Sprigg, R. K.

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K. K. Sprigg

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A. Rna-Tas: Tibeto-Mongolica: the Tibetan loanwords of Monguor and the development of the archaic Tibetan dialects. (Indo-Iranian Monographs, Vol. VII.) 232 pp. The Hague, etc.: Mouton and Co., 1966. Guilders 28.

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Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studieshttp://journals.cambridge.org/BSOAdditional services for Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies:Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click hereA. Rna­Tas: Tibeto­Mongolica: the Tibetan loanwords of Monguor and the development of the archaic Tibetan dialects. (Indo­Iranian Monographs, Vol. VII.) 232 pp. The Hague, etc.: Mouton and Co., 1966. Guilders 28.K. K. SpriggBulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies / Volume 30 / Issue 01 / February 1967, pp 216 ­ 217DOI: 10.1017/S0041977X00099456, Published online: 24 December 2009Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0041977X00099456How to cite this article:K. K. Sprigg (1967). Review of A. Rna­Tas 'Tibeto­Mongolica: the Tibetan loanwords of Monguor and the development of the archaic Tibetan dialects' Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 30, pp 216­217 doi:10.1017/S0041977X00099456Request Permissions : Click hereDownloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/BSO, IP address: 212.219.238.14 on 17 Oct 2012216 REVIEWSLhasa', ' Going on a pilgrimage to samyEt '[Samye], and ' Monasteries in the Lhasa area 'could profitably have been replaced by' Moving from Seattle to Berkeley', forexample, or other situations in keeping withthe circumstances of Tibetan refugees.At the grammatical and lexical levels theManual has much to commend it. In thepresent climate of opinion the generative basisof the grammatical exercises should provestimulating. An exemplary break withtradition, at the lexical level, is that the' polite ' vocabulary is given equal prominencewith the ' non-polite '.One final point: the Manual is entirelywithout indications of other work on LhasaTibetan ; Dr. Richter includes a superb biblio-graphy, covering not only Lhasa Tibetan butother Tibetan dialects, and even languages ofthe ' Tibeto-Himalaya Gruppe ' as well.In general I would say that the Manualfalls between two stools : it is not linguisticenough for the professional linguist, whowould rightly insist on being told what phono-logical units are being distinguished, and whatthe relations of each are with phonetic cate-gories ; it is too linguistic for the ordinary runof students, some of whom may well neverhave seen symbols such as ' o ', ' n ', and ' A 'before. The authors suggest that ' ideally, acourse in which it is used should be taught bya Tibetan ' ; but how many Tibetans are therewith sufficient training in linguistics for thistask?The Grundlagen is addressed not to studentsbut to a professional readership, who will nowwait eagerly to see how the problems raised atthe phonetic level are to be solved at thephonological, grammatical, and lexical levels.Indeed one could wish that Dr. Richter hadattempted an integrated analysis at all theselevels in one volume.E. K. SPEIGOA. RONA-TAS : Tibeto-Mongolica : theTibetan loanwords of Monguor andthe development of the archaic Tibetandialects. (Indo-Iranian Monographs,Vol. VII.) 232 pp. The Hague, etc.:Mouton and Co., 1966. Guilders 28.The Monguor dialect, of Mongolian, throughits numerous Tibetan loan-words, providesDr. Rona-Tas with the occasion for a compara-tive phonetic study of data from a dozen ormore Tibetan dialects. The 790 loan-wordsare examined as evidence for the pronunciationof Tibetan in adjoining dialect areas ; and acomparison of the corresponding forms inthese and other Tibetan dialects then furnishesthe author with material for a historical studyof the development of the contemporaryspoken dialects from his hypothetical OldTibetan forms.In his introductory remarks Dr. Rona-Tasplaces the Monguor dialect, spoken in theChinghai province of north-west China, inrelation to other Mongolian dialect material,and emphasizes its significance for bothMongolian-dialect and Tibetan-dialect studies,a significance due, on the one hand, to con-servatism, and, on the other, to innovationunder the influence of Tibetan. He discusseshis sources, which, it should be noted, includeChinese and Russian works, in detail, and evalu-ates their systems of transcription, while care-fully avoiding any attempt at unifying them.Since his interest in Tibetan dialects isdirected towards those which may be presumedto have acted as donors to Monguor, he findsit convenient to divide them into ' archaic 'and ' non-archaic ', taking as criteria for the' archaic ' category (i) the absence of' pitch asa phonematic suprasegmental feature', and(ii)' the preservation in a more or less completeform [of] the preradical system of OldTibetan ', and, as criteria for the' non-archaic ',(i)' phonematic pitch ', and (ii) the loss of' theold preradical system'. While broadlyefficient for this purpose, at least one of thesecriteria might be made more precise ; andDr. Rona-Tas himself refers subsequently toa characteristic that might be used to modifythe second criterion of the ' non-archaic'category : ' the preradical is preserved in thesecond syllable if the first ends in a vowel alsoin the non-archaic dialects ' (p. 134). Indeedmaximum precision might require one todistinguish between consonant and phoneticfeature; for, in the Lhasa dialect, whichDr. Rona-Tas classifies as ' non-archaic ', theold ' preradicals ' might be said to be preservedeven in word-initial position in those wordswhich are distinguished by the phoneticfeature partial voicing (and therefore alsonon-aspiration) from those which have voice-lessness and aspiration ; e.g. dgong-mo [g-]' evening ', 'ja' [d?