Indian Antiquary Vol 54

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Stephen Meredyth Edwardes, Krishnaswami Aiyangar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 35

FEBRUARY, 1925) REMARKS ON THE ANDAMAN ISLANDERS AND THEIR COUNTRY
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the power of Indian presses and modifications have had to be made. Still it has been the form in which Andamanese has been reduced to writing for half a century, so that it has become as it were, the Andamanese script. To my mind it requires a much stronger linguist than Mr. Brown to upset it.
The remainder of Mr. Brown's remarks are on the use of hyphens. He says : " in writing Andamanese words I have followed the practice of separating by hyphens the affixes from the stems in each word." Here I agree with him as far as linguistic works are concerned ; for all other purposes Mr. Ellis has pointed out that beringada, good, abjadijo gada, spinster, and so on, are in speech one word and not split up into affix and stem.
Before parting with this phase of my remarks on the Andamanese, I will quote again from Mr. Ellis (pp. 51-52): “the following, written by Mr. Temple in July, 1881, on finally returning the MSS. to Mr. Man, sums up his opinion of the nature of the South and other Andaman languages : The Andaman languages are one group. They are like, that is, connected with no other group. They have no affinities by which we might infer their connection with any other known group. The word-construction (the etymology of the old grammarians) is two-fold ; that is, they have affixes and prefixes to the root, of a grammatical nature. The general principle of word-construction is agglutination pure and simple. In adding their affixes, they follow the principles of the ordinary agglutinative tongues. In adding their prefixes, they follow the well-defined principles of the South African tongues. Hitherto, as far as I know, the two principles in full play have never been found together in any other language. Languages which are found to follow the one have the other in only a rudi. mentary form present in them. In Andamanese both are fully developed, so much so as to interfere with each other's grammatical functions. The collocation of words (or syntax, to follow the old nomenclature) is that of agglutinative languages purely. The presence of the peculiar prefixes does not interfere with this. The only way in which they affect the syntax is to render possible the frequent use of long compounds almost polysynthetic in their nature, or, to put it in another way, of long compounds, which are sentences in themselves. But the construction of these words is not synthetic, but agglutinative. They are, as words either compound nouns or verbs, taking their place in the sentence and having the same relation to the other words in it, as they would were they to be introduced into a sentence in any other agglutinative language. There are, of course, many peculiarities of grammar in the Andaman group, and even in each member of the group, but these are only such as are incidental to the grammar of other languages, and do not affect its general tenor. I consider, therefore, that the Andaman languages belong to the agglutinative stage of development, and are distinguished from other groups by the presence in full development of the principle of prefixed and affixed grammatical additions to the roots of words."
On my use of the term 'affix ' in the above quotation Mr. Ellis remarked in a footnote, p. 51: "Mr. Temple, following the usual unetymological definition given in dictionaries, here uses affix in place of suffix. In what follows I shall adopt the practice of Prof. S. S. Haldeman in his Affixes in their Origin and Application, Philadelphia, 1865, p. 27: 'Affixes are additions to roots, stems and words, serving to modify their meaning and use. They are of two kinds, prefixes, those at the beginning, and suffixes, those at the end of the word bases to which they are affixed. Several affixes occur in long words like in-com-pre-hen-8-16il-it-y, which has three prefixes and five guffixes. Affixes also include infixes (or, as Prof. Haldeman calls them, interfixes), where the modifying letter or syllable is introduced into the middle of the base, as in the Semitic and other languages."
To this I may add that in all subsequent writings I adopted affix as a generic term, with prefix, infix and suffix as specific terms to describe particular forms of affixes.
(To be continued.)