1853.] Sifdn and Borsok Vocabularies. 135 



plete, and without insisting so much upon the primitiveness of this 

 type as upon its much more interesting feature of a connecting bond 

 between the so-called monosyllabic aptotic and the so-called poly- 

 syllabic* non-aptotic classes — classes which appear to me to have 

 no very deep or solid foundation much as they have been insisted on 

 to the obscuration of the higher branches of philology and ethnology 

 rather than to their illustration (as I venture to think), and but for 

 which obscuration our Leydens and our Joneses, our Bopps and our 

 Humboldts, could never have been found at such extreme apparent 

 diversity of opinion. I may add, with reference to the disputed 

 primitiveness of Ta-gala, owing to its use of the "artifices" above 

 cited that throughout the Himalaya and Tibet it is precisely the 

 rudest or most primitive tongues that are distinguished by useless 

 intricacies, such as the interminable pronouns, and all the perplexity 

 caused by conjugation by means of them with their duals and two 

 plurals. The more advanced tribes whether of the continent or of 

 the islands have, generally speaking, long since cast away all or most 

 of these "artifices." 



I have thus, in the present and two former communications shown 

 what a strange conformity in the essential components of their speech 

 still unites the long and widely sundered races inhabiting now the 

 Himalaya, Tibet, Indo- China, Sifan, Altaia, Caucasus and Oceanica ; 

 and, as a no less strange conformity of physical conformation, unites 

 (with one alleged exception) these races, it cannot much longer be 

 doubted that they all belong to one ethnic family whose physical 

 attributes it shall next be my business to help the illustration of by 

 describing the heretofore unknown peoples whose languages have 

 been submitted to inspection and examination. Before however I 



* Compare the monosyllabic roots and dissyllabic simple vocables of Gyarung 

 with the sesquipedalians just given ? The comparison is pregnant with hints, espe- 

 cially as there are in the cognate tongues, all grades of approximation. Thus Ka- 

 nare, laugh, in Gyarung with its double prefix, is Yere in Limbu with one, and 

 Rer, in Magar without any ; and thus Taliang, air, in Lepcha with its prefix and 

 suffix, is Tali, in Gyarung with prefix only, and Li or Le in Burmese without 

 either. Innumerable instances like this make me conclude that the Gyarung dif- 

 fers only in degree, not in kind notwithstanding that its verb, like that of the Ta- 

 gala, certainly presents an extraordinary and seemingly unique spectacle in some 

 aspects — but not in all ; for, in the sentence tize-kaze papun, he called them to 

 feast, though the root za to eat be repeated and each time with a differently vowel- 

 ed servile attached, yet the combination is not grotesque nor the root smothered. 



