Guwahati: A manuscript of a 200-year-old dictionary of ten languages, including English, Assamese, Bengali, Manipuri, Garo, Rabha, Koch, Kachari, Panikoch and Mech, has been traced in the British Library in London.
The British Library, with a wide collection of manuscripts and paintings from all over the world, has in its shelves ‘Comparative Vocabularies’, the manuscript of the 200-year-old dictionary, written by Dr Francis Buchanan Hamilton, a British polymath of the 18th century.
Hamilton came to India when it was under the East India Company.
The manuscript was traced in the Library by Rini Kakati, NRI Assam Coordinator for UK and the Director, FASS (Friends of Assam and Seven Sisters), at the behest of Dr Raktim Ranjan Saikia, on behalf of Asomiya Jatiya Prakash, the publishers of the encyclopaedic dictionary ‘Asomiya Jatiya Abhidhan’ (Assamese National Dictionary).
The ‘Comparative Vocabularies’ was written circa 1800, has 155 pages of landscape-sized paper.
There are 18,000 words in all with 1,800 words in each of the 10 languages.
Dr Hamilton (1762 to 1829) was an explorer and naturalist.
Born at Branziet (Baldernock, East Dunbartonshire), Buchanan in 1794 was appointed a surgeon with the East India Company in Bengal (India).
He was able to explore Burma, Chittagong (1798), the Andaman Islands, Nepal (1802-3) and North Bengal and Bihar (1807-9) and made detailed surveys of the botany, geography, agriculture, economy, social conditions and culture of these areas, preparing extensive reports which now form an important historical resource. Devabrata Sharma, chief editor of Asomiya Jatiya Abhidhan (Assamese National Dictionary), is going to include this historic manuscript for their future publication, Ms Kakati informed from London. (UNI)