The Indo-Aryan Languages.

• Author: McGregor, R.S.

This impressive book surveys a wide subject-matter pertaining to the history and interrelationships of the various Indo-Aryan languages and to the linguistic character of many of them as seen at the present time. It ranges through a century and more of scholarship and investigation. Such a book is necessarily very complicated, and Dr. Masica is to be congratulated on assembling and organizing so much material, much of it little known, with the clarity and accuracy he has done and in maintaining the identifiable perspective of a single scholar on it. This is a great merit of the book. Masica concentrates on the modern languages and deals with Sanskrit and MIA languages as background to the modern field. His interweaving of descriptive and historical subject-matter in the nine chapters that make up the bulk of the book appears, given this viewpoint, as careful planning. The topics discussed in these chapters are: the modern languages and dialects (general); the historical development of Indo-Aryan; features of the NIA lexicon; NIA descriptive phonology (helpfully placed after the preceding item); writing systems (the position of this item underlining the primacy of speech in language); historical phonology (its subject matter depending on what precedes); nominal and verbal "forms and categories"; and syntax. There is ancillary material of 120 pages, comprising a descriptive inventory of the NIA languages and dialects; a discussion of the main subclassifications of the languages as made from Hoernle's time (1880) to the present; notes to the chapters; a very extensive and usefully arranged bibliography; an index allowing reference to topics discussed for each language, and a general index.

Various topics of general interest, such as the connections between language and dialect, the changing functions of the larger languages and their relationships of contact and competition with English and with one another, are well treated in the opening chapters. The exposition is eminently readable despite the great amount of factual material introduced. Problematical matters are generally carefully assessed. The later chapters on phonology, morphology, and syntax are more technical and (that on syntax especially) more abstruse, since dealing with widely differing and sometimes rapidly changing styles of analysis of the same data. These chapters are likely to remain largely the preserve of language specialists. A study of their carefully assembled...