The History of the Bengali Language

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One essential requirements of a scientific procedure in an investigation of this sort, I have steadily kept in view. The ethnic as well as the social history of a people or group of people must corroborate and light up the linguistic history, if the latter is to be rescued from the realm of prehistoric romance to which the story of philological origins, as so often told, must be however reluctantly, assigned by the critical or scientific historian of to-day. One or two incidental results of my application of this anthropological test may be here mentioned.