-] ' rainbow ', rdung [d-]' strike ' ; cf. gong [kh-] ' price ', ja [tGh-]' tea ', dung [th-] ' shell'.Dr. Rona-Tas's criteria owe their importanceto the fact that he uses them to limit his studyto the ' archaic ' dialects, together with theliterary language, admitting forms fromCentral Tibetan or Lhasa Tibetan, as represen-tatives of the ' non-archaic ', only for somespecial purpose. The ' archaic' dialectmaterial is divided into six categories inaccordance with the six places in syllablestructure that he distinguishes for Old Tibetan :' preradical (C--), radical (C-), postradical(-C-), syllabic vowel (-V-), final (-C), postfinal(--C)'. Radical and postradical are dealt withsimultaneously, absence of postradicals ' -y- 'REVIEWS 217and ' -r- ' being treated as postradical ' zero ' ;but, somewhat inconsistently, the same methodis not applied to preradical and radical and topostfinal and final.Dr. Rona-Tas carefully distinguishes his' phonemical' categories (preradical, radical,etc.) from his ' orthographical' (' prescribed ',' superscribed ', etc.) and his ' morphological'(' prefix ', ' stem ', etc.); but, since his hypo-thetical Old Tibetan forms differ little fromthe orthographic forms of literary Tibetan,the reader has easy access to a wealth ofdialect forms, some from sources that mightotherwise be inaccessible, painstakinglyarranged for immediate comparison. His debtto the author is great.One is, of course, free to ask oneself whethera different basis for his presentation of thematerial might not have served the authorbetter. He might, for example, have extendedto the other categories his syntagmaticpractice of associating the postradical with theradical in statement; for, just as the post-radical presupposes an associated radical, sothe preradical and the postfinal respectivelypresuppose associated radicals and finals. Thevariant of the phoneme theory that Dr. Rona-Tas has adopted, one of the more flexiblevariants, would lend itself to such an extension ;for he takes difference in environment intoaccount, and makes no difficulty over analysingpreradical [s] and [z], for example, differentlyfrom radical [s] and [z], the former pair asallophones of a single phoneme, conditioned bythe following radical phoneme, and the latteras phonemically distinct; but an even moresyntagmatic analysis might well by-pass com-plications resulting from his present method,especially in dealing with tonal reflexes.Since his study is mainly concerned with thenon-tonal dialects, it is not surprising thatthese complications are not much in evidence ;but they can be illustrated from his treatmentof dby- : ' in the cluster dby- the -y- became aradical consonant after the b > zero develop-ment : *yby- > yuy- > yy- > y- '. As far asLhasa Tibetan, at least, is concerned, thisstatement leaves tone out of account: suchsyllables as dbyar(-ka) ' summer ', and dbyangs' vowel', have a high-tone classification (cf.the low-tone classification of yang ' too ' andyar ' upwards'); if one introduced thisfeature into Dr. Rona-Tas's over-segmentedform of statement, -y- would remain post-radical, and high tone would have to betreated as the radical.One minor phonetic point: Dr. Rona-Tasinterprets forms in orthographic lh- as havingpreradical I- and radical h-, and refers to thepreservation of 1-- through ' metathesis(lh- > hi- > 1-) '; but, apart from irregulari-ties in some dialects (e.g. Lhasa [h-] in Iham-' boot'), lh- symbolizes a single lateralconsonant, voiceless ([!]) initially, and voiced([1]) medially. It is, thus, a digraph, likeWelsh II, English th, and Hungarian sz, andpresumably always has been. The question ofmetathesis does not, therefore, arise.In a concluding section Dr. Rona-Tas useshis comparative dialect material to suggestlines of development for the various categoriesof elements of Old Tibetan syllable structurein their progress towards their contemporaryreflexes in the modern spoken dialects. ' Zero 'figures widely among these for preradicals,postfinals, and finals alike in the ' non-archaic 'dialects. In the case of the finals his ' zero 'refers, strictly speaking, only to the absence ofconsonantal reflexes for -s, -d, -I, and, to someextent, -g, all of which have vocalic features asreflexes, at least in Lhasa Tibetan ; and theauthor again resorts to syntagmatic statement,treating the vowel and the final categoriesjointly, in order to be able to show this. Asimilarly syntagmatic type of statementseems to be required for the preradicals too :there are numerous syllables in Lhasa Tibetan,for example, that do not provide any phoneticevidence for a preradical, at least in word-initial position ; but there is no scarcity ofsyllables, on the other hand, in which thecurrent reflex is either tonal, or the voicefeature referred to above, or both at once.Dr. Rona-Tas accounts for the ' zero ' reflexof the Old Tibetan preradicals &--, d/g--, r~,I—, and s-- in a table showing the process ofconvergence on ' zero ' through ' spirantiza-tion ' via s, s, and x- There are aspects of thisscheme of stages of ' spirantization ' that arenot immediately convincing on generalgrounds of phonetic probability ; but therecan be no doubt that the awe-inspiring amountof work that must have gone into sifting thevarious sources, European and Asian, esti-mating their reliability, and marshalling thedata systematically fully entitles Dr. Rona-Tasto his own conjectures. No other single volumecontains so much Tibetan dialect materialfrom such diverse sources ; and its Monguorsection disposes of any need for further studieson this scale.K. K. SPBIGGW. PACHOW (PA CHOU Q ffi) (ed.):Tun-huang yiin-wen chi f& j ^ §j| ~%%. [i], 9,18, 218, [ii] pp. Kao-hsiung,Taiwan : [Buddhist Culture Service],1965.Dr. Pachow (Pa Chou) is a Chinese Buddhistscholar who has taught for many years inIndia and Ceylon. He has recently spent a yearworking in the British Museum on variousBuddhist manuscripts in the Stein collection.

A. Rna-Tas. Tibeto-Mongolica: the Tibetan loanwords of Monguor and the development of the archaic Tibetan dialects

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A. Rna-Tas. Tibeto-Mongolica: the Tibetan loanwords of Monguor and the development of the archaic Tibetan dialects

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