, ~aS) ; and cf. ^5 [ko:cfj below.
350. Persian J = «« S » [g]. It is a comparatively rare sound in
Persian itself. The normal Indian equivalent would be [z] > [jg, -dg].
In the word ^5 [l^^-cf] for [k^^-Jg] ^ -"^uiaJf irrerjiihtr pirct^ aflnrliPil to a
regular plot we probably have a Persian word in « S » : « ka^ » (also « kaj »)
crooked, cvrvedy irregular,
[IX] The Semi-vowels * y » and « w ».
351. Persian « y » was probably both aspirant [j] and a semi-vowel
[i, j]. Both the values are absent in Bengali.
Initially, Persian « y- » becomes ^ [i] (see p. 533) : e.g., |^t? [iad]
remembrance (yad) ; \\k^x'\ friend , hoon-cuinpamon (yar); t^^Tf^ [iunani]
Greeh > Arabic {•sj/He?fi of wpdicine) (yunan) ; t^ft [ifiudi] Jeir (yahudi) ;
[i(«)J«p(h)] (yusuf) ; trff^ [iakub] a name (ya^^qub) ;
etc. In [akhni] .sY>;/jo, hndh (yaxni) we have dropping of « y- »; and
« ya- » is assimilated to [e] in ^fif?f [ejgid] a no hie (yazid).
Interior « -ya- » becomes ?[ [e] in Bengali, which generally forms
a diphthong with a preceding vowel or is assimilated or dropped : e,g,y
'srt^^l [aenda] coming (ayandahj a^indah) ; C^t^^ [kephaeot, kephaet]
heaefit (kifayat) ; [Joiod, Jo(i)ed] a Sol //(id (saiyad) ; C5tt^5( [doeom,
doem] i^econd (doyam) ; CW [Jeom] third (siyam) : [bilat] Europe
(wilayat) ; ^Tf^l [paea] leg {of fniiitim) (payah) ; H^lc^J'^ [nefiaet, nefiat]
excessivehj (nihayat); [baea] seller (*baya, *baye^<bayi^) ; etc.
In the group t^l « -iya- the « y » > [e] is a mere glide, which is
dropped in quick speech [iea > ia, ea, sa, jb, see] (see pp. 412, 417) : f^^^
OTt?^ ^Tt^ [miad, mead, mjerd] ternij iertu (f imprimn,he>it (miyad) ; C^^W
^JtWt [jgeada, jVC©)^*!] ''^"^^^ (ziyadah); ^tf^j^^ [fgcrliat]* forger
(ja^aliySt) : ^ot^t^f. [toiar, toer] ready (taiyar) ; C^RH, 'W^^l [peak,
PERSIAN 'Y^ AND 'W^ IN BENGALI 615
p{e(e)lQ] mip fpiySlah) ; C^t^ [teat] cav^iou (ittiyat), etc.; cf. also t£if^^^,
t£l"^t^ [ektiar, ektear, ektyer, ektar] aut/iorify (ixtiyar).
« -ya-, yah » after a consonant becomes [ia, ea] : [bok(h)ea]
f'ack-^dtcJi (baxyah) ; '^\V^^\ [takia] bolster (takyah) ; ^H^l [dunia] icorld
(duu\a); 5ff^^1 [doria] rirer (darya) ; ^f^l^? [buuiad], also C^^?«f [boned]
fonudatiotf (bunyad) ; ?-f%^tW [phoriad] petition (farvad) ; ttf^ll [fiajia]
hoTtler of 'shturl (haSyah) ; etc.
Final « -y » at the end of a syllable remains as [e], and occasionally
as [i] : €,g.,-^-^ [jS^ie], also iJSai] place (jay); \yiCiQ\ jinlgment
(ra}'); n?'ft«T, ^t^t^ [poemal, paemal] ih^lroijeil^ crmhaJ (pay-mal) ; etc,
*y. » became Ijg] in t^tt [jgifindi] beside [ifiudi] e/^vr
(« yahudi », also « jahudi » in Persian), and in C^T^^ft? [rojgdad] datement
(ro-y-dad = ru-i-dad ) .
352. Persian j « w » was probably both a semi-vowel [w, u] and a
spirant [v, i^]. Both these articulations are represented in Bengali, the
former by vowels, and the latter by ^ [b] (and in recent times by ^ =
[bfi, V, 13]).
Initial « w- » :
Persian « wa-, wu- » > Bengali [o, o] : ^S^t^^ [okabt] cuh:ocacy
(wakalat) ; [oktD, okto] time (^waqt) ; [ocjhi, oejhi,
Dsi] heir (wasi) \ ^f^^1 [acfhila, ocfhila] excme (wasilah) ;
«^?t^ [ojguRat] reasons (wajuhat) ; [ofS^^n] weight (wazn) ;
[oli, oli] ^/ niuue (wall) ; ^^Vf [ojged] a Jiame (wazed) :
[oku, oku] //<zcY occurrence (waqii^ < wuqii'') ;
[«^JS^^ <^J5^] Muiionn (wazu < wudu) ; etc.
Persian « w^-, wu- » > Bengali [u] : [ukil] pleader (wakil) ;
["JSir] i^^i'^i^i<-^^ (wazir) ; [uli] beside '^flt [oli,
oli] a name (wall) ; ["J"l] realisaiion, recovery {of
money) (wusul) ;
Persian « wa- » > Bengali [oa] : this is recent : «ft^^ [oakoph]
teligious property (waqf ) ; «?IT^t^ [oafiabi] a sect (wahhabi) ;
* ^^lYt [oada] a stated period (waMah). Persian « wa- » is also
found as [ba] in ^^^1 [bagoera] et cetera, (wagairah) etc.
616 PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
Persian « wi- » = [ui-, vi] became [hi] : f^^^ [bilat] Europe
(wilayat) ; fwt^ [bidae] fareioell (wida*?) ;
Persian « wa- » > Bengali [oa] : ^^tf^^, [oakiph, -b] kaoiring
(waqif) ; ^^T^^ Locip^J] returning (wapas) ; [ocijil]
coUeetions avil balances (wasil) ; [^ctJSib] nf^ctfmirf/, proper
(wajib) ; '>9^t^ [oasta] iaterynedianj , reason, sake (wastah), etc.
In Musalmani Bengali, following the MB. tradition, [oq] is written
«1 as well as
Interior « -w- » : it is found as the [6] glide, or as [u] ; or following
the spirant pronunciation it is changed to [b], mainly before [i, e] :
e.g., ^t«^t^ [o-ociJS] '"^omid (awaz) ; ^t^^t^ [aboab] IteiuU of expeadiiure
(abwab); ^tS^t^ [kaociJS] meaonivre, f/nY/ (qawa^id) ; (?f^^5{, C?f^
[de(o)an] minider (diwan) ; CT^m^, [Jeoae, ^0(0)08] vuthoui, in
aAdition (si way); ift^ftt [daoai] medicine (dawa^) ; ii[m [eo^ < eoojs]
exchange (*?iwaz < **iwad) ; [meoaj fruits, dried fruits (mewah) ;
?t^^ [fiaoa] air (hawa) ; ^^l^^ltt, also [Raloai, fialui] siceet-meat
maker (talwai) ; i?tg^ [fialua] a sweet-meat (talwa) ; ^mH\ > C^t^t^
[tooakka, toakka] care, recking (tawaqiiu^*) ; ^^^q [/ooal] question (sawal,
suwal) ; etc. ^^t^ [jS^bab], pronounced also [jgouab] rejili/ (jawab) ;
[tojgbijg] enqniri/ (tajwiz) ; Sf^C^i i dorbeX] a Dervish (darwe§);
[nobab] a Nabob (nawwab) ; s^f^n [nobij] writer (navis) ; ^\^^ < ^t^ff
[babur^i < baborcfi] cook (bavarcl) ; tK^^ [fiabeli], also ?t^^,
[Bauli, Bttbli] mansion (haveli) ; C^\^ft [moulobi] a Mohammedan scholar
(maulavi); [multobi] adjourned, postponed (multavl) ; ^^fff^^fl
[mujcrbida] draft (musawadah) ; f^»t^^ [rijbot] bribe (riSvat) ; t^ff [ijbi],
beside [ijui] Christian (^savl); 'artf^^^ falibordi] a nnme (^^allvardl) ;
C*M^^ beside C^Wt^t^ [pejba^], pejoajg] a dancing girl's gown (peSvaz,
-baz) ; ^t^^ L^^g^^i] '^onej/ advanced to farmers (taqavi) ; ^5^,
[tofiobil, tobil] treasury (tahvil) ; ?fft^OT«^^, -C^^t^ [gO"bne(o)Q^,
-nebajg] kind to the poor (9.arib-navaz) ; etc.
« w » occurs as ^ [bfi, v] in some words, in the recent pronunciation
and spelling, frequently through the English transliteration with « v » :
e,g,, « m&ul4bhl » [moulovi, -i5i] Maulavi j ^^CB^ « habheU >
PERSIAN 'W: CONSONANTAL METATHESIS 617
[fiaueli] a mansion ; « g&jnlibhi » [gojgnotii, -vi] a mmanie — of
Gliazna (gAznavi) ; ^t^tit « takabhl » [takavi, -ui] teccavi grant CSf^^ftC^
« jendabhesta a recent word = ZemUAvesfa (zand-avastah) ; etc.
Interior « -w- » is assimilated or dropped (ef. p. 349) : e.g,y ^t^5f
[bagau], Late MB. ^5tt?t^ [bagoan] (bag^wau) j T^t^t^, beside
^^W^ [natan, natoan] tveak (natawan)- [tophat] distance
(^tafawat, tafawut) ; ^OTft^, earlier ^^fvS^ [umedar < *umedo6ar
< umed8ar] applicant, client (ummedwar) ; C^Rt^ beside CT^ff^ [deal,
de8al] 2vaU (dlwal), also c^f^, ^ [de:], ds:l, dteil] ; beside ^>S^,
C^W^ [ro:k < rooak, roak] ledge, 2^i^tform of masonry (rawaq), see p. 403 ;
^^t^l, ^^^1 beside '^tW'S^lts^l [porana, porona, poroana] n-rit from Icing or
avthoriiij (parwanah) ; [^ofiorot <*^o8fiorot] jeicellery (jawahirat) ;
3(Cf^ [mokkel] client {in a law-suit) (muwaqqil) ; [bekub <*beukuph]
fool, idiot (be-wuqf) ; etc.
« -w- » becomes nasalised [w > m] through the proximity of « n »
in a few words ; see S2ipra, p. 608 ; ef . also ?WfWl, ?t^t^f^ [fiama(n)
dista] mortar and pestle (hawan-dastah) ; and C^fW^, C^^l [goara,
gomra] the emptij bier.s carried in the 2Iuharrain procession (o-ahwarah
cradle) shows spontaneous nasalisation of < w » : so also in *tt^l [pdjga]
brick-kiln (*paja < *paja^a < pajawah).
Final « -w » remains as [o] : [talao] tank (talaw, talab) ; C^tW®
[polao] i?^7/a?^ (pulaw, pilav) ; tc?« [deo] a giant (in MusalmanI Bengali)
(dew).
[X] Consonant Changes of a Genei-al Character.
353. Vocalisation of « -y- » and « -w- », and hardening and
softening of stops and affricates, have been touched upon before.
Metathesis.
