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56
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[FEBRUARY, 1873.
for ourselves by imagining how we should get on candidates could at all decipher the writing. All if compelled to do all our writing in Roman charac- had been well educated and all could speak and ters, keeping the letters separate from each other. write English, yet not one out of four could read However this may be, the learning of the current their own language in that form which should be hand is a most important item of a iad's education. most familiar to them. Mufassal candidates could In English schools this subject is altogether neglect- generally read, thongh even among them those who ed, and it is most assuredly a grievous evil. For had been taught in good English schools were inost example, the work of the Census office is mainly deficient. The total number of candidates was expended on schedules written in the vernacular of probably not less than 1,000, and yet there was the various districts. Being compiled by the village immense difficulty in obtaining 200 persons even karnams, who are practised writers, the entries are tolerably at ease in vernacular writing. It is subusually in a clear current hand, far superior to mitted that in the national system of education which ordinary English writing. Yet when applications India is now slowly providing for itself, every were made for employment, and candidates were means should be taken to ensure thorough instrucexamined as to their power of reading the schedules, tion in vernacular reading and writing, substituting it was discovered that not one out of four of Madras | the modern for the ancient dialect.
REVIEW A GRAMMAR OF THE URDU OR HINDUSTANI LANGUAGE, teach him how to break it down into the ordinary
by John DowBox, M.E.A.B., Professor of Hindustani, style of the natives. It is a pity that the book Staff College. Trübner & Co., London. 1872.
is so destitute of philology. Although intendThis little book appears, from advertisements that ed for learners, there is no reason why even have appeared since it was issued, to be the first they should not bave a clue given them now of a series which Professor Dowson proposes to
and then. You may either teach a boy on the publish for the benefit of students of the Urdu dogmatic principle "This is so, learn it, and never language-the principal medium of commanication mind why," or you may tell him-"The reason between mun of all races and classes in India. In of this apparent irregularity is so-and-so." Of the looking through the neatly-printed pages, it is two methods the latter will certainly make his difficult to avoid envying the present generation
task easier, and probably also pleasanter. In the of learners. We in our time had no such books as book under aotice, for instance, the subject of these. Lucidity of expression, descending at times genders might have been treated in a much fuller almost to the colloquial style, an admirable clear- and more intelligent manner. Although in geakness of arrangement, and careful study of all the
ing, gender is to a great extent neglected, yet it is recorded forms of the written language, are appa- necessary to know the main rules; but Professor rent on every page; while the beauty of Stephen
Dowson has hardly made any attempt to explain Austin's well-known type enhances the pleasure of them. reading. Seeing how much the author bas made The subject of declension, however, is fully and of his materials, one cannot but wish he had had ably treated ; and the author has not fallen into the better materials to work on. How long is rubbish temptation, so cominon to grammar-writers, of maklike the Bagh-o-Bahár and the Totá Kahani to be
ing one declension into half-a-dozen on account of allowed to hold the chief place, in the estimation some trifling peculiarity, which is in most cases of scholars in Europe, amongst Indian classics? inherent in the base of the noun and is not a -books written to order for English students by declensional feature at all. Objection may be taken pedantie manshis, who wrote up to a given set of to the way in which the form of the plural pronoun rules which they invented for themselves, and of the 1st person, hamon, is spoken of; this form which have never had, and probably never will being very rarely used by good speakers, and conbave, any influence on the native mind, or currency demned as barbarous by men of taste, as it is among any but our own countrymen. If some one certainly indefensible from & philological point of would only send home twenty books taken at random view. The Prakrit amhe, from which ham is out of the masses issued by Munshi Nawal Kishore derived, makes no oblique form amhanam from of Lucknow, there would be more true vernacular which hamon could be derived. The same holds Urdu of the purest kind found in a fiftieth part good of tumhon, though in a less degree. of them than in all the stilted pages of the Araish-j- No less able and admirably lụcid is the treatment Mahfil and the rest put together. Still we must of the verb, in which all the numerous combinations take things as they are. From this book of Pro- which this supremely flexible language possesses fessor Dowson's the student in England would are drawn out in a logical and transparently clear certainly learn a very accurate and not inelegant sequence. Well and neatly put is the awkward style of Urdu, and a few years in India would modern construction of the past tense of transitive
