4 research outputs found
The colonial construction of Hindustani 1800-1947
Considerable research has been done on the impact of English in India but despite the fact that, for a century and a half, almost all British civil and military officers had to learn Hindustani, almost nothing has been written on its importance to the colonial state. The small amount of literature has focused on a few particular aspects, either the very early Gilchrist years or specifically on the textbooks themselves. This study uses a wide range of archival materials relating to the British learning of the Hindustani, together with the textbooks and grammars they produced and memoirs of those who had to learn the language, both to tell the story of the British Hindustani ‘enterprise’ comprehensively, and to reveal its relationship to colonial state power. The initial premise was that Hindustani was the ‘cement’ which held the empire together. As to be expected, however, over such a long time frame the evidence revealed considerable changes in the perceived importance of Hindustani to the colonial state and links made by many scholars between language and colonial power are in this particular case, shown to be dubious. The study, in looking at an area hitherto unresearched, contributes to the knowledge and understanding of the role of an indigenous lingua franca in the colonial context and sheds new light on its ‘fate’ in the Indian context
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Nostratic Dictionary
A revised edition can be found at http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/244080.Aharon Dolgopolsky is the leading authority on the Nostratic macrofamily. His 'Nostratic Dictionary' presented here is, of course, something very much more than a dictionary. It is the most thorough and extensive demonstration and documentation so far of what may be termed the Nostratic hypothesis: that several of the world's best- known language families are related in their origin, their grammar and their lexicon, and that they belong together in a larger unit, of earlier origin, the Nostratic macrofamily. It should at once be noted that several elements of this enterprise are controversial. For while the Nostratic hypothesis has many supporters, it has been criticized on rather fundamental grounds by a number of distinguished linguists. The matter was reviewed some years ago in a symposium held at the McDonald Institute, and positions remain very much polarized. It was a result of that meeting that the decision was taken to invite Aharon Dolgopolsky to publish his Dictionary - a much more substantial treatise than any work hitherto undertaken on the subject - at the McDonald Institute. For it became clear that the diversities of view expressed at that symposium were not likely to be resolved by further polemical exchanges. Instead, a substantial body of data was required, whose examination and evaluation could subsequently lead to more mature judgments. Those data are presented here, and that more mature evaluation can now proceed.McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
Alfred P. Sloan Foundatio