Examples are : ^^^1 [phoeta] prayers (*fahita < fatihah) ; ^'^^ <
^f^^ [polte<polita] ?«?/V/?: (fatilah) ; [phoij5ot] quarrelling, wrangling
(■^fahizat< fadihat) ; "^^X [tokma] hadge, crest (Turki tamga); ^f^^sf •s{■^'^^
[dofiorom mofiorom] intermi.vtnre, familiarity (dar-ham bar-ham);
78
618
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VI
[lofioma] shod S2)ace of f'nue, insfaut (lamliah) ; C^^\ [bdcjka] linidle
(Turki bug-cah); [bajgruk] charlatan^ (buzur^^); [nogi^
neiglihourhood (^nagdiz <nazdik) ; [mucjloka] hand (mukalcah) ; m
[mokjo] coiiying (masq) ; ^^f^ vulgar for [bojkij < bok(h)ji|]
^reseat (baxSiS) ; etc., etc.
Elision (by Assimilation generally).
Elision of « y, w » has been noted before.
[moigur] dailjf lahonref (*madzur < muzdur) ; t5(%,
[mojid, -it] mosque (masjid) ; C^^^^t^, ^Tt^ [khonkar, khogkar] a
Mohammedaft sumame (xwand-kar) ; 'Sft^ [akhunJSi] teaclier (axwandjl) ;
C^^f&t^ [reboncfini] China rhibarb (ravand-i-cini) ; f^^^^ [pili^JS]
lamj) Oil stand (fatil-soz) ; ^^"^ [no/ipur] a place-name (naslb-pur) ;
[nojiram] a personal name (nasSb-ram) ; etc.
Double consonants are occasionally simplified (always so when final) :
5^ [fio:k] true (haqq) ; C^, f%^f [fgetd, Jgird] importuaacy (zidd < fiidd) ;
Csrt^^ [mokror] confirmed (muqarrar) ; ^ft [muBuri] clerk (muliarrir) ;
^^Tt"^ [albat] certainly (albattat) ; [tomo/uk] bond (tamassuk) ;
C^l^ [/eresta] eonrt office (sar.ri§tah) ; (XTS^^^I [motphorka] miscellaneons
(mutafarriq) ; WM^ [dalal] broker (dallal) ; ^1 [khata] notebook (xatt-ha) ;
^f^^ [toc^rup] embezzlement (tasarruf) ; etc.
In MB. [^^a/u] spy (jasus) there is loss of final « s » ; and of
* r » in [borgi] Maratha raider (bargir), [mufiuri] clerk
(muharrir).
Loss of pre-eonsonantal « r » has been noted before (p. 610).
Insertion of Consonants.
Euphonic insertion of consonants is found in a few words : e.g., of [d]
in ^^55^ [tundur] oven (tannur, tanur) ; of [r] in sf^^ [mor/um] season
(mausim), 3?^^ [mokordoma] law-suit (muqaddamah) ; of [fij in
[nofiobot] Indian mtisical band (naubat) ; and probably of [p] in C^ft^^
for '^CSt^Wt^l [cforagopta< gotta] crouching like a thief (« gptah » jilmige :
influence of Skt. « gupta »),
INTRUSIVE ^ R ' : DOUBLING
In printing, we often find ^ for -rdd-, -rj j-, -rmm- » for
* -dd-, -jj-, -mm- » etc. : e.^., « hardda » for [fioddo] Inrut (hadd),
^t^^ « tarjj§,b^ » for [tajjob] sirau^e (ta^ajjub), ^^?f * sarjjad^ »
for ^t^^f [jaj^cid] (saj jad) ; ^f^t^ « harmmamgl » for
[fiammam] dal/i (Iiammam], C^l « terceha » for [keccfha, kessa]
stoij, scandal (qisi^ah). This is generally met with in MusalmanI Bengali
printing. It is due to the fact that Bengali type sets were first prepared
on the model of Sanskrit as written in Bengal, so that Prakritic groups of
double consonants generally do not occur in ordinary founts, and printers
were obliged to be content with what was available, — apart from the
tendency to regard the intrusive [r] as a learned characteristic (see p. 542).
Spontaneous doubling of consonants is not rare: ^spt^q [akkel]
irisdom, aeuisc (*^aql) ; ^t^'SlVf [aBommod] beside the recent ^t^? [amed]
a iiawe (ahmad) ; ^t^T^^ [ahammuk] fool (atimaq) ; [khappa] nngr//
(xaf3); [ettek] simimom (itala^); C^^^^ [joporoddo] handing over,
placing hefore (supurd) ; ^tMt^ [tallak] divorce (talaq) ; ctH [kella] fort
(qil^ah); [kimmot] price (qimat) ; ^(t)m*t [tallaj, tollaj] •search
(tala§) ;?tPt^ [fiallak]/rt%/'^// (halak) ; (?m^ [mefionnot] lalour (mihnat) ;
C^5[^ [bemokka] vntimdy (be-mauq^ah) ; sft^^ [mat^bbor] eUer, chief
(mu^tabar) ; f^C^rtl^ [bimojJSim] in accordance tcitk (bimaujib) ; etc.
Spontaneous nasalisation, presupposing the insertion of an « n », has
been discussed before, p. 608.
CHAPTER VII
PHONOLOGY OF THE FOREIGN ELEMENT : PORTUGUESE
354. An account of Portuguese activities in Bengal has been
summarised by J. J. A. Campos (in his * History of the Portuguese in
Bengal/ Calcutta, 1919). The Portuguese first came to the province in
1517, and they exerted a very great inlluence down to 1668, when Shayista
Khan destroyed their power at Chittagong. Before that the capture of
Hugli by the Moghals in 1632 had put a stop to Portuguese aggrandise-
ment in West Bengal. After the decline of their power and prestige as
traders, pirates and conquerors, and controllers of the sea-board of Bengal,
the Portuguese were content to remain in a humbler role and to make
room for their rivals the Dutch, the English and the French; but
Portuguese missionary activity continued, and Portuguese influence in
Bengal was in a flourishing state down to the end of the 18th century.
The Portuguese element in Bengali came in during the period extending
from the latter of part of 16th down to middle of the 18th century, or
even later, when there were settled communities of Portuguese, or
Portuguese speakers, at Hugli, at Chittagong, at Dacca, and at other places
in the Delta. Already in the ^ Candi-kavya ^ of Muknnda-rama (c.l580)
we find the word ^^^?tW « h&rmad^ » or 2^t^t^^ « haramftd^ » Fortugiiese jiirate
= Portuguese « armada ». The phonetic characteristics of the Portuguese
loan-words show that they were borrowed during the Late MB. period.
The extent of the Portuguese element in Bengali has been noted before
(p, 214f). It is quite likely that there were a good many Portuguese words
in Bengali of the 17th and 18th centuries which are now lost, or are found
as class-dialect words, specially pertaining to religion, among Bengali
Christians whose ancestors were converted by the Portuguese and^among
Luso-Indians who have become Bengalised. Portuguese words (unlike a
number of Persian and English words) came into Bengali through contact
PORTUGUESE PHONETICS
between Portuguese and Bengali speakers, and not through the literary
influence of Portuguese on Bengali. The words were therefore not
transliterated, following some system. Dialectal i^honetics also undoubtedly
presented some slight variations in the Bengali forms. Folk etymology
also played its part. The forms in the Standard Colloquial are taken
into consideration, as these are the recognised ones. The general closeness
of the Bengali loan-words to the original Portuguese forms, however, is
striking.
Accounts of Modern Portuguese pronunciation are to be found in the
paper by Henry Sweet (1883, in the * Collected Papers/ Oxford, 1913, pp.
465-498) ; in Anice'to dos Reis Gon§alves Vianna's ' Portugais, Phonetique
et Phonologic, Morphologic, Textes ' (Leipzig, 1903^ in Teubner's ' Skizzen
Lebender Sprachen aud in Louise Ey's ^Portuguese Conversation-
Grammar ' (Heidelberg, 191-2). The basis of the Bengali loan-words was,
however, 17th century Portuguese in the main, which certainly differed
a great deal in its pronunciation from Modern Portuguese, as is the
case with most languages. I have not seen any account of the early
pronunciation of Portuguese. The phonology of the Portuguese loan-
words in Bengali (and in other languages), however, will certainly throw
some side-light on the phonetics of the former language as it was over
250 years ago. The phonetics and phonology of Modern Portuguese
is one of the most complicated among European languages. The vowel
system is not very rich, but the possession of some central vowels
[«, 9, {] as subsidiary forms of other vowels, and of some breathed vowels
and diphthongs makes the phonology rather intricate. There are some
peculiar consonants, e.^., breathed nasals and liquids ; voiced stops occur
as fricatives intervocally ; the original [s] sound is pronounced as [J]
and as [g] ; [m, n] nasalise vowels and are dropped under certain circums-
tances, etc.; all of these bring in the complexity of the consonant
phonology as well.
A ngtnber of the Portuguese words in Bengali are not native Portuguese
(Latin), being themselves loan-words from different languages, but so far
as Bengali is concerned, they are Portuguese, and nothing else.
6U
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VII
The Vowels.
355. In Modern Portuguese unaccented « a » is pronounced as [y],
something like the English [9] in aiore [abAv]. This was probably also
the pronunciation in Early Modern Portuguese of the 17th century.* The
unaccented « a » as a rule is retained in Bengali as ^ [a] : e.^,, ^s?t^^
[anttrof] pineapple (ananas) ; '^t^f^sf' [alpin] piii (alfinete) ; ^t«1^^^1
(alkatra] tar (alcatrao) ; CWt^ [kedara] ckair (cadeira) ; f^\, f^T^I
[g"J5ci> girJS^i] ^'^^'^^'^^^ (igreja); ^t^(t)^1, ^t^^^ [J5<in(a)Ia, ^Sanela]
trindow (janella) ; C^t%1 > C^StTtC^ [toalitt > toale] towe/ (todlha) ;
^tf¥ [kaphi] cofee (cafe) ; ^\ [/agu, Jabu] sr/^o (sagu) ; etc. But
in a number of cases, it is dropped in Bengali, both initially and finally :
^'ff'i ^T^t^ [kabar] lo cud {(t-i a montli) (acabar) ; C»it»i1 [nona] aistard apple
(anona); [jeko] arsenic ([*9ssejiko] < arsenico) ; ?Ft^ as in ^t^^^
[kajgghor] httton-Jtole (cdsa [debotao]); C^^ [nie:J5] fahle (mesa); ^tf'T^
[kami^] shirt (camisa) ; [i/ptit] sleel (espada) ; f%C^ [^^JS^l] a
sJtallo7v earthen poi to hoil rice (tigela) ; f*f^c| [pistol] pistol (pistola) ;
f^5t^<*f%^^ [phigru<^pbigur] a leanfgnre (figura) ; C<Jt^^ [botal] bottle
(botelba). In disyllabic words, initial or final « a » remains : ^ST^Sl [ata]
custard apple (ata) ; ^STfH [aea] nvrse (aia) ; cgt^l [toka] a hat, an nwhrella
kat of bamboo {toMQB) ; C^C^T^ [terenta] thirty {in a card game) (trinta);
f^11>f'1^^[pipa>pipe] cask (pipa) ; ^'^l [phorma] /6»-;« /// priatiug ({ovmsi),
[boga] buoy (boia); ^^9fl [bor(o)ga] ra/V^r (verga); C^i^pW, c^pW
[be(fi)Qltt] violid (viola); C^p{\ [boma] bomb (bomba) ; spt^l [marka] mark,
stamp (marca) ; [jaea] jjetticoal (sdia) ; >rt^ [JcL^Ja] ^uuce, sarsaparilla
(salsa) ; etc.
Stressed « a pronounced as a central [a] , or as [a] before the
velarised [t] and before [u], remains in Bengali as ^ [a] : e.g,^ '^^rf^Rtft
[almari] almirah (alm&rio) ; ^W^W, ^tC^^^^I, ^IT^^I^I, ^Jt^5f??1
[kanttstara, kanestara, ksenestara, ksenestra] canister (« canfetra » large
basket : there has been influence both in form and meaninsr of the English
r
* In the Portuguese words given within brackets, stress on the vowel is indicated,
although stress is not represented in the ordinary orthography.
