Suniti Kumar Chatterji

"The first Bengali with a scientific insight to attack the problems of the language was the poet Rabindranath Tagore; and it is flattering for the votaries of philology, to find in one who is the greatest writer in the language, and a great poet and seer for all time, a keen philologist as well, distinguished alike by an assiduous enquiry into the facts of the language as by a scholarly appreciation of the methods and findings of the modern Western philologist. The work of Rabindranath is in the shape of a few essays (now collected in one volume) on Bengali Phonetics, Bengali Onomatopoetics, and on the Bengali noun, and on other topics, the earliest of which appeared in the early nineties, and some fresh papers appeared only several years ago. These papers may be said to have shown to the Bengali enquiring into the problems of his language the proper lines of approaching them."

"MIA and NIA languages are not, strictly speaking, derived from the language of the Rigveda or from Classical Sanskrit […] these Aryans of the eastern tracts seem to be different from the Midland or Vedic Aryans in many respects―in religious observances, in many practices, in dialect […] these Aryans were distinct from those other Aryans of the West among whom the Vedic culture grew up, distinct in dialect, in religion and in practices... The morphology of Vedic […] retains most faithfully the inflections of primitive Indo-European."