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WORKS ON INDIA AND THE EAST.

A Grammar of the Pukhto, Pushto, or Language of the Afghans. By Captain H. G. Raverty, 3rd Regt. B. N. I. Second Edition, Hertford: Stephen Austin. 1860.

Beauty' the poet tells us, 'is not, as fond men misdeem, An outward show of things that only seem.' That is, to put it prosaically, though a handsome face and a fine figure never fail to make a good impression, if the lady, on closer acquaintance, should be found to make havoc of her h's, to be very bad tempered, and to believe in Joe Smith and spiritual rappings, our feeling of resentment will probably be greater than if she had less attractions. If any thing could bribe one to study Pushto, it ought to be the exquisite manner in which the volume named in the margin has been got up. The whitest paper, the blackest ink, leaded types, careful printing, a generous margin, are points of almost irresistible charm, and contribute their full share in keeping up the well-deserved fame of Stephen Austin's printing office. But on examining the volume we are deterred from giving ourselves to Pushto by the author's sad experiences. He says After having devoted seventeen of 'the best years of my life, and expended much money in acquiring, more or 'less, a knowledge of nine Oriental languages, I find that the pursuit has never 'brought me advantage or advancement.' The Punjab Government, it appears, kept the meritorious author down. A thousand pities. But he knows how to requite good for evil. He is convinced that the Kabul disasters were due to the non-existence of his Grammar, and is quite certain that any future complications in that quarter will readily be obviated, or at least mitigated through his labours. He hastens therefore to present us with his books, as Dost Mohamed, he informs us, may die any day. Thanks!

But a gift may be unacceptable; it may be worthless. Is Capt. Raverty competent, with all his devotedness, to teach us Pushto ? He introduces, himself to the public quite freely, somewhat like the great Mulligan, Mr. Titmarsh's friend. He gives us, in his copious prefaces and introductions, written not in Pushto, but in plain, though not very good, English, an insight into his mind, talents, and abilities. A grammarian should above all possess the analytical faculty, a faculty closely allied to the logical faculty. This he is glaringly destitute of. Let us take a few examples at random. He wishes to prove, for instance, that the Afghans are the lost tribes of the house of Israel;' and he does prove, to almost every body's satisfaction, that they claim to be of the tribe of Benjamin, not one of the Lost Tribes' at all. He sets out to prove that Pushto does not belong to the Indo-Teutonic' family of languages, and the first argument he uses is that it contains a great number of Zend, Pehlevi, and Persian words and that it bears a great similarity to the

MARCH, 1861.

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modern Persian, all these being 'Indo-Teutonic' languages. He says that 'the 'Pushto pronouns bear no similarity whatever with those of the Sanskrit family,' as the reader will at once see.

English.

Sanskrit. Zend. Greek. Latin. Slavonic. German. English. Pushto.

And even in the third person, which is usually more difficult to recognize, de in the nominative, philologists will at once recognize as identical with the Greek, German, and English article; and ye, the oblique case, as the Prakrit and Latin se, and the Zend, Greek, and English he.

But then, a man need not be a logician after all, nor even a philologist to teach us a language which he knows: and Captain Raverty tells us that Pushto is not difficult. Why then does the grammar extend to 200 quarto pages? It ought to be very knotty and crabbed indeed to require or even justify such an unreasonable length. We fear we must be plain. The book. is an imposition. It smells of Grub Street from beginning to end. It has very little to recommend it to a bona fide learner. Capt. Raverty in his pros-. pectus solicited subscriptions for his works on the ground that they would be curiosities in literature.' He has kept his word; the grammar certainly will establish his character for veracity. But it is destitute of every element that could make it useful to an inquirer. Its facts are false, its rules are incorrect, its method is utterly at fault, and system it has none.

