1894.] F. B. Shawe —Tibetan Orthography and Pronunciation. 
11 
of the theory, tha t the orthography corresponds to the act ual pronun¬ 
ciatio n of the language at the time of the invention of the alpha bet. 
Or is it probable, that the language originally contained such a. large 
proportion of pure homophones, and was reduced to the necessity of 
naming the most widely different things by the same sound P Such 
is to some extent the case in Chinese, where, however, the practice of 
intoning or singing pronunciation has made a way out of ensuing diffi¬ 
culties. In Tibetan, however, only the rudiments of this method can 
be traced and seem to be due to Chinese influence. 1 Nor do the high 
and low tones now in use in the Central Provinces materially reduce 
the number of homophones. Or is it, thirdly, conceivable, that T'on-mi 
Sam-bho-ta and his successors deliberately introduced all these multi¬ 
tudinous variations in spelling ? The language existed before the 
alphabet, aud an arbitrary fixation of the orthography would have been 
a failure. An attempt has lately been made in Germany to approx¬ 
imate, by Act of Parliament, the orthography to the modern German 
pronunciation (a very much simpler task than that of the early Tibetan 
literati), but the experiment can hardly be considered a success. The 
experts were unable to agree, and the result is, that what is ortlio- 
graphically correct in Prussia is possibly wrong in Bavaria. This would 
have been the case to a much greater degree in Tibet, wdiere each 
translator would have been at perfect liberty to form his own ortho¬ 
graphy. Such arbitrary attempts to regulate a language cannot succeed, 
unless all learning is in the hands of a small and select caste, bent on 
securing its own privileges. We find no traces of any such attempt 
on the part of the early propagators of Buddhism in Tibet; on the 
contrary, they seem to have encouraged popular education by all means 
in their power. And even supposing that the lo-tsa-ba had introduced 
differentiating orthography, why were not all the homophones thus 
treated ? What ideas could have governed the choice they made ? 
Again, the usage of grammatical forms as shown above, is evidently 
the result of actual observation and not of theory. Tibetan gram¬ 
marians were not sufficiently schooled to make this probable. 2 There 
seems to be only one way of extricating ourselves from these difficulties, 
viz., by ack nowledging that the orthography as it stands did at the time 
of its introduction represent the actual pronunciation. 
«i i 1 " 1 1 J 
1 Jaeschke. Phonetik, p. 166 ff. Dictionary, p. xiii, and Phonetic Table. 
2 A Tibetan Reader in my possession classes the letters as follows :—Guttural : 
Jc, V, g, n , .a, h, ’a. Palatal: c’, c’, j, ny, ts, t’s, dz, zh , y, s'. Dental: t, t\ d, n, z, l, s- 
Labial: p, p\ fr, m, w. Lingual: r -a classification that seems very rude and 
singular to our ideas. Tibetan grammarians also assign either the masculine, 
feminine or neuter gender to each of the consonants —a piece of mero childish 
pedantry. V. Jaeschke, Dictionary, s. v. p’o. 
