476 NOTES. OF THE QUARTER. THE STUDENT'S GUJARATI GRAMMAR. By G. P. TAYLOR, M.A., B.D. Irish Presbyterian Mission, Gujarat. The author of this work states in his Preface that he publishes it in the hope of providing a manual that will exhibit the main facts and principles of Gujarati Grammar in a form intelligible to anyone of average English education, and that his constant endeavour has been to secure accuracy and simplicity, not novelty. The book is specially addressed to those who are in want of a grammar to read before going to the country of which Gujarati is the vernacular language, Mr. Taylor must excuse us when, from a practical knowledge of Gujarati extending over many years, we are of opinion that in the matter of simplicity he has entirely failed in his object, and that, so far from enabling a beginner to study the language without the aid of a native munshi, the former would, in the generality of cases, be utterly bewildered and lose himself in the maze of infinitesimal hair-splitting dis- tinctions in form which the author has provided for the assimilation of the unaccustomed student, and would be apt to despair of ever acquiring a tongue placed before him in such an uninviting and portentous shape. The book is really more of the nature of a philological analysis of the Gujarati language, useful to advanced scholars, than a grammar to be put into the hands of beginners. Other- wise, with the exception of an absence of allusion to words and idiomatical expressions peculiar to different parts of the country in which Gujarati is spoken, for it must be remembered that its range is from far to the north of Ahmadabad throughout the P.eninsula of Kathiavar well down to the south near Bombay, the work is learned, and the analysis thoroughly and conscientiously worked out. Before proceeding to offer a few remarks on the grammar itself, it will be as well to point out for the benefit of the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. INSEAD, on 14 Sep 2018 at 14:53:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0035869X00144909 KOTICES OF BOOKS. 477 Surat Mission Press that sufficient distinction is not made in the type between the letter sa (y) and the syllable rd (\l), which are thus apt to be mistaken for each other. It should also be noticed that in ordinary Grujarati hand- writing, although the characters used are much the same as those of the printed type, a line is drawn along the page and the letters are written underneath. This has the advantage of keeping the lines of writing tolerably even, and of enabling similar letters to be distinguished from each other, e.g. V dha and ^ gha, the former being partly above the line and the latter below it. Another respect in which the written differs from the printed character is that the former does not follow the practice of the Devanagari in placing i (("") before the letter after which it is pro- nounced, or in affixing r () above the letter before which it comes: for instance, the word visarg in page 9, line 1, printed fan»i, would in manuscript be cQ^l^l. This symbol "visarg" is seldom or never used in the written character, and it would only be a pedantic purist who would think of writing for pain (at the end of para. 5) the word % ',^\ ; it would be simply ?>t, for, pace the author, the visarg has no audible sound at all, and the word would be pronounced in English simply as dookh. As the Hunterian system of transliteration of Oriental letters has been finally adopted, it is a pity that it has not been strictly adhered to in this book. Passing on to the rules laid down for the gender of nouns—it is admitted that the gender can be learned only through constant practice, but there is more in the matter than this. A noun considered feminine in Ahmadabad may be masculine in Surat and neuter in Kathiavar (Kattywar), and vice versd. A good deal depends on whether the origin of the word was Persian (or Hindustani) or Sanskrit (or one of the dialects descended from the latter), the rule in some parts of the country being that the gender in Gujarati Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. INSEAD, on 14 Sep 2018 at 14:53:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0035869X00144909 478 NOTES OP THE QUARTER. should follow that of the original language, and in others that it should be that assigned to it by common custom. The general rules laid down for distinguishing gender are, with this exception, correct, but some of the distinctions drawn are unnecessarily fine: for instance, it would have been far simpler to omit the exceptions to the femininity of nouns ending in i (fc/~) in para. 12, with the remark that those thus ending, when belonging to individuals evidently of the male sex, should be treated as masculine, notwith- standing their feminine termination. Another instance of the hair-splitting, so puzzling and laboured to beginners, indulged in by the author is in para. 13, where it is said that should an inanimate object have a name ending in a*U or (3, and an object of the like kind a name ending in (/, the former is generally the larger, stronger, coarser of the two, and the latter the smaller, weaker, finer. This is in reality by no means the case. In one of the instances given, m's "a cart," »ni\ "a carriage," the latter may be a heavy clumsy cart with wooden wheel tires, and the former a light carriage on springs, the gender used depend- ing simply on the speaker's fancy. Among the different words used for the masculine and feminine of the noun representing the same person we notice 4«-*MI, given as "a bride," the feminine of ^U, "a bridegroom," but the former really means a virgin, although applied to a bride; again,^i «v»ii and O>\\ <>*ii, which follow the Hindustani, and are commonly used, viz. sv^l */£i and as well as the variations in the inflected cases of £1131, such as ?Ti£i«T for ^i§}. The definitions of the various tenses and parts of verbs appear to be unnecessarily complicated for beginners, although they may be linguistically correct. It is advisable to warn the student that he will in ordinary handwriting not find inserted in the past tenses the ^, (ye), carefully used by the author: for instance, *U|, chadyo "he rose," would be so written, and not aU'a*u > as in this grammar. The distinction between the 1st and 2nd perfect participles drawn in the note on page 51 is without a difference, that formed with an inserted 61 (I), being more or less frequent in different parts of the country, and being specially common in Kathiavar, where such words as *fl
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