Classical Tibetan Research Articles

Studies in the Morphology of Bodic Verbs

Verb roots remain constant in most Sino-Tibetan languages. But in; Burmese the consonantal initial of some verb roots alternates from an unaspirated surd in the intransitive to the corresponding aspirated surd in the transitive. And in some Tibeto-Burmic languages, particularly in the Himalayas, we find verbs with a sonant initial in the intransitive and a corresponding surd in the transitive. Diversity of form reaches the extreme in Old Bodish (classical Tibetan), where no positional phoneme of the verb is necessarily constant—whether consonantal prefix, consonantal initial, medial vowel, “final” consonant, or “suffixed” consonant.

The Initials of Sino-Tibetan

ALTHOUGH MOST linguists generally concede that a great number of languages of southeast Asia probably form one linguistic family-the -this view was not scientifically established but rested until a few years ago only upon a number of common features of the languages composing the family : monosyllabism, tones, and many roots phonetically similar. But in The Vocalism of Sino-Tibetan the phonetic equations for the most important final and medial vowels of the four chief literary languages and of a representative (Lusei) of the most archaic linguistic group of the proposed family were established. In a subsequent article, Problems in Sino-Tibetan, 2 final *-I, *-r, and *-s were discussed, and the rules for the correspondence of final stop and nasal consonants were noted.3 Among the remaining problems for the complete establishment of the Sino-Tibetan family on a scientific basis are the equations for initials, prefixes, and tones. Here we aproach the most difficult problems of Sino-Tibetan. For previous investigators have found that in some of the modern dialects the development of prefixes, initials, and tones are mutually dependent;4 and we may suspect a similar mutual dependence characterized the development of at least some of the principal languages selected for our study. Moreover, if we try to confine our study to initials as much as possible, we note that within the conjugation of the same Old Bodish (classical Tibetan) verb we may find consonantal alternation of initials within the same varga, as dgens (pres.), bkcan (pf.), dgan (fut.), k'on (imper.) fill; and other scholars in the Sino-Tibetan field have noted a similar alternation of initials within the same varga in different languages of

Morphology of Some Tibeto-Burman Dialects of the Himalayan Region

Since the time of the appearance of the first grammar and dictionary by Csoma de Koros, Tibetan has become one of the beststudied languages of the East. The Tibeto-Burman family of languages, which forms the subject of the present study 1), comprises a large number of dialects extending from Tibet in the north to Burma in the South, and from Baltistan in the west to Ssechuan and Yiinnan in the East. All the dialects spoken in this vast area are connected with the Siamese-Chinese languages, but how nearly they are related to each other it is too early yet to say with any degree of certainty. The dialects dealt with in the present paper are Classical Tibetan or the written language (Cl. T.), Balti (Bal.), Purik (Pur.), Ladakhi (Lad.), Lahul (La.), Central Tibetan (Cent. T.), Spiti (Sp.), Nyamkat (Ny.), Jad (Ja.) Garhwal (Gar.), Kigate (Ka.), Sharpa (Sha.), the Bhotiai of Sikkim or PD-njon-kii (Bho.), the Bhotiaof Bhutan or Lhoke (Lho.) and Khams (Kha.). Taking