It is not that the author is ignorant of Pushto. On the contrary, considering the disadvantages of his position, for out of the 'seventeen years' he did not spend one on the Afghan frontier, his knowledge of the language is very great; the mere collection of his illustrative examples betokening a variety of reading which is astonishing. But partly from the absence of original training, and perhaps more from the vast display and parade got up to hide, if possible, the original defect, the grammarian has made a decided fiasco. The way in which he uses grammatical terms, sometimes Arabic, sometimes English, reminds one very much of a child playing with edged tools; he has but a dim preception of their real use, and the looker on becomes quite nervous, lest the man should cut himself; and he does cut himself. He speaks of conditional and optative tenses; he has a thing he calls Future Indefinite, of which it is hard to tell, what it is; he sports an Aorist, which on inspection turns out to be the Subjunctive Mood; he has a 'noun of fitness,' which common people would call a Gerund; ‘I should do' he calls the future; he recognizes two Forms of the Imperative, but has no idea that the one is the present Imperative, and the other the Aorist Imperative; the verbal noun (it is really the old Infinitive, and usually ends in an or ana, as one might expect from a comparison of the Sanskrit, Hindi, Greek, Persian, and German languages, though one of Capt. Raverty's great arguments is that there is no similarity between the Infinitives of these languages) his verbal noun he call the Present Participle. There is a startling announcement (p. 48) that certain three prepositions are used as demonstrative pronouns. Certainly Pushto must be a difficult language, if prepositions perform such antics. But in vindication of Pushto we must state that it is the grammarian who performs the sur prising feats, not the harmless parts of speech. This statement is equivalent to saying that the German prepositions von, an, are used as articles when

they are spelt vom, am, or that the French preposition de stands for a demonstrative pronoun when it is written du. Capt. Raverty does not see that the insignificant vowel mark, which he is obliged to put after his curious prepositions, is the pronoun, and that the preposition remains a preposition.

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His English style is so bad that his rules are mostly unintelligible. He repeatedly says, thou becometh''thou seizeth' and the like; he constantly mentions words with prepositions and postpositions' prefixed;' the latter seems to be quite an easy operation with him; he speaks of 'extrinsic friends;' he obtains, assistance from the potentiality of the spirit;' he says 'after having explained the past tense so fully, the imperfect is easily described.' And when his rules are intelligible, they are sure to be wrong, or, at least, misleading to one who simply seeks instruction. Sometimes the example he adduces, refutes his rule, as in Sec. 90, and many other places. And then his radically incorrect views about pronouns, and his inability to understand the construction of the past tenses, vitiate almost every page. How little he understands the structure of the Pushto sentence, may be inferred from the principal rule which he gives on the subject (p. 108). The object must be in the nominative, and sometimes in the dative (!) and the agent in the instrumental case,' That is odd. The nominative is the object, and the agent is the instrumental; then where in the world is the subject? Even Capt. Raverty would find it difficult to construct a sentence without a subject. A very large part of the volume, more than a hundred pages, is taken up with so called rules for the formation of the tenses, which are totally useless, as after telling how many different methods there are of forming a certain tense-if the word method can be properly applied to any thing in this book-he does not in a single instance give a list of the verbs belonging to any one of his classes, nor does he ever point out a mark by which they are to be recognized. Indeed, he has no less than thirty-seven conjugations. This is simply mocking the poor inquirer who comes to him for advice. Classification is confessedly a difficult subject, but if Capt. Raverty had no more power of generalization than is manifested in his leaving the Pushto verb in an anarchy of thirtyseven divisions, he should not have usurped the dictatorship; aut Cæsar aut nullus; he is evidently not Cæsar. He does not even tell the reader always that the verb, which he gives as an example in one or another of his cojugations, is the only one of the kind. The same may be said of a subsequent chapter, that on the derivation of words, in which the value of his rules and the sinful waste of good paper may be seen at a glance. He states lucidly, Abstract nouns may be obtained from adjectives, in eight different ways; and then he enumerates them. But it so happens that besides the single example which is given under the head of the first four rules, there is not another adjective in the language which forms its abstract in the way indicated; of what use then are these four rules? A little reflection, moreover, would convince any one that even the alleged derivation is purely imaginary. He goes on, in the same chapter: VI. This form is something similar te the fourth' Why? By rule IV. tor 'black' formed tyárá' 'darkness, and by rule VI. tor black' forms torwâle 'blackness.' Striking similarity; very much like Sambo and Pompey, who were very much like each other, especially Sambo.

The oblique cases of the personal pronouns bother the author very much; he has made the discovery that they have no meaning separate from the verbs,' which is a pure absurdity, if it means anything, an oblique case of anything implying something upon which the case depends. Then he has what he calls affixed personal pronouns,' and refers to the Arabic and Persian as analogous. A pronoun which is affixed (as is the case in the Semitic languages) implies that the word to which it is affixed is a word without

this affix; but on separating Capt. Raverty's 'affixed pronouns 'from the words which he adduces as examples, the latter cease to be words altogether. The fact is that he mistakes the common personal terminations of the verb for pronouns; he virtually calls the terminations, for instance, am, as, at, in the Latin agam, agas, agat, affixed personal pronouns.' There is no doubt that these terminations were pronouns originally, as philology has proved long ago, but our gallant author is so totally innocent of anything like philology, that he can hardly even be presumed to have blundered into the truth by mistake; besides that the enunciation of a theoretical truth like this would be out of place here. The mistake is probably the most serious in the whole production, as it destroys whatever value the bare paradigms of the transitive verbs might have had. Whole pages are utterly ruined by this sad botchery. And the matter is so vital that this baneful error alone is sufficient to damn the book. What would be said of a Latin grammar that went on conjugating page after page a me laudatur, a te laudatur, ab eo laudatur, and did not give the smallest hint of the existence of the forms laudor, laudaris, laudamur, laudamini, and so throughout all the tenses? This is precisely what the ingenious author has done.

The principal value of this grammar might be supposed to consist in its copious illustration by examples taken from a considerable range of authors. And Capt. Raverty certainly deserves the highest credit for the industry and perseverance with which he has collected this store of material. Our admiration, however, would be more unalloyed, if we were sure that the author thought the examples necessary for the explanation of his doctrines, and if there were no ground for believing that they were collected rather for bookmaking purposes. The examples themselves would not create this suspicion so much as the manner in which they have been translated. In a grammar, bare, bald, literal translation is all that is required, but that is essential. Ornament would not only not be expected, but would be utterly unsuitable, and would materially impair the usefulness of the work. Capt. Reverty has permitted himself to be carried away by an inconsiderate vanity, and has wretchedly marred the best, almost the only good, feature of his production. The student will often get more assistance from an unadorned, faithful translation than even from the best rules; hence in Capt. Raverty's grammar such translation would have been of tenfold value; but what is the perplexed inquirer to do, when, instead of literal rendering of word for word, he finds most nauseously diluted paraphrases, got up quite regardless of expense, which however are of no use to any one except to the grammarian, who no doubt each time that he had achieved one, took a step backwards, gazed at his creation with fervent admiration, put his head slightly on one side, and exclaimed, 'Isn't it pretty?' Let the reader look for instance at the first example in p. 95, with its Phoenix of one's desires,' and 'the immortal bird. Or take this hemistich of five words: If a devotee be ill-five words also in the original; the Bombay Captain renders it in the third-rate reporter style: If a man in the constant habit of praying may become afflicted with sickness.' For a 'rose' he says 'queen of flowers; for birds' he says 'feathered race,' for 'wine' juice of the grape,' and so on to an incredible extent. There is a couplet of Hamid's in p. 94 also, the literal translation of which is: When his justice's sun did set, the dark night of oppression rose, the land became dark;' which Capt. Raverty sweetly beautifies thus. Since the bright luminary of his equity and justice hath set, the black night of oppression has set in (!), and filled the land with darkness.' What is the learner, who is not supposed to have spent seventeen years on Oriental languages, to make of such elegance? He wants bread, and the grammarian gives him--not a stone, but-wind. The reader will also observe