307 NOTICE OF A GRAMMAR of the THREE PRINCIPAL ORIENTAL LANGUAGES, Hindoostanee, Persian, and Arabic, ON A PLAN ENTIRELY NEW, and perfectly easy; to which is added a set of Persian Dialogues, composed for the author by MIRZA MUHAMED SALIH, of Shiraz, accompanied with an English Translation: by WILLIAM PRICE, ESQ., Assistant Secretary to the Rt. Hon. Sir GORE OUSELEY, Bart., Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Persia. London. 1823. xiii. and 236 pages in 4to. : THE author of this Grammar was chosen on account of his previous knowlege of the Persian language, to be attached to Sir Gore Ouseley's Embassy to Persia in 1810, which embassy was accompanied by Mirza Abou 'lhassan, afterwards named Abou 'thassen Khan, Persian Ambassador to the court of England, and through which embassy he availed himself of the opportunity to learn of Abou 'lhassen Khan the correct Persian pronunciation, and to accustom himself to the use of the language as spoken in Persia, During the residence of the Ambassador at Shiraz, Mr. Price formed an acquaintance with a Persian of that town called Mirza Salih, who had the reputation of being a man of letters, and who attached himself to the British legation. Mr. Price persuaded Mirza Salih to compose, in his language, that is to say, in the dialect of Shiraz, which is considered as the purest in Persia, a collection of dialogues. These dialogues, written in the style of conversation, and translated literally into English by Mr. Price, are 10 in number, and occupy 84 pages of this volume; they are presented also to the reader in the Persian character, accompanied with an English translation, and also in Roman characters with a French translation. Mr. Price has rendered an essential service to persons studying the Persian language by the publication of these dialogues. But we feel compelled to limit ourselves to this single eulogy. We will only add, that the author of these dialogues, Mirza Salih, afterwards came to London to learn English, and after returning to Persia in 1819, he lately performed a second voyage to England, charged with a special mission from his sovereign to His Majesty George the IVth: returning after this mission, he went to Paris, and departed from thence in the course of 1823 for St. Petersburgh.-We now pass on to the Grammar of Mr. Price. We know not upon what foundation Mr. Price could establish that the Hindoostanee, the Persian, and the Arabic, are the three principal languages of the East, to the exclusion of the Sanscrit, of the Chinese, of the idioms of Tartary and of Tibet, &c.; but this question is scarcely worth a discussion: what is more important is the announcement which he has made, of having composed his Grammar, or more properly, the three Grammars which he has united in this volume, according to a plan altogether new, and which is recommendable by the extreme facility which it presents to students. If, to possess the merit of introducing into the study of a language a new and an easier method than was before known, it be sufficient to limit oneself to simple rudiments, extremely incomplete, to neglect in a considerable degree the rules of Syntax, and to place at the end what preceding grammarians for very good reasons had been used to place at the beginning, we will readily admit that Mr. Price has fulfilled all these services, particularly in his Arabic Grammar. But we fear not to acquaint him, that what renders the study of a language difficult, is not a voluminous grammar, or a multiplicity of developements, when well classed after a methodical analysis, or a synthetical arrangement, but it is rather a too great concision, an insufficiency of developements, and above all, the want of method. Of the three languages of which Mr. Price has undertaken to give the grammar, none presents more difficulties, none consequently requires more method in the exposition of its multiplied forms and its Syntax, than the Arabic language; and our author has also devoted to that language a much larger space than to the two others. Nevertheless, it appears to us, that we are left to desire in this work complete portions of Arabic grammar, which are indispensably necessary to the student. It is almost impossible to assimilate Arabic grammar with that of the Persian language. On the other hand, it is not difficult to co-dispose the forms of the Persian with those of the Hindoostanee, although this last language has a greater variety of inflections; Mr. Price, whom this observation could not es On this double method vide La Grammaire Arabe de M. le Baron de Sacy, vol. ii. pages 13 and 14. : cape, has edited harmonically the Persian with the Hindoostanee: but as I do not understand the Hindoostanee I shall confine my observations to the Persian and Arabic grammars only. X The first of these languages is remarkable for the very small number of forms which it employs; and all the etymological part, that is to say, that which teaches the knowledge of the inflections of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs, might have been explained in a still shorter space than Mr. Price has taken to elucidate them. But we find not in what he has said on this subject much exactitude. The Persian language has no cases; these are supplied by particles: but our author attributes to them a declination of six cases; no doubt because there are six cases in the Latin. They have two ways of forming the plural of nouns; in adding at the termination ان or ها and he altogether omits the second form. In receiving these inflections, the singular sometimes suffers alterations, as بنر plural بتركان خانهplural خانها Mr Price does not even notice this.. The Persian language has no pronominal adjective, vulgarly called pronoun possessive; where these are used in other languages the Persian language substitutes pronouns personal, or prefixes which represent them, and instead of saying my book, his book, it uses the term