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DICTIONARY OF THE CAR-NICOBARESE LANGUAGE, by THE REV. G. WHITEHEAD, B.A., Rangoon, American Baptist Mission Press, 1925.
The chief sources of our knowledge of Nicobarese has hitherto been de Roepstorff's Dictionary of the Nancowry Dialect (Calcutta, 1884), and the works of E. H. Man and Sir Richard Temple; and now Mr. Whitehead has made a valuable addition to our information by the publication of this account of the Car Dialect. Although Car and Nancowry are certainly variant forms of the same Môn-Khmêr speech, they differ so widely both in grammar and in vocabulary that it would almost be possible to class them, not as cognate dialects, but as separate languages not very closely allied to each other. Car is spoken by some 5200 people out of the eight or ten thousand Nicobarese, while the number of speakers of Nancowry (Mr. Whitehead spells the word "Nankauri") is about 1165. The other dialects (Chowra, Teressa, and Shompen) share among themselves the remaining speakers of the language.
I
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
To his Dictionary proper Mr. Whitehead has prefixed an Introductory Chapter of about fifty pages in which he gives an account of the general features of the language. This does not pretend to be a formal grammar, but is rather a collection of notes of varying length dealing with the main particulars. The most important sections are those devoted to the sounds of the language, to the pronouns, and to the verb. While there is no list of numerals, there is an interesting catalogue of the numeral co-officients that form an important element in the methods of counting employed by speakers of Indo-Chinese languages.
In the section on phonetics, the vowel sounds are treated with minuteness, the chief features of interest being the many diphthongs and semi-diphthongs, and the tendency of some vowels to change under the influence of a following consonant. As for the consonants, with a few accidental exceptions, there are no sonant stops (g, j, d, b),-in this differing widely from Nancowry-and no aspirated consonants. Two letters,-k and n,-are liable to become "clipped" when final. I presume that by this term it is meant that, as in Burmese and other languages, they are sounded without the off-glide; but this is doubtful, for the author mentions another sound, which he represents by r. This, he says is "a kind of modified (or clipped) r", in which "clipped " can hardly have this meaning, especially as the sound is never final.
Singular.
Thou
He
Car.
châ–5, chin
BOOK-NOTICES.
Nancowry. tille
me
anah
The pronouns are the only words that show inflexion. They have three numbers, singular, dual (only when referring to persons), and plural,-and the pronoun of the first person has two forms each for the dual and plural, one including, and the other excluding the person addressed. So far as I am aware, the latter distinction is not found in Nanwhich has, however, the three numbers. cowry, The comparative table below shows the principal personal pronouns in the two dialects. It illustrates at once the connexion and the difference between them,
As regards verbs, the author tells us little about conjugation, but gives a long and valuable list of suffixes (which he calls affixes) and prefixes that, as in cognate forms of speech, modify the rootmeaning of the word. No information is given about tenses, and I presume that, as in Nancowry, present, past and future are all represented by the same form, the temporal significance being gathered from the context.
Similarly, we are given no information about the declension of nouns. It is true that in languages of this family there are no formal cases, but, to take an example, it would have been interesting to learn how the idea of the genitive is expressed. Does the possessor follow or precede the thing possessed? Is, for instance, "the house of the parent?" pa-ti (house) yöng (parent), or yöng pa-ti? From sentences given as examples of other syntactical uses, I presume that, as in Nancowry, the former, and not the latter, is the correct idiom, but it would have been well if this had been distinctly stated. Readers of Pater Schmidt's Die Sprachfamilien und Sprachenkreise der Erde will remember how important from the point of view of anthropology is this question of the position of the genitive.
[NOVEMBER, 1927
The Dictionary itself is admirable. It is no mere vocabulary, for nearly every entry is supplied with sentences illustrating the exact meaning of the word under examination. Considering the scanty word-store that would be possessed by an isolated and uncivilized tribe of only a few thousand people, it is astonishingly full, and the evident care with which it has been compiled, gives confidence as to its accuracy. I can congratulate not only the author on its successful completion, but also my fellowstudents who are struggling with the Môn-Khmer languages on finding ready to their hands a new and excellent weapon to aid their conquest.
G.A.G.
Dual.
Car. an, ai-ya-a (In.); tieae an, ai-yo (Ex.).
Nancowry.
nan, na-an nan
man, meh-en
ina
an, a na, ön
ona
3 Car, like Nancowry, has no word for 'father' or 'mother. It has only male parent' and 'female parent."
Plural.
Car. Nancowry. in, ai-y-ö (In.); tiedi in, hö (Ex..)
yin, yi-ö yin, cha-a
ifä ofä
