476 NOTES. OF THE QUARTER.
           THE STUDENT'S GUJARATI GRAMMAR. By G. P. TAYLOR,
                M.A., B.D. Irish Presbyterian Mission, Gujarat.
              The author of this work states in his Preface that he
           publishes it in the hope of providing a manual that will
           exhibit the main facts and principles of Gujarati Grammar
           in a form intelligible to anyone of average English
           education, and that his constant endeavour has been to
           secure accuracy and simplicity, not novelty. The book is
           specially addressed to those who are in want of a grammar
           to read before going to the country of which Gujarati is
           the vernacular language, Mr. Taylor must excuse us when,
           from a practical knowledge of Gujarati extending over
           many years, we are of opinion that in the matter of
           simplicity he has entirely failed in his object, and that,
           so far from enabling a beginner to study the language
           without the aid of a native munshi, the former would, in
           the generality of cases, be utterly bewildered and lose
           himself in the maze of infinitesimal hair-splitting dis-
           tinctions in form which the author has provided for the
           assimilation of the unaccustomed student, and would be
           apt to despair of ever acquiring a tongue placed before
           him in such an uninviting and portentous shape. The
           book is really more of the nature of a philological analysis
           of the Gujarati language, useful to advanced scholars, than
           a grammar to be put into the hands of beginners. Other-
           wise, with the exception of an absence of allusion to words
           and idiomatical expressions peculiar to different parts of
           the country in which Gujarati is spoken, for it must be
           remembered that its range is from far to the north of
           Ahmadabad throughout the P.eninsula of Kathiavar well
           down to the south near Bombay, the work is learned, and
           the analysis thoroughly and conscientiously worked out.
             Before proceeding to offer a few remarks on the grammar
           itself, it will be as well to point out for the benefit of the
    Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. INSEAD, on 14 Sep 2018 at 14:53:54, subject to the Cambridge
    Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0035869X00144909
                              KOTICES OF BOOKS. 477
           Surat Mission Press that sufficient distinction is not made
           in the type between the letter sa (y) and the syllable rd
           (\l), which are thus apt to be mistaken for each other.
           It should also be noticed that in ordinary Grujarati hand-
           writing, although the characters used are much the same
           as those of the printed type, a line is drawn along the
           page and the letters are written underneath. This has the
           advantage of keeping the lines of writing tolerably even,
           and of enabling similar letters to be distinguished from
           each other, e.g. V dha and ^ gha, the former being partly
           above the line and the latter below it. Another respect in
           which the written differs from the printed character is that
           the former does not follow the practice of the Devanagari
           in placing i (("") before the letter after which it is pro-
           nounced, or in affixing r () above the letter before which
           it comes: for instance, the word visarg in page 9, line 1,
           printed fan»i, would in manuscript be cQ^l^l.
             This symbol "visarg" is seldom or never used in the
           written character, and it would only be a pedantic purist
           who would think of writing for pain (at the end of para. 5)
           the word % ',^\ ; it would be simply ?>t, for, pace the author,
           the visarg has no audible sound at all, and the word would be
           pronounced in English simply as dookh. As the Hunterian
           system of transliteration of Oriental letters has been finally
           adopted, it is a pity that it has not been strictly adhered
           to in this book.
              Passing on to the rules laid down for the gender of
           nouns—it is admitted that the gender can be learned only
           through constant practice, but there is more in the matter
           than this. A noun considered feminine in Ahmadabad may
           be masculine in Surat and neuter in Kathiavar (Kattywar),
           and vice versd. A good deal depends on whether the origin
           of the word was Persian (or Hindustani) or Sanskrit (or
           one of the dialects descended from the latter), the rule in
           some parts of the country being that the gender in Gujarati
    Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. INSEAD, on 14 Sep 2018 at 14:53:54, subject to the Cambridge
    Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0035869X00144909
            478 NOTES OP THE QUARTER.
            should follow that of the original language, and in others
            that it should be that assigned to it by common custom.
            The general rules laid down for distinguishing gender are,
            with this exception, correct, but some of the distinctions
            drawn are unnecessarily fine: for instance, it would have
            been far simpler to omit the exceptions to the femininity
            of nouns ending in i (fc/~) in para. 12, with the remark that
            those thus ending, when belonging to individuals evidently
            of the male sex, should be treated as masculine, notwith-
            standing their feminine termination. Another instance of
            the hair-splitting, so puzzling and laboured to beginners,
            indulged in by the author is in para. 13, where it is said
            that should an inanimate object have a name ending in
            •a*U or (3, and an object of the like kind a name ending
            in (/, the former is generally the larger, stronger, coarser
            of the two, and the latter the smaller, weaker, finer. This
            is in reality by no means the case. In one of the instances
            given, m's "a cart," »ni\ "a carriage," the latter may be
            a heavy clumsy cart with wooden wheel tires, and the
            former a light carriage on springs, the gender used depend-
           ing simply on the speaker's fancy. Among the different
            words used for the masculine and feminine of the noun
            representing the same person we notice 4«-*MI, given as "a
           bride," the feminine of ^U, "a bridegroom," but the former
           really means a virgin, although applied to a bride; again,
            ^i «v»ii and O>\\ <>*ii,
           which follow the Hindustani, and are commonly used, viz.
           sv^l */£i and  as well as the variations in the
           inflected cases of £1131, such as ?Ti£i«T for ^i§}.
              The definitions of the various tenses and parts of
           verbs appear to be unnecessarily complicated for beginners,
           although they may be linguistically correct. It is advisable
           to warn the student that he will in ordinary handwriting
           not find inserted in the past tenses the ^, (ye), carefully
           used by the author: for instance, *U|, chadyo "he rose,"
           would be so written, and not aU'a*u > as in this grammar.
           The distinction between the 1st and 2nd perfect participles
           drawn in the note on page 51 is without a difference, that
           formed with an inserted 61 (I), being more or less frequent
           in different parts of the country, and being specially
           common in Kathiavar, where such words as *fl