Reviews Of Different Books

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226 REVIEWS Origin and Development of the Bengali Language' (Calcutta, 1926) would bestow upon the interested readers new and recent informations, the linguistics of Bengali 'as a discipline' (iii) is busy with reformulating and rearranging the already known facts in order to achieve a synchronic grammar. Thus, in place of a phonetic transcription P. S. Ray, in the book under review, speaks about 'segmental phonems' (p. 4 sq.), but he differs from Chatterjee's description (p. XX sqq. and p. 267'sqq.) only in one but very noteworthy detail, namely, that he does not mention the existence of a voiced h in Bengali. His new arrangements, however, do not always necessarily result in a greater clarity, as can be observed e.g. in chapter 4 on 'verb words'. Although Chatterjee brings forward a very useful classification of Bengali verbs (p. 893), P. S. Ray starts with a mere enumeration of twenty-nine traditional 'stem classes', but instead of explaining the criteria which are at the basis of this table, he continues with a representation of the Bengali verb arranged according to verbal sufixes. A cumbersome repetition of rules of vowel mutation under the headings of the various suffixes and constant cross references are the results of such a procedure. Into this tangled scheme he squeezes also remarks about function and meaning of suffixes and tenses. So the basic principles of 'Umlaut' and mutations of vowels - clearly represented in terms of a synchronic grammar by E. C. Dimock (Dimock, S. Bhattacharji, S. Chatterjee, Introduction to Bengali, I, Honolulu, 1964), p. 76 sqq. -- have to be found out by the reader of this handbook by painstaking comparisons of the verbal suffixes and the specific rules connected with them and by setting up general rules and restrictions. But even the result of such an effort is far from satisfying. E.g. verbal suffix 14 (VS) |-en/ is, according to the author to be used by following the rules of VS 12. This would result in a form daen, in place of the actually used /daen/. - The rules for Vs-16 produce a form h@bi), which should be /hobi/ (cf. Dimock, p. 167). - Vs-7/-0) (imperative present) is connected with rules which would result in a form /boSo/. This, however, is imperative future. There is no provision made for the actual 2nd pers. imp. present /b@Sol, covered by the rules for Vs-12 (2nd. pers. present). -- Chatterjee states on p. 393, "the native speakers of Standard Colloquial say .. korbar .. instead of *[korbar..]", whereas Ray has for Vs-2 (/ba/) a rule just in the opposite sense: "/O/ before consonant changes to /o/.../..korba/". - ross reference under Vs-2: "the meanings are the same as of Vs-1" (/-a/) would give the suffix /ba/ among other the meaning of a "completed action attributed to an object". But such a meaning never occurs with forms like /dekhiba/ (cf. Chatterjee, p. 1017). This misleading statement is due to the fact that Ray does not make a difference between verbal nouns in -a and (passive) verbal adjectives in -a under Vs-1 (1-a/). An incorrect meaning is also attributed to Vs-5 (/e/), the 'conjunctive', if Ray states "the meaning is that of a past" and at the same time identifies the suffix with that of the first member in compound verbs like die de Wa) (p. 25). Wrongly represented is also the meaning of the imperative future ("imp. with attention on the state after completion of the action" p. 27), although Dimock has already more appropriately expressed it ("The future imperative is used to indicate that a command or wish is to be carried out at some future time". p. 346) and has given examples which show that this imperative is used after the conjunctive in -e. Among the suffixes of verb words (4.3.) one does not come across the -i of the imperative present, the -ben of imperative future and the -lem which, according to Chatterjee (p. 400), is the "Standard Colloquial pronunciation of -lam". On p. 24 under V-3 (last para) one has to read: /e/ before semivowel /W/ changes to /i/ in place of "/e/ before consonant...". In chapters 5 and 6 ("Noun words" and "Auxiliary words") I missed the determiner suffix' -dig and noted the restriction that /-der/ "cannot occur before any further case suffix", although Chatterjee (p. 728) has a manuS-der-te and other forms. The description of "Aspectives" (i.e. auxiliary verbs) under 6.5. shows clearly how much the