82 E. H. Walsh —Tibetan Language, 8f Recent Dictionaries. [No. 2, 
be the accepted symbols to-day, but the fashion may change, and in 
fact has done so since Jaschke wrote his Dictionary in 1881, where it 
will be found that five out of these six letters are represented by a 
different symbol, and the only symbol in which they agree, namely 
9 , has itself been since abandoned by v orientalists, and s substituted. 
The Asiatic Society of Bengal up to the present has adopted another 
system of transliteration for these letters, which it has only within the 
last few months altered to that approved by the International Oriental 
Congress of 1894, which is the system followed by the Royal Asiatic 
Society in England. 
«. The confusion produced by this “ multitude of councillors ” will be 
best gathered from the following comparative table in which I give the 
transliteration I propose in the last column. 
r 
Tibetan 
letter. 
Jaschke. 
Present 
Dictionary. 
Asiatic 
Society 
Bengal. 
Royal 
Asiatic 
Society. 
Proposed 
Transliter¬ 
ation. 
c 
n 
A 
n 
9 
n 
ng 
r 
n .y 
ft 
n 
ft 
\ 
z 
sh 
8 
s 
zli 
CV 
o 
h 
• • • 
• • a 
a 
9 
9 
9 
/ 
s 
sh 
1ST 
’a 
a 
• • • 
a 
In the above tables and have been left blank under the 
Asiatic Society of Bengal, and the Royal Asiatic Society, as no trans¬ 
literation appears to be prescribed, and the transliteration followed in 
any case would therefore be that followed by the contributor. 
Apart from the want of finality, there is also the great opportunity 
for error due to the omission in copying or printing of the small 
diacritical mark which alone distinguishes the one letter from the 
other. 
A word further in support of the system of transliteration which 
I propose. 