the book of me, the book of him. Mr. Price leaves this to be discovered by the student, and translates these pronouns personalمن or تو ×م or × او or ش by my, thy, his, &c. He does not inform us that in certain cases we ought to write, in isolating the prefix ام x اشات He omits to notice how mine and thine, &c. are to be expressed by means of ازان joined to the personal pronoun وازان من mine ازان توthine. He says not a word of the compounds so frequent in Persian, or of the manner of indicating the dependence that one noun hath with respect to another noun, or with a pronoun; as, in the House of the brother of the King, خانه برادر شاه × and it is remarkable, that in this respect he has comınitted a great fault in the title of his work, in writing نحوي for نجو : a fault, however, which Sir William Jones had committed before him. X The same negligence is remarkable in that which concerns the conjugation of the verb. All the Persian verbs relate to two forms, which are distinguished by the termination of the infinitive in تی or in our author neglects this distinction; he gives for a paradigm of the active voice the verb لرزیدن × and for that of the passive voice he chooses the verb كنتى speak correctly, as there is no passive voice in Persian, it would have been better if he had given the conjugation of the verbs بودن × شدن × and of the verb است which joined to the participle of the past active, serve to express the passive voice. The conjugation of the Persian verb is composed of a very small number of forms and inflections, which they modify by the help of two particles prefixed, and auxiliary verbs, from whence the result is, that it can be reduced to a very limited table. Our author has preferred to present it more developed, possibly to co-dispose it with the Hindoostanee verb; but, notwithstanding, he has omitted one of its primitive and simple tenses, the preterite رزید which, according to our author, appears but imperfect, and consequently united to the particle مي. In fact, the great number of irregular Persian verbs which take their imperative and indicative from a verb disused or obsolete, forms almost the only difficulty that occurs in the etymological part of grammar. We might seek in vain the slightest notice of this in Mr. Price's work, who, satisfied with this mutilated skeleton of a grammar, says not a word of Persian Syntax, nor of that of the Hindoostanee. - We now pass to the Arabic grammar. Here the author commences by the verb, according to the usual custom, and he chooses for a model the verb برك to which he gives the signification of to bless, a signification which it never has in Arabic but in the derived forms; whilst under the primitive form its ordinary signification is to kneel, in speaking of the camel. By an inconsistence, he translates the participle active بارک feminine وباركه by blessed. But what is still more extraordinary, because it is not less opposed to all theory of language, as well as to Arabic grammar in particular, is, that our author gives entirely the conjugation of the = verb to be, to which he attributes for the infinitive, وكانا = كونا X a word of his own invention, instead of and divides this erb into active and passive voice. He has given to this last voice, of which assuredly no one ever heard before him, the same meaning as in the active voice, without having been enabled by this circumstance to perceive his error. After similar mistakes, there are no other particular errors that can surprise us; we are not astonished to find Persian words, as سال سال annulment, (page 85); or Arabic words with a form appropriate to the Persian language, as مباكى, which Mr. Price translates by Sanctity, page 48), classed among Arabic words; to see the nouns divided, we know not why, into six declinations; to find nothing said on the irregular plurals, called by grammarians rompus, the knowlege of which is indispensable. Finally, to find everywhere numerous errors of Syntax; errors which, in a work composed with more knowlege of the subject, one would be disposed to attribute to errors of the press; after which it is almost useless to say, that the Syntax, which occupies 14 pages, is nothing but a number of rules taken up at a hazard, which can be of no use whatever, for want of method; and that those, the application of which is most frequent, are there wholly omitted, whilst others, which might have been omitted without detriment, are inserted. One observation alone will justify this opinion, however severe it may appear: in this Syntax we find not a single word on the employment of the various modulations of the Aorist, moods which Erpenius and most of the grammarians who succeeded him have denominated antithetical future, apocopal, and paragogical. Moreover, in this respect, Mr. Price has been in unison with himself, since in his paradigms of the conjugation of verbs he has entirely suppressed all these inflections. A remarkable singularity of this grammar is in that without doubt which the author denominates a plan entirely new, and in that he has placed last, what all former grammarians have considered as preliminary notions necessary to the understanding of all the rest. Thus he has placed the rules of permutation of the letters 1 × × × at the conclusion of the etymological part of the work, whilst they are the key of all the irregularities of the verbs and the nouns; and it is not till after the Syntax that he speaks of the division of letters into classes, according to the parts of the vocal organs which perform the principal part in their pronunciation; of their systematic division into radical and servile letters, solar and lunar; of the formation of syllables; of the accent; and of the punctuation. The author, it is true, has said somewhat respecting the servile letters in regard to the inseparable particles, page 76, and following pages'; but that of itself is a farther proof of the disorder which prevails |
