A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India v1.c4.337.4

v1.c4.337.4

These poems, written three hundred years ago, exhibit a perfectly settled modern language, partly analytical and partly synthetical, but the analytical element of which has been so long in use as to have already undergone modifications of a secondary and even tertiary character. It retains unchanged forms which are older than the oldest Bengali or Hindi, and others which can only be compared with Bengali forms of three centuries ago, but which have long since died out from that language. Bidyapati, the contemporary of Upendro, writes, as we have seen, in a language more akin to Hindi than to modern Bengali. At a period when Oriya was already a fixed and settled language Bengali did not exist; the inhabitants of Bengal spoke a vast variety of corrupt forms of eastern Hindi. It is not till quite recent times that we find anything that can be with propriety called the Bengali language.