The Tibeto-Chinese families of Indian Languages
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THE Tibeto-Chinese family
Excepting the Austric, no grMt family of speeches is spoken over 60 wide an extent Of the eastern hemisphere from central asia to southern Burma and from Baltistan to pekin at that formless ,ever moving ant horde of dialects ,the tibeto Chinese.The number of its speakers far exceeds those of the austric and even of the indo European family. So vast is the area coverd by it and so apparently infinite is the number of its members, That no single scholar can hope to master the latter in their entirety.A few of them ,such as Tibetan,Burmese,Siamese,or Chinese ,have been more or less thoroughly investigated by specialists of others we have only a few words single bricks each of which we have to Take as specimens of an entire house ,while of others again we know only the names,or not even that.
The first attempts at classifing this mass -of langua.ges were made by Brian
Houghton Hodgson, Hodgaon , clarum at venerabile woman and his
works still form the foundation of a1l similar undertakings.
Closely following Hodgson came the enthusiastic and indefatigable Logan, to whom we are indebted for much that relates to Burma and Assam. After him we find several writers, some like Mason, Cushing, Forbes, or Edkins, armed with a practical mistery of a. portion of the field, and adding new facta to our knowledge, and others. tra.il)6(l philologists like Max muller Friedrich Muller, or Terrien de Iacouperie, who examined t he material8 collected. by the fonner, and did something towards reducing cha08 into order. Since then oon.8idera.ble progress has been made, a.nd, if we confine ourselves to our immediate subject, the languages of India. and the countries of the immed.iate neighbourhood, it will be sufficient to record the work done by the late Professor Kuhn of Munich, Professor Oonrady, formerly of Leipzig, Dr. wufer and Professor Bradley in America, a nd., above all, tile brilliant b&nd of schola.n wllich adorns L':Bcole Fmn9aise d'Ext~me-Orient a.t Hanoi under the leadership of Monsieur Fiuot. - Through their labours a. framework of clasaifioation has been put together which is genemlly accepted hy schola.1'8 who are in a positil)n to judge its value. They bave even succeeded in formulating phonetic rules that bridge over the dill'ereuOO8 between what are a.pJ?&rent ly the m08t widely separated langtmgcs, and in suggesting theories to account for the origin of the tones which are so characteristic of theee form8 of 8peech. In this way the ground h808 boon prepared for the Linguistic Survey of Burma, which will, I hope, be well advanced before these words are in types.
If we judge by vocabulary, the Latinized English of Dr. Johnson would have to be recorded. n.s a Romance language, and U rdu as Semitic or B ranian, wherea.s every one knows thl\t English is really Teutonic and U rdu Indo-Aryan. Thc rule ap~liea admirably to languages like Sa.nskrit or Latiu or Bnglish. which have gramma..rs, but wha.tarewetodo when we come to Iangua..,.ooes which to our Aryan ide&s have no grammar at a ll-forms of spoecb which make no distinction between noun, adjective, and verb, which han no inflerions, or hardly any, and whi.ch are entirely composod of monOllyllables that never cMnge their Corms P Acooniiog to the• Century Dicti.onary', grammar is • a. systematic account of the usages of a laiI.guage, •as regards especially the' parts of speech it distinguishes, the forms and uses of inflected. words, and the combinations of words. into sentences.' Hence, to answer the above question, we must either a.oondon our p'rinciple or enlarge our conception of grammar by omitting the word' inflected' from the definition. We are thus thrown back on the forms and uses of words genernlly; that is to say, we are compelled to lay more stress upon a comparison of vocabularies, and, as will be seen subsequently, this will really bring us back to our principle. Tibcto-Chinese languages, like the' Buddhists who speak most of them, have passed through many births. 'I'hey, too, are under the sway of ka,'m(l•. 'I'he latest investigations have shown that in former existences they were inflected, with a.ll the familiar panoply of prefix: and suffix, and that these long dead. accretions are still influenCing each word in their vocabularies in its form, its pronunciation, and even the position which it now occupies in a sentence.
The history of a. 'I'ibeto-Chinese word may be compared to the fate of a number of exactly similar stones which a man threw into the sea at various places along the shore. One fell into a. C3lm pool, and remained. unchanged; u.nother received. a coating of mud; which, in the course of centuries, itself became a. tllud outer covering entirely concealing w~t was within; ru.lOther fell a.mong ~ks in a stormy channel, and was knocked. about and chipped and worn away by cont~nual attrition till only a geologist could identify it; a.nother was burrowed into by the pholas tiU it became a caricature of its form~r self ; u.nother was overgrown, by limpets, and then was 80 worn away and ill-treated. by the rude waves that, like the grin of l\lice's Cheshire cat, all that remained was the merest trace clinging to the sh ell .of its whilom guest. Laborious and patient analysis has enabled scholars to trace the fate of some vocables through a.U thtlir different vicissitudE-ii . . For instance, no two words can apparently be so difiel'Cnt as rang and ,maj both of which mean 'horse, ' !loud yet Professor Conrady has traced the derivation of the latter from tlie former, although all that has remained of the original rang in the Chinese ,ma is the tone of voice in which the latter is pronounced.
