NOTES ON THE LHASA DIALECT OF THE EARLY NINTH CENTURY

Abstract

The tasks of philology are often greatly complicated, when working with materials from the East and Far East, by the complex nature of many of the scripts there employed; especially is this so in the Chinese field, where our philological materials are recorded by means of the morphemic symbolisation system known as the Chinese logograph (vulgo: ideographs, characters). Tibet, however, was fortunate enough to come to look toward India rather than toward China, in so far as its writing system is concerned, and has hence, since the beginnings of its literacy, employed a script based upon an Indic prototype. This has of course been an enormous boon to comparative philology in this area, and indeed, phonetic records of the degree of precision and antiquity which we may safely attribute to those of Written (the so-called 'Classical') Tibetan would be treasured in any branch of comparative philology. The researches of Karlgren and Maspero have, however, made the phonetic interpretation of records in Chinese logographs a less formidable task than it once was; give or take a few points of detail, we may now with considerable confidence use their reconstruction as the basis for phonetic conclusions concerning a logographic text. It has long been generally known that after the Tibetan language was committed to writing, sweeping phonetic changes took place, at least in the central and south-central dialect areas, while the border dialects, those on the east and west, appear to have escaped these changes to a surprising extent; these last, even today, retain a phonetic aspect strikingly like the language preserved for us by the orthography. The present notes are concerned with the problem of how early it can be shown that this change in the central dialects took place, and with the problem of the exact description of these early changes. The Chinese-Tibetan bilingual inscription of 822 A.D. provides all but unique materials for the study of the metropolitan dialect of Tibetan