Amrita Collected Papers by A M Ghatage

SR No.: 006968
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Jitendra B Shah
Publisher: Kasturbhai Lalbhai Smarak Nidhi Ahmedabad
Total Pages: 530
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 10 MB

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that there would be greater emphasis on the analysis and study of modern Indian languages, both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian. This work is being carried on along two different lines of approach. The older historical approach continues to be cultivated with good and valuable results, while the more recent descriptive approach is being slowly but steadily developed in analysing Indian languages of all types, literary or spoken, cultivated or tribal, dialects or more wide-spread forms of speech, and socially marked different idioms. In this field, we owe to Dr. Vishwanath Prasad and Dr. Sudhakar Jha, a small linguistic survey of local and social forms of speech of the Sadar division of Manbhum and Dhalbhum areas of Bihar, which collects a good deal of interesting material including some tribal languages as well and supplies brief sketches of these dialects. An interesting attempt is made here to record the texts phonetically in a modified Devanāgarī script. We now possess, as a.. publication of the Central Government, a new basic grammar of Hindī, prepared under the supervision of a committee specially appointed for the purpose, which is in many ways an improvement on the earlier grammars of Hindi of even larger scope but, on the whole, it moves on more conservative lines and appears to neglect more recent methods of analysis. In this connection, mention may also be made of the scheme of the Ministry of Education, Government of India, to prepare a phonemic and morphemic count of major Indian languages, based on a count of one hundred thousand items selected on a random-sampling procedure. A few of these analyses are ready and others are making progress, and the information so collected will be not only useful for the purpose of inventing or improving rapid scripts or typewriters, but will also be of great value for linguistic studies and practical application of linguistics to the problems of language-teaching. A similar scheme of preparing common vocabularies of Indian languages, to judge from the two or three such bilingual lists available, appears to be not wellconceived and properly executed, and probably competent linguists will have to be consulted on this matter before acceptable results can be obtained. A number of these, on historical lines, tracing the growth of many Indian languages and dialects are prepared at different Universities, and it is highly desirable that they should be available in print for the use of interested scholars.
9. Analyses of some modern Indian languages on descriptive lines are. recently published. Kannada gets a brief and lucid description in W. Bright's work 'An outline of Colloquial Kannada' published by the Deccan College. Dr. Kelkar has published in a mimeographed form a detailed phonological and