Grammar of the Tibetan language, literary and colloquial; with copious illustrations, and treating fully of spelling, pronunication, and the construction of the verb, and including appendices of the various forms of the verb

426 Pages·1973·22.02 MB·English

by  Herbert Bruce Hannah

UniversityofCalifornia • Berkeley
Theos C. Bernard -
G. Eleanore Murray
Collection and Archive
7^^- ^-^^^
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GRAMMAR
OF THE
TIBETAN LANGUAGE
LITRRARY AND COLLOQUIAL.
With nopious Illustrations, and treating fully of Spelling, Pronwri'
ciation and the Construction of the Verb, and including
Appendices of the variousforms of the Verb.
BY
HERBERT BRUCE HANNAH,
Esq.,
Barrister-atrLaw, and Advocate of the High Courty Calcutta.
CALCUTTA: ^^^
^
PRINTED AT THE BAPTIST MISSION PRESS.
^ 3
1912.

DEDICATED
TO
E. DENISON ROSS,
TO WHOSE INTEREST IN TIBETAN IT IS DUE THAT THIS
LANGUAGE HAS FOR THE FIRST TIME BEEN
INTRODUCED INTO THE C?URRICULUM
OF A UNIVERSITY.

PREFACE.
—
For ihany centuries Tibet has been a terra incognita little or
* nothing being known about it, as regards either its physical conditions
or its inner life.
Not, indeed, till a few years ago, when a British force entered
Lhasa, the '' Place of theminorgods,"wasthe veil withdrawn; and even
then the withdrawal was only partial, transient, and very local.
As for thelanguage,though there havebeenseveral gallant—attempts
to plunge into the labyrinthine obscurities of its construction notably
on the part of—Alexander Csoma de Koros in 1834 and subsequently of
H, A. Jaschke that also, it must be confessed, remains more or less
a mystery ; for no one, I take it, is likely to aver that the present
state of our knowledge on the subject is at all satisfactory.
Much, no doubt, has been contributed by the more recent labours
of Rai Sarat Chandra Das Bahadur, Mr. Vincent Henderson, the Rev,
Edward Amundsen, and Mr. C. A. Bell, I.C.S. But, in spite of all,
even they, and every one else who has taken up the study, will admit
that, wherever one treads, the ground still feels uncomfortably shaky,
especially in regard to certain aspects of the so-called verb ; wherever
he gropes there is something that seems ever to elude him and, amid
;
the weird philological phantoms that flit uncertainly around in the
prevailing gloom, his constant cry, I feel very sure, is still one for more
light.
I do not for one moment claim for this grammar the character of a
scientific work. Many years ago when —I was studying the language in
Darjeeling, under—Kazi Dawa Sam Diip a particularly intelligent and
scholarly Tibetan it was my habit during the course of my morning's
lesson to make notes of what I then learnt. After a time these notes
became so numerous that for my own convenience I was obliged to
reduce them to some degree of order. These ordered notes themselves
growing in bulk, the idea occurred to me that—I might just as well put
them into the form of a book, and this I did the result being a MS,
which has long lain by me, but which is now about to be published.
It is merely another attempt on the part of one who has tried
vi PREFACE. t
to profit by the works of others, to re-state (originally for his
own private satisfaction) what has already been achieved in a field
of obscure and somewhat difficult research; to correct or modify
previous effort, wherever correction or modification seemed necessary
or desirable; and even, to some extent, to supplement it in one or two
respects which appeared to be susceptible of further elucidation and
expansion.
Both Literary and Colloquial Tibetan have been dealt with, the
particular dialect chosen for exposition being that standard one, known
as the ^3^'^^' or U Kd\ which is now spoken in and around the
—
centre of Tibetan Civilisation Lhasa.
This is the dialect in which, as the result of centuries of develop-
ing Lamaic culture, the phonetic values of Tibetan are found to have
undergone a greater degree of change from those of the original speech
than any of the other dialects.
In other regions ofTibet, it is said, theprefixes, superposed letters,
and suffixes, are still more or less pronounced as of old, and the original
vowel-sounds are still more or less unaltered, in a degree corresponding
to the remoteness of the speakers from, or their proximity to, the
Holy City.
The difficulties confronting the student of Tibetan are considerably
enhanced by the fact that in addition to the Literary Language andthe
Modern Colloquial, it also possesses a totally different vocabulary the
employment of which is de rigueur when one is conversing or corres-
ponding with a person of quality. This is known as the Honorific
Language and besides that there is another called the High Honorific,
;
which is only used when addressing exalted personages such as the
Dalai Lama or the Tashi Lama. With these honorific forms of speech,
however, this work is not particularly concerned. The student, if so
inclined, can easily hunt them up for himself, after he has acquired a
working knowledge of the ordinary literary or book language and the
modern
colloquial.
Attention is particularly invited to the earlier paragraphs of the
Grammar deahng with the important subject of Pronunciation, in
which an endeavour has been made, on principles more systematic and
accurate than those hitherto in vogue, to ascertain, fix, and express in
roman characters, the subtle distinctions that lurk between the
numerous phonetic values of the Tibetan consonants and vowels; also