________________
May, 1915)
A NOTE ON GUJARATI PRONUNCIATION
107
पीम
the mingles so thoroughly with the initial consonant as to give a class aspirate as a resultant sounds; e. g. Sanskřit Prákçit or Apabhrança
Gujarati गभीरम् गहीरं
घेई गृहीतः गहेलो
चलो गोधा
गोहा गोधूमः गोहूमो
घर्ड महणम् महर्ष
घरण संग्रह संपहो
संघरो भीष्मः
गिहमी (Noto: This result is due to the fact that the rint and as of and are aimost identical, with a few exceptions, whereas in the case of , , etc. they are so different as to prevent the formation into , &ca).
A further independent indication is furnished by the fact that in Hindi we always write , #, GATT, though it must be noted that the h-sound is strong in Hindi - an effect of the strong lung power of the sturdy races of Upper India.
This brief analysis will be enough to justify the spelling of words of this class with an h rather than without it. Dr. Tessitori refers to the list of words quoted by Sir George Grierson at pp. 347 ff. of his volume on Gujarati in the Linguistic Survey of India. The list is necessarily faulty occasionally; e. g. dâhya (wise, prudent) is given as a word in which the h-sound is not written; but in fact, nobody even amongst the advocates of dropping the h writes dâyâ; similarly jehr or jher ( poison) given in the list is always written with an aspirate, most commonly jher (with the class aspirate); on the other hand, tehtris (-thirty-three) is wrongly given as possessing an h-sound. This by the way; what I wish to accentuato is the fact that this I-sound must be, and is now being, shown in writing in our Gujarati language. To substantiate this statement I am reluctantly compelled to briefly go into the history of the agitation for phonetic spelling which I hinted at in my opening paras in this Note, and in which I took the main share.
Those who know this history will remember that until the Educational Department introduced an arbitrary and artificial system of spelling over 40 years ago, this h-sound was represented in actual writing in some manner or other, as is evidenoed by books published before that period and private letters and other writings. The inconsistencies and errors of the Departmental books attracted the attention of the late Mr. Navalram Lakshmiram, a sound Gujarati scholar, who, wrote an able discussion in his Gujarat-Sala
* This process has a beginning oven in the Prakrit stage in some cas; . 9., Sanskrit un Prakrit . The Prákerit grammarians give as the ready-made Adehaol for the sake of brevity and convenience; but the word really preges silently through the following phonetis stages : T. TCE, TE, gi. . True, this system was adopted under the advice of a Committee of “experts of the day. But the Committee laboured under certain disadvantages. It is not possible to go into the whole history. But it may be pointed out that while some of the errors of the Committee were disapproved of by much mon as the late Saatri Vrajalal Kalidas, the sound: elements in its recommendations, on the other hand, were not corrootly understood, or were not properly followed, in the editing of the schoolbooks of the day.
