VI.] THE SOUTHERN MONGOLS. 183 



incessantly kept going all over the land, some being so cleverly 

 arranged that the sacred formula may be repeated as many as 

 40,000 times at each revolution of the cylinder. These machines, 

 which have also been introduced into Korea and Japan, have 

 been at work for several centuries without any appreciable 

 results, although fitted up in all the houses, by the river banks 

 or on the hill-side, and kept in motion by the hand, wind, and 

 water; while others of huge size, 30 to 40 feet high and 15 to 20 

 in diameter, stand in the temples, and at each turn repeat the 

 contents of whole volumes of liturgical essays stowed away in 

 their capacious receptacles. But despite all these everlasting 

 revolutions, stagnation reigns supreme throughout the most priest- 

 ridden land under the sun. 



With its religion Tibet imported also its letters from India by 

 the route of Nepal or Kashmir in the yth century. 

 Since then the language has undergone great a^LetSs. 

 changes always, like other members of the Indo- 

 Chinese family, in the direction from agglutination towards 

 monosyllabism 1 . But the orthography, apart from a few feeble 

 efforts at reform, has remained stationary, so that words are still 

 written as they were pronounced 1200 years ago. The result 

 is a far greater discrepancy between the spoken and written 

 tongue than in any other language, English not excepted. Thus 

 the province of Ui has been identified by Sir A. Cunningham 

 with Ptolemy's Debases, through its written form Dbus, though 

 now always pronounced U 2 . This bears out de Lacouperie's view 

 that all words were really uttered as originally spelt, although 

 often beginning with as many as three consonants. Thus spra 

 (monkey), is now pronounced deu in the Lhasa dialect, but still 

 streu-go in that of the province of Kham. The phonetic dis- 

 integration is still going on, so that, barring reform, the time must 

 come when there will be no correspondence at all between sound 

 and its graphic expression. 



This point, so important in the history of linguistic evolution, has I think 

 been fairly established by T. de Lacouperie in a series of papers in the Oriental 

 and Babylonian Record, 1888 90. 

 2 Ladak, London, 1854. 



