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REVIEWS
H. W. Bailey, Dictionary of Khotan Saka, Cambridge University Press, 1979. xvii + 559 pp. £ 80.
The long-awaited publication of Bailey's Dictionary of Khotan Saka fills a long-felt gap in the field of Iranian studies and marks at the same time the culmination of the author's life-long devotion to the language of Khotan.
The list of Bailey's publications, nearly all of which concern Khotanese in some way or other, is long. 164 items up to 1970 were listed in the bibliography in the volume in his honour (BSOAS, XXXIII. 1, 1970, IX-XIV). More than forty items have appeared since then.
The basis of Bailey's dictionary is formed by the transcriptions of Khotanese texts published by him as Khotanese texts 1-V, Cambridge 1945-63 and Khotanese Buddhist texts, London 1951. In these volumes he has transcribed most of the extant material and in numerous articles he has shed light on many of the texts contained in them and on a large proportion of the vocabulary.
Bailey's Khotanese texts VI, Cambridge 1967, which contains no texts but is, as the sub-title indicates, the 'prolexis to the book of Zambasta', was a foretaste or preview of what Bailey's dictionary would be like. It contains discussions of words found in a large Khotanese text called by him The Book of Zambasta and occasionally also of other words.
The magnitude of the task of compiling a dictionary of Khotanese was described as recently as 1974 by M. J. Dresden (Acta iranica, 3, 235): 'It cannot be expected that a complete dictionary with full textual references and a linguistic apparatus will be published in the near future. The sheer extent of the materials, which can approximately be estimated at some 40,000 printed lines, and the many unsolved problems of interpretation are still formidable obstacles. It seems, therefore, desirable that an attempt be made to collect the data required to produce a "working" dictionary - wordlist is, perhaps, a more appropriate term - of Khotanese.' He then went on to give an example of what his "working" dictionary would look like on the basis of 28 words chosen at random. Each receives two or three lines giving the essential information. I do not propose to make a detailed comparison of the items in his list with the corresponding ones in Bailey's dictionary but the difference of scale is of interest. Thus, to the one and a half lines devoted to the word paysa- in Dresden's list correspond almost one and a half columns in Bailey's dictionary. Bailey quotes five passages in which the word occurs and translates them. This occupies the first fifteen lines. The rest of the article concerns. the etymology.
Despite the obvious emphasis on etymology Bailey insists that his dictionary is not an etymological dictionary, and it is accordingly entitled Dictionary of Khotan Saka. Nevertheless, he regards it as 'one contribution to the far vaster project of the etymological dictionary of all Iranian languages' (p. vii). As for 'the fairly copious quotation of Iranian cognates, the purpose of this is 'to assure the Khotanese word and to situate it within the dialects' (ibid.).
In fact in a large proportion of the entries the space devoted to etymology greatly predominates and in some instances the Khotanese lemma seems to have been used as the title of an etymological essay. Thus, the word candarno, which occurs once only and is of uncertain meaning, is allotted more than two full columns. The word.ragai, which likewise occurs once only and is of uncertain meaning even according to Bailey, receives well over a column, and a column already contains sixty lines. The word durausa' occurs once only and is of uncertain meaning but its treatment requires 85 lines.
The etymological character of the dictionary can be seen from the fact that there is at least one entry listing only a hypothetical root *yat- 'to place properly', for which the reader is referred to the words (not all lemmata!) nistu, bistu, nyāttara-, and gista-.
A large proportion of the vocabulary occurring in most Khotanese texts consists in words of Indian origin either from Sanskrit or from Prakrit. The learned Sanskrit borrowings can usually be recognised as such, at any rate in well-written texts especially in Old Khotanese, but those from Prakrit are often difficult to detect in their Khotanese guise even for trained Indologists.
