Old English Morphology and Indo-European

About the Book In the closing of the 18th century, the foundation of the science of Comparative Philology had been laid by the discovery of Sanskrit to the Europeans. The science has been fully developed in course of less than two centuries and now it has been known that major European languages and Sanskrit along with the latter's derivative languages belong to the same family, called Indo-European or Indo-Germanic.

As a corollary of this discovery, it is believed that the English language belongs to the same stock with Sanskrit, the eldest surviving sister in the Indo-European family. It is very easy to believe, is but very difficult to linguistically prove. This herculean task has been performed by Dr. B.K Ray in his monumental work which is now being reprinted. The erudition and scientific insight of Dr. Ray is simply are inspiring. He has not only traced the origin of various forms of English morphology-nouns and verbs, but has traced the origin and development of each and every example to different stages of the word comparing them with a dozen other language forms, and each case citing the cognates from Sanskrit. Therefore, though the subtitle of the work reads as "A Dissertation on the Origins of the English Language", it is, in fact, a very well written handbook for the study of the Comparative Indo-European Philology. For the students of Sanskrit, it is a linguistic study of their language.

The innumerable bibliographical references will initiate a student further research in the subject.

About the Author Dr. Basanta Kumar Ray, MA, B.L., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, the University of Dacca, was an educationist and a humanist. Born in February, 1883, in a sleepy hamlet near the Hardinge Bridge, over the Padma, in the district of Nadia (now in Bangladesh), he had been brought up under the inspirational guidance of his progressive minded father, Rajkumar Ray, who was a student of the Hindu College and passed his life as a teacher and Headmaster of Government High Schools in Bengal and Bihar.

Ray's brilliant academic pursuit was untimely put off because of Rajkumar's retirement. He, however, graduated with honours in English from the Presidency College at 17. Initially he did some school teaching to stave off the financial burden and took a first class in Law. A staunch nationalist, in those days, Ray was refused judicial service, inspite of his academic achievement, because of his close association with the revolutionary leader Jatindranath Mukherjee (Bagha Jatin). For the next few years, he served the Kakina Raj Estate, in North Bengal, as a Sub-Manager and Executive Superintendent. Throwing up this service, he finally did his M.A. in English from the University of Calcutta, thirteen years after his graduation.

In the same year, Ray began to teach in the Bangabasi College, Calcutta (1914-17). Three years later, he was taken into Cooch Behar Victoria College (1917-20) by Brojenctranath Seal and also served Rajshahi Govt. College for a few months (1920-21). While in the Cooch Behar College, the members of the visiting Saddler Commission (including Michael Saddler, Asutosh Mukherji and P.J. Hartog, the then Registrar of the London University) at-tended his classes and were so impressed by the brilliance of the young teacher that they gave the following glowing account of their impression in the published report: 'At the Victoria College, Cooch Behar, we had the privilege of hearing a lecture on the position of Sir Walter Scott in British fiction, a discourse so admirable in structure, diction and critical insight that it would have been received with applause by any company of European scholars' (Vol. I, p. 117). On the strength of the lecture vividly remembered by Hartog, afterwards the first Vice-Chancellor, Dacca University, Ray was appointed a lecturer in English, when the university opened its door in july,1921.

Introduction A few years ago, it would have been deemed the height of absurdity to imagine that the English and the Hindus were originally one people, speaking the same language, and clearly distinguished from other families of mankind ; and yet Comparative Philology has established this fact by evidence as clear and irresistible as that the earth revolves round the sun." So said Marsh in his lectures on the-English Language, delivered in the early sixties. In the closing years of the 18th century, the foundation of the science of Comparative Philology had been laid by the discovery of Sanskrit by European scholars-Sanskrit, eldest sister among languages, who alone remembered a relationship, of which the younger sisters had lost all recollection, and which they never suspected till their happy meeting with the former, after long years of separation and wandering in distant lands. The first founders of the science, Francis Bopp and his collaborators, had already terminated their labours, and the sum total of the philological knowledge of Marsh's day, together with the evidence to which he refers, was set forth in Schleicher's Compendium (1862), which is the next great landmark in the history of philology after Bopp's Comparative Grammar. Since that time, however, the science has made great progress, and several momentous discoveries have been made, strengthening the main conclusions, but changing the character of the evidence greatly. Finally, Brugmann has brought to a close his monumental work, Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen ', embodying the results of the researches of the new school, and standing in the same relation to the new philology as Schleicher's Compendium did to the old. Those results, which, like Verner's Law, have an obvious bearing on the history of the English language, have indeed been appropriated by all the current handbooks, but few systematic attempts have yet been made, to derive the forms of English grammar from the primitive speech, in the light of the new knowledge. No one will pretend that the character of the parent speech has yet been satisfactorily settled in all respects, or that some points will not always remain doubtful; but enough has been done to justify and encourage an attempt to prepare an intelligible account of the origins of any particular member of the Indo-Germanic family.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages