66 Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. [March, 



on the vernacular language of the valley of Kashmir. The first is by 

 Mr. M. P. Edge worth of the Bengal Civil Service, who describes it as 

 " a grammar and vocabulary of the Kashmiri Language," and states 

 that he drew it up from the dialect of the shawl- weavers of Ludhiana, 

 through the assistance of Meer Saif-u-deen, a respectable Syud of that 

 place. In extent it is limited to 20 pages, of which the bulk is made 

 up of straggling lists of words. The second is somewhat larger, and 

 occupies about 40 pages of the Journal. It was compiled by Major 

 R. Leech, C. B., and was intended to be only a " grammar of the 

 Kashmiri language," but in reality it was made up of a number of 

 vocabularies arranged under different grammatical headings. Like 

 the first, it was drawn from the shawl-weavers of Ludhiana through 

 the intervention of a Musulman. Neither of these works is of a 

 character to afford safe data for any useful purpose. They are avow- 

 edly founded upon the language of a small community of artisans 

 long expatriated from their native country, and not drawn directly 

 from the Hindus of whose language they profess to treat. 



The rules they contain are meagre in the extreme ; the work of 

 Major Leech illustrates the principles of grammar by examples, but 

 gives no rule at all ; altogether they are as imperfect as grammars 

 compiled from examples drawn through the medium of interpreters 

 must necessarily be. Nor were their authors unaware of this, for 

 Major Leech avowed, in his preface, that his essay " does not deserve 

 the name of a grammar," and Mr. Edgeworth admitted his to be 

 " necessarily very imperfect." 



On the subject of orthography, Mr. Edgeworth is extremely brief ; 

 he docs not give more than a dozen lines, and that only to indicate 

 in what respects the alphabet of the Kashmiri differs from the Sans- 

 krit. Major Leech, on the contrary, is very diffuse, and devotes no 

 less than one-third of his essay to it. Bat for any practical purpose, 

 it is as useless as the first; being made up of examples of diphthongs, 

 triphthongs and other combinations of vowels and consonants peculiar 

 to Kashmiri. 



It is evident that the alphabet of the Kashmiri is of Sanskrit 

 origin, and the character used in writing is a modified Punjabi or 

 Griirmukhi, a form of the Devanagari, but there appears a most re- 

 markable difference in their nomenclature. 



