Romance group of languages, the Provençal, Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and the indications, we cannot call it history, of the origin and growth of the Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, and Sindhi.[1]
It is observable in French that there are often two forms of the same word—one ancient, the other modern. The ancient word, though often very much corrupted, invariably retains the accent on the same syllable as in the Latin. And the reason of this is plain: in the days when those words were adopted into common use by the inhabitants of Gaul, they were taken, as it were, from the lips of the Romans themselves and accentuated naturally just as the Romans accentuated them. They became current colloquially long before they were written in many instances, and could not fail to be pronounced correctly. But the modern forms of these words were resuscitated by learned men from Latin authors where they occurred, just as the Pandits do and have done with Sanskrit words. In borrowing these words the savants of later times did not know how they were pronounced, and did not care; they merely cut off the Latin termination, and pronounced the word as seemed best to themselves; as the modern and mediæval French accent differ considerably in the place of their incidence from the Latin accent, the result is that in no case does the modern
- ↑ I have placed these four languages alone, because, down to the fifteenth century, the Panjabi and Gujarati are little more than dialects of the Hindi; and the Oriya, till the time of Upendra Bhanj and Dînkrishna Dâs, has no literary existence, and we cannot tell what the spoken language was like, because poets always wrote a language of their own, having no care to keep their works on the level of the spoken dialects. The poems of the earliest Bengali writers also present very few of the grammatical peculiarities of modern Bengali; they, like Chand, and even like much later writers, Tulsi Dâs and Bihâri Lâl, resemble the writings of the Troubadours and Trouvères, in which the old synthetical languages with their array of inflections have fallen into decadence and disuse, while the analytical system of modern time has not yet obtained its full development.