PORTUGUESE ' A, AO ' IN BENGALI
623
cauister) ; ^t^f^ [kaphri] negro (eafre) ; ^^t^ [katan] stoord (eatana) ;
^tf^ [qfcibi] % (ehave) ; ^^tff^l > ^^tC^f, ^^tfw [goradia > gorade, -di]
bars of a wiudo(0 (grade); ^^t^ [p^rot] « large plate (prato) ; ^S'Tt^^
^1t^ [tamat, tomak, tamaku] tobacco (tab&co) ; ^f%, ^t^fif [baiti, -di]
bucket (bfilde) ; MB. ^^\^ [fiormad] beside a variant spelling
[Baramod] Portz/gnese pirate-s/np (2LYmM2i) ; etc.
Portuguese « a, a» are also represented by ^ [o], through folk
etymology in most cases : e.g,^ [anaroj] pineapple (ananas) :
'^^Wt^ [olondajg] Butch (Hollandez) ; ^^it^ beside [tomak, tamak]
tobacco (tabaeo) ; MB. [fiaramod] piirate fleet a variant of
[Bormad] (armada) \ C^t^ < vS^^I, ^^^Jl [tolo<tolua, ^toila, ^toila,
•^tolga] a large iarihen pot (« t&lha » : through influence of ^1 [tola]
ba^e^ bottom)^
In C^t^^^l [korenta] fortT/^ a terra in card-game (quarenta), we have
« a » as [o] through the influence of the « u » (Modern Portuguese
pronunciation [k we'rent'e] ) . In C^W^ [JSol^^p] V^i^'Qaiive (jaUpa) we have
influence of the Perso-Bengali C^^^ [go^^ip] ^'^^^ (gulab).
Change of « a » to [e, ce] is noticed in a few words : ejj,^ (?F5ftWl
[kedara] chair (eadeira) ; C^^tf^ [be/ali, bse/ali] vessel , pail (« vasilha »,
through Umlaut : « ^basilya > "^baisilya > *besalia ») ; c^c^t [pSpe]
papaya fruit (papaia). As in C^ft < « vasilha « lha »=:palatal «I » +
«a» [Xa], becomes « > *lia » in Bengali in CSMf^^ > CStffC^
[toalia > toale] towel (toalha).
« a » is found as [i] in |f%f^ [istri, istiri] ironing clothes (estirar),
through Vowel Harmony ; and in ^!tTfft [/akali] bag toith tivo months
(saccola), there is probably the influence of the final vowel of \^
[tholi, thoili] lag.
Loss of « a » : through absence of stress : ^t^l < ^^W^l [kamra <
kamara] chamber (camara). In «T^tWl, WA"^ [lobada, lobeda] a loose goivn,
we have probably a ease of assimilation of « loba » loose gown + « abada »
tucJced edging,
35y The nasal diphthong « ao in a final position^ was probably
pronounced [au] in Early Modern Portuguese. This regularly became
•
624 PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER VII
[au, ao], and then [q6, dm, am, ag] in Bengali. See pp. 521-5-2-2. E.g,,
C^t^ [botam] hvttoyi (botao) ; ^Vft^ > ^CTt^ by Vowel Harmony [gudam, ^
^dioml godown, warehonse (gudao) ; ^t^t? [jcitag], also ^rf^t^ [Jaban] soap
(« sabao » : the « n » form is due to the influence of the Perso-Arabic
« sSbun ») ; ^tt^, in combination with [pau-, pao-ruti] European
bread (pSo) ; < *^^it^ [nilam < ^lilam] sale (leilao) ; ^t^^f,
^^^^ [boeam, boiam] eartheu-ioare or stone-ware vessel (boiao). In f^WR
earlier [kristan, kristao] CJtristiau (e[h]ristao), and in ^^t^ beside
^TC^ [kaptan, kapten] capiaia (capitao), there is influence of the
English Christian, captain, with the [n] : of. tlR t^t^ [krijcfan,
khri/tan], ^JtC^^^ [ktepten] etc. The nasalisation is dropped in "sit^^t^^
[alkatra] ;;/fe/^ tar for [*alkatram] (alcatrao).
357. The Portuguese « e ». When strong, it probably had in the
17th century, as now, the values of [e, s]. When weak or unstressed, it
was probably both short [i] and [a] as now.
Final unstressed « e », or unstressed « e » in a final syllable, is
normally represented by [i] in Bengali : the 17th century Protuguese
pronunciation was probably a short [i]. Before « s » + eonsonant, it
occurs also as [i] in Bengali, following the Portuguese pronunciation.
E.g., ^f^ for C^tf^, C^f^ [topi, kobi] cabbage (couve) ; ^t^% [kaphri]
negro (eafre) ; Ftf^ [^aW] % (chave) ; ^tf^ [padri] Christian priest
(padre) ; ^t^f^, Tt^f^ [balti, baldi] bucket (b«lde) ; [binti] twentj/,
a term in canUgame (vinte) ; ^?rf% ijurti] lottery (sorte) ; C^fw [berdi]
green colour (verde) ; ^t^^f% [kalapati] to correct, tinker, calker (calafate) ;
[goradi] bar (grade) ; [piri^ (pires) ; ^^t^ [ijpcit]
steel (espada); [istri] ironing (estirar). In an initial syllable,
unstressed « e » remains [e] : e.g., [pern] turkey fold (peru) : in ft«
[^i/u] Jesus (Jesus), there is probably the influence of the English [dgirzas] :
we have also a rare (71^ [J5e/u]j based on the Aramaic.
Stressed « e », pronounced [e, s], is retained in Bengali as ^ [e] :
C^pt^^ [korenta] term in card game (quarlnta) ; fvDc«jq [ti^el] a vessel
(tigela); [p(e)rek] nail (prego) ; C^i^ [me:^] table ,{m€^^)\
[berdi] green colovr (verde) ; C^^ [resto, -o] balance, capital (resto) ;
PORTUGUESE 'E, I' IN BENGALI 6^5
OT^I [Jeko] ar-mi!c (arsenico). Open [s], a? in « pera » pear becomes [ea,
te, aee] in Benj^ali : C^^l, ^Jt^l, ^t^^t [peara, piera, pseera] yvava.
In f^f^^l, ft#1, f^t^l [girjga, gnjga] chnrch (igreja), we have [i] for
« e », through influence of the assimilated « i » : see also p. 357. In <l^tT¥
[kaphi] cafftf' (cafe), final stressed « e » is changed to [i].
In C^t^ [botol] hoiih (boteiha), it seems there is influence of the
English word [bofl].
Loss of « e » : ^^f^ [alpin < *alpint ?] pm (alfinite) ; ^sf^il
[gamla] large eartlieu or metal basiu (gamella); ^t^^l [JSanla] beside
^C^^, ^^^1 [jFganela, j'ganala] windov' (janella).
The group « ei », in ]\Iodern Portuguese = [si] when stressed, [yX]
when unstressed, is differently represented in Bengali : e.g,^ ^ft^t'? > «^«1t^^
fs{v\\^ [*lilam > nilam] s<(le (leilao) ; C^-^t^1 [kedara] c/////V (eadeira) ;
C^3?t^1, ^srt^l [premara, promara] a ear/I game (primeiro) ; C^tTllS^ >
C^tC^C? [bambatia > bombete] yirnie (bombardeiro).
358, Portuguese « i », stressed or unstressed, remains as [i] in Bengali :
e.g,, '^it^f^J? [alpin] piif (alfinite) ; ^tf'I^ [kamij5] .v////7 (eamisa) ;
[kristan] C/trisfian (cristao) ; [phita] tape (fita) ; f^*n [pipa] barrel
(pipa); f<l1%5 [pii'^cf] sadcer (pires) : W5f^ [phigru] leau of Jigvre (figura) ;
1%f^5, f%f^^ [kiricj, kirijj MahtijaK dagger, hafjonei (oris) ; i5it^5itf^
[alraari] alnurah (armario) ; f^f% [binti] a if^rm in eanJ game (vinte) ;
CTf^C^Tl [merino] a kiml of irooilen afuff' (merino) ; [^ijgel] an earthen
pot (tigella) ; [bijkut] Ihcint (biseoito).
Intervoeal « i » becomes the [e] glide, rarely [i], in Bengali: ejj,^
^^t^fj ^t^t^, ^^^t^ [boeam, boiamj large earthen^irare or Rtone-irare vessel
(boiao) ; [aea] aurse (aia) ; [boea] bao// (boia) ; [jaea] d^irt,
gown (saia) ; C*^C*I < ^*lHtt^1, "^^ff^^l [pepe < "^papaia, *papia] papaya
fruit (papaia).
In C^t^1, [premam, promara] a eanJ game (primeiro), and
C^^^ [terenta] a term in card game (trinta), the group « ri » behaves
like ^ «f» in Bengali words (see aate^ p. 357). In C^^l, C^^lt^l,
also t^JW^I [beala > befiala, bteela] violin (viola), there is change of
« i » to [e] .
79
626
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER VII
In t^TfS^I, ^t^'W Cf<^trQ, Jantara] orange, cf . ^^t^^T^ltff [Jatrap;a^i]
Onnifie'trpe, village near Calcutta, from Portuguese « Cintra », we have
change of the group « in » to [an, a].
Loss of « i » : "5ft«lf^^? [cilpin] pi a (altinite) ; ^tC^ [kapten] captahi
(eapitao), through English inflnenee ; and (J^\ [/eko] arHenic (arsenico),
where « ni » probably became « ii » and then a mere nasalisation of the
vowel,
359. Unstressed « o » was pronounced as [u] in Early Modern
Portuguese, as now. In Bengali « o » occurs as [u] and as [o] :
[tamaku] beside ^t^, «^t^ [tamak, tomak] iohaeco (tabaco) ;
3rt^<*^^ [mastul <*mastru] maHf (mTistro) ; in a number of ^Christian '
words like tfl^T^S [entrudu] carnival^ nhrove^idf (entrudo)^ t»tf«lf?r^
[i/piritu Jantu] ilol^ Ghonf (espirito santo), t^jpi^^ [injen/u] incense
(incenso), Tt5 [manu] brother (mano), Cv©^^ [terju] ma;-^ (tergo), etc. ;
C^^St^ [botam] hnlton (botao) ; C^t^^ [botol] bottle (beteiha) ; C^sM^^
[tode] towel (toalha) ; C^t^^ [bombete] pirate (bombardeiro) ; (?lf^
[merino] a kind of woollen stuff (« merino » : may be through the English) ;
C^, C^C^1 [resto, -to] renudnderj cajntal (resto), probably through a
stage ^C^^ [restu] ; (7^^ [Jeko] may be from a form H^f^
[Jekua] arsenic (arsenico). Unstressed «o» occurs as [a] in ^ifl
[khana] (Htck (eano), and in C'Sf^Tt^t [promara, premara] a cnnt
game (primeiro).
There is loss of final unstressed « o » in ^t^srtft [almari] almirah
(armario) ; "^^^^t^t [alkatra < ^alkatrau] tar (alcatrao) ; ^^^t^ [katan]
sicord (eatano, catana) ; ^^t^ [porat] /^zyy^ W/v.t (prato) ; C*tC^^, C^Tf
[perek, pre:k] nail (prego) ; Jarf^^, ^TfC^f^ [martol, -tol] hammer (martello),
[bi/kut] biscuit (biscoito), due partly to a facetious analysis f^^-^
« bisijl-kut^ » poisoii-massy biscuits as foreign food prepared by Christians
being prohibited to orthodox Hindus.
