1849.] On the Aborigines of Nor-Eastern India. 455 



agreement cited may be neutral quantities, that is, characteristics com- 

 mon (say) to the Tamulian and Tibetan tongues, or to the Chinese and 

 Tibetan : and certainly some of them are so far from being diagnostical- 

 ly, that is, exclusively, Tibetan, that they belong to Hindi, Urdu and even 

 to English ! "We have yet much to learn touching the essentials of the 

 structure of the Indo-Chinese tongues, the Chinese and the Tibetan ; and 

 until a philosophical analysis shall have been made of these languages 

 it will be very hazardous to rest upon a cursory view of the supposed 

 distinctive (structural) characters of Mr. Robinson's exclusive standard, 

 or the Tibetan ; in regard to the structure of which tongue, moreover, he 

 has scarcely more fully availed himself of De Coros' grammar than he has 

 in his vocabulary of De Coros' dictionary. Under these circumstances 

 I am disposed to place at least as much reliance upon Mr. Robinson's 

 copious list of vocables* as I can do upon his incomplete analysis of 

 structure ; and with regard to Mr. R.'s disparagement of the words of 

 any unwritten and uncultivated tongue as evidence of ethnic affinity, 

 I must say there seems to me a good deal of exaggeration, f 



Whoever shall take an adequate number, not more than Mr. Robin- 

 son's, of well selected words, and shall take them with such care as to 

 be able to reach the roots of the words and to cast off those servile par- 

 ticles, whether prefixes or postfixes, among which deviation is ever most 

 rife, may confidently rely upon his vocabulary for much sound informa- 

 tion respecting ethnic affinities, supposing of course that he has a good 



* This list seems to gainsay Mr. R.'s theory, for if theB6dos (for example) were 

 of Tibetan origin, it is hardly credible that their ordinary vocables should not more 

 plainly reveal the fact, seeing that they have never been out of actual contact with 

 races of the same descent as that ascribed to them. The sub-Himalayan dialects 

 differ from the trans-Himalayan standard : but identity is here shown in the roots 

 as well as in the mode of agglutinating the servile particles ; not to mention that 

 the snows form such a barrier in this case as exists not in regard to the Bod6 inter- 

 course with tribes of Tibetan origin. 



The same general result follows from a careful examination of the vocabularies 

 now forwarded. Apparently the Tibetan, like the Hindi, words, are adopted ones. 



f Mr. Kemble has lately made most important use of the Saxon of the Hep- 

 tarchy, of its words, and words only, Saxons in England. A yet higher and strictly 

 ethnological use has been made of the vocables of the old Iberian tongue, by the 

 younger Humboldt, who was yet reduced to glean these vocables from maps ! What 

 would not Bunsen give for 100 plain words of the old Egyptian tongue, as spoken, 



