|
London: The manuscript
of a 212-year-old dictionary written by a British polymath
employed by the East India Company in the late 18th century has
been traced in the British Library, shedding new light on the
history of words in Indian languages.
The dictionary, titled "Comparative Vocabularies", was written in
1800 by Dr Francis Buchanan-Hamilton (1762-1929), who was a
surgeon to the governor-general Lord Wellesley in Calcutta (now
Kolkata).
The manuscript traced in the British Library by Rini
Kakati, the London-based director of FASS (Friends of Assam and
the Seven Sisters), is a dictionary of 10 languages, including
Assamese, Bengali, Manipuri, Garo, Rabha Koch, Kachari, Panikoch
and Mech,.
Kakati told IANS she was alerted about the manuscript by Raktim
Ranjan Saikia of the Department of Geology in JB College, Jorhat,
on behalf of Asom Jatiya Prakash, publisher of the dictionary. She
said she was delighted to be able to trace the historic
collection.
The book has 155 pages of landscape-sized paper. There are 18,000
words in all with 1,800 words in each of the 10 languages.
A Scottish physician, Buchanan-Hamilton is recognised for making
significant contributions as a geographer, oologist, and botanist
while living in India. The standard botanical author abbreviation
'Buch.-Ham.' is applied to plants and animals he described.
In 1794, he was appointed a surgeon with the East India Company,
and explore Burma, Chittagong (1798), the Andaman Islands, Nepal
(1802-3) and North Bengal and Bihar (1807-9), when he made
detailed surveys of the botany, geography, agriculture, economy,
social conditions and culture of these areas, preparing extensive
reports which now form an important historical resource.
On the return of the mission, being stationed at Jjakkipur, near
the mouth of the Brahmaputra, he wrote a description of the fishes
of that river, which was published in 1822.
|
Comments
|
Quick links