en ee ee a eee eS _— 
1879.] H. L. St. Barbe—Pali Derivations in Burmese. 255 
common errors, and many others will be noticed among my examples. Nei- 
ther Dr. Judson in his Dictionary nor Dr, Mason in his Pali Grammar can 
be relied on, and I regret to state that the provincial government is among 
the worst of offenders. Besides countenancing the most frenzied methods 
of transliteration, it had the temerity to allow the Education Department 
to publish a collection of popular Burmese texts with but the scantiest 
acquaintance with the language. Pali MSS. were exclusively relied on, 
the result being that it is almost impossible to conceive more orthogra- 
phical errors being included within a smaller space. 
The process of engrafting Aryan vocables on a Mongoloid stock must 
be more or less clumsy and inadequate. Gotama would scarcely understand 
ten words together of his own doctrine as recited by a phungyi, and most 
certainly could not make himself intelligible to a Burmese audience. The 
character must always be a most unsatisfactory one to adopt for any new 
dialect or language. In reducing Karen to writing, the American Mission- 
aries had a grand opportunity of introducing the Latin alphabet (with the 
necessary additions) which was just as intelligible to their converts as any 
other, and which would have led easily to a general scheme of vernacular 
transliteration. They were misguided enough, however, to employ Bur- 
mese, the consequence being a series of appalling hieroglyphics incompre- 
hensible to all but the contrivers. I hear that Kachyen is to undergo a 
similar treatment. This is the language spoken by all the Singphos on 
the borders of Burma and Assam and deserves a better fate than being 
interred within an ingenious (perhaps) but inscrutable cipher. May I be 
permitted to recorda feeble and, no doubt, ineffective protest? Apart 
however, from a want of orthoepical precision (to use Dr. Wilson’s phrase) 
there is a certain amount of method and uniformity observed in the appro- 
priation of Pali terms. I have been able to frame a simple set of rules 
which are tolerably comprehensive and which may be of some use in deal- 
ing with future importations. It will be noted (1) that anuswara and 
the nasals are freely interchangeable, (2) that visarga (which in Burmese 
is only used as a grave accent after long vowels and nasals) is added with- 
out any reference to the original. 
I. The word was imported whole. 
FE. g. kala, sati, utu, gati, ussabha, ratha:, kula:, khana, upama. 
Often inflected or misspelt. 
EB. g. asavo, upaddavo, pakate (pakati), chute (chuti), sare (siri), yujana 
(yojanami), hans4 (hamsa), ans4 (amsa), parikkhayd (parikkhara),* milak- 
* Of. also Tirichchhan for Tirachchhana. There was evidently some false analogy 
deduced from “ viriya’” another importation. 
