The Tibeto-Chinese families of Indian Languages
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THE Tibeto-Chinese family
Excepting the Austric, no great family of speeches is spoken over so wide an extent of the Eastern Hemisphere from Central Asia to Southern Burma, and from Baltistan to Pekin -- as 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 covered 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, clarum et venerabile nomen , and his works still form the foundation of all 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 mastery of a portion of the field, and adding new facts to our knowledge, and others, trained philologists like Max Muller, Friedrich Muller, or Terrien de Lacouperie, who examined the materials collected by the former, and did something towards reducing chaos into order. Since then considerable progress has been made, and, if we confine ourselves to our immediate subject, the languages of India and the countries of the immediate neighbourhood, it will be sufficient to record the work done by the late Professor Kuhn of Munich, Professor Conrady, formerly of Leipzig, Dr. Laufer and Professor Bradley in America, and, above all, the brilliant band of scholars which adorns L'Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient at Hanoi under the leadership of Monsieur Finot. Through their labours a framework of classification has been put together which is generally accepted by scholars who are in a position to judge its value. They have even succeeded in formulating phonetic rules that bridge over the differences between what are apparently the most widely separated languages, and in suggesting theories to account for the origin of the tones which are so characteristic of these forms of speech. In this way the ground has been prepared for the Linguistic Survey of Burma, which will, I hope, be well advanced before these words are in type.
Vocabulary alone is but an untrustworthy guide. If we judge by vocabulary, the Latinized English of Dr. Johnson would. have to be recorded as a Romance language, and Urdu as Semitic or Eranian, whereas every one knows that English is really Teutonic and Urdu Indo-Aryan. The rule applies admirably to languages like Sanskrit or Latin or English, which have grammars, but what are we to do when we come to languages which to our Aryan ideas have no grammar at all-forms of speech which make no distinction between noun, adjective, and verb, which have no inflexions, or hardly any, and which are entirely composed of monosyllables that never change their forms ? According to the ` Century Dictionary', grammar is ` a systematic account of the usages of a language, 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 abandon our principle or enlarge our conception of grammar by omitting the word ` inflected.' from he definition. We are thus thrown back on the forms and uses of words generally ; 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. Tibeto-Chinese languages, like the Buddhists who speak most of them, have passed through many births. They, too, are under the sway of karma . The latest investigations have shown that in former existences they were inflected, with all 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 stence. The history of a Tibeto-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 calm pool, and remained unchanged ; another received a coating of mud ; which, in the course of centuries, itself became a hard outer covering entirely concealing what was within ; another fell among rocks in a stormy channel, and was knocked about and chipped and worn away by continual attrition till only a geologist could identify it ; another was burrowed into by the pholas till it became a caricature of its former self ; another was overgrown by limpets, and then was so worn away and. ill-treated by the rude waves that, like the grin of Alice's Cheshire cat, all that remained was the merest trace clinging to the shell of its whilom guest. Laborious and patient analysis has enabled scholars to trace the fate of some vocables through all their different vicissitudes. For instance, no two words can apparently be so different as rang and ma , both of which mean ` horse, ' and yet Professor Conrady has traced the derivation of the lager from the 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 !
