পাতা:সাহিত্য পরিষৎ পত্রিকা (দ্বিতীয় ভাগ).pdf/৪০৯

a »00 R ] পরিশিষ্ট । 8 o dè Minute by DR. RájENDRALÁl.A MITRA, President to the Central Teat-book Committee, on Transliteration of Historical and Geographical Proper AVате8. SIXTEEN years ago the Calcutta School Book Society adopted, at my suggestion, a set of rules for the rendering of foreign proper names in vernacular primers on geography. The rules, however, were never published, and no advantage was derived from them. The evils I then com plained of have since greatly multiplied. No two books agree with each other, and none corresponds with any given map or atlas. This discordance cannot but be a source of much trouble to school-boys. In many otherwise good text-books even Indian proper names are most frightfully misspelt. In a small primer which was lately sent to me for examination and report, I found between 20 and 30 such names misspelt on a single page. I cannot conscientiously recommend such books for school use, and yet as most of, if not all, our primers are similarly circumstanced, if they be rejected the work of vernacular education would be brought to a deadlock. I propose, therefore, that a set of rules be framed and published for general information, with the intimation that a year after its publication no Work on geography will be selected by the Central Text-book Committee which would not conform to those rules. I. The first rule I would suggest would be that proper names be invariably transliterated according to their native sounds, and never translated. This is founded on certain directions of the Royal Geographical Society of London, and is the same with what occurs in the Admiralty Manual of Scientific Enquiry. It embraces two rules-first, the adoption of a strict phonetic system; and second, the avoidance of translations. Little need be said to support the position that proper names should never be translated. They are not expected to indicate objects which are conformable to their meaning, but to convey the idea of objects to which we arbitrarily attach them. Thus (Mr.) Black is not connotative of an individual of a particular colour, but of one whose forefathers happened to be so called. If we translate it into Krishna, the value of the word Black as a proper name is at once sacrificed. Similarly, in geography Mont Blanc would become in bengali Dhavalagiri, and in Persian Sufed Áoh; Dhavalagiri and Sufed Kol in French Mont Blanc, and all three in English While Mountain, while almost every snow-capped mountain would be called in Bengali Himalaya. A system which would lead to such confusion should never be tolerated. Transliteration, therefore, is the only alternative, and in adopting it