ETnXOLOOT 0¥ THB I5D0-rACTrTC T9LAHDS. 



and Sun war go, Tiberkhad geo, Mitclianang and Sum elm gu, 

 which cannot have been directly derived from the Chinese ngo, 

 iign, n^oi, gu Sec. In like manner the prevalence of e and i forms 

 in the eastern Ttekpa, in Mikir, in some of the Naga diiilects, in 

 TurigUm, in sonie of the Nipal dialects anJ in Tiberkhad ehowa 

 that they were widely diffused at an ancient period, and thai they 

 csnmot be reftfrrcd to the modern spread of Bhotian across the 

 Himalayas. In a previous page, while adverting to the dtflicutty 

 of diatinguiahing between the Dravirian and Tibetan forms in e, i, 

 I obsci-ved that in Dravirian the slender form^ had been produced 

 hy the incorporation of a possmive i, e, with the pronoun, white 

 the Tibeto-Ultraindian appeai'ed to have incorporated a plural f, 

 and were hence regularly or most commonly found in the plural 

 only. The Takpa, Kmawari, Tibetan and Mikir # forms I attri- 

 buted to a purely plionetvc substitution of 0 for a. It i^s hardly 

 possible to decide to what esient the variution* may he simply 

 phonetic as in the Chinese ngoi, ngsi, nget, bnt it certainly ap- 

 pears probable that in Tibetan the variation of nga to nge, ngi was 

 originally an assimilative or incorporative plural form analogous 

 to (he Scythic. As Tibetan baa aleo a ?u, «, possessive postfix a 

 similar variation may have been also possessive as in Scythic and 

 Dravirian. The Kinawari Bliotian nga singular, net pi. suggests 

 that ne was an archaic pi. form, and its honorific use in the 

 Tibetan Bhottan ngef/ might be explained in accordance with this^ 

 the use of "we" for "I" being the most prevalent honorific 

 idiom in the Ist pronoun. The Surpa nga m-rang pi, Gurung 

 nga Jf., ngi-7»o p!., Dhimat ka ky-dj pos., k\-ng pL, (2 J pron. 

 na 2., m p.), Garo ang s, ning pL^ Naga nga jr., ni-tna pL &nd 

 some of the other forms given in the Table (chap. v. sec. 11) are 

 stronf^ly in favour of the archaic Tibeto-Ultr,iiudian having pos- 

 sessed an incorporative or assimilative plural in t, e. The Lhopa 

 nga nom, nge-yi fmi pron. cbhu tt, chhe-^i p.), shows bow 

 posseesiTpg might be formed in the same way by the euphonic 

 assimilation of the radical vowel to that of the postfix. Mr Ro- 

 binson gives rang, dag, and kho as other forms of the 1st pron. 

 The 1st in the reflexsive affix (''self"), the 2d is the plural particle, 

 and the ;3d is the 3d pronoun used for the Ist. The 2tl pro j. 



