INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.
Words of Indian origin have been insinuating themselves into English ever since the end of the reign of Elizabeth and the beginning of that of King James, when such terms as calico, chintz, and gingham had already effected a lodgment in English warehouses and shops, and were lying in wait for entrance into English literature. Such outlandish guests grew more frequent 120 years ago, when, soon after the middle of last century, the numbers of Englishmen in the Indian services, civil and military, expanded with the great acquisition of dominion then made by the Company; and we meet them in vastly greater abundance now.
Vocabularies of Indian and other foreign words, in use among Europeans in the East, have not unfrequently been printed. Several of the old travellers have attached the like to their narratives; whilst the prolonged excitement created in England, a hundred years since, by the impeachment of Hastings and kindred matters, led to the publication of several glossaries as independent works; and a good many others have been published in later days. At the end of this Introduction will be found a list of those which have come under my notice, and this might no doubt be largely added to.[1]
Of modern Glossaries, such as have been the result of serious labour, all, or nearly all, have been of a kind purely technical, intended to facilitate the comprehension of official documents by the explanation of terms used in the Revenue department, or in other branches of Indian administration.
The most notable examples are (of brief and occasional character), the Glossary appended to the famous Fifth Report of the Select Committee of 1812, which was compiled by Sir Charles Wilkins; and (of a far more vast and comprehensive sort), the late Professor Horace Hay man Wilson's Glossary of Judicial and Revenue Terms (4to, 1855) which leaves far behind every other attempt in that kind.[2]
That kind is, however, not ours, as a momentary comparison of a page or two in each Glossary would suffice to show. Our work indeed, in the long course of its compilation, has gone through some modification and enlargement of scope; but hardly such as in any degree to affect its distinctive character, in which something has been aimed at differing in form from any work known to us. In its original conception it was intended to deal with all that class of words which, not in general pertaining to the technicalities of administration, recur constantly in the daily intercourse of the English in India, either as expressing ideas really not provided for by
- ↑ See Note A. at end of Introduction.
- ↑ Professor Wilson's work may perhaps bear re-editing, but can hardly, for its purpose, be superseded. The late eminent Telugu scholar, Mr. C. P. Brown, interleaved, with criticisms and addenda, a copy of Wilson, which is now in the India Library. I have gone through it, and borrowed a few notes, with acknowledgment by the initials C. P. B. The amount of improvement does not strike me as important.
