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Reviews
289
HINDI-GUJARĀTI DHĀTUKOŚA (A Comparative Study of Hindi
Gujarati Verbal Roots): by Raghuveer Chaudhari. L. D. Institute of Indology, Ahmedabad 380009, 1982, pp. 230. Price Rs. 45/=
This study of Hindi-Gujarati verbal roots is a welcome addition to the linguistic studies in the field of Indo-Aryan linguistics. The study was undertaken by Dr. Chaudhari for the Ph.D. degree of the Gujarat University. The work constitutes, in fact, a historical and comparative study of the Hindi verbal roots. It is historical in the sense that author tries to determine the sources of Hindi roots and it is comparative in the sense that in every respect be tries to ascertain the relationship of Hindi roots with those of Gujarati.
In the Introduction, called Section 1, the author Darrates the work done in India and abroad in the field of the investigation of roots. The narration is informative and therefore useful.
The author next lists the Hindi roots with their meanings, indicating their etymology and listing a Gujarati comparable root wherever available. For the preparation of this list the author got his material from the standard Hindi lexicons and some dialectal studies of Hindi. He also includes some obsolete Hindi roots. The total number of roots comes to 4270. But for his further investigation the author rightly excludes from this list such roots which show differences only in phonetic forms and thus obtains the revised number 2981.
This list of Hindi roots, together with notes on them, forms Section 2 of the book though not specifically so described by the author.
The third and the last section consists of two parts. In part 1. the author gives the classification of the roots such as tadbhava, deśaja, onomatopoetic, tatsama, ardha-tatsama, and foreign roots. It may be remarked that it is necessary to consider the desaja roots also as those coming from foreiga sources, and, as the author rightly emphasizes, it is important to identify, as far as possible, the source which is vaguely labelled as desi. In part 2, the author gives his conclusions based on statistical account.
The entire study has been carefully carried out and neatly presented (misprints are to be regretted). There could be some occasions of disagreement with the author, for example, one may not agree with his listing of **64 (729) in addition to ( 781), or his mentioning of Guj. TH 'to like, to prefer’ under Hindi TH 'to lose' (1073). Incidentally, don't we have Guj. Tre in this sense ?
The author's use of शब्दकोशीय सामग्री-संरक्षण-शास्त्र for lexicostatistics (p.
Madhu Vidyā/645
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