522 Aborigines of the Nilgiris. [No. 6. 



Eemarks. — I give the above as they reached me without entirely- 

 assenting to the value set on such precision by the venerable Author 

 of these corrections, or always even approving the corrections ; for 

 the more ample and careful becomes our survey of the Turanian 

 tongues, the more deep is the conviction that the largest commuta- 

 bility of consonants and vowels is normal in this family of tongues, 

 that local varieties of utterance are not to be reduced to a quasi 

 exotic standard, and that Akayam and Keramam, for instance, re- 

 flecting as they do the well known preference of Tamil for surds 

 and its aversion to heaped consonants,, may very reasonably be pre- 

 ferred to Agayam and Kramam. Mr. Schmid's conjecture that the 

 English th is known only to the Todas is incorrect, for, the Burmese 

 and Kukis as well as some Himalayan and Sifanese tongues have 

 the sound ; and likewise the Todava proneness to blend the sounds 

 of s, z, and the English th, and tha latter also with d, like the Tamu- 

 liansof the Eastern Coast. My Ceylonese papers were prepared for me 

 by a gentleman who used the ordinary English way of representing 

 oriental words. I myself always use the continental, but the other 

 does not mislead me. The Nilgirian vocabularies are framed on the 

 latter model. The cerebral letters are marked by a dot, thus t, d, 1 ; 

 ch is to be pronounced as in English much, ch with the mark ~y 

 above, as in gaelic loch ; and in Toda th is always to be sounded the 

 English way. B. H. H. 



