for ourselves by imagining how we should get on if compelled to do all our writing in Roman characters, keeping the letters separate from each other. However this may be, the learning of the current hand is a most important item of a lad’s education. In English schools this subject is altogether neglected, and it is most assuredly a grievous evil. For example, the work of the Census office is mainly expended on schedules written in the vernacular of the various districts. Being compiled by the village kamams, who are practised writers, the entries are usually in a clear current hand, far superior to ordinary English writing. Yet when applications were made for employment, and candidates were examined as to their power of reading the schedules, it was discovered that not one out of four of Madras candidates could at all decipher the writing. All had been well educated and all could speak and write English, yet not one out of four could read their own language in that form which should be most familiar to them. Mufassal candidates could generally read, though even among them those who had been taught in good English schools were most deficient. The total number of candidates was probably not less than 1,000, and yet there was immense difficulty in obtaining 200 persons even tolerably at ease in vernacular writing. It is submitted that in the national system of education which India is now slowly providing for itself, every means should be taken to ensure thorough instruction in vernacular reading and writing, substituting the modern for the ancient dialect.
REVIEW.
The littlebook appears, from advertisements that have appeared since it was issued, to be the first of a series which Professor Dowson proposes to publish for the benefit of students of the Urdu language—the principal medium of communication between men of all races and classes in India. In looking through the neatly-printed pages, it is difficult to avoid envying the present generation of learners. We in our time had no such books as these. Lucidity of expression, descending at times almost to the colloquial style, an admirable clearness of arrangement, and careful study of all the recorded forms of the written language, are apparent on every page; while the beauty of Stephen Austin’s well-known type enhances the pleasure of reading. Seeing how much the author has made of his materials, one cannot but wish he had had better materials to work on. How long is rubbish like the Bágh-o-Bahdr and the Totd Kahdni to be allowed to hold the chief place, in the estimation of scholars in Europe, amongst Indian classics? —books written to order for English students by pedantic mûnshîs, who wrote up to a given set of rules which they invented for themselves, and which have never had, and probably never will have, any influence on the native mind, or currency among any but our own countrymen. If some one would only send home twenty books taken at random out of the masses issued by Múnshî Nawal Kishore of Lucknow, there would be more true vernacular Urdu of the purest kind found in a fiftieth part of them than in all the stilted pages of the Araish-i-Mahfil and the rest put together. Still we must take things as they are. From this book of Professor Dowson’s the student in England would certainly learn a very accurate and not inelegant style of Urdu, and a few years in India would teach him how to break it down into the ordinary style of the natives. It is a pity that the book is so destitute of philology. Although intended for learners, there is no reason why even they should not have a clue given them now and then. You may either teach a boy on the dogmatic principle “This is so, learn it, and never mind why,” or you may tell him—“The reason of this apparent irregularity is so-and-so.” Of the two methods the latter will certainly make his task easier, and probably also pleasanter. In the book under notice, for instance, the subject of genders might have been treated in a much fuller and more intelligent manner. Although in speaking, gender is to a great extent neglected, yet it is necessary to know the main rules; but Professor Dowson has hardly made any attempt to explain them.
The subject of declension, however, is fully and ably treated; and the author has not fallen into the temptation, so common to grammar-writers, of making one declension into half-a-dozen on account of some trifling peculiarity, which is in most cases inherent in the base of the noun and is not a declensional feature at all. Objection may be taken to the way in which the form of the plural pronoun of the 1st person, hamon, is spoken of; this form being very rarely used by good speakers, and condemned as barbarous by men of taste, as it is certainly indefensible from a philological point of view. The Prakrit amhe, from which ham is derived, makes no oblique form amhánám from which hamon could be derived. The same holds good of tumhon, though in a less degree.
No less able and admirably lucid is the treatment of the verb, in which all the numerous combinations which this supremely flexible language possesses are drawn out in a logical and transparently clear sequence. Well and neatly put is the awkward modern construction of the past tense of transitive