Stressed « 6 pronounced [o, o], occurs in Bengali as [o, o] as well :
^ [boeal buotf (boia) ; (?^\ [nonaj custard apple (anona) ; CTffI [boma]
bomb (bomba); ^1 [phorma]/bm (forma). In ^fS [/urti] lottery (sorte),
the [o] is changed to [u] by vowel harmony (see p. 397). « 6 » occurs
PORTUGUESE ^OI, U': INTRUSIVE VOWELS: ^B^ 627
as [a] in ^*t^t^ [jHkali] iwo^movthed hag (saceola), and in C^fT^l [beala]
t 'iolin (viola).
« oi », pronounced [01] ^ occurs as [u]in [bijkut] biscuit (biseoito).
« ou », pronounced [o, ou] in Modern Portuguese, was probably [o] in the
17th century: In ^f^l for *C^H ^C^tf^ [kopi < kobi] cnbhage (couve)
and [toka] a large bamboo hat (touea), this group is found as [0].
360. Portuguese « u », stressed and unstressed, remains as [u] in
bengali, t\g,^ Jit"© '^^'^^ (s^g^) • [peru] turkei/ bird (peru) ;
[kajgu] Brazil nut (caju) ; ^tft^T [gudam] godofcriy war e-Jiovse {gn^B^o) ;
tt^ [J5iu/u] Je^w^s (Jesus) ; [krurj, kuru/j cross (eruz) ; f^5l^
[phigru] lean Jig ure (tigura) ; ^t^t^fl [kakatua] a ichiie talking parrot,
cncka/00 (eacatu) ; ^"ff^i [phudil] /n?ifiel (funil). The word c^t^l, C^fl
[koga, koa] bent double tcitli age^ probably from Portuguese «eunha» wedge y
shows change of [u] to [0] through Vowel Harmony.
361. In groups like « cr, tr, pr » there has been an intrusive vowel :
f3(%f^ [mistiri] beside fsf^t [mistri] craftsman, artisan (mestre) ; l^t^
[porat] 7>A//6r (prato); WT^>! [phoraji/] French (Franeez) ; [kiricf]
dagger, ba/jnaH (cris) ; 5f^t%1 [goradia] bar (grade) ; etc. « r » with a
consonant has been treated as ^ « }• » in Bengali (see p. 356) : e.g.^ « igreja»
church > %^\, HT^M [gii'J5<^. ^^^50, girijsa] ; « verga, virga » rod,
j)ob', lintel > [boroga, borga] rafter,
A Hnal [a] has been added to some words : ^t^t^^ [kakatua] parrot
(cacatu) ; ^tf^^l [goradia] bars (grade) ; and }>robably also ^C^^l >
(?fc^1 [^jekua > Jeko] arsenic (arsenico).
Consonants.
362. Portuguese « b » remains as [b] in most cases : ^1(1 [boea] bnof/
(boia); C^t^ [botam] hat ton (botao); ^t^ft [bdti] pail (balde) ; ^t^t^
[kabar] finish, last day of month (acabar). « mb » occurs as [m] in C^sn
\homQ?)^ bi»nb (bomba). Intervoeal «b» becomes [m] in ^t^t^ etc.
[tamak] tobacco (tabaeo) : the intervoeal stop in Portuguese itself has the
open pronunciation of « ^ » = [r ].
6-28
PHONOLOGY: CHAPTER VII
363. Portuguese « e » before « a, o, u », and before consonants =
[k] in Bengali : e,g,y [kajgu] Brazil nut (caju) ; [^^^P^] cablafje
(couve); ^ [krutj] crosx (eruz) ; ^t^t^ [kabar] y///?.y//, fasf chifj of month
(acabar) ; ^t^n^?l [kakatua] cockatoo (caeatu) ; C&t^l [toka] large bawboo
hat tised an umbrella (touea). In ^T»i1 [kana] ditch (cana), we have a ease
of « ea » = [kha], through influence of native word like « khat^ »
fosse < « kh&n » to dig^ etc.
Portuguese « ce, ci » pronounced [ge, si] : J^ft^^l [Jatra] oranfje
(Cintra) : see p. 626, si^pra,
364. Portuguese « ch » is now [J], as in French; but in earlier
times it was a palato-alveolar affricate [tj*], as in Old French and
in Spanish (Castilian). In North Portugal (Tras-os-Montes), the affiricate
sound is still found (F. Diez, Gi*aramar of the Romanic Languages,
French trans., Vol. I, Paris, 1874, p. 358). In the 17th and early 18th
centuries the value of « eh » in all likelihood was [tJ] : for (East)
Bengali 5 « c » = [cj, ts], is represented by Padre Assump^am by « ch »,
and by « s and Portuguese « ch » normally became 5 = [cj = tJ]
and not *t, ^ = [J] in Bengali ; besides, [tJ] of other languages is
written « eh » by the early Portuguese authors. Examples in Bengali :
51 [cfa:] tea (cha) ; 5tf^ [§cibi] ketf (ehave) ; ^5T^ [cicfar] inckhsy comerv*'H
(achar).
365. Portuguese « d » is generally rendered by the dental Vf [d] in
Bengali : ^f^t^^f [g^^crde] bars (grade) ; C^^ft^l [kedara] chair (cadeira) ;
Ttfe [pcidri] Christian pric-sf (padre); C^f^ [bevdi] rjirnf cnfonr (verJe) ; etc.
In some words it is cerebralised in Bengali, in the group « nd » : vS^sqI
[olonda] a kind of pea (HoUanda), but cf. ^S«l'5ft5r [olondajg] Dutch,
(HoUandes), which may equally be from the French ; ^t^^^i, [ban<jel
h&n^^X] plfice-naiifc near Jlngli toinf (Bandel < Pers. bandar port) and
tflQ [londro], an early Bengali name for London (Londra). There is
unvoicing of « d » in beside ^t^fff [balti, baldij bncket (balde),
and in ^'^t^ [^Jp^^t] deel (espada sirord),
An intrusive [d] occurs in < ^ff^^j [phudil < *pbundil] funnel
(funil).
PORTUGUESE 'F, G, H, J, L, LH^ IN BENGALI 629
366. Portuguese « f » occurs as ^ « ph », which is pronounced as
[ph, f] : fts^l, fe^^ tf¥t« [phita, phite, phite] fojje (fita)jfffffl
[phudil] finiiiol (funil) ; Jc^-^ [phesta] lioHday (festa) ; ^^t^
[kaphri] /^^^//ro (eaf re) ; ^tf^ beside ^tf^ [kQp(h)i] coffee (cafe). It also
occurs as [p] in 'sJt^lf^ [alpin] pin (alfinite), and ^t^t^fe [kalapati]
tinker (calafate atufker). In the Dacca dialectal Portuguese Christian
word ^^Tt^, ^^>!t^ [kog(k)jar] to confens (confessar), we have change of
.nf .to [g(k)].
367. Portuguese « g » before « a, o, u » and before consonants = 5t
[g] in Bengali : ^t1^ [gamla] large fasin (gamella) ; ^ift^ [gudam]
7rar^/iOi/5e (gudao)'; ^it^tl [bor(o)ga] r^z/i^^^ f*5t^^1 [girJ5a] church
(igreja) ; etc. In C*f^^^ [perek] «a/^ (prego) there is hardening of [g].
Loss of intervocal « g », pronounced as an open consonant in Portuguese,
has given rise to the form [Jabu < ^Jbwu] beside Tff^ [Jcigu] sar/o
(sagu) ; and « figura ^Jignre has given in addition to f^<5t^ [phigru] ,
[phikru] as well as f^f-;^ [phibru] lean and thin.
In Modern Portuguese, * g » before * e, i » is pronounced [g], as in
French. Probably the old pronunciation was [d5l : f^jsq [tijgel] a large
earthen vessel (tigella).
368. The letter « h » was not pronounced in Early Modern
Portuguese, as now : [olonda] a kind of jiea (Hollanda).
There is protlietie [fi] in MB. ^^s^j^f, ^^tW [fiormad, fiaramod] pirate
Jleet (armada), and euphonic intervocal [fi] in C^i^^ [befiala] violin (viola).
369. «3» is [5] in Modern Portuguese, but formerly in all likelihood
it was [dg]. In Bengali it occurs as ^ [jg] : ^\^^^\ [jganela] windotv
(janella) ; ^® [jgij^] "^^^^^^^ (Jesus) ; ^tf^ [kajgu] Brazil md (caju).
370. Portuguese « I » ordinarily remains ; e,g,^ ^t^^t^^l [alkatra]
tar (alcatrao) j ^tW^ll [fganela] tcindow (janella) ; ^Vs\i^ [Jal/a] sarsaparilla
(salsa) ; ff^f^ [phudil] (funil); etc. In [nilam] sale (leilao),
initial « 1 * is changed to [u], and in [igreJS] English (Ingles), we
have [r} for « 1 ».
tLc group « Ih » has the value of a palatal [a] in Modern Portuguese,
but its earlier value seems to have been [li] : in Bengali, the basis of
680
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VII
change was a [li] sound, which was later modified ; e,g., ^^J^^l, *n5^T1 >
[tolua. toila, > tolo] a large pot (talha) ; C^5t^^ < (TSt^ft^ [toale
< toalia] loird (toalha) ; C^^f^ [be/ali, hc/ali] pnil- (vasilha) ; and
C^t^^ [botolj bottle (boteiha) seems to have been influenced by the English
word = [bort].
371. « m » remains : ^1 [raarka] wa/'^t (marea) ; [phorma]
form (forma) ; ^t^^l [kamra] rhcmher (camara) ; ^t^^ [2;amla] large
basia (gamella) ; [mastul] mad (mastro) ; etc.
372. « n » remains : CfTt^fl [nona] ev.sfanl apple (anona) ;
[binti] terot iu card game (vinte) ; ^tW^ [jS^fn^l^] [''f'^'^^^^^' (janella). Folk
etymology has changed it to [r] in ^^Tt^^ [anaroj] pine^appJe (ananas),
and it nasalises the vowel in J^T^^t [jatra] orange (Cintra a to^r,,), and in
(pfc^l [Jeko] arsenic (arsenico).
There is spontaneous nasalisation in C^C*f [pepe] l^^'P''//^^ /^'"^
(papaia).
* nh » has the value of Fji] in Portuguese. In the word C^tSl, (M'A
[koga, koa] bent {with age), probably = Portuguese « cunha » iredg^^,
we have a case of « nh » = [g, in Bengali.
373. Portuguese « p » is retained : fl^t [pipa] barrel (pipa) ;
[pdu] as in « piu-ruti » European bread, loaf (pao) ; cW^I [peara]
(pera) ; f^^^ [pistol] pidof (pistola) ; etc.
374. In (TFfc^^ [korenta] a term In card game Portuguese « qua »
occurs as [ko].
375. Portuguese « r » is generally retained : C^^ [resto] remofuder,
eapltal {in card game) (resto) ; ^fe [padri] priest (padre) ; C^?^ [peru]
Ivrkeiffoirl (peru) ; ^ [krur/j cro^^ (cruz) ; ^j^^ [kabar] fumh, lad day
of month (acabar) ; etc. It is changed to [1] in [mastul] m.ad
(mastro) and in ^«15(tf^ [almari] almirah (arniario) : and it seems to have
been be dropped finally in tit [istri] ironing (estirar).
