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Early Evidence for Vowel Harmony in Tibetan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Roy Andrew Miller
Roy Andrew Miller*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

It is to Yuen Ren Chao that we are indebted—among so many other things—for the first modern phonetic description and phonological analysis of a spoken Tibetan dialect; in this pioneering work of his with a Lhasa speaker he noted a number of alternations in vowel quality that seemed to run counter to the generally regular one-to-one correlation to be observed between the vowels of the Tibetan written language and the vocalization of the modern dialects. Chao's work on that occasion was by and large limited to a description of the reading pronunciation for a text in the written language, and hence it then appeared to him possible to treat these alternations as the result of differences in tempo or even as simply fortuitous; but subsequent work with speakers of the same language, involving living speech rather than the reading of literary texts, has shown that the phenomenon which Chao noticed and so meticulously recorded in his early publication is instead part of a widespread process of vowel assimilations which at least in Lhasa Tibetan operates in certain morphemes in a fashion regular enough to merit the designation ‘vowel harmony’.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 42 , Issue 2: April-June , June 1966, pp. 252 - 277
Copyright
Copyright © 1966 Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 Yu Dawchyuan and Jaw Yuanrenn [i.e. Chao Yuen Ren], Ti-liu ta-lai la-ma Ts'ang-yang chia-ts'o ch'ing-ko, Love songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama Tshangs-dbyangs-rgya-mtsho (Academia Sinica, National Research Institute of History and Philology, Monographs, Series A, No. 5; Peiping, 1930). The most accurate dating for the colorful figure to whom this text is attributed appears to be 1683–1707, according to Pelliot, TP 29.272–4 (1932).

2 Cf. R. K. Sprigg (fn. 4 infra) 189.

3 Kun Chang and Betty Shefts, with the help of Nawang Nornang and Lhadon Karsip, A manual of spoken Tibetan (Lhasa dialect) (Seattle, 1964).

4 R. K. Sprigg, ‘Vowel harmony in Lhasa Tibetan’, Trudy dvadcat' pjatogo meždunarodnogo kongressa vostokovedov Moskva 5.189–94 (Moscow, 1963); the contents of this paper are expanded in his ‘Vowel harmony in Lhasa Tibetan: prosodie analysis applied to interrelated vocalic features of successive syllables’, BSOAS 24.116–38 (1961).

5 Chang and Shefts 46. For the mechanical rewrite rules which have been applied here to all citations from Chang and Shefts, see Lg. 41.682 fn. 9 (1965), where, however, ā → a was an unfortunate misprint for ā → a.

6 The Lhasa forms and their WT equivalents have been gathered from Chang and Shefts 255–86; in the summary above, the WT forms precede and the Lhasa forms follow the equal sign. Glosses have been dispensed with here and in the citations of historical forms from manuscript and other early materials below, since only the forms are of interest, not their meanings. The meanings can be verified in the sources cited; in most cases also the WT form will provide a sufficient guide to the meaning even without reference to the original.

7 For a useful bibliography of these works, see now E. Richter, ‘IV. Verzeichnis der Literatur zur Phonetik der Sprachen (bzw. Dialekte) der Tibeto-Himālaya Gruppe, einschlieβlich der Literatur zur “Morphologie,” Syntax und Wortbildung derselben’, in his Grundlagen der Phonetik des Lhasa-Dialektes 235–69 (Schriften zur Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung, Nr. 8; Berlin, 1964), with additions as in Lg. 41.681 fn. 1 (1965).

8 According to the annotated translation by Kenneth K. S. Chen of Mochizuki Shinkō, Bukkyō daijiten 4.3618a–9aas ‘The Tibetan Tripitaka’, HJAS 9.52–62 (1946), the first printed version of the Tibetan canon was the ‘old’ Snar-than, dating from the first part of the 13th century but surviving today chiefly (perhaps only) in the 1410 Yung-lo reprint for which it provided the basis. The Li-than edition is to be dated after 1580; the Wan-li is a reprint of the Yung-lo and was begun in 1602; the Peking was begun in 1683; the ‘new’ Snar-than edition was begun in 1730, and the Sde-dge edition is later than that year. Otherwise all the xylograph editions which Mochizuki and Chen list are undated (except for the Lhasa edition, which is after 1893).

9 On this dating see P. Pelliot, TP 24.72 (1926).

10 Johannes Schubert, ‘Das Reis-Mandala, Ein tibetischer Ritualtext’, Asiatica: Festschrift Friedrich Weller, Zum 65. Geburtstag gewidmet von seinen Freunden, Kollegen und Schülern 584–609 (Leipzig, 1954); abbreviated Rm.

11 F. W. Thomas, Ancient folk-literature from north-eastern Tibet (Abhandlungen der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zur Berlin, Klasse für Sprachen, Literatur und Kunst, Jahrgang 1952, Nr. 3; Berlin, 1957); abbreviated Fl. F. W. Thomas, Tibetan literary texts and documents concerning Chinese Turkestan: Part I. Literary Texts; Part II. Documents; Part III. Addenda and corrigenda, with Tibetan vocabulary concordance of document numbers and plates (I: London, 1935 = Oriental translation fund, n.s., vol. 32; II: London, 1951 = ibid. 37; III: London, 1955 = ibid. 40); all citations from Part II, abbreviated Tx. J. Bacot, F. W. Thomas, and Ch. Toussaint, Documents de Touen-houang relatifs à l'histoire du Tibet (Annales du Musée Guimet, Bibliothèque d'études, tome 51; Paris, 1940–6); abbreviated De. R. O. Meisezahl, 'Tibetica der Pelliot und Stein Tun-huang MSS: 1. Über zwei Bruchstücke der fragmentarischen Tun-huang Handschrift der tibetischen Āryatathāgatosnīsasitātapatrā nāma aparājita dhāranī im Besitz der Pariser Nationalbibliothek (Fonds Pelliot tibétain 56 No. 3)', UAJb. 27.208–21 (1955); abbreviated At. Glosses have been omitted here for the reasons set forth in fn. 6, and also because in some cases, even though the WT equivalent is quite clear, the complete sense of a passage in the manuscripts is not well enough understood to permit meaningful glosses. In the transcriptions, capitals have been used to indicate names of persons and places.

