SMITH, John MacDonald.

£1,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

A Practical Handbook of the Khond Language. First edition, signed by the author on the front free endpaper verso and with "from the compiler" written in a different hand above. Part IV presents 30 Khond fables in English and romanized Kui (the language of the Khond people). Centred on village life, these feature tigers, elk, snakes, and other animals. An officer in the Madras Staff Corps, Major John MacDonald Smith (1827-1919) was the special assistant to the agent of Richard Plantagenet Campbell Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 3rd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos and Governor of Madras. His practical handbook was the first book on Kui to use romanization, previous studies by Captain John Frye having employed Odia script. For Part IV, Smith adapted the fables found in Frye's rare 1851 publication, Fables in the Kondh Language. The other sections concern grammar, vocabulary, sentence construction, and parts of depositions given by Khond in local courts and recorded by Smith.The fables offer lessons, similar to those in Aesop, in sharing, cooperation, honesty, modesty, and other virtues. They often involve pairs of animals or an animal and a human, and the animals are anthropomorphized. For example, the tale of the old woman and the hen warns against greed and covetousness: the old woman, in overfeeding her hen to make it lay more eggs, eventually causes it to die of overconsumption. The fables are also set in the same kinds of rural contexts that produced the Western fa

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