Tibetan Language

TIBETAN LANGUAGE. The language of Tibet is known as "the speech of Bod or Tibet" namely Bod-skad (pronounced Bho-16), while the vernacular is called P'al-skad or "vulgar speech," in contradistinction to the rje-sa or "polite respectful speech" of the educated classes, and the ch'os-skad or "book language," the literary style in which the scriptures and other classical works are written.

It comprises several dialects classed into three groups: (I) the central or the dialects of Lhasa and the central provinces of t..1 and Tsang (including Spiti) which is the lingua franca of the whole country, (2) the western dialects of Ladak, Lahul, Balti stan and Purig, and (3) the eastern dialects of the province of Khams. Many sub-dialects of Tibetan are spoken in the frontier Himalayan districts and states outside Tibet. The Takpa of Tawang in the eastern Assam Himalayas appears to form a transi tion between the central and the Sifan group of dialects on the Chinese frontier, which includes the Minyak, Sungpan, Lifan and Tochu dialects. On the north bordering on Turkestan the dialect of the nomadic Hor-pa tribes is much mixed with Turkic in gredients.

Tibetan is allied to the Burmese languages, and forms with the latter the "Tibeto-Burman" family.

Writing.

Notched sticks (shing-chram) and knotted cords were in current use. On the eastern frontier the medicine-men or tomba of the Moso have a peculiar pictorial writing, which is known in Europe from J. Bacot's work, Les Mo-So (Leyden, I9I3). It undoubtedly contains survivals of a former extensive system superseded by the alphabetic writing introduced from India. The close resemblance of the Tibetan characters "with heads" to the Gupta inscriptions of Allahabad shows them to have been derived from the monumental writing of the period; and the other Tibetan letters came from the same Indian char acter in the style in which it was used in common life. The Tibetan half-cursive was further developed into the more cur rent "headless" (u-med) characters, of which there are several styles. The ancient manuscripts discovered by Sir Aurel Stein in Khotan include very early Tibetan documents.

The language was first reduced to writing with the assistance of Indian Buddhist monks in the middle of the 7th century A.D. by Thonmi, a Tibetan layman. The letters, which are a form of the Indian Sanskrit characters of that period, follow the same arrange ment as their Sanskritic prototype. The consonants, 3o in number, which are deemed to possess an inherent sound a, are the follow ing: ka, k'a, ga, nga, Ca, ja, nya, ta, t'a, da, na, pa, p'a, ba, ma, tsa, ts'a, dza, wa, z'a, za, 'ha, ya, ra, la, s'a, sa, ha, a; the so-called Sanskrit cerebrals are represented by the letters ta, t'a, da, na, s'a, turned the other way. Y a, when combined as a second consonant with k-, p-, in-, is written under the first letter. Ra, when combined as second letter with k-, t-, p-, is written under the first, and when combined with another consonant as first letter over the second. The vowels are a, i, u, e, o, which are not distinguished as long or short in writing, except in loan words transcribed from the Sanskrit, etc., though they are so in the vernaculars in the case of words altered by phonetic detrition. By adding to the bases form-words as prefixes, suffixes or infixes, the Tibetan language has developed a considerable grammatical system. Agglomerations

of consonants are often met with as initials, giving the appearance of telescoped words—an appearance which historical etymology often confirms. Many of these initial consonants are silent in the dialects of the central provinces, or have been resolved into a simpler one of another character. The language is much ruled by laws of euphony. Among the initials, five, viz., g, d, b, m, 'h, are regarded as prefixes, and are called so for all purposes, though they belong sometimes to the stem. As a rule none of these letters can be placed before any of the same organic class. Post-positions, pd or ba and ma, are required by the noun (substantive or adjec tive) that is to be singled out; po or bo (masc.) and mo (fern.) are used for distinction of gender or for emphasis. The cases of nouns are indicated by suffixes, which vary their initials according to the final of the nouns. The plural is denoted when required by adding one of the several words of plurality. When several words are connected in a sentence they seldom require more than one case element, and that comes last. There are personal, demon strative, interrogative and reflexive pronouns, as well as an indefinite article, which is also the numeral for "one." The per sonal pronouns are replaced by various terms of respect when speaking to or before superiors and there are many words which are only employed in ceremonial language. The verb, properly a kind of noun or participle, has no element of person, and denotee the conditions of tense and mood by an external inflection, or the addition of auxiliary verbs and suffixes when the stem is not susceptible of inflection, so that instead of saying "I go" a Tibetan says "my going." The chief differences between the classical lan guage of the Tibetan translators of the 9th century and the ver nacular, as well as the language of native words, existed in vocab ulary, phraseology and grammatical structure, and arose from the influence of the translated texts.

Tones.

Tones in Tibetan have developed on the same lines as in Chinese. Thus intransitive bases seem to have begun only with soft consonants, and it is doubtful whether the parent tongue possessed hard consonants at all; while transitive bases were formed by hardening of the initial consonants and at the same time pronouncing the words in a higher tone, and these two latter changes are supposed to have been indicated by a prefix to the base-word. Many of these old soft initial consonants which are now hardened in the modern dialects are preserved in classical Tibetan, i.e., in Tibetan of the 7th to the 9th century A.D.

See Sarat Chandra Das' Tibetan English Dictionary with Sanskrit synonyms (1902) ; V. C. Henderson, Tibetan Manual (19o3) ; and Sir C. A. Bell, Grammar of Colloquial Tibetan (Calcutta, 1919), and English-Tibetan Colloquial Dictionary (1920) ; also vol. iii. of the Linguistic Survey of India (1908). As separate publications there are several vocabularies of Chinese and Tibetan, Mongol and Tibetan, Chinese, Manchu, Mongol, Oelot, Tibetan and Turkish, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Manchu, Mongol and Chinese.