4,. c THE HEV. A. H. FUANCKE ON THE 



at any rate a z/. Thus the West-Tibetan pronunciation of the word dbang, power, is 

 wano- • and as has been stated in my notes on a language map of West Tibet, there are 

 several dialects in which the pronunciation of sb or rb is v. The Tibetan letter zh was 

 derived directly from the Tibetan sh (ancient dbumed form) by omitting the stroke on the 

 left side of the sh. There is some probability that the Tibetan letter z, which does not 

 occur in the ordinary Indian alphabet, was developed in Turkestan. The Kashgar- 

 Brahmi form, reproduced on Plate IV, is taken from. Dr. E. Leumann's article, cited 

 above. Professor Leumann's transcription of this character is z. The Tibetan vowel- 

 bearers can hardly be derived from Indian prototypes. In the case of 'a we must remem- 

 ber that this letter was a really indigenous Tibetan letter, the proper pronunciation of 

 which is still uncertain. Its form may be a creation of the Tibetan mind. The form of 

 the Tibetan a looks almost like a development of the Tibetan ya, and there are a number 

 of words in which an original y has been dropped, or been turned into a vowel-bearer a ; 

 yang becomes ang, yid becomes id, yin becomes in, youg becomes ang, etc. But in its 

 later development the letter a became decidedly similar to the a of the Kashmir Takri 

 script, for which reason it was derived from it by General Cunningham. That the letter 

 a is one of the latest Tibetan characters with regard to development, is shown by the fact 

 that it is placed at the end of the Tibetan alphabet. 



Vowel-signs and compound characters. — That the vowel-signs of the Tibetan and the 

 Kashgar-Brahmi scripts are closely related, is not to be wondered at, because also the 

 other Indian scripts are very similar to both of them in this respect. The Tibetan pre- 

 fixes r, /, and s, and the Tibetan suffixes r, /, andjy, have their closely corresponding 

 prototypes in the Kashgar-Brahmi script. 



Headed and headless characters. — As we have seen, there are headed and headless 

 characters used by the Tibetans. When writing on the ancient rock-inscriptions of West 

 Tibet, I was of opinion that the headless characters represented an earlier type of Tibe- 

 tan writing, and that the headed characters represented an innovation, introduced perhaps 

 by Srong btsan sgampo. If it should, however, become evident that the Tibetan alphabet 

 was developed in Eastern Turkestan out of the Kashgar-Brahmi characters, we might be 

 led to believe that both Tibetan alphabets originated at about the same time. The rea- 

 son is that the Kashgar-Brahmi characters exhibit both types of writing, headed and 

 headless. The material at my disposal has not yet allowed me to distinguish carefully 

 between both types. From Dr. M. A. Stein's Tibetan relics, from Endere, which can be 

 dated, we learn that about 1,200 years ago the headed as well as the headless alphabet 

 were already perfectly developed. 



The doubts about the historical accuracy of the Tibetan reports on Srong btsan 

 sgampo s and Thonmisambhota's civilizing mission, which I raised in my article on 

 ' The Ancient Rock-Inscriptions of West Tibet ' (Indian Antiquary, September, 1903), and 

 which were independently raised by Dr. Barnett in his article ' Preliminary Notice of the 

 Tibetan MSS. in the Stein Collection,' 1 may receive some confirmation from the preceding 



1 J.R.A.S. January, 1903. 