376. Modern Portuguese « s » has four sounds, namely [s, z, J, g],
all of which seem to have obtained in the 17th century. T^e [s, JJ
pronunciation appears in Bengali as »f, [J] (occasionally as 5 [cfj in a final
position), and the voiced ones, [z, 5], as ^ [jg]. Examples : ^"^X
PORTUGUESE ^S, T, V, X' IN BENGALI
631
[jciban, -ag] mip (sabao); ^itfl IJaea] i<kir1, petticoat (saia) ; ^fl [Jarti]
^ loitt'i-y (sorte) ; 1t«T^ [J^^'jci] mrmparilht (salsa) ; ^STfJ^n^T [anaroj] plae-^
apple (ananas) ; C^^ C^n^'JS] ^^^^^^^ (mesa) ; "^f^^ [l^crmijs] shiri (eamisa) ;
t'^T^ [ijpcrtj Hted (espada) ; in ^t^-^^ [kaJS-ghor] huitoti-hole (easa);
ttC^W [igre^] Eaph'd (Ingles) ; fnf^5 [piricf] mvcer (pires) ; f%f?l5f, f^R,
f%f%^ [krij, kirij, kiricj] hntjonef, ^'^^W' (crjs) ; etc. In « st », the dental
[s] is retained: f^^«l [pistol] pistol (pistola) ; fi(^ [mistri] craflstnan
(mistri).
377. Portuguese « t » is retained as v© [t] in most eases : \5t^?|5r
[tamak] tolmoi^o (tabaeo) ; C^tftf^^ [toalia] ton-el (toalha) ; f^C^^T [tijgel]
earfhni pot (tigella) ; f^f% [binti] tenn in card fjamp (vinte) ;
[mostul] ma%t (mastro) ; f?^1 [phita] tape (fita) \ etc. It is eerebralised in
Cfef^l [toko] uttibrel la-hat (touea), in y^n^i [Jopeta] a plant (zapota, sapota),
and in [bijkut] Iji^'uit (biseoito). Loss of « t » occurs in '«rt*lf^*l
[alpin]jo/?2 (alfinite).
378- Portuguese « v » is regularly represented by A [b].
The denti-labial spirant [v] was absent in Middle Bengali, and the
bilabial spirant [i?] seems equally to have been non-existent. The spirant
pronunciations of ^ [bfi], = \y, 15], are very recent, and do not seem
to have been developed before the 19th century (cf. pp. 135, 443; also
infra^ under « v » in English loan-words). ^ « bh * became [v, x>] first
in the towns, among educated classes, and in the country-side in
West Bengal the use of [bfi] for the foreign [v], following the Modern
Bengali transliteration, is not absent. If the spirant pronunciation of ^
had been developed in Bengali of the 17th, ISth and early 19th centuries
we would have found that letter, rather than ^ [b], for the Portuguese
[v]. f^t% [binti] twenty y term in card game (vinte); C^^Ttf*! [be/ali]
pail (vasilha) ; 5tf^ [cfabi] key (ehave) ; ■^C^1%>^^f^ [*kobi>kopi] cabbage
(eouve) ; C^f^ [berdi] green colour (verde) ; [bJ>r(o)ga] rafter (verga).
379, Portuguese « x » has as its characteristic value the sound of
[J], although other sounds are known [ks, kj, z, s]. (See p. 547,) It is
not foun^in any Portuguese loan-word in Bengali, unless it were « crux »
as a variant of « eruz »
632
PHONOLOGY: OHAPTER VII
380. « z » is found in ^ [kru:J] crosH (eruz), ¥^t^^ rphora/ij]
French (Franelz) : final «z» was pronounced as |J] as now in Early Modern
Portuguese. In [J*opeta] a plant, sapofa, we have fj] for « z »
(« zapota », also spelt « sapota »), and « ananas » > "sn^tl^JT [anaroj]
pineapple is also spelt « ananaz
CHAPTER VIII
PHONOLOGY OF THE FOREIGN ELEMENT : ENGLISH
381. The English first came to Bengal in 1651, more than a hundred
years after the Portugaese had obtained a footing in the province.
Calcutta was founded in 1689, The English thus came in touch with
the people of Bengal in the middle of the 17th century, but it was not
until the middle of the 18th that there was much scope for the English
speech to influence Bengali. Among other reasons, one was that Portuguese
influences ruled supreme, although Portuguese power was on the decline.
The names of the English and of other European nations in 18th century
Bengali are from French, or from Portuguese (Igrej, Phirasi[s], Ol&ndaj,
Dinemar, Aleman : see p. 215). A Portuguese jargon was for a long time the
language of intercourse between European traders of various nationalities
and their Indian agents. Barring one or two words like C^^f'Tt^
« kompani » company^ it does not seem likely that any English words came
into Bengali before the year of Plassey (1757). When the English
assumed the reins of government in 1765, a number of English terms of
administration at once came into Bengali, like ^^«f^ ^^^f^t^ « g&b&rn&r^
j&nd&ral^ » governor general y C^Y®^ « kSusuli » comisel^ 4lC^^1^
« kalektar^ » collector^ ^t^ « lat§l » lord^ CTC^^ft « terejurl » treamry^
C^ftf'II or ^^^f^ « polis^, pulis^ » police^ etc. From the third quarter of the
18th century, there has been a steady accession of English words into
Bengali, and through an intimate knowledge of the English language and
English culture among the educated classes — and ^educated ' is now almost
synonymous with * educated in English ' — an unending stream of English
words is now being admitted into Bengali ; and the process was never
more active than at the present moment : so that it is well-nigh im-
possible ijow to estimate the English element in Bengali, alike in its
extent Ind in its phonology. Contact with English is now arresting
farther Bengalisation of English loan-words, as English-knowing people,
80
634
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VIII
whose number is now on the increase, will not ordinarily pronounce these
words in the ignorant way, and some would even use an approximately
proper English form rather than a naturalised one like \5t^^ « 45ktar »
doctor, tt^'lt^fl « hispatal^ » kof^pital, ^f^Jj « apisi » office^ \5^9f « d&b4l^I »
double, etc.
In the present connexion, notice can only be taken of the naturalised
*words, which have completely accommodated themselves to Bengali
phonetics, and are used and understood by most Bengali speakers. In
introducing the English words into Bengali a rather archaic pronunciation
of the language, based to a great extent on the spelling, is followed as the
basis of the English forms. A hundred years of English schooling in
Bengal has established a current Bengali pronunciation of English,* and
some five generations of Bengali schoolmasters have been teaching
an English pronunciation, of a sort, which obtains wherever English is
used by Bengalis — in the law-courts, in the schools and colleges and the
University, on the political platform, in government offices and in Euro{>ean
firms, in literary and scientific societies — and which, though not unintelli-
gible to even an unaccustomed English ear, is not, and cannot be English.
The same thing has happened in Madras, and is happening everywhere in
India. Extreme types of Indian provincial pronunciation of English, e.f/,,
East Bengali pronunciation and Tamil pronunciation, are at times
mutually difficult to follow.
The current Bengali pronunciation of English has at its basis Standard
Southern English of about a century ago, modified to a great extent by
the Scottish pronunciation, and by the spelling and the pronouncing
dictionary, all of which have helped to give it rather an archaic character.
The vowels [e:,o:] of 18th century English and present-day Scots English^
have been diphthongised to [ei, ou] in Standard Southern English, as in
the words cane, cone \k^e:x\, ls>o:n = k^ein, k^oun], but they retain their
* The only scientific system of transcription of English sounds by Bengali letters, to
teach a correct English pronunciation to Bengali children, is that of SySpa Charan
CMKdgnB, in his • Bengali-English Word-book/ New Edition, Calcutta, 1901, the in«.t)dnction
to which little work is valnable for Bengali phonetics as well.
BENGALI PRONUNCIATION OF ENGLISH 635
monophthong character in Bengali, although occasionally [ei] also is found.
Southern English drops the sound of [r] at the end of a syllable and before
a consonant within a word^ but it is retained everywhere in Bengali except
that it is occasionally assimilated with a following [t, rf] . Finer distinc-
tions in the vowel sounds are avoided, and, naturally enough, Bengali
approximations are used for all English sounds not found in Bengali.
Below is given a transcription (in the alphabet of the International
Phonetic Association) of the Story of the North Wind and the Sun in the
Bengali pronunciation as followed in West Bengal by people who have no
opportunity of coming in contact with native English speakers^ or who
do not care to acquire the correct pronunciation from such native speakers
of English even though they meet and talk with them frequently :
[di north nind send di san oi^r dispiutiij fiuicj oaz di stroggar, fioen
e traevlar (traebRIar) ke:m aelog rsept in e oarm klo:k. de: egri:(J.
dseb di oan fiu: farst (pfarst, Farst, pharst) med di traevlar tek of:
(oph) Riz klo:k /utj bi kon'sicjarij stroggar daen di adar. den di
north uind blu: uith 0:1 Riz mait, bat di mo:r fii: blu:, di mo:r
klozli did di trjevlar fold (pfol(j, Fol(j, phold) fiiz klo:k teraund
fiim ; tend tet last di north uind ge:v (ge:bfi) ap di £e'tem(p)t.
den di san /o:n ant oarrali, tend im(m)ij5ietli di traavlar tuk of:
(oph) fiiz klo:k ; lenij so di north uind oaz oblaijgd tu konfes
(konphes) diet di san oaz stroggar of (oph) di tu:] ^ .
The general line of change of the English sounds in Bengali is indica-
ted below ; and this is followed by a select list, with phonological notes, of
naturalised English loan-words in the language.
The Vowels.
382* (duautity of vowels is entirely in accordance with Bengali
habits. (See ' Brief Sketch of Bengali Phonetics/ §§54 ff.) Thus, in all
^ Fcf phonetic transcriptions of the above story in the ordinary South English,
Northern English, Scots English and American English pronunciations, see ' The Principles
of the International Phonetic Association,' London, 1912.
636
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VIII
monosyllables the vowel is always long : e.g,^ [fS^'fh\ j^^^9^ (d5^^5)i
^ [phu:t] foot (f u^) ; ^ [u;l] ivool (wul) ; ^ [pi-H P^^ ^'^ ^ theatre
(phiif) ; etc. No difEerence is made between ./«// and/oo/, hell and hail in
Bengali.
The stress is according to the habits of Bengali.
The vowel sounds of English, as in Standard South English, are the
following : [i, i:, s, ae, a:, n ( = short o), 0:, u, u:, a, a, 9: ( = long 8:)], with
the diphthongs [ei, ou, ai, au, oi, sa, oa, ua]. [e, 0, a, aa] are also found.
(See Daniel Jones, * An English Pronouncing Dictionary,* Londou, 192-2 ;
'The Pronunciation of English,' Cambridge, 1914; * An Outline of
English Phonetics,^ 'Leipzig and Berlin, 192£ ; Lilias E. Armstrong, * An
English Phonetic Reader,' London, 19i3; R. J. Lloyd, 'Northern English,'
Leipzig and Berlin, 1908 ; William Grant, 'The Pronunciation of English
in Scotland,' Cambridge, 1914).
383. [i, i:] both occur as ^ ^ [i:, i] =a rather low vowel in Bengali;
[s] becomes ^ [e:, e] ; [se] remains as [sb:, «], written t£i7l, the
Bengali sound being rather lower than the English one ; [a:] is found as
^ [a:, q], slightly more advanced than the English sound.
384. The treatment of English [d, O:] requires a note.
At the present day, [d], the so-called short [0] sound (as in lot
[In^]), and long [a:] (as in late [lo:]), are both rendered by ^ [0,0:]
in Bengali: e,g.^ '^X?\^ [kolejg] college [k^Dlidg], q [lo:] law [lo:], etc.
This is now the nearest Bengali equivalent of the English sounds.
