Dutt, Romesh Chunder: The literature of Bengal: being an attempt to trace the progress of the national mind in its various aspects, as reflected in the nation’s literature from the earliest times to the present day ; with copious extracts from the best writers (Calcutta, 1877)

JAYADEVk GOSWAMI. 43 ^

In these eight lines there aife only four words whictf
are no,t Sanskrit—c^TT, ^Nw, and Off*^- All the
other words are pure Sanskrit, though some of them
have Bengali terminations. Even the four words above
mentioned are very nearly connected with, and are imme-
' diately derived 'from,' Sanskrit roots.

The Aswin number has no poetry, and we therefore
turn to tie J£artik number. The poem on <fl^ begins
thus:— •

In these lines only two words and fa'wfsr are

not Sanskrit, besides Ttfa which is not Sanskrit,
being Sanskrit. The terminations are BtDgali of course.

In the seventeen lines which we have quoted above,
there are only six or seven words which are not Sanskrit,
and these lines are from ordinary Magazine poetry select-
ed at random. We may go over the entire range of pur
literature previous to the 19th century, without finding
.any seventeen consecutive lines in which there are only
six non-Sanskrit words. Kirtibas, Kasi Ram Das,
Makunda Ram, Bharat Chandra, all wrote in colloquial
Bengali. *

If we progress in this direction a century longer,
the Bengali language will be distinguishable from the
Sanskrit only by the case terminations, and mood and
tense terminations, which rarely or never change. It