Ebook: Phonetics in ancient India

Oxford University Press, 1953. — 105 p.W. S. Allen, Phonetics in ancient India.
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. London Oriental Series - v. 1This book is intended as a guide to the appreciation of the earliest phoneticians. Whitney's pioneer expositions of certain of our sources some eighty years ago are acknowledged in the introductory chapter; but a general reinterpretation has now long been overdue, and this fact is in itself suggestive of the remarkable quality of the Indian texts. For it implies that they display a level of phonetic discourse beyond the full comprehension of Whitney and his contemporaries, such as only the advances of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries enable us to appreciate today. The recognition that analyses so advanced in their technique should have been evolved at so early a date may well inspire a salutary scientific humility, and it would be at once arrogant and pessimistic not to expect that a reinterpretation will again be necessary in another eighty years—or even eight.
I am grateful to Professor J. R. Firth for the encouraging interest he has shown at all stages in the progress of this work, and no less for his constructive suggestions; and I am happy to acknowledge the researches of Dr. Siddheshwar Varma, the stimulus of whose published work has been augmented for me by the background of his personal association with Professor Firth over twenty years ago—an association which has led, in the light of contemporary linguistics, to a fuller realization of the wealth that lies in the ancient treatises. My thanks are also due to Professor J. Brough, who read the work in manuscript and made a number of helpful criticisms, and to Mr. C. A. Rylands and Mr. R. H. Robins, who generously undertook to read the whole of the proofs during my absence in India.
Finally I acknowledge the generosity shown by the authorities of the School of Oriental and African Studies in providing a full subvention for the publication of this work.