Reviews Of Different Books

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286 REVIEWS although a few references to publications of 1968 occur. The large majority of the contributors belong to the generation born in the twenties and the early thirties, the older generation being represented by Renou, Burrow, Clark and Emeneau only. Although there naturally is an undeniable difference in quality and in general character between the various chapters, most of them are of a high standard. For future research this general survey of what has been done and is being done in the field, with frequent indications of the gaps in our knowledge and the most urgent problems that wait for a solution, will be indispensable as a starting point. The extensive bibliographical references will no doubt prove extremely useful. The circumstance that this book is the first to give a comprehensive account of the recent amazing development of Dravidian studies contributes much to its importance. Studies in the field of the Munda languages cannot compare with those in Dravidian because of their smaller number, their cultural background and the amount of work done (or, at least, published). Still, this work, too, has only started in the last few decades and the general survey here given is one of the first to appear in print. The book is divided into four parts. Part One ("Indo-Aryan Languages") consists of fourteen chapters, Part Two ("Dravidian Languages") of six, Part Three ("Other Language Families") of three only, while Part Four ("Linguistics and Related Fields in South Asia") comprises as many as eleven chapters. Only a few of these thirty-four chapters can briefly be mentioned here. In Part One Thomas Burrow, to whom the task of surveying the linguistic publications on Sanskrit was assigned, begins his contribution with the words "The progress of Sanskrit studies in the last twenty years is characterised by no striking new developments." He then gives an almost exhaustive and fair report on publications in the various departments of phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicography. The last category is perhaps treated somewhat more elaborately than might seem necessary in view of the exhaustive and detailed bibliography (pp. 19-35, as long as the article), which gives a most useful enumeration of all the publications in this field. In "Comparative Indo-Aryan" Gordon H. Fairbanks gives in seven pages (pp. 36-45) a historical survey of the earlier stages of comparative studies in Middle and New IndoAryan languages, starting from Beames (1872-1879) via Jules Bloch (1933) to modern developments, but the function of this chapter in the general plan of this book is not sufficiently clear. Ernest Bender's account of Middle Indo-Aryan could be brief: (about three pages, but with a "selected bibliography" of four pages). Out of the eleven chapters on the New Indo-Aryan languages an arbitrary choice must be made. Vladimir Miltner's chapter on Hindi (pp. 55-84) is particularly useful on account of its enumeration of the many Russian contributions, most of which are not easily accessible to scholars working outside the East European bloc. Besides it gives a reasoned account of the numerous Indian publications written in Hindi and other Indian as well as Western languages. In conclusion he quotes K. Ch. Bahl as saying that "the grammatical treatises on Hindi lack any scientific coherence". Kali Charan Bahl's article on Panjabi (pp. 153-200) contains a theoretical treatment of high standard of the verbal system. Incidentally he remarks (p. 175) that "the investigation of compound verbs seems to have reached a dead end" and (p. 181) that "there is no way to understand the nature of modification of the meaning of the main verb by means of a subsidiary verb without first knowing what the meaning of the main verb (i.e. the lexical content in our sense of the term) really is". In his conclusion (p. 195f.), he states that scholars "have never understood the difference between the colloquial and literary aspects of the language. Consequently the scientific investigation of Panjabi is beset with discussions on language vs. dialect, spoken vs. written language, colloquial vs. literary standards, linguistic descriptions vs. nonlinguistic or extralinguistic considerations, and so on... The grammars of the language describe it only superficially.