Sales catalogue: Luzac's

Date:: July-Sepember 1922

Reference:: WA/HMM/CM/Sal/41/3

Credit: Sales catalogue: Luzac's. Source: Wellcome Collection.

7/44 page 41

${ anton on “the pee ‘ef “Magaahi Hels Se 27-45), which has en Pedal published by Mr. Humphrey Milford from the Oxford University . : ‘Until the whole work is issued it is impossible to. give an adequate and we may therefore restrict ourselves for the present to a few . peivationic. The first question that arises in the reader’s mind is: what is eant by ““ Magadhi”? Our author ig not at the outset very clear on this point, and it would have been better if he had begun by defining “ Magadhi om and its relation to the other Aryan vernaculars of India. Sometimes with - him it denotes the group of dialects represented in the inscriptions of Asoka, ‘sometimes a hypothetical speech-area of still wider extent, and some-— times the Magadhi of the grammarians. “In the third century B.C.,” he z remarks on pp. 6-7, “the greater part of India came under both political and religious unity. MAgadhi as the symbol of this unity spread from the - Bay- of Bengal to the North- ‘Western Frontier.” This is highly debatable. - Asoka never imposed complete political unity on the whole of his empire, and ‘he admits that he tolerated great diversity in religion; and the ©MaAgadhi” of his Edicts, which was “‘ the symbol of this unity,” was really an official dialect of uncertain ‘origin, locally varied. “‘Its literary use in- Pali ”{p. 7). 1is).a phrase implying that Pali was, as Buddhist tradition asserts, a Magadhi dialect; but the evidence for this given on pp. 18, 28-30, i esis, singularly ‘inadequate. This fundamental obscurity is increased by the. somewhat difficult style of our author: what are we for example to under- stand by a sentence like “the literary Prakrts...kept up their remote ~ connection with the Dési element through Apabhramsa disintegration 2 Gp: ee What is meant by the a similarity between Dravidian Janguage and race’ (pp. 6)? is it to be taken to imply, as it seems to imply, that there is only one. race speaking Dravidian language?‘ A Roman of the epoch of Plato” (p. 8} of the pen that call for correction, for example, ‘ School of Oriental Society ”’ (p. 16), “ Buddhaghosa on Attakatha’” for “ Buddhaghosa’s Atthakatha ” (p. 18), ‘ ‘prakrto’ apabhramsah ” (p. 21, with a wrong reference), “ Hema- _ dandra” (p. 34), “ Varuruci” (p.. 35), “‘ Devaddhi” (p. 44), ‘ Bultzsch ”’ _(p. 51), and so forth. Nevertheless the book seems likely to be useful, from the amount of digested information and references that it contains, and the coe part bears. honourable testimony to the learning and diligence of its writer . ; iyi : ie ie ri : i { j nei Ptiniitive Speech, Part L A Stay in Ricicen Phonetics. By the aah ae oe W. A, Crabtree. London (S.P.C.K.). 1922. | so sa We regret ‘to see so much industry, learning and ingenuity employed to fag nae SO} little purpose as, unfortunately, we find to be the case in the work before ve us. The author appears to be obsessed by two ideas: that Luganda is the eel most primitive form of Bantu now available for comparison, and that the se origin of Bantu speech is to be sought in Sumerian. We are aware that good authorities admit the possibility of some connection in the latter case; fe i but such connection can scarcely be proved by Mr. Crabtree’s methods—of which — ao it is sufficient to say that he first postulates (without adducing a shred of tt hee evidence) a primitive form LIG for the LI prefix and then says that LiG:is.)> produced “ by metathesis’? from YIL. Again: “ Bantu YIG, YIN, tooth, _ corresponds to sum. gug; tooth.” YIN may be the root underlying the various — _ forms i-zinyo, dzino, jino, 'lino, ete., but it is not easy to deduce YIG from them, though it may be represented by the totally - distinct word gego—pro-. -perly “ molar,” though in some languages used for “ tooth” in general. But — both words ford. > Lem. have, phonetically the same origin. Omukazi, mosali and similar words for “‘ woman’ (more reasonably assigned by Meinhof to . Proto-Bantu stem Kali “ female ”*) are derived from Sala “ cut’? (for the dible explanation of this etymology see p. 29), and Sala is equated with$

Sales catalogue: Luzac's

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