]X All these factors have combined to ma। Bengali Language as it stands today so different from what it was in the fifteenth century and before it that they cannot both be called the same language. This ide gulf between the languages of Old and New Bengal has been sought to be bridged over by Bengali scholars by giving such a wide and general conno tation to the Bengali Language', that it can be com prehended better by the Geographer than by the phi }ologist. In its Geographical sense it has been applied to mean not only all the different speeches that are caurrent in North, South, East and West Bengal, owever different they are in morphology, but it has been extended also to the languages of Assam, Orissa and Mithila. In fact Dr. S. K. Chatterjee has been unable to decide which of the two languages Viz. Assamese and Oriya, has the greatest sense of eloseness " with Bengali ( vide pages 94 and 17 of Origin and Deve lopment of the Bengali language'. ) The language of Old Bengalis surviving in the Assamese, being super seded in Bengal by the new languageIt is to make up to this wide difference between the two languages of Bengal, that Bengali writers have been forced to call Assamese and Bengali as one language or to invent such terms as ‘Bengali-Assamese' , ‘'Old Bengali”, Proto Bengali etc . The following pages lo not pretend to exhaust the study of the Assamese language. There are many words in it whose origins are still obscure. The bool
