BENGALI, or GAURA, LANGUAGE, one of the five modern languages of Hindu stan, which are derived from the ancient San skrit. Its name is derived from Bang-a, the Sanskrit name of the country, with the Arabic article al suffixed; the whole being corrupted into the present form. Gaura is derived from Gaur, the name of the ancient metropolis; it is spoken by 44,624,048 British subjects, of whom about one-fourth speak also some other dialect. It extends over the regions on the lower Ganges, from Patna down to its delta, being purest in the province of Bengal and in the eastern regions. This language consists of an aboriginal basis, with which a much greater portion of Sanskrit and Pracrit has been admixed than with any one of its nates; with a considerable addition of Afghan, Persian, Arabic, Portuguese, Malay and English words. Although the Sanskrit element dominates as regards the words, the cal forms of the language differ more from the Sanskrit than the forms of the Greek, Latin, Gothic and Persian; most of the flexions of nouns and verbs having been lost, and their places being supplied by auxiliary words and by circumlocution. Notwithstanding this, it admits in the higher style many of those forms which are intelligible only to more cultivated persons. There are no forms of gender, sex being denoted by the use of qualifying terms or by different words. There are seven cases made by suffixes — nominative, accusative, mental, dative, ablative, genitive and vocative. The plural of nouns is made by suffixing dig to the genitive singular. It delights in compound words, formed especially by means of a sort of past participle; elegant Sanskrit compounds being unidiomatic. There is but one tion, whose radical is the imperative. pound tenses are made by the auxiliaries, ing to do, to be, to become. The singular and plural of verbs are often confounded; the plural with a singular noun denoting respect, the singular with the plural noun being used in speaking to inferiors. There are three simple infinitive, nfinitive, indicative, imperative; four others being periphrastic, the potential, optative, inchoative and frequentative. Any verb is j ugable negatively by the suffix to. The tem of writing is that of the devandgari of the San skrit language hut the forms of letters are more broken and twisted. B and v, however,
are written by one character, and the ters of the sounds, s, z, sh, are interchangeable.
No book written in Bengali appeared before 1500 A.D. After the settlement of Moslems in Gaur, the Voisyas and Soodras (agricultural and servile castes) began to study Persian, to gain a livelihood, and were well rewarded by the conquerors. Except the stories of Krishna's study, the rules of arithmetic in verse and a few other elementary books, the vernacular lit erature was very poor, until Rajah Krishna chandra Roy Bahadoor restored Hindoo litera ture in India, by bringing in pundits and en dowing schools. Owing to the abundance of Sanskrit books, and the prejudice of most Brahmins against the Bengali, this was neglected until 1800, when the college of Fort William was founded, and the study of Bengali was made imperative and collateral to the San skrit. Many Bengali works have since been printed at Calcutta and Serampore. The first native newspaper was published at Serampore in 1818. Considerable change has been made since in the diction and composition of this language, which continues to be enlarged and ennobled, by being capable of borrowing in definitely from the venerable Sanskrit mother. In 1913 the Bengali poet Sir Rabindra Nath Tagore received the Nobel prize in literature. Gilchrist, H. P. Forster, Carey, W. Morton, Hunter, Mohun Persaud, Tahur, Tarachand Chukruburti and Sir G. C. Haughton have pub lished Bengali English dictionaries and vocabu laries and Ram Comul Sen has translated is edi • Todd edition of Johnson's English dictionary into Bengali.
Bibliography.—Beames,
Gram mar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India);
of the Bengali Language' (Oxford 1894) ; Cust, (The Modern Languages of the East Indies) • Dutt, (The Literature of Bengal> (Calcutta 1895) ; Ganguli,