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JUNE, 1895.]
THE LOLO WRITTEN CHARACTER
173
Papers, 1882, pp. 124ff.) Mr. Baber's specimens include (1) a facsimile copy of a Lolo manuscript fonnd in a Lolo house ; (2) a list of twenty Lolo characters (written by a Lolo in the presence of Mr. Baber), with the English equivalents; (3) a Lolo manuscript of eight pages obtained through the French missionaries from a Lolo chief. These I call MSS. Nos. 1, 2 and 3.
When I was in Sz-ch'wan in 1881, a Lolo chief, who had met Mr. Baber, sent me a beautiful Lolo MS, on satin for M. Baber, which, I believe, is now safoly stored away in Europe in the British Museum (but perhaps somewhere else). Before sending this book to Mr. Baber 1 took a copy of the whole. This I call MS. No. 4.
So far as I am aware, the above documents are all the Lolo MSS. at present known to the world, unless it be one (once I believe in the possession of Mr. Ilans of Shanghai), which used to be in the Library of the Shanghai Asiatic Society.
When I was in Corea with Mr. Baber, he showed me a brochure by the late Prof. de Lacou perie, attempting to demonstrate that the Lolo character was in some way connected with Accadian. I was unable, however, to discern any evidence for such a conclusion in Prof. de Lacouperie's pamphlet. Afterwards, when I was in Burma, the Editor of this Jururnal shewed me four pages of a reduced facsimile (vide plate) of the Lolo MS. on satin, which the chief had sent through me to Mr. Baber, and asked me to write a paper upon the snbject. He mentioned that Prof. de Lacou perie had promised him to write an explanatory paper, and seemed surprised when I told him that he had already written one, which I had seen eight or nine years ago.
I had been in hopes that during my year's residence in Burma, in 1892, I might meet some Lolos on the Yünnan frontier, and have thus been able to extract from them some explanation of these mysterious documents; but I never got near to them at all.
An examination of MS. No. 1, which consists of about 130 Lolo characters with their sounds attached in Chinese, discloses the fact that most of these characters are repeated : some of them six or eight times. It is also perfectly evident from their form, that these Lolo charac. ters are based upon the Chinese. Thus we find the connected syllables, or the trisyllabic sung-li-chin, occurring no fewer then eight times. The Chinese character younds given to: sung-di-chin are too l , and the Lolo signs for the same sounds are itt 5 *h The middle one of the three, namely 5 (the popular or valgar short form of the Chinese character 5), is the only one of the three written with uniformity in all vight cares. The first, namely, the Chinese character it is also written 1, and the second is also wriiten
# Both are written with other slight variations, whowing that the inventor of the Lolo writing must have been familiar with Chinese abbreviated writing. However, the Chinese character to is easily discernible in each case, in which the last of the three symbols is used. Thus, we find that the Lolos have adopted abbreviated forms of the three Chinese characters He tre to express the trisyllable sung-li-ekin.
No other triplets, or pairs, occur in MS. No. 1. The syllab three times, and may be described as an abbreviation of the Chinese character 4 or 4 The syllable lu tot occurs four times, and may be described as the vulgar Chinese syrohoi
The MS, was in Prof. de Lacouperie's possession in 1886, for he then lent it me for the purpose of reproduction. - ED.)
