viii INTRODUCTION. 



and separate his few followers from the mass of Afghans (called by them Kash) 

 who would no doubt at first look upon the Barakis with jealousy as intruders. 

 The muleteers of Cahul, being led by their profession to traverse wild countries 

 and unsafe roads^ have also invented a vocabulary of pass-words.' 



Major H. G. Raverty (J.A.S.B., xxxiii, 1864, pp. 267ff.) also gives a short list of 

 ' Barakai ' words, and adds : — 



" The Barakais, who are not Afghans, are included among the people 

 termed Tajiks (supposed to be of Arab descent,) dwell at, and round about, 

 Kanigoram, * * * and about Barak in the province of Loghar, and But-khak 

 on the road between Jalalabad and Kabul, south of the river of that name." 



The following account of the language is principally based on a book written in 

 1886 by Ghulam Muhammad Khan, District Inspector of Schools, Dera Ismail Khan, 

 at the request of Major Macaulay, who was Political Officer with the Punitive Force 

 that entered Waziristan in the year 1881. It is entitled Qawdid-e-Bargista, and is 

 written partly in Urdu, and partly in P'sto. It is a very full and carefully written 

 work, containing a grammar, a vocabulary, and a collection of short sentences and 

 stories in Ormurl. Unfortunately, owing to its being printed in the Persian charac- 

 ter, the vocalization of many Ormurl words has been left doubtful, and this I have 

 endeavoured to remedy so far as was possible by reference to other authorities. 

 These are the manuscript materials collected for the lyinguistic Survey of India, and, 

 esi^ecially, a valuable transcription into the Roman character of Ghulam Muhammad 

 Khan's list of Ormurl verbs, kindly placed at my disposal by Mr. Longworth Dames. 

 When all other sources failed, I consulted the local authorities in Waziristan, and I 

 am indebted to Sir John Donald, K.C.I.E., the Resident, for much kind help ungrud- 

 gingly rendered in the midst of his multifarious duties. 



From the above materials, I have prepared a full grammar and vocabulary of 

 the language for the appropriate volume of the lyinguistic Survey. In these I at- 

 tempted to show only the facts of the language, so as to give a purely practical 

 account to those who wished to make a study of it for administrative purposes. 



The present work has a different object. Here, it has been my endeavour to 

 treat this interesting and little-known language from the point of view of compara- 

 tive philology, and to ascertain, its relationship to the other members of the Branian 

 family. Considerations of space, and also the desire to prevent leading facts from 

 becoming obscured under a mass of details, have prevented the account of the grammar 

 in the following pages from being nearly so complete as that which will be published 

 in the Linguistic Survey, but I hope that I have not omitted any fact that is of 

 importance for the object in view. 



