Reviews Of Different Books

Page 46

292 REVIEWS divergent dialects with bizarre criss-cross borrowings in e.g. Santali for which so far no essential dialectal split has been reported. If one nevertheless prefers to stick to the "standard explanation" it should be noted that for such cases as Mu. Ho buti : So. pudi 'navel such an explanation lacks any foundation in the facts. Consonant cluster simplification would presuppose for proto-Munda a word-structure entirely different from, e.g., the Austronesian type, for which I fail to see any indication. So there remains, for the present moment, as the most promising explanation the "expressive derivation", the very explanation proposed by Pinnow and accepted in the paper under discussion, I am afraid that Zide's report will fail to give the reader an insight into the real problem while creating false impressions about the extent to which dialect borrowing can be applied. On the other hand, his experience as a field-worker with the difficulty of distinguishing between p:k and b:g in Gutob is the very kind of information that we need. The problem of Nihali (Kalto), discussed on pp. 427-428, is one of the most intriguing. After Konow and Grierson had incorrectly assigned it to Munda, Robert Shafer was the first to point out unidentifiable elements in it (1940: Hary, J. As. Studies, 5, pp. 346-371, cf. 1954: Ethnography of Ancient India, pp. 10-12). After the publication of fresh and more reliable material by Bhattacharya in 1957 (Ind.Ling., 17, pp. 245-258), Burrow referred to Nahali in the next year as a remainder of pre-Dravidian and preMunda (1958: Bull. Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, no. 19, p. 8). Pinnow, while making several attempts to explain it as a Munda language, was for a long time non-committal (1959: Kharia-Sprache, p. 1 n. 6 vs. p. 45 etc.; 1960a: published in Studies in Comparative Austroasiatic Linguistics (1966), pp. 187-191; 19606: IIJ, 4, p. 86 n. 23). In 1964, however, he was more outspoken in Linguistic Comparison in SouthEast Asia and the Pacific (p. 151: "It is at any rate not Munda"; p. 152: "We may perhaps come closest to the truth if we assume that Nahali possesses an isolated nonAustroasiatic substratum that has been partially replaced by an Austroasiatic stratum which has also provided Nahali with its inflection." These words were clearly written independently of this reviewer's monograph, published in 1962, consisting of an analysis of the grammatical system and the available lexicographical material (about 500 words!), in which he had tried to prove that Nahali probably was an argot, the two oldest layers of the vocabulary being an unidentifiable language (ca. 24 per cent of the vocabulary) and (in a few per cent) an Austroasiatic language which cannot, in the present state of our knowledge, with certainty be called Munda. In 1966 David Stampe reported in IJAL, 32, p. 395, on a Nihali lexicon by Aasha Kelkar Mundlay (still unpublished), comprising some 2000 items, of which sixty to seventy per cent are recent borrowings from Indo-Aryan or Korku. "Of the rest, a few have older Dravidian or Munda sources, but most are not identifiable." This more extensive material, accordingly, confirmed entirely the conclusions of the earlier monograph. The latter, however, failed to convince Pinnow, who in 1965 (Indo-pacific Linguistic Studies, I = Lingua, 14) on the one hand characterized Nahali as "a language the status of which is still much disputed" (p. 4) but on the other hand concluded that "the personal pronouns of the disputed language Nahali can also be classified with those of the Austroasiatic family, even though they are rather markedly distinguished from the personal pronouns of the other groups", adding that Nahali and Nicobarese may possibly "be more closely connected than was hitherto thought to be the case" (p. 18). Finally, in 1966, he ended up a review of the monograph on Nahali with the conclusion: "Der grundlegend austroasiatische Charakter des Nahali schalt sich so nach und nach immer mehr heraus" (OLZ, 61, col. 496). In the present state the central problem would seem to be that of the origin of the few Austroasiatic elements in the vocabulary. It is on their occurrence that Pinnow founds his right to attempt to connect the Nahali verbal (1960) and pronominal (1965) systems with those of Austroasiatic. My provisional attempt at an analysis of the case-endings and the pronouns did not confirm this