Book Title: Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind
Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications
View full book text
________________
INDIAN BRANCH
Adaptation of the Tibetan Character to other Languages
357
Nam Language
The Tibetan character was also adapted to other languages. Two of these survived in a few fragmentary Central Asian manuscripts, and their existence was unknown until quite recently. They were discovered by Professor F. W. Thomas and made known in the "JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY" (1926, pp. 312-13: A New Central Asian Language, and pp. 505-6: Two Languages from Central Asia; 1928, pp. 630-634: The Nam Language; and 1929, pp. 193-216: The Nam Language).
One of the two new languages, according to Professor Thomas was a dialect akin to Lepcha; the script used was the Tibetan character. The other new language, called by F. W. Thomas the Nam language, a monosyllabic form of speech, "as old as Tibetan and in structure more primitive, is likely to have been closely related to that of the TibetoBurman people known to the Chinese by a name which has been transliterated... ..as fo-K'iang, Ti-k'iang..., and Dia-K'iong..., a people, who... occupied from remote times the whole stretch of country immediately south of the mountains...from the Nan-shan to the longitude of Khotan, and who may be shown to have furnished an element in the population of Southern Turkestan" (Thomas).
The script used was Tibetan, "of a squarish kind," with some few peculiarities characteristic of the early period: "the hand is rather coarse, and the letters fairly large and wide-spaced" (Thomas).
Chinese in Tibetan Writing
Chinese offers some interesting instances of the difficulties of adaptation of a script to other languages. It seems that it was quite frequently written in Tibetan script. F. W. Thomas and G. L. M. Clauson (partly in collaboration with S. Miyamoto) published: (1) A Chinese Buddhist Text in Tibetan Writing ("THE JOURN. OF THE ROY. ASIATIC SOCIETY," 1926, pp. 508-26), consisting of two fragments of thick yellowish paper, partly couched in Chinese language and "in an elegant, rather cursive, Tibetan script," of the eighth-tenth century A.D.; (2) A Second Chinese Buddhist Text in Tibetan Characters (in the same journal, 1927, pp. 281-306), written in a script being "a rather formal copybook Dhucan"; (3) A Chinese Mahayana Catechism in Tibetan and Chinese Characters (the same journal, 1929, pp. 37-76), "an extensive and well-written MS.", consisting of 486 lines "of good, rather calligraphic, cursive Tibetan writing." probably in more than one hand, perhaps of the eighth-ninth century A.D.
Siddhamatrka Character
Out of the western branch of the eastern Gupta character, the Siddhamatrka character developed during the sixth century A.D.