But in the late 18th and early and mid 19th century transcriptions
of English words and names in Bengali, we find the use of ^ [a:, a],
for the English vowel now pronounced [n, o:], and not ^ [o:, 0], as
we would expect. = [0] is also found, but ^ [a] is more common ;
and this ^ [a] tradition in spelling, as an equivalent of the New English
[0, 0:] sounds, is carried down to the end of the 19th century. Early
naturalised loan-words from English all show ^ [a] and not '^T [0] : e,g,y
'^^^ [agor], beside ^5t<T [ogor] which is recent < auger-, ^Tft*^^ ^irfifJf
[kttrni/] < cornice ; [ka:r] < cord ; [Bad] hall ; [ka:k] cork ;
^f*PT [api/] office; ^sft^ [ttrdali] orderly; [daktar] doctor; ^iS <
ENGLISH 'o' AND BENGALI 'A'
637
•^^t^ [la:t < *la:4] lord ; [pali/] J^olish ; ^rrf^ [kttpi] copy ;
[bakjb] bojp'y etc., etc.; and also quite a number of English names in early
19th century Bengali, e,g.y ^t»T [J5ci:nj Johi; ^t^>f [tamoj] Thomas-, ^#
[j5a:rJ5] George; ^tH^^t»^ [lard marnig(g)tan] Lord Morniiigion ; etc.
The use of 'SIl [a] in Bengali was due to the fact that the pronunciation of
0, ai{, aw etc. in English of a hundred years ago was to a great extent open :
it was quite distinct from the present-day [n^O:], and acoustically was rather
like [a, a:] both short and lono^, possibly with but little rounding of lips.
This old [a]-like pronunciation of o, au, aw is still found in American
English. (Cf. Otto Jespersen, *A Modern English Grammar,' Part I,
Heidelberg, 1909,\inder [o:], pp. 313, 316: Kenrick in 1773 identifies the
vowel sound in .w//, oft, clofk, call, hawl^ caul, George with that in French
dme, pas; and Pegge, 1803, says that daater, saaee, saacer, saaey
^daughter, sauce, saucer, saucy, savour rather of an affected refinement
than vulgarity. There were fluctuations between [d, o:] and [a, a, a:]
in the 18th century. See also under the treatment of [a] in Jespersen). It
is also to be noted that in the 18th century and early and mid 19th century
transcriptions of Indian names and words into English, the Indian sound of
[a, a:] was almost invariably rendered by o, an, aw : which is strong
corroborative evidence for (at least acoustically) an [a] pronunciation
in English itself: e.g,, Awlley Cawn = ^Ali Khan; CoUychtrn Loss =
Kall-e&r4n^ Das^ ; Punjaub = Panjab ; Dau'(?i), Laiv, Shaw, Paul = the
Bengali surnames ^1 « DS >, ^1 or « La(ha) », 7f1 or Jft^ « Sa(ha) »,
•ft^ « Pal »; Loll — ^ Lai »; Jaini^^ Jan »; JHggernaut = m'^'\^ « Jagan-
nith^ »; Meer Cosseem « Mir Qasim » ; Cossipore = ^^'J^ « Kasipur^ » ;
pawnee = « pani » waier ; skraiib = « Sarab » wine ; dolly =
basket {of fruits or flowers, a^s a present); d/ioll = iff! « dal^ »
pulses ; skawl =^ « SaU ; etc., etc. Early Bengali forms with ^ [a] of
English loan-words are thus based on a more opea pronunciation which
obtained in English itself. At the present day, when the [n, o:] pronuncia-
tion has ibeen definitely established in English, many early 19th century
Bengali* borrowings from English are being revised according to this
later pronunciation. Thus although we retain [4aktar] doctor,
•
638
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VIII
'STtfipr [api/l office, <1lf^n [pali/] polish, ^tf^*t [karni/] coriiice, ^
[bakfo] bo^i sjlfe we do not ordinarily say as before, ^1C«1^^
[kalektor] collector^ ^tf*f [kapi] [kalejj] college, etc., which
are regarded as old-fashioned, but [kolektar, kopi, kolejg].^
The slight difference in quality between the sounds of the short [p]
as in not [nn^j and the long [o:] as in law [lo:] is not taken in to account
in Bengali.
385. [t-, u:] are rendered by [u:, u], written ^, and occasionally fe.
The English sound of [a] as in dvU^ .sun, mn, is now changed to ^
[a] in Bengali, but its older transformation in Bengali was [o] : e.g.,
^f^*fbl*& « gab&rn&ment^ » govmnrv^tii , « d&b&l 5 donhle,
« h&riken » hvrrkane {lantern), ^^?r « n&mb&r » nvmher, « h&nd&r »
hnnilredweighf, ^ « t&n » ion, fe^ « t&b » tub, \5^5? « <J^J5&n » dozen, etc.,
etc., and in names like « B&rt&n » Binion, ^ffi?^^ « G&lib&r » GulUrer,
etc. Most of the naturalised words introduced into the language early
in the 19th century retain the [oj sound in Bengali.
The [o] sound for Modern English [a] is based on an earlier value of
the short « u, o », of English, which is still found in dialectal English, as
for example, in Ireland. Present-day English [a] rather approaches [a] :
possibly in the late 18th and early 19th, it approached the back sound of
[o] to a great extent. In Modern Bengali transcriptions, the equivalent
of [a] is ^1 [a], and the use of ^ [o], in pronunciation as well as in
writing in Bengali, is now regarded as old-fashioned.
386. W, the so-called neutral vowel, is not found in Bengali, and
the other strong vowels (of which it is the weakening in English) are used
for it : e.g., [epril] April, beside ^^f^ffff [abril] in late 18th cen.,
and 'srt^ff^ [april] in early 19th een. transcriptions; ^iicrf?r^, ^«rt^^f^?p1
[semerika, amerika] America ; C^C^^*^ [leptenant] lieutenant ; cctt^^^ft^
1 In HindostSni and other Indian languages, ^ [a:] is normaHy used for the English
sound of [d = o, o:]» and now * an.' pronounced [ao, au, oo. o:] is also employe^i. Except-
ing the diphthong * au/ HindostSni does not, or till very recent times did not, possess a
gound approximating the English [o], and hence the employment of [«:].
THE ENGLISH GROUP ' EU: & DIPHTHONGS 639
[fiomiopathi] honmopatht/ ; -^T^, [iglond, -land, -laend] England ;
[cfaeno] Chhia, When this [9] occurs with [r], which is not
pronounced in Modern Southern English, it is now found as [ar] :
in the earlier transcription, however, it became [or] : e.g,^ earlier
5f^«f^ [gabornor], beside ^^(t)ft^ [goi^arnar, -i?or-] governor-. fsRt^
[liuar] liver beside old-fashioned %^^^ [nibor] = infantile liver-,
[riuolbar] revolver; •{^^ [nombor, nombor] nnniler, an old borrowing;
etc. The use of ar for er is not unknown in the orthography and
pronunciation of English itself. The commonest equivalent of [a] in
Bengali would be ^ [a]. Initial [0] is found to be dropped in a few cases :
z*.,^., [turni], also §^ [torni] aitornejf \ V^'^Vi^ [girimento] agreement.
[9:], the so-called long form of [a], as in hirth, shirty her [bs:^, Js:^, hs:],
occurs only in connexion with [r], and it is generally rendered by ^t^T [or] :
e.g.y *ft^ [/art] shirty 3Fff^ LJ^^JS] ^^^9^> 'It^^ {^ox^^vl'\ sergeant {i7i police),
also surgeouy etc. The word [kornel] colonel [k^sml] is probably
influenced by the spelling in 0.
387. [ei] of Modern Southern English is ordinarily denoted by tfl [e],
following earlier English and present-day Scotch pronunciation of [e:].
It is only rarely that the Southern English diphthong value is followed :
^•^'> [phe:l], rarely (TP^ffl fpheil]/^/^ ; cS^? [me:l tre:n] mail train \
[^e:l] jail J etc.
[ai] is regularly denoted by ^tt [ai] : ^t^f, [taim, tain] time;
[toip] type; ^Ftbl [phain] ///^ ; 5ttc^tferC^t^ [B(riko(r)t] High Court;
^tt^(T)t^ [bai/msen, -man] vice-man, mechanic ; ^tf^f^ [baij^kil] bicycle,
etc. The first element of this diphthong was probably of a higher quality
than now, but that was not taken into consideration in Bengali.
[acj] = English oit, oiv, etc. The equivalent of this group now is '^Tt^
[au], e.g.y [fiau/j house, [taun] town, [aut] out, ^f^f^i
[kaun^l] council, ^q^i^ [phanl] fovl, etc. In the earlier borrowings
in Bengali, on the other hand, we find ^ [ou] : e,g., [fiou/] {commer^
cial) house, ^ [out] out, c^)^f^ [k5u/uli] counsel, ^ [toun fia:l]
for prese»t-day fet^ ^ [taun Bo:l] Town Hall, etc. Here, too, as in the
case of early Bengali ^ [a] for English aw, au, 0, the [ou], or rather [00],
640
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VIII
pronunciation obtained in English itself a hundred years ago. (Cf. O.
Jespersen, op. cit., pp. 235, 236.) We would expect to find [au] in Bengali
in the late 18th and early 19th centuries for ow, if the first element in
the diphthong were a low-back or low-central sound, and not a mid-back-
wide-round one.
The South English diphthong [ou] was at one time simply a long
[o:], which is the value preserved in Scotland. Bengali renders it by
[o:, o], €,g., [bo:t] boat, C^t^, C?JT^5OT [ro:d, rod/e/] road, road cess^
CTtfe [ko:t] coat^ etc.; and occasionally by [d], following Bengali phonetic
harmony : e.g.y ^FC&I (-C^t^) [photo(gerap)] /?^o^o(-^rff/?A) = [fou/ou, fou^a-
gra:f], ^rSiT [motor] motor (mou^a).
[oi] and [oi] are represented by [og] : [bog] boi/ [boi, boi] ,
^?fet^ [rogtar] Renter (roi^a). For [ia], we have [ia] : IfNQ^ [in4ia]
Jndia^ ^tf*W [rofia] Russia • and the [r] is preserved when [io] occurs in
connexion with that consonant : e,g,, [biar] beer, 'fb^lt^' [cfiar] cheer \
^f^T* beside ^?rt^-f?r^ [iQ(r)-rii)] earring, [ua] would similarly be
[uo], %JJ^ [uor] or [uor] : ^C^^, ^ [buor, buor]
Boor, Boer-, ^^'^^ [puor] poor. The diphthong [oa], also pronounced [o:],
is from earlier [or], written ore, oor, and it is rendered by [o:r] in
Bengali : clt^ [sto:r] store [s^oa, s/o:] .
[sa] of South English is based on the group [s] 4- [r], and the
group [sr, s:r] brings in a glide [a] — [s^r, s^]. In earlier transcriptions,
this group became [aer] : e,g,, [Bffirr] Hare, a name; [cfser] cAair;
^It^ [kae:r] care ; [/serr] share etc. In recent renderings, we have tfjfl
[ea] : C^^t^^ Cl^t^, C^^^T [gear, /ear, Bear], etc.
388. Regular loss of vowels is rare : see under [a], supra.
There is addition of vowels [a] in the interior of words, by anaptyxis —
e^g.j l^elaf] glass ; c&c^sf [teren] train ; cS%5nrr? [teligerap(h)] tele-
graph ; C^^:^^ft [terefguri] treasury (an obsolete form) ; c^^- [torog] truni,
Cy^^ [peleg] plague ; ^ [buru/j bmsA ; [/ilet, /elet] slate,
^CStC^t^ [ine/pektar] inspector, etc., etc. ; [b] at the head of words
beginning with *s»4-stop: e.g., ^5fm^ [astabal] stable; t^*^ [i/kul]
school; iiilrt'^ [e/tsempo] stamp ;^^pf^ [i/ti/on], also ^|»tt^ [i/te/an] station;
INTRUSIVE VOWELS : ENGLISH ' K, P, T, G,B,D' 641
tf'^r?r?, tfett [i/p(i>ig] spring, etc. ; and [c] at the end of words ending in
two consonants, where both are retained, without one of the consonants being
dropped or assimilated, or where there is no intrusive vowel in between : €.g,,
C^f^ [ben^] bench ; c^f^ [ketli] htt/e ; cm, Cm [4ek/o, de/ko] desk ;
^t^ [bak/o, bajko] box; f^ff^ [gilti] ^z7/ ; f^t [lijti] /m/; ^l^^l or ^rt^
[lompo, laempo] lawp, etc. Cases of dropping or assimilation of one
consonant— [ripot] report; [ka:r] cord; [lait] lord ; si^^
[lonthon] lanthorn, lantern; ^^tfw^ [oarin] warrant; [Bondor <
*?i^u^^vA] /nmdred2ceight; f^^^, fw^lfe; -C^t^B [picf-, pijgbot, .bod] paste-
board^ etc. ; and cases of intrusive vowel in a final consonant nexus, e.ff,,
^t^firf^F^ [bai/ikil] bici/cle ; ^Ff^sf [pharom] /(9m ; gt^^ [tarom] etc.
