ભાષાવિજ્ઞાન/FOREWORD
The present work on General Linguistics by my friend Prof. Shri Kantilal Baldevram Vyas is a very useful publication, and evidently the first of its kind in the Gujarati language. Linguistics as a modern science developed in Europe during the last century, and it has entered, one might say, a new phase, particularly in America, from the third decade of this century. Our students in India had to form their acquaintance with this subject mostly through English, and there has been a considerable interest in the subject among Indian students of language (particulary Sanskrit) and literature. Very few books are available in our Indian languages, and these are mostly of an amateurish type. There are of course a few good books in Bengali and Hindi and one or two modern languages of India, but there is a general lacuna in Indian languages in connexion with books on this subject by Indian writers. The present work so far is a pioneer composition in Gujarati. There was no helpful model in Gujarati in front of the author when he started to write this book. Consequently in the matter of definitions in Gujarati (or, rather, translation of English technical terms in the subject, as well as in the selection and presentation of illustrative examples), Prof. Vyas had to rely upon his own scholarship and linguistic sense. Unfortunately there has not as yet developed a pan-Indian system of technical terms in linguistics based on Sanskrit which could be used in all the languages. There has been no co-ordination, and as a consequence each writer who has been working in the field of his own language has to plough a solitary furrow. In the present work, however, Prof. Vyas has on the whole made a good beginning and achieved a good success. It will not be my purpose to institute a comparative study of the merits of the terminology which has been used by Prof. Vyas with similar terminologies in Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, etc. which scholars working independently have tried to use and establish in their own languages. This can only be done when we have lists of these technical terms in linguistics which are in use in the various languages of modern India, particularly on the basis of Sanskrit. We should of course put to the fullest use our inheritance of terms from Sanskrit, and that generally is being done. I would have loved to fine at the end of Prof. Vyas’s book an English-Gujarati vocabulary of linguistic terms used by him. Prof. Vyas has on the whole followed the established system of linguistic approach which has been the joint creation of scholars from Europe (England, France, Scandinavia, Germany and Italy) and India. From Panini onwards, there has been a noted contribuation of the study of language by Indian scholars, and there is a rich scientific vocabulary for the subject in Sanskrit. Of course, the methods of approach, which was inaugurated by the Founders of Indian Linguistics, like the Rishis of the Pratisakhyas and by Panini and others, are no longer wholly applicable to language study either in general or in particular in modern times. But an appraisement of the Indian Methodology will continue to be very instructive, and even helpful to modern linguistics. In recent decades, through the American Methodology of Descriptive Linguistics, newer vistas and venues are being opened up, and these are also coming to India. But on the whole, the traditional method which was started and developed by the great masters of the last century as well as of the present century, including a few Indian scholars, per-eminent among whom was Ramkrishna Gopal Bhandarkar, has still its value, and it is largely in the field of linguistic studies in India. Some Indian linguistic scholars have sought to introduce the new method in the scientific study of language in India, and books have been published in Hindi (like the on by Dr. Uday Narayan Tiwari) in which the modern American method has been placed before Indian students through an Indian language. The traditional method however has not yet outlived its usefulness, and since the field is vast and workers are few, we would always welcome scholars who can successfully employ the method obtaining in India now in collecting facts and in seeking also to explain them in their sequence. Prof. Vyas’s book takes up these topics in the orthodox manner. He first gives some appraisement of the nature and application of the linguistic science. This is followed by a study of the historical development of the linguistic science, mentioning the more important names in this connexion. The third and fourth chapters give various theories regarding the origin of language as well as its development. The fifth chapter deals with phonetics, and this is elaborated with a number of good illustrations. Some of the terms that he has used are quite good, like, for example, sphota for ‘explosion,’ and I am glad that he has used the term. balaghata for ‘stress accent.’ We should have all-India equivalents on the basis of Sanskrit for terms like Syllabary, Affricates, Pitch, Stress, Phoneme, and scores of others in connexion with the different aspects of linguistics. There is a study of writing and scripts in the different languages. The next chapter in Prof Vyas’s book discusses the question of words, in their diversity of grammatical employment and also in their forms. Then we have a chapter on Semantics and on the structure of the sentence. In chapter X the author discusses various phenomena in connexion with the development of language, and finally he takes up the question of linguistic classification in chapter XI, giving brief accounts of the various language-families of the world with their characteristics. Thus the work gives us multum in parpo, and a good survey of the linguistic science in most of its aspects has been presented within the compass of 500 pages in a book of moderate size. In a work of this kind there are bound to be deficiencies. There are some misprints, and I would like the transliteration of the English words in Gujarati being given more attention. The book is well-documented with quotations and references, and should prove useful for students of the linguistic science in India who would like to study the subject through their mother-tongue Gujarati.
Legislative Council
West Bengal
Calcutta
April 20, 1964.
Suniti Kumar Chatterji
Emeritus Professor
Calcutta University, and
Chairman, West Bengal Legislative Council.