1912: Knighted as a Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire (KCIE).Grierson died in Camberley, Surrey, England at Rathfarnham, the house he built and named after his grandfather's castle in Dublin. ![]() Turner refer to the extensive publications of the Linguistic Survey of India as "a great Imperial museum, representing and systematically classifying the linguistic botany of India". Most of Grierson's later work deals with linguistics. He also published on literary texts and writers, including a paper on Kalidasa in 1877. His contemporaries noted both his lack of sympathy for Advaita Vedanta, which he regarded as "pandit religion," and his "warm appreciation of the monotheistic devotion of the country folk". Grierson published scholarly works throughout his career: on the dialects and peasant life of Bihar, on Hindi literature, on bhakti, and on linguistics. On the completion of the Linguistic Survey of India was celebrated at the Criterion Restaurant by the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland with Lord Birkenhead proposing the toast. He spent the following thirty years editing the enormous amount of material gathered and worked briefly in collaboration with the Norwegian linguist Sten Konow (who contributed to volume III on Tibetan languages). By 1903 most of the data had come in and he retired from the Indian Civil Service. ![]() In 1900 he moved to England "for convenience of consulting European libraries and scholars". The survey classified the languages of 290,000,000 people. The parable was chosen because 'it contains the three personal pronouns, most of the cases found in the declension of nouns, and the present, past, and future tenses of the verb'. He sought a version of the parable of the prodigal son, oral narratives and a predefined list of 241 words and phrases (this list had been made by Sir George Campbell in 1866). He provided forms and instructional material to his correspondents. He had government officials collect material for every language, dialect, and subdialect, going from village to village and sampling across the classes and sexes. For the survey a standard set of materials was sought. The recommendation was made to the British Government and in 1898 he was appointed Superintendent of the newly formed Linguistic Survey of India. A resolution was passed urging the Government to undertake a 'deliberate systematic survey of the languages of India.' The signatories included Karl Bühler, Max Müller, Monier Williams and Grierson. At the Congress it was noted that the number of Indian languages was unknown with estimates varying from 20 to 250. Grierson was a delegate of the Royal Asiatic Society along with Dr Theodor Duka, Albert Terrien de Lacouperie, Cecil Bendall, and R. Grierson attended the Oriental Congress in 1886 at Vienna and proposed the idea of a formal linguistic in India. He married Lucy Elizabeth Jean, daughter of Maurice Henry Fitzgerald Collis, a Dublin surgeon, in 1880 but they had no children. First posted to Bankipore (Patna) in Bihar, he became Magistrate and Collector at Patna and still later in 1896, Opium Agent for Bihar. He took a deep interest in languages, won prizes for studies in Sanskrit and Hindustani before leaving for the Bengal Presidency in 1873. He continued studies at Trinity College for two probationary years where he was influenced by Robert Atkinson, professor of oriental languages. Grierson qualified for the Indian Civil Service in 1871 ranking twenty-eighth for the year. He then went up to Trinity College, Dublin, where he was a student of mathematics. Bees School, and from the age of 13 at Shrewsbury. His mother Isabella was the daughter of Henry Ruxton of Ardee. His father and grandfather ( George Grierson) were well-known Dublin printers and publishers. Grierson was born in Glenageary, County Dublin. He published the findings of the Linguistic Survey in a series that consisted of 19 volumes. He continued the work until 1928, surveying people across the British Indian territory, documenting spoken languages, recording voices, written forms and was responsible in documenting information on 179 languages, defined by him through a test of mutual unintelligibility, and 544 dialects which he placed in five language families. The Congress recommended the idea to the British Government and he was appointed superintendent of the newly created Linguistic Survey of India in 1898. He published numerous studies in the journals of learned societies and wrote several books during his administrative career but proposed a formal linguistic survey at the Oriental Congress in 1886 at Vienna. He worked in the Indian Civil Service but an interest in philology and linguistics led him to pursue studies in the languages and folklore of India during his postings in Bengal and Bihar. Sir George Abraham Grierson OM KCIE FBA (7 January 1851 – 9 March 1941) was an Irish administrator and linguist in British India.
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