has formally alleged the impossibility of making them worthy and vigorous men and citizens by reason of their race,* when it is really as certain as that 2 and 2 make 4, that the race of the Hindús is identical with Mr. Elliot's own! Glottology and anatomy combine to place this great truth (and in every educational view it is pre-eminently such for all those who are now seeking to make this splendid country capable of adequate British, and eventually in the fulness of time of self-government) upon an unshakable foundation. Would that the science of Law, national and international, stood upon an equally stable basis of numerous, largely and irrefragably inducted facts. Having said so much, by way of encouragement, upon the extensive bearings and high importance of Indian ethnology, I will now add a few words by way of caution. Mr. Robinson, in a recent paper upon sundry of the border tribes of Assam,t has not scrupled confidently to assert the affinity of these tribes (the Bódó and Gáró amongst others) with the people of Tibet. This may or may not be so. But I apprehend that this alleged affinity demands larger and more careful investigation than Mr. Robinson has yet had leisure to apply to it, and that in thus deciding upon a most interesting and difficult point, he has adduced maxims which are not very tenable. In the first place, he has wholly neglected the physical and psychical evidence which are, each of them, as important as the glottological towards the just decision of a question of ethnic affinity. In the next place, whilst adducing a copious vocabulary which makes against, and a curt survey of the mechanism of language which (we will allow) makes for, his assertion, he proceeds to lay down the doctrine that the former medium of proof is worthy of very little, and the latter medium of proof (thus imperfectly used and applied) is worthy of very much reliance. In the third place, whilst insisting upon the indispensableness of a written and fixed standard of speech, he has neglected the excellent standard that was available for the Tibetan tongue, and has proceeded to rest upon two spoken standards, termed by him Bhotia and Chángló, but neither of • Preface to the Moslem Historians of India. I cordially assent nevertheless to the justice of Mr. Elliot's strictures. But I find the cause of the actual evil elsewhere. + Journal, No. 201, for March 1849. which agrees with the written or spoken language of Lassa and Digarchi. In the fourth place, he speaks of Bhót, alias Tibet, and Bhútán, alias Lhó, as the same country; and also gives his unknown Chángló a position within the known limits of Bhútán,* without the slightest reference to the latter well-known country; besides, speaking of the cis-Himálayans and sub-Himálayans (p. 203) as separate races! But These remarks are by no means captiously made. some sifting of the evidence adduced is surely indispensable when a question of delicacy and difficulty is (I must think) prejudged upon such grounds. Mr. Robinson is possibly not aware how much of the mechanism of the whole of the Turanian group of languages is common to every one language of that group, nor that the Tamúlian and Tibetan languages are held to be integral parts of that group. Yet such are apparently the facts,† whence it must surely result that a cursory and exclusive view of the organisation of one of these languages, such as Mr. Robinson gives and rests on, cannot be adequate to settle the Tibetan affinities of the Bódós and Gárós (interalia), since the points of lingual agreement cited may be neutral quantities, that is, characteristics common (say) to the Tamúlian and Tibetan tongues, or to the Chinese and Tibetan: and certainly some of them are so far from being diagnostically, that is, exclusively, Tibetan, that they belong to Hindi, Urdú, and even to English! We have yet much to learn touching the essentials of the structure of the Indo-Chinese tongues, the Chinese and the Tibetan; and until a philosophical analysis shall have been made of these languages, it will be very hazardous to rest upon a cursory view of the supposed distinctive (structural) characters of Mr. Robinson's exclusive standard, or the Tibetan; in regard to the structure of which tongue, moreover, he has scarcely more fully availed himself of De Körös' grammar than he has in his vocabulary of De Körös' dictionary. Under these circumstances I am disposed to place at least as much reliance upon Mr. Robinson's copious list of vocables as I can • Viz., 92}° east longitude.—Pemberton's Report. + Prichard, Vol. IV. p. 199 ff., and Bunsen's Report. * This list seems to gainsay Mr. R.'s theory, for if the Bódós (for example) were do upon his incomplete analysis of structure; and with regard to Mr. R.'s disparagement of the words of any unwritten and uncultivated tongue as evidence of ethnic affinity, I must say there seems to me a good deal of exaggeration. Whoever shall take an adequate number, not more than Mr. Robinson's, of well-selected words, and shall take them with such care as to be able to reach the roots of the words and to cast off those servile particles, whether prefixes or postfixes, among which deviation is ever most rife, may confidently rely upon his vocabulary for much sound information respecting ethnic affinities, supposing, of course, that he has a good standard and makes the proper use of it. Of course, I reject, with Mr. Robinson, as neutral quantities, all adopted, imitative and interjectional words. But when I find Mr. R. insisting upon "casual" resemblances as a class of words equally worthless with the three above enumerated, I desire to know what this chance means; for one of the highest of living authorities on ethnology and glottology, and one, too, who insists almost too much upon the mechanism of language,† declares that "the chance is less than one in a million for the same combination of sounds signifying the same precise object." With these cautionary remarks, which are given in a spirit of perfect courtesy towards Mr. R., I now conclude, any further observations being unnecessary to explain my purpose in appending the written and spoken Tibetan-the former from De Cörös, the latter from a native of Lassa-to my present series of vocables. of Tibetan origin, it is hardly credible that their ordinary vocables should not more plainly reveal the fact, seeing that they have never been out of actual contact with races of the same descent as that ascribed to them. The sub-Himalayan dialects differ from the trans-Himálayan standard: but identity is here shown in the roots as well as in the mode of agglutinating the servile particles; not to mention that the snows form such a barrier in this case as exists not in regard to the Bódó intercourse with tribes of Tibetan origin. The same general result follows from a careful examination of the vocabularies now forwarded. Apparently the Tibetan, like the Hindi, words, are adopted ones. • Mr. Kemble has lately made most important use of the Saxon of the Heptarchy, of its words, and words only, in his “Saxons in England.” A yet higher and strictly ethnological use has been made of the vocables of the old Iberian tongue by the younger Humboldt, who was yet reduced to glean these vocables from maps! What would not Bunsen give for 100 plain words of the old Egyptian tongue, as spoken ! + See Bopp's remarks on the structural diagnostics of Sanscrit and Arabic.— Comp. Gram. Bunsen's Report to the Brit. Assoc. |