own languages. I admit I have never yet found a case where it can be proved that English has influenced the grammatical categories of the native languages of American Indian pupils. It may be noted, however, that in the drama of "The Little Clay Cart", ascribed to King Śūdraka, Candanaka tries to excuse his slip in Prakrit (which nearly cost Aryaka his life) by appealing to the grammatical categories of non-Aryan languages. As I am ignorant of these I cannot say whether his plea is well-founded. In discussing the differences between the accentuation of Vedic and Classical Sanskrit, it would have been well tol mention that certain Asokan dialec ts had a system identica with or very similar to the latter: see IF. 23, p. 231. In conclusion the writer agrees with the thesis that Sanskrit, "though not in the very form in which it occurs in literature" was a truly spoken vernacular. Even the late Classical Sanskrit cannot have been wholly artificial; the existence of such an enormous literature necessarily presupposes a large audience who normally spoke a language that did not differ from the written one too violently. That the audience belonged to cultivated circles of society goes without saying. Petersen has done well to emphasize this aspect of the problem, as against Pischel, Gr. d. Pkt. Sprachen, § 6, note 2. But other phases such as the question as the genetic relationship of the Middle Indic dialects require more protracted and more intensive study before satisfactory answers can be given. Notes on the Phonology of the Tirurai Language. 1. Tirurai (sometimes called Tedurai) is one of the numerous Indonesian languages of the Philippine Islands. It is spoken by about four thousand people in the mountains south of the town Kotabatu (Cotabato) on the southern coast of Mindanao. The chief town of the Tirurai is Tamontaka. 2. Bibliography. Bennåsar, Padre Guillermo, Diccionario Tiruray-Español, Manila 1892, and Diccionario Español-Tiruray, Manila 1893. The author of the three items that follow is given anonymously as "un Padre Misionero", who, however, is known to have been Padre Bennásar. Observaciones gramaticales sobre la lengua Tiruray, Manila 1892. Catecismo Histórico por el Abate Claudio Fleury y traducido al Tiruray por un P. misionero de la Compañía de Jesús, Manila 1892. Costumbres de los indios Tirurayes escritas por José Tenorio (a) Sigayán y traducidas al español y anotadas por un Padre misionero de la Compañía de Jesús, Manila 1892. 3. Chief Peculiari ties. Tirurai phonology presents several marked differences from that of other Philippine speech groups. Of these the more apparent are: (a) the rounding of Indonesian a to the o sound of Ger. hoffen or Fr. école, (b) diphthongization of final i and u to ei and eu, respectively, (c) ƒ everywhere for p, (d) the frequent occurrence of a trilled r of varied origin, and (e) the change of Indonesian k to g under certain cirmcumstances. These, and other peculiarities of less frequent occurrence, are so striking as to give a Tirur ai text a very foreign appearance when compared with other Philippine languages. 4. Indonesian a. Under certain conditions an original a may be rounded in Tirurai, becoming a sound very close to the o in Ger. hoffen, Fr. école, e. g., IN lima Tir. limó "five"; IN anak: Tir. onók "offspring, son, daughter, child". This change occurs independently only in a final syllable, e. g., Tir. limó, lifot (Phil. lipai "to forget"). Where it occurs in the penult, as in Tir. onók, it is by assimilation to the o (<a) of the following (final) syllable. Under other circumstances an IN penultimate a remains unchanged in Tirurai, as in the following examples: In the following examples IN a > Tir. o in final syllables and the o thus arising assimilates to itself an original a of the preceding (penultimate) syllable: (a) IN a Tir. o in final position: 5. But the change a > o is prevented by an adjacent s or y, and by an adjacent r, unless this r be preceded by u and the affected vowel be in final position. As a rule IN i and u remain unchanged in Tirurai everywhere except in final position, where, in a number of the most common words, they are diphthongized to ei and eu, respectively. (a) Indonesian final i ei in Tirurai: Non-Tirurai Tirurai 7. The Indonesian obscure vowel (pepet).1 The pepet vowel remains uniformly an obscure, colorless, ĕ in Tirurai: Tir. atef, IN atěp "roof"; Tir. enem, IN ěněm "six". 8. Indonesian p. Every p, whether originally IN or not, becomes ƒ in Tirurai: 2 Tir. fitéu, IN pitu "seven"; Tir. afei, IN apui, api "fire"; Tir. 1 Cf. Conant, The Pepet Law in Philippine Languages, Anthropos, vol. VII (1912), pp. 920—947. 2 Cf. Conant, F and V in Philippine Languages, Division of Ethnology Publications. vol. v, part. ii, Manila 1908. VOL. XXXIII Part. II. 11 |