A. H. Francke, ‘Tibetische Handschriftenfunde aus Turfan’, SBAW 1924.5–20, and ‘Weitere tibetische Handschriftenfunde von Turfan’, SBAW 1924.110–8, contain no pertinent data except a few unimportant forms in T II T 9 Tuyoq, Francke's ‘Erster Brief’. The apparently early inscriptions which Francke reported in ‘Some more rock-carvings from Lower Ladakh’, IA 32.361–3 (1903) have only one interesting example, the date phag gï lo la ‘[erected] in a pig year’, Fig. 10, Plate VIII.

The 16th century Tibetan dialect of Hsi-k'ang province known from the Chinese transcriptions of the so-called Hsi-fan-kuan i-yü, now available in Nishida Tatsuo's meticulous study and edition 'Jūroku seiki ni okeru Seikōshō Chibettogo Tenzen hōgen ni tsuite—Kango-Chibettogo tangoshū iwayuru Heishūbon “Saibankan yakugo” no kenkyū', Kyōto daigaku bungakubu kenkyū kiyō 7.85–174 (1963), presents several forms where a similar process appears to have operated, thus WT chab-brom 'ice', Hsi-k'ang [tčhobruŊ]; WT ri tse-mo ‘mountain peak’, Hsi-k'ang [ri tsum mu]; and WT yi-ge, Hsi-k'ang [yi gi], this last a familiar form throughout the materials treated in the present paper. Nishida treats (102, 128, 131) a somewhat different kind of development which also results in morphologically determined allomorphs, thus šel ‘glass, jade’, Hsi-k'ang [şe], but WT spos-šel ‘amber’, Hsi-k'ang [po şi]. What the Chinese transcription of the text has for this last form is actually [puɔsɚ]; normally one would (as Nishida has) consider the [u] here to be a non-distinctive element in the transcription made necessary by the phonological requirements of Chinese, but in view of the allomorph [şi],perhaps the Hsi-k'ang form should rather be interpreted as /pu şi/.

Most recently A. Róna-Tas, Tibeto-Mongolica, The Tibetan loanwords of Monguor and the development of the archaic Tibetan dialects (Budapest, 1966) 97 and fn. 89 has again called attention to the WT doublet byi-ru and byu-ru ‘coral’, cf. Ladakh tšuru 'id.' and the loanwords into Monguor as úüru, fsurë, and wsirë. The doublet is old, and both forms appear already in the Mahāvyutpatti, 5947 and 5948, where however in each case the form byi-ru is listed first, probably because the authors felt it to be the older ; and perhaps it is. Certainly they were correct in the sense that byi-ru is based ultimately upon Skt. vidruma (one of the two translation equivalents sanctioned by the Mahāvyutpatti, loc. cit.), but some other Indie form which we cannot cite, with assimilated -u- in the first syllable, may equally well be the form behind byu-ru, which would in that case not tell us anything about the history of the form in Tibetan. On parallel Indie forms with secondary -u- in the first syllable, cf. W. Geiger, Pāli Literatur und Sprache (Strassburg, 1916) §16 (usu 'Pfeil' = isu, etc.), and R. Pischel, Grammatik der Prakrit-Sprachen (Strassburg, 1900) §117, taking note however of the cautions of Franklin Edgerton, Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit grammar (New Haven, 1953) §3.97.

12 Meisezahl, At. 212.

13 E.g. in Bacot et al., Dc. 17 no. 44, rtsañ cen poe [presumably pohe] Hbrog, which Thomas, Tx. 4, reading the same manuscript, transcribes as rtsan cen pohi Hbrog.

14 TP 15.53 fn. 1 (1914).

15 Ibid., 85.

16 P. Pelliot, TP 16.2 (1915).

17 TP 16.423 (1915).

18 J. Hackin, Formulaire sanscrit-tibétain du Xe siècle (Mission Pelliot en Asie Centrale, Série Petit in-Octavo, tome II; Paris, 1924).

19 Ibid., 85–6.

20 TP 24.72–4 (1926). Other examples where the i and ï distinction clearly does not correlate with length in writing Buddhist Sanskrit may now be cited in abundance; for example, Meisezahl, At. 211 and fn. 8, shows how one manuscript writes hï-hī, while another writes the same combination hï-hï.

21 TP 15.53 (1914).

22 Li Fang-kuei, ‘The inscription of the Sino-Tibetan treaty of 821–822‘, TP 44.1–99 (1956).

23 At.; cf. fn. 11 supra.

24 Giuseppe Tucci, The tombs of the Tibetan kings (Serie orientale Roma I; Rome, 1950).

25 Fl.; cf. fn. 11 supra.

26 Tx.; cf. fn. 11 supra.

27 Johannes Nobel, Suvarnaprabhāsottama-sūtra, Das Goldglanz-sūtra: Ein Sanskrittext des Mahāyāna-Buddhismus, Die tibetischen Übersetzungen mit