[Footnote 4: In my essay _On the Relation of Bengali to the Aryan and Aboriginal Languages of India_, published in 1848, I tried to explain these plural suffixes, such as +dig+, +gaṇa+, +jâti+, +varga+, +dala+. I had translated the last word by _band_, supposing from Wilson’s Dictionary, and from the Śabda-kalpa-druma that _dala_ could be used in the sense of band or multitude. I doubt, however, whether _dala_ is ever used in Sanskrit in that sense, and I feel certain that it was not used in that sense with sufficient frequency to account for its adoption in Bengali. Dr. Friedrich Müller, in his useful abstracts of some of the grammars discovered by the _Novara_ in her journey round the earth (1857-59), has likewise referred +dal+ to the Sanskrit +dala+, but he renders what I had in English rendered by _band_, by the German word _Band_. This can only be an accident. I meant _band_ in the sense of a band of robbers, which in German would be _Bande_. He seems to have misunderstood me, and to have taken _band_ for the German _Band_, which means a ribbon. Might +dala+ in Bengali be the Dravidian +taḷa+ or +daḷa+, a host, a crowd, which Dr. Caldwell (p. 197) mentions as a possible etymon of the pluralizing suffix in the Dravidian languages? Bengali certainly took the idea of forming its plurals by composition with words expressive of plurality from its Dravidian neighbor, and it is not impossible that in some cases it might have transferred the very word +daḷa+, crowd. This +daḷa+ and +taḷa+ appears in Tamil as _kala_ and _gala_, and as Sanskrit _k_ may in Sinhalese be represented by _v_ (+loka+ = _lova_), I thought that the plural termination used in Sinhalese after inanimate nouns might possibly be a corruption of the Tamil _kala_. Mr. Childers, however, in his able “Essay on the formation of the Plural of Neuter Nouns in Sinhalese” (_J. R. A. S._, 1874, p. 40), thinks that the Sinhalese _vala_ is a corruption of the Sanskrit +vana+, forest, an opinion which seems likewise to be held by Mr. D’Alwis (l.c. p. 48). As a case in point, in support of mv own opinion, Mr. Childers mentioned to me the Sinhalese _malvaru_, Sanskrit +mâlâ-kâra+, a wreath-maker, a gardener. In Persian both _ân_ and _hâ_ are remnants of decayed plural terminations, not collective words added to the base.] [Footnote 5: Stanislas Julien, _Exercises Pratiques_, p. 14.]