1865.] Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. 35 



Committee of Papers. 

 All the members of the Council. 

 Communications were received. 



1. From the Under-Secretary to the Government of India, Public 

 Works Department, a copy of Major General Cunningham's diary of 

 occupations for the months of November and December, 1864. 



2. From Babu G-opee Nath Sen, an abstract of the Hourly Meteo- 

 rological Observations taken at the Surveyor General's Office in 

 November last. 



Kev. Mr. Jaeschke then having been introduced to the meeting, 

 read a paper on the pronunciation of the Tibetan language of which 

 the following is an abstract : — 



After some introductory remarks on the fact that the Tibetan lan- 

 guage, which has possessed an alphabet and a literature for about 

 1,200 years, shows at present a remarkable discrepancy between the 

 mode of spelling and the pronunciation, the amount of this discre- 

 pancy was compared with the same in the French language, though 

 the means of tracing the gradual changes which lie tolerably clearly 

 before us in the case of this European language, are totally absent in 

 ; that of the Tibetan. This latter presents however an interesting 

 circumstance, viz. that the greater part of those consonants which 

 are either extinct or considerably changed from their original sound 

 in the pronunciation of Lhasa and Tibet proper,^are still distinctly 

 heard in the vulgar dialect of the remotest western districts, e. g. in 

 the valley of Purig, but gradually vanish to the eastward, the 

 degeneration from the original state reaching its highest pitch in the 

 capital itself. 



But as this circumstance still leaves the question of the historical 

 periods when the different changes took place, unsolved, it may be 

 worth mentioning that the Tibarskad or Bunan language, which is 

 spoken in part of Kunawar and in a small district of Lahul, and belongs 

 neither to the Tibetan nor to the Indian family, but has adopted a 

 great many Tibetan words, especially nouns and verbs, exhibits in the 

 pronunciation of these a remarkable difference; a number of them 

 preserving exactly the ancient sound and agreeing with the ortho- 

 graphy established more than a thousand years ago, — whereas the same 

 words uttered by the same people when speaking Tibetan, are pronounced 



