1853.] On the Indo-Chinese horderers. 3 



people of Asie Centrale, and from the Tibetans, will be astonished 

 to find one type of language prevailing from the Kali to the Koladan, 

 and from Ladakh to Malacca, so as to bring the Himalayans, Indo- 

 Chinese and Tibetans into the same family. 



That such, however, even in the rigid ethnological sense, is the 

 fact will hardly be denied by him who carefully examines the sub- 

 joined table, or the documents from which it is taken, because not 

 only are the roots of the nouns and verbs similar to identity, but the 

 servile particles are so likewise, and that as well in themselves as in 

 the uses made of them, and in the mutations* to which they are 

 liable. It should be added that the resemblances cited are drawn 

 not from " ransacked dictionaries" but from vocabularies of less than 

 300 words for each tongue. 



To those who, not content with this abstract, shall refer to the 

 original documents, I may offer two remarks suggested by their study 

 to myself. 1st, The extraordinary extent to which the presently 

 contemplated affinities holds good, has been made out by the helps 

 afforded by the series of cognate tongues, whereby the synonyma 

 defective in one tongue are obtained from another, whilst the 

 varying degrees and shades of deviation are a clue to the root 

 or basis.f 2nd, The other remark suggested by the comparison 

 of the vocabularies is, that it is the nouns and verbs, and not 

 the pronouns and numerals, which constitute the enduring part 

 of these languages ; and that consequently, whatever may be the 

 case in regard to the Arian group of tongues, we must not always 

 expect to find the best evidence of family connexion in regard to the 

 Turanian languages among the pronouns and numerals. Indeed the 

 confused character of these parts of speech seems to be a conspicu- 

 ous feature of the Mongolian tongues. 



* In order to appreciate this remark and to trace the elements of the vocables, 

 see analytic observations of the following paper on Caucasian and Mongolian words, 

 appended to the list of those words. 



t Take the radical word for dog, as a sample. We have khyi, khia, khi, ki, 

 khwe, kwe, kwi, ku, ki-cha, ku-chu, kh6, ky6, cho-i. For the appended particles 

 and their mutations I must refer to the original documents, and to the future con- 

 firmations to be supplied by my Sifanese series of words. 



B 2 



