THE WELWYN TIMES
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1936
THE LORIMERS' TRIUMPH OF RESEARCH
A LANGUAGE THAT IS ONLY SPOKEN
GARDEN CITY RESIDENTS' DANGEROUS JOURNEY
The Burushaski Language: By Lt.-Col. D. L. R. Lorimer. Two vols. Norwegian Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture. Oslo, 1935.
These two beautifully-printed volumes enshrine the results of an amazingly brilliant piece of research work by two Welwyn Garden City residents, Col. and Mrs. Lorimer, who have recently returned to their Parkway home after 18 months spent in one of the wildest parts of Northern India.
Burushaski is a language spoken by a small group of people who live in one of the most remote and inaccessible parts of the world. It has a special interest on that account. Human beings move about and mix up with such freedom that there are very few existing tribes or races whose languages and customs have not been much influenced by those of adjoining races, and therefore indirectly by the various civilisations of the last few thousand years; so that the study of primitive human society is rather like trying to track the footprints of a courting couple across Margate Sands on August Bank Holiday. The prints are there, but such a lot of other things are there as well that the student is baffled.
Now the people who speak this Burushaski language live in Hunza and Nagar, which happens to be a region most difficult to get into, and therefore equally difficult to get out of. It is right up in the extreme north of India, in a wild and rugged tangle of tremendously high mountains—a sort of hub from which radiate spokes consisting of the Himalayas, the Karakoram Range, and the Hindu Kush. Hunza and Nagar are made up of scattered human settlements in the valleys—so narrow and rocky as to be better described as gorges—of the rivers fed by the glaciers of these giants. The district as a whole is cut off from Afghanistan, from China, and from Tibet by ridges so high that their few passes are at 15,000 to 17,000 feet. To get to the place from Kashmir, by way of Gilgit, involves a difficult and dangerous journey on mules and on foot across similar passes and along rock-strewn river valleys and terrifying precipice paths.
Untouched by Civilisation
These are the reasons why the 27,000 people who live their poor and precarious life in Hunza and Nagar are as little touched by modern civilisation as any people in the world. What is a stranger thing—indeed, almost an inexplicable one—is that the language that most of them speak (Burushaski) is, so far as is known, quite unrelated to any other language, whether in India or China or Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world. When this is realised, it is possible to understand the interest which language experts are taking in the Lorimers' achievement. It is also possible to get a slight idea of the extraordinary difficulties they have met and overcome.
It must be borne in mind that the language is entirely unwritten, and that it is spoken by people whose lives and thoughts are as different from those of Europeans as is conceivable.
There is not space here to describe adequately how the Lorimers set about their seemingly impossible task. But a brief sketch of how they came to undertake it will be of interest.
From 1920 to 1924 Col. Lorimer was British Political Agent in Gilgit—itself a remote spot by ordinary season-ticket-holding standards. For three years he devoted his spare time to the study of two other, and quite different, languages, Shina and Khowar. In 1921 Mrs. Lorimer got interested in Burushaski, and began the study of it by talking for several weeks with an intelligent lad of one of the villages. She acquired a sufficient general idea of the language in this time to give her husband a flying start when he began his systematic research into it. How he proceeded to do this can best be described in his own words:
Learning Under Difficulties
"For a few weeks I worked with Nazer of Aliabad, head of my establishment of domestic servants, eliciting from him the principal inflectional forms of the language as well as the chief pronominal forms and the numerals. Nazer, though illiterate, was a man with excellent brains and the instincts of a teacher and elucidator, and Hindustani provided a medium of intercourse. After this I secured the services of Imam Yar Beg, brother of the Wazir of Hunza and a Jemadar in the Gilgit Scouts, and began to take down texts to his dictation. Each day I wrote down as much as I had time to, making every effort to record the sounds phonetically as far as I was able to appreciate them, and to make sure of the division of the words. I did not make a point of fully following and understanding what I wrote. The same day, or the next working day, I read out to him what I had written, corrected it as far as I could from every point of view and strove to arrive at the exact meaning of every word and sentence. I made notes of the translation and obtained the principal parts of verbs, the plural forms of nouns and so on, and recorded other words and phrases that were suggested by those of the text.
All this was very hurriedly done, but the results in general proved satisfactory to the texts themselves seem to be readily intelligible to Burushaski speakers when read aloud to them. They will often complete a sentence and continue the narrative, where it is short, in much the same words as the original, for though there are no professional story-tellers in Hunza, many of the local stories or accounts of customs appear to be told habitually in a customary, if not stereotyped form."
The texts which Col. Lorimer took down in this period, from 1921 to 1924, are set out in full in the second of these two volumes. The actual words of the original are printed (and it is a marvellous example of the printer's art) in the phonetic system which is accepted in the international records of languages, and on the opposite pages are Col. Lorimer's English translations. They are mostly very long and wandering stories of adventures, full of kings and the everyday work of poor people, with a good sprinkling of magic. They are not rounded off in the way of the professional story-teller, but they have an interest over and above the linguistic value which was the main reason for their collection.
It was not until some years after returning to England that Col. Lorimer was able to make use of the material collected in this laborious way. The tremendous work of preparing these volumes was, in fact, done during his residence in Welwyn Garden City, and the final proofs were passed during his recent visit to the actual home of the Burushaski-speakers. Early in 1934 Col. and Mrs. Lorimer made the arduous journey to Hunza, where they lived among the people, for about 18 months, carrying into much further detail their study of the language and incidentally obtaining an immense amount of information about the habits, customs and economic life of their hosts.
They are now back in Welwyn Garden City, and Col. Lorimer is at work on the third volume of his great work, which will contain a very full vocabulary of the language.
Expert reviews of these two volumes in various foreign journals commend the admirably scientific exposition of the structure of the language in the first volume, which contains the Grammar, and the great richness of the exemplifying material. The whole work is regarded as a magnificent piece of research, worthy to stand beside Col. Lorimer's previous publications on the Bakhtiari and allied Persian languages.
To the intelligent layman such work is, of course, more awe-inspiring than understandable. The knowledge acquired by Col. and Mrs. Lorimer of the Hunza-Nagar people themselves is also of great scientific importance and will be of interest to a much wider public. It is to be hoped that they will soon let us have a book on this aspect of their studies.
F. J. O.
THE NEW DIRECTORY
for Welwyn Garden City
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