The above Are the normal modifications of the English vowels in
Bengali » There are ease of irregularity due to folk-etymology, to the
influence of Sanskrit, and at times to a humorous attempt at punning to
which foreign words with even a very slight resemblance to native ones
lend themselves (although these latter may be wide apart in significance) ;
but such eases cannot be taken iuto account genei'ally.
Occasionally, especially on the printed page, there is an attempt to
give continental (Italian) values to the vowels in European and other names,
personal or geographical : e,g,, ^ft^l [ajia] rather than ^£lf»f^1 [e/ia] for
Asia, ^^i^ttf^fl [bulgaria] Bulgaria, ^Xm{^) [plcito(n)] Plato [plei?^ou], etc.
This is rather exceptional, and it is the English forms which generally
obtain in the spoken language, as most speakers having occasion to use
foreign names are familiar with English.
The Consonants.
389. The Stops and Nasals, and Affricates.
The slight aspiration of unvoiced initial stops of English, [k^, t^, p^],
is dropped in Bengali. In tlt^ (^|, ^lt^) [khrijto, khri/tan] Christ,
Christian, the aspiration is due to the original Greek : cf . f3p»5t»T> f5t^
[kri/(^an], from the English.
The voiced [g, b] remain. English alveolar [t {JM)^ d^ are regularly
changed to the cerebral 5, \5 [t, 4] in Bengali. But it is curious to note
81
642
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VIII
that in the earlier adaptations of English words and names the dentals \5, if
[t, d] are frequently employed for the English sounds. This was partly
due to the fact that transcription in Early Modern Bengali books and
printed documents was done by, or under the inspiration of English scholars
and orientalists, who equated the so-called English dentals with the Bengali
dentals. Examples are, among obsolete forms, ^Cq»H^ [oktobor] October^
f^Jf^ [di/ombar] December^ [tamo/] ThomaHy ^tW^^ [kalektor]
collector^ C^^C^^^ [leptenento] lienteaant^ etc., and among living words,
^5t^§5t^ [daktar] doctof, tT^^t^St^ [Rd/patal] konpUal, 5tt?nf [garod] guard =
lock'Upy C5C?ll[#t [tere^uri] ireamrjj, ^t^f^»? [tarpin] tnrpetiiiiiey ^^*ffit^l,
C^*t^ [tarpolin, terpol] tarpanliney etc.
English [g, n, ra] are retained. Final [g] sometimes, and in a few
words final [m], become [n] in folk- Bengali (this is independent of the
same change which is observable in spoken English of the uneducated
classes) : €,g.y t<iltf^ [e/takin] nfockings^ vil^ft [aektini] working as a
substitute < acting -^-^ I », J^sf [tain] time (ef, ^f^^^, '^Ttf^, [apig,
ttpin, apim] opinm, from Perso-Arabic « afyum »),
The affricates ckj [tj, dg] regularly become 5, ^ ^] in Bengali :
ftf^fii [cfimni] chimney y ^ L^^-JS] In East Bengali, these as
usual become [ts, dzl.
390. The Liquids. The equivalent of the English 'clear' and 'dark'
I [1, t] is the q [1] of Bengali, the velarised 'dark' [i] being ignored.
The r sound of South English is a fricative, [j], and in Scots English it is
a trilled sound. It becomes the ordinary trilled or flapped ^ [r] in Bengali,
[r] is commonly dropped before [t, 4] = English alveolar d"] : e.g.,
?rt§ [la:t] lord,C^ [bo:(J] board] also after consonants. Its retention in
Bengali is due to a great extent to a spelling pronunciation of English.
391. The Fricatives. The English is an unvoiced sound, [h], and it
is altered to the voiced ^ [fi] in Bengali: e,g,, ^ttc^ [fiaikot] High Court,
[s] and [/] of English fall together in Bengali as ^5 ^ [/j ; [s^] normally
becomes I [Jt], but the pronunciation [sfc] is also heard, and occasionally
we meet with the spelling ^ in an attempt to be more faithfui to the
English original (cf* the recent Devanftgarl ligature ie=« st »).
THE ENGLISH FRICATIVES IN BENGALI
643
[z] and [5] become ^ [^] in naturalised words, e,^,, [^ebra]
zeira, ^[jgulu] Zulu, CWlT-C^^l [me^ar gelaj] measure glass^ etc., but
the [z] sound is often heard. This [^] becomes [dz^ z]> as usual^ in East
Bengali.
The equivalent of the unvoiced spirant th \_&], as in thin [^m], is the
aspirate ^ e,g,y f^^fC^^^ [thiejar] theatre. The voiced dental spirant
[8], as in then [3sn], regularly becomes the dental stop W [d]. We would
expect consistency in this matter by meeting with «f [dfi] for [8], which is
the regular Marathi and Gujarat! substitute for the English sound : but as
in the case of ^ [th] and ^ [g], unvoiced aspirate and voiced stop, for the
spirants [x, 9.] of Persian (see snpra^ pp. 572, 599, 600), the voiced spirant
becomes a mere stop. Hindustani agrees with Bengali in employing [th]
for [d] and [d] for [3].
The unvoiced denti-labial spirant [f] is written ^ « ph » in Bengali,
with its three-fold pronunciation of [ph, f, f]. Intervocally and finally,
the sound tends to become a mere stop [p] : e.g,, '^Tff'I'T [dpi/] office, 5t*f
[fia:p] half.
The treatment in Bengali of the voiced denti-labial spirant [v] of
English shows how recent the spirant pronunciation of v» « bh » is in the
language. (See supra, pp. 44*2, 443), During the first half of the 19th
century, English [v] is ordinarily represented by ^ [b] : whereas at
the present day it is invariably ^ = [bfi, t>, v]. In the Portuguese loan-
words in Bengali, we have only <[ [b] (see p. 631) ; and in the Roman-
Bengali of Padre Assumpgam, in the early part of the 18th century, we
have « ph » for ^, and « bh » for ^, never « f, v ». So long as the modern
spirant value of ^» « bh » did not develop, the stop ^ « b » was used for the
foreign denti-labial or bilabial spirant as its nearest equivalent in Bengali
(cf. also p. 616, for treatment of Persian « w, v » in BengaH). We have
typical early 19th century English loan-words and names like the following :
f^'^ftpT «bisubiylbs» Vesuvius i ^f«i% « barnis » varnish; '^^'^
« g&barnftr, gib&rn&r » governor-, ^C^*^ « baikaunt » viscount; ^f^^
* birjil » Virgil ; •fC^^^ « n&bemb&r » November, etc., etc. It seems that the
spirant pronunciation of « bh » became established (at least among certain
644
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VIII
speakers of the Standard Colloquial) during the middle of the 19th century :
in the Ilutdm Pemcar Naksa (18(52), ^ is used in transcribing^ some
English words, e.g.y ^ttf^' « draibhiri > drivitig, t*f^^TC^*^ « insalbhenfc »
insolvent^ f^(^fqt«?>i*i « sibhilijesin * civilistdiony C^T®^^ « skebhenj&r »
scav€7ifferj ^o^T^RT « bh&l&mnfts » volffmiaoua, etc., but ^ also is used. We see
that ^ «b» for [vj is almost the rule in the first quarter or first third of the
19th century, but from the second half ^ « bh » is seen to be coming into
prominence : but the ^ « b » tradition holds its ground well on tow^ards the
end of the 19th century : thus spellings like |Ft^^ « Klaib » C/iir, ^4VS^
« b&rnSkular » vernacular^ ^t^>T^(t)^ * baisray, -r^y » xicmiif^ ff^ « bib&r »
hearer {the animal), ^f^^f « K4lbin » Colviuy 1%C^ff^^ « Biktdriya* Victoria,
^^^^ « P&bt&n » Dovelou, flft^tJT « Tribiliyau » Trerebfan, ^^^^T
« Bil&ntin-Dubal » Valentin Baval^ « B<eyar » Voftairc,
« Binsent » etc., are found, among hundreds of similar names and words,
in Bengali literature and periodicals of the second half of the 19th
century.
The spirant pronunciation, however, seems to be spreading now.
Beames remarked in his Bengali Grammar (Oxford, 1891) : ^it takes
a Bengali boy many years' training before he can pronounce the English
Vy and many never attain to it Some Bengali writers have conceived
the erroneous idea that the European v corresponds to their ^« bh^ thus they
transliterate s6bha 'an assembly' as shova, which is absurd' (p. 9).
But there cannot be any doubt that the transliteration « shova » indicates a
spirant pronunciation, [Jova, Joca] : the spirant in extremely quick
articulation loses its friction and so disappears. Thus, the word (?»rN
« aobhS pronounced [/ova, /oi?a], results in [/oa], and even [Jo:], in
Calcutta, as in CHM^^t^ > '^'^^ [/obfiaba^ar > /o(i3)abaj^ar >
/o:ba^ar] name of a quarter in Calcutta toion (see p. 40i5 — [wa:, oa] becomes
[o:] in Bengali). Present day transcriptions like « Avilash, Amitava,
Biva, Prova, Shulov, Durlov, Vishma, Vramar » and even « Vadraloo-ue »
gentry and « Mohavarot » for « Abhiiash, Amitabha, Bibha (Vibha^ Prabha
Sulabb^, Durlabh^, Bhisma, Bhramar^, Bhadra-lok^, Mahabharat^ ,
etc. have a real basis on the pronunciation.
THE ENGLISH SEMIVOWELS : WORD LIST 645
392, The Semivowels ^, ic = [j, w] of English.
The palatal semivowel is always dropped before [i], e,g,y \5t^^
[daig klinig] Dyeing and Cleaning^ in Calcutta shop signs ; and it
becomes a full vowel, [i], before the other vowels. Intervoeally and at
the end of a syllable, it is changed to ^ [g].
[w] is dropped before [u, o]. Before [i], it becomes [u | ; and before
the other vowels, it is lowered to [5]^ written «oy ». E,g,, ^^^tf^^I
[udi-, ufc-pen/il] iruod pencil ; [u:l] 2VOol ; the word woman is ordinarily
pronounced ^sfJt^? [omten] ; [«i:l] 2vil/ ; c^«T^^ [reloel raihmy ;
^^J^S^T^f [oar^^oarth] Wofdmodh. For an attempt to represent the
[w] (as well as the [v]) sound of English by the letter ? « b », see
pp. 534, 535.
The usual consonant changes — voicing, unvoicing, elision, metathesis
etc.^ are present in the English loan-words.
Typical Naturalised English Words.
393. Below are given some common English words naturalised in
Bengali. The phonological alteration in most eases is plain, but in some
instances they are complicated, through folk-etymology. Extreme folk-
forms are often very widely removed from the original.
