Book Reviews

Author(s): J W De Jong
Publisher: J W De Jong

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REVIEWS
nineteenth century and valuable pioneering work was done by Kellogg in his Grammar of the Hindi Language (1875), by Hoernle in The Comparative Grammar of the Gaudian (Arya-Indian) Languages (1880), and especially by Grierson in two works, Seven Grammars of the Dialects and Subdialects of the Bihari Language (1883–1887) and An Introduction to the Maithili Dialect (1 909). Unfortunately, in spite of this good start, very little further study was done on this well-prepared foundation. Aside from a small number of brief grammars meant for nonacademic use, by the end of the sixth decade of this century only two linguists had attempted a detailed description of a language in this group. One of these was S. Jha, the author of The Formation of the Maithili Language (1958), and the other was Udai Narain Tiwari, who wrote Bhojpuri Bhāsā aur Sahitya (1954) and The Origin and Development of Bhojpuri (1960). This neglect has largely been due to the fact that, except for Maithilī, hone of these languages were able to develop literary traditions in the pre-modern period. Their geographical position has meant that they have been in the past and continue to be today so overshadowed both in the spheres of literature and of politics by Standard Hindi and Urdu to the west and Bengali to the east that they have been held in disdain by their own speakers as rustic tongues unworthy of polite usage or serious attention. Even some scholars have seen them as mere variants of either Hindi or Bengali. It, therefore, was with a great deal of pleasure that Monika JordanHorstmann's book on Sadani was welcomed by those interested in Bihari languages. Since the publication of this book other grammars of Sadāni have been written in Hindi, in particular S. K. Gosvami's Nagpuri Bhāṣā (Patna: Bihār Rästrabhāṣā Parişad, 1976), but it remains the only easily available study of Sadāni in a European language. For this reason a review of the book is essential, even though unforeseen circumstances have delayed the review for several years.
The book begins with an introduction of 18 pages followed by a section each on phonology (pp. 19-40), morphophonemics (pp. 41-52), and morphology (pp. 53-104) and closes with thirty-six pages of Sadani texts and their English translations. There is also a glossary of Sadāni words (pp. 142-175), a summary of basic information about Sadani, a table giving the Kaithi script, and an excerpt from the 1961 Indian census listing mother tongues with number of speakers for each.
In her introduction the author deals with the social and historical aspect of Sadāni: its number of speakers, its location, its name, and its general linguistic relationship. She also gives a brief survey of previous work done on Sadānī and finishes with an explanation of the nature of her own study. Since she has limited herself mainly to the speech of a single Sadani speaker (p. 18), though she did have access to one other speaker, some tape recordings, and written materials, her results are naturally quite restricted. Her reliance on one person seems also to have given her the mistaken impression that "Sadani... ceases to be a still productive language" (p. 14) and that it is [being (?)] gradually replaced by Hindi, the State language of Bihar" (p. 186). In fact, Sadāni is a healthy, vigorous language with an important role to play as a lingua franca in southern Bihar (as the author also notes on pp. 181-182). In the years since this book was written Sadāni has even seen a modest literary flowering with the publication of such collections of stories, poems, and plays as Nāgpuriya (Sadāni) Sahitya (Ranchi, 1964) by P.S. Navrangi [P. S. Nowrangi), Shravan Kumar Gosvami's Dū Dair Bis Phūl (Students' Book Depot, Ranchi, 1971), and Vacandev Kumār's Ek Jhopā Nāgpuri Phül (Ranchi University, 1976). As a result of this new interest in Sadāni as a literary vehicle there is a definite tendency for speakers of Sadānī to regard it as an independent language and not as a dialect of Bhojpuri.
The treatment of both the phonology and morphophonemics is exhaustive and clear and the system of transliteration is adequate and harmonises well with the usual method of romanisation used for Standard Hindi. The chapter on morphology also is sound, though the explanations are all too often expressed in language too tangled to be immediately intelligible. For example, on p. 74 the author says about the verb rah: "The original meaning of rah in its non-preterite use is 'to remain'. In Sadani rah means either 'to be' or 'to remain'.