दक्षिणी मराठी खजाना

The Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) is a comprehensive survey of the languages of British India, describing 364 languages and dialects. It was first proposed by Sir George Grierson, ICS and linguist. The survey formally began in 1894 and continued for over thirty years till 1928. At Sir. Grierson's suggestion, during 1922-26 gramophone recordings were made of the dialects and languages of Madras Presidency and the relative transcripts were published in 1926 by the Madras Museum. Samples of DM contained in the two pages reproduced here are from that collection. The original sound recordings are held by the Madras Museum. It will be interesting for us now to see how our DM was spoken in the early part of the 20th century ie, almost 100 years back. The transcripts were done at that time in devanagari. It is probable that the majority of the community had already given up writing DM and so the samples of transcripts shown here would be as conceived by the the person who wrote it. Still, it will be worth our while to examine the written words also.