103

HERBERThNZL, A Grammar of P&to, A descriptive stzcdy of

tke hdect of Kandahar, Afghanistan. Washington D.C. (Amer-
ican Council of learned Societies), 1955, III + 169 pp.
Price $2.00
of tix three main regional standard dialects of Pashto, viz. that of
Peshakar (Pakistan), that of eastern Afghanistan, and the “southern”
dialect of Kandahar, only the first has become well-known in Western-
Europe owing to the large number of British manuals and readers
mostly written by army officers. These include several works of the
pioneer 1ingui::t Major H. G. Raverty, who commenced this study
when a young man in !853. For the two dialects of Afghanistan the
sole grammatical descriptions mentioned by Penzl are written in the
native language. Therefore Penzl’s book, which gives a description
of the Kandahar dialect based on first-hand observation in Kan-
dahar and work with informants, is most welcome.
In the Preface it is stated that “this grammar is not primarily
intended to demonstrate an application of descriptive technique
to a modem Oriental lan;;uage, but rather to facilitate instruction
in it by the understanding of its structure”, and that it was not
“considered desirable to restrict the description to one oral style
only and to leave out all references to other types of Pashto and other
descriptions”. In the introductory pages the author gives, indeed, a
succinct and clear account of the main types of Pashto on both sides
of the frontier, with references to modern grammars and text-books.
For the “East,em” and the Kandahar types of Afghanistan Pashto,
however, no mention is made of such older descriptions as “The
F’uShto Manual” by Major H. G. Raverty (London 1890). As there
is twice a brief reference to &din’s “Kratkij Afgano-Russkij Slo-
var’ (Moscow 1950), one wonders why K. A. Lebedev’s “Grammatika
jazyka puStu” (Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo Instituta Vostokovedenija,
Moscow 1945, 181 pp.) is completely ignored.
The author rightly gives the language in Roman script. :He uses
a. personal transcription system which avoids diacritics by introdu-
cing combinations of Latin letters for simple values (except where
ilt seemed desirable to indicate the original Arabic orthography).
The prevalence of practical considerations is unobjectionable in a
book that is intended to be a first introduction into this language.
It is expressly stated that the spelling na, ee, oo for the long vowels
“does not imply any phonemic interpretation” (2.2). ~Thus Penzl
writes a5zzuo1“son’s wife”’ for R&V,shkhwd “noise” for b~al, sh@.zz
,psix” for Spa,&zvactsh“dry” for’&. For spractical purposes this sys-
tem would seem quite satisfactory,
The grammatical descziption is succinct and clear. The last two
chapters contain two short sample texts with interlinear translation
and grammatical notes, and a glossary of 16 pages. The book gives
a good introduction to the language and will no doubt prove useful
for university courses as well as for individual study.

F. 3. J. KUIPER

‘I It ‘1
B. EMENEAU, Kolami. A Dravidian uqyage, university
l

M.
of California Press, Los Angeles 1955 (University of California
Publications in Linguistics, vol. 12), XVI + 302 pp. Price
$3.00.
For a long time our knowledge of the Dravidian languages has been
restricted to the four southern ones with their rich and old literatures,
viz. Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. Of these Tamil was
already well-known in the eighteenth century. Among the fruits of
these early Tamil studies the description of the literary High Tamil
by the brilliant Jesuite father Beschi and the first dictionary publii;hed
in 1779 by the Lutheran Missionaries Fabricius and Breithaupt desczve
special mention. In the beginning of the 19th century grammars of
the three other languages followed. As a result of it Caldwell’s Compa-
rative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages
(1st ed. 1856) was nearly exclusively based on these languages, The
large group of northern ‘languages spoken by uncivilized and, partly
at least, small tribes remained practically unknown till the beginning
of the 20st century. The publication in 1904 of the 4th volume of the
Linguistic Survey of India marked a milestone in the history of Dra-
viciian linguistics, because it presented for the first time a series ef
grammatical descriptions with sample texts of languages about which
very little had been known till then, while an attempt was made to
determine the exact relationship of the Dravidian languages among
each other. For many dialects, it is true, the materials upon which the
author of this volume, Sten Konow, had to base his descriptions were