'SOsi-gj^^f, .c^sTS [oel-k(e)bt(h)] oiUch^tlt \ [ciut], earlier ^§ [out]
fi/^if; ^tf*f^, ^f^^ [ap(h)i/] office [apol] fl^y^; ^srf^t^ [ardali]
orderl// (?wh//) ; ^t^^«1 [astabol] do die, d. Perso-Arab. istabal », from
Greek from Latin ; l^t>[-cN [inkom-, igkam-tekjo] income-faj' ; tf^
[incfi] inc// ; tcsf^C^^t^, [inejpektar, -tor] inspector ; ^hV^ [i/tjempo]
sfamp; t^(t)^ Vh'^h^, ^afion; [i/timar] steanter ; [ijkul]
school; Itr^i ^ [i/tit, i/t(i)nt] dreef; ^ [i/til-pen] sfeel^
p^m; tfer?, t>?r^l%? [i/p(0i'^5] n^^'ijig {(^oil) ) ^5f^ [igol] eagle,
toill', ^^f^21 [ud-, utpeu/il] icooi pencil) ;£)^f^f^, ^flff^*f5f,
^^f^f^*fJ? [egJSibipn, ekji-, ekjgi-] exhibition ; tfi^t^tftsr [egj§amin] emmine
— examinatioa', cil^^ [ektini, icktini] acting ^-^^^ nominal affix
cii^Tf?r^, tftf^v ^-mx [earig, iarig, iarrig] earring ; ^#f^,
til«iCi?^, <^|5^^^^ [enfcanjo, enten/o, entrens] enirance = matricvlation
646
PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VlII
e^rohiiaation ; c£iltf^ [ejtakin] stockings ; ^^rf^R, -C^ [oarin, -ren] warrant
{legal) ; "^Z^X [oetig rum] waiting room ;
-^flM [kornel] colonel-, older ^tf^ [kopi, kapi] cop/j \ ^
as in ^t^-t? [kttk-ijk(u)ru] cork-screw ; ^ [ka:r] cord ; ^P^,
[komphat, -phot] t"0/y/(9r/J^/, '^car/ /br the neck-, ^t^fil5T [karni/] cornice;
<Fft^, older ^C^^ [karen/i, korenj^i] curreacif \ <^w^<< [kolektor]
coUector ; ^•Tf^^T [kuinain] quinine ; ^^C^I^T [kuil pen] yweV/ pea ;
[kelttj] [ko:t] coaf C^t§, [ko:t, kort] covrt; C^T^f?,
[koc^man, kocfuan] coachman^ showinsf vocalisation of the [m] ;
C^ygft^, ^rt^t^, [kegaru, ka»-, ka-] kangaroo, fallen in line with
native words lik [goru] caiile, LfcLJSaru] porcupine, etc.;
C^^, older ^sjt^ [kear, kae:r] e^/^' ; C^?t^ [kera/in] keromie oih,
C^t^^ [kompani] Compani/, the End India Company > the English
goveriuneut ; C^^f^ [koujuli] counsel, adrocate, with native -t, « -i, -I »
affix; ^tfe [khati] cointtrj/ = countrfj-liqifor {t), showing aspiration
of the guttural; ^fi?, C^fs [gonj^i, genfsi] gin^rnsefj, undervest] ^fl^,
earlier c^tk [gaun, gounj guivn\ ^^if [garod] ^wari, lock^np-, 5tti:#^
[garjgen] ^//^/'rf/^/M; ^tt^, [ga(r)tar] ^«r/^/^; f^ff^p^^ [girimento]
with aphesis of a- ; CRt^, older 5Tt^ [cfear, cja-r] chair:
[^urut] cheroof, from the Tamil « ^uruttu » ; ^tW^W«1 [JS&drel] general >
bigyhvge] C6^^ Meret] chariot, large coach-, f^^RT^^ [^5™najtik], also
f^^srft^ [fSibnaJtik] gymnastics',
§^ [turni, torni < ^atorni, atorni] attorney, with aphesis of
a-, and change of [o] to [u] (see p. 398) : [tomtom] tandem, a
folk alteration ; §5^^ [tofiorom] term with intrusive [fio] through analogy of
Perso-Arabic forms like 3Jf?J^ [mofiorom], Ctt^^ [JoRorot], etc.; ^f^I
l^tali] (i) tile [ < tail], by metathesis, (ii) traivley [of an electric tram) ;
^f^^, ISf^'l [fcikit, tiki^, also tfg^fe [tikot] ticket ; iSf^ [tipin] tiffin ;
fe^^, i^^t^ [^ig(k)^ar, tin^ar] tincture-, C^, ^ft^ [tek/o, taek Jo] ;
|»t [tu:l] ; <^f^ [tebil] table-, [telipho] ?5^/tfjo^(?we>, ^nasalisa-
tion brought in by the influence of ^ [phu:] hloioing; fd^^^n]
dozen-, ^5^^ [dobol] double; v5tt^«^> v5lW? [4aimon, ^c^emon] diamond
pattern on jewellery, with final consonant group simplified ; ^t^1^ [(Joktor]
TYPICAL ENGLISH LOAN-WORDS IN BENGALI 647
also J\5t^ [4aktDr] doctor ; ^5^, also a receut vStC^ [gambol, 4ambel]
dmnb-belh {Jor exereixe) ; CSt^. fet^T [deputi, (^ipti] depiif// = d'-pi'ti/
magiitrate ; cm, [^ejka, .'ek jo] desk, showing metathesis ;
'St^Tlf'H [tarpolin] iai-panUne, also cait^l, fet^l, C5^1?I [trepol,
tripol, terpol] ; ^^flJR [tarpin] beside ^T^fis [tarpinj turpentine; C^t^Sf,
C15t?»M [toroggo, torog, torog] ^/vo<y{-, box ; f'JC^^t^ [thietar] ;
C<nft^ [dera^] from [*dra:z] drair<-r, r/icif of dnuvers -j^cm^ [nobfiembar] ,
' older [nobembar] Noreiiiln'r ; J^^? nombor] numher; ^ [ni:t] neft,
the [i:] for [s] is exceptional ; [nutij] notice, cf . •'jj^lil below : a
vulgar ^ [lutij] with [1] for [n] is also found ;
•fel [pO:n] from [*p3n4] pound {in the paper trade) ; *|5!^(T)5l [pola-
stora, -tara] plaster; ■>\p^ [panji] pinvace: connection with «fttt « pani »
n-ater suggested by folk-etymology?; ftf^ll ^ [palil] /f*^'*/' ; ft^^l^,
ft^t^, f'lStTt^, ftK^ [pi/Sbo<'. pifSbot, pi^-bod, pi^bot] ^fl*('e-io«rrf,
based on a form like [*pe/bord < pheis(/)boy/ : s^ > s > / > ^, ^1 ;
^ [pu:t] pit (/// tailor^ ,„>'„siir>-) ; ^X, ^\ [putig, pudig] ptittff (in
repairing pi as^) (influenced by pudding ?) ; [pull/] ^;o/w, exceptional
ease of Vowel Harmony changing [o] to [u] ; so [pulti/] poultice;
C'l'^t^R [pentulen] pa ,dalooH{x) ; ^TC^mt*! [photogerap] photograph;
[phut] feet, fit ; f^, beside <^^, C^'- [phiton, phetin, phetig] large
carriage, p}imtmi;f%, [phlu:t, phulut] C¥5f, also occasionally
[phe:I, pheil]/«//; [pMan] .A'^*'*"; 'ft'^ [papar] po>'Pfr {legal
term) : ef the common Bengali *ttf5, « p$pM, pipir^ » '-ound
irafera of Kpieed gram or puhe pante (parpata); [boglof] hnekleit;
^% fbogi] huggi/; ^fs [bodi] I)odice, with exceptional loss of final [s] ;
^^^^ [bor^ai/] bourgeois {ti/pe); ^V^, hy metathesis ^t^ [bak/a, ba/ko]
ioar; ^tf<»t [barnij^ w;w«// ; ^t^jpTfJl [baijman] rice-mn, meeianic; ^
[bibor] ifflw; ^ [buru/] /y/w^ ; [bulu' i//'<? (dye); Clf<(» [benc[i]
dm-/^; C^C^mnl [belestora] blister {medical), cf. tsj^-W [palastara] above;
?Tt^5I [ketombol] i«« and ball (see p. 532); [bfiijgit] ^oc/o?'.«
/ec ; J(i^ [moton] ^/iK^offl ; JltSf^ beside Jf^f^f^ [margi^, morgi^] mortgage;
C^l^, l-y^^ [mse^iitar, ma-] magistrate; s|JtC^«^(^), amc^t^ [maejfeen-
ttt(r), mse^en^ar] jwa^^w^a (>e<?),with intrusive final [r]; iltiUlN [manoar]
648 PHONOLOGY : CHAPTER VIII
mano'ivar, hattleship \ J^'^f^^ [markin] Anferlca^i, with loss of initial [a]
[omsrikan] ; sftlt^, t'^Ttl^, [ma/tar, ms/tor, majtor] waster, teacher )
rai ^ f ^ f>i ^^ [miunij^pal(})ti] wuiiidpaJiiu (see p. 216); OT, [rnerm,
mserm] European ladf/ < nfa\iuiy mafhtttf ] tr^^ [motor] motor [mou/o],
influenced by the native word [motor] pea ; ^t^^ig [mamlet] oweletff,
with prothetic [m] ;
^t^^^l [rajkelj rancal ; f^Pl^, f^f^^ [ripit, ribit] rIvH ; f^C11§, f^Ht^
[ripot, riport] /(^w/; f^^^^t^ [ribfiolbar, -i5ol-] revolver] f^fi|^^, beside
firfiR^, ^^51 [rijibfiar, rijibor] receiver {of properiif) ; a^^lt^t [re^Se/tari]
register, registered; c^t^ [ro:d] roz^?z;/, ^5 ^/ a policeman : change of [n] to
nasalisation of vowel ; ^tf^*f [rabi/] ruhhish ;
^^^^ [I^JS^D^u/, rojfgoncfuj] lozenges (meets), influence of
native root ^ « cus » s?/rty and peculiar chancre of [1] to [r] in the
alternative form ; ^f^J? [lonthon] lantern, lanihorn ; cjjf^ [lompo,
liBmpo] lampi [Ia:t] lot {of goods)] ^Tf^ [la:t] lord, governor of
province; f^^t^ [libar] [itifanti/e) liver, also Xf^'^'^ [nibor] ; C^^fS for (?rt^
[lo:t < no:t] note {moiieij)^ showing vulgar change of [n] to [1] \ so ^|§»t
[luti/l notice; ^It'C^ [Iseg bo:t] long boat {attached to a steamer) =^ satellite.
^'^•{ [jomon] summons {law)j influenced by « s&m&n^ » Gtjrf
^Z^fffA; *tt^ [/crj^] wi?ido2o sash, also a form with intrusive [r], »tt^'', 'Tt^
[Jcrr/i]; ^ftiq, [^id] seal; f»R:^g, [Jilet, jelet] s/^/^; ^f^l, ^rfiRl
[jop(h)ina] syb-poena, with exceptional aspiration ; >f^, ^ [job, Jab] sub,
in words like [Jj>bJ5oj5] sub-judge, [/obdeputi] sub-depntf/
etc.; t^^^^^, through initial stress fil^j:^§ [Jigaret, Jigret] cigarette;
(?ff^^ [/emi^] chemise; (TT^Sl [/o^a], beside a vulgar C^^T^ [A^ta] soda.
[fiondor] hundred-iceight (seep. 641); [Rci:p] half: ^^tl^5
[fiap/aid] offside, in game of foot-fall, with prothetic [fi] ; [fiibru]
Hehreiv; ^IZ^f^^K'f) [&armonia(m)] harnionium, with vulgar dropping of
final [m] ; fishing wheel; Q^, ^ [fi^ert] hat; etc., etc.
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