Digital Dictionaries of South Asia
Search Turner Comparative Search help About the Dictionary Front Matter Copyright Information Back to DDSA
A Comparative Dictionary of Indo-Aryan Languages

[page vi]

EDITOR'S NOTE

Sadly, Sir Ralph Turner died on the 22nd April, 1983, in his 95th year. Until a few days before his death he was still engaged upon a final revision of this volume of Addenda (referred to as Add2 in order to distinguish it from the original addenda).

On some 12,000 slips he had noted and indexed new attestations and etymologies taken from works published since the appearance of the Dictionary. These provide additional data relating, for the most part, to Kacchī (as far as the letter m), West Pahāṛī, Gaṛhwālī, Assamese, Old Mārwāṛī, Brajbhāṣā (as far as n), Maldivian, and the Shughni group of Iranian border languages, as well as Sanskrit. The scope of the Dictionary is thereby extended particularly in respect of the peripheral dialects—which have been less exposed to loss of inherited vocabulary due to the inroads of Persian, English, and Sanskrit. The use made of Hendriksen's unusually complete vocabulary of a dialect from the valley of the Sutlej north of Simla provides a key to the interpretation of data available from other much more scrappily recorded dialects of the Himalayas.

A period of grave illness and failing sight had put an abrupt end to Turner's active collection of fresh material. After his death a good deal of mechanical revision appeared to be needed: the phonetic transcriptions of both Hendriksen (WPah.) and Kakati-Goswami (Assamese) are very liable to be miscopied even by younger men than Turner. The editor has carried through a process begun by Turner of adapting the transcription of the WPah. consonants to conform with the usage of the Dictionary (e.g. substituting ċċh in lieu of Turner's ttsh for Hendriksen's t:sh). The vowels have been left unaltered (ə a ı i ɔ ) instead of the Dictionary's a ā i ī au, etc.) in order to accommodate the notation of vowel length and intonation—although these remain generally non-phonemic in the dialect. Words drawn from Hendriksen had therefore to be listed separately from other WPah. material in the Index.

For the sake of brevity, Hendriksen's Kocī forms have been cited only when they differ materially from the Koṭgaṛhī The reference 'kṭg. (kc.)' indicates that a form corresponding to the Koṭgaṛhī phonetic transcription cited has also been recorded from Kocī. Corresponding to the kṭg. endings, m.sg. , f.sg. , infinitive -ṇõ, kc. has -o, -e, -ṇo respectively.

For Assamese Turner tended in Add2 to adopt from Kakati-Goswami both orthographic and phonetic forms (e.g. śel, phonet. xel < ŚALYÁ-ˈ). The words are indexed as in the Dictionary (viz. xel). The editor has abandoned the convention whereby close a (phonet. [o]) is transcribed as ɔ (cf. A. kɔlizā, B. kalijā < KALEYAKA- in the Dictionary). Such words are indexed in Add2 uniformly with a. The symbol ɔ has been retained only as a phonetic representation of Assamese open â.

For simplicity, Turner's corrigenda have been merged with the addenda. In view of the practice adopted in Add2 of assigning intercalary reference numbers to new head-words, the seventy or so additional head-words that appeared (printed with obelisks) in the original set of addenda have been entered again here and re-numbered at their proper place in the alphabetic sequence. Indeference to Turner's wishes, the set of over 400 new head-words (printed with obelisks in Add2) have been processed after the manner of the Phonetic Analysis. For economy of effort, this was done manually, rather than by computer. The human agency felt unable to follow the computer in tacitly omitting the category of polysyllables in -ati and treating e.g. *uddayati on a par with davayati.

The opportunity was taken to include and adapt additional material from Koṅkaṇī

[page vii]

(S. M. Katre, BSOAS, xxx, 702-4), Old Panjābī (C. Shackle, A Gurū Nānak Glossary, London, 1981, with supplementary material in 'The non-Sanskritic vocabulary of the later Sikh Gurūs', BSOAS, XLVII, 76-107), and Old Bengali (T. Mukherjee, 'Śrīkr̥ṣṇakīrtane br̥kṣanāmer tālikā', Viśvabhāratī Patrikā, XXIX, 20-32). Other amendments of substance have been identified with the initials J. C. W. The Maldivian material was checked by Mr. C. H. B. Reynolds; additional etymological information bearing on Sinhalese and Maldivian which he kindly supplied has been incorporated, for the most part tacitly. Listing of Kacchī words has been completed in a Supplement to the main Addenda, and further attestations in Sanskrit have been noted from T. Burrow, JRAS, 1967, 39-42 and W. Rau. OLZ, 1970, 397f.

J. C. WRIGHT

Back to the Search Page  |   Back to the DDSA Page

This page was last generated on Monday 1 March 2021 at 22:17 by dsal@uchicago.edu
The URL of this page is: https://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/soas/frontmatter/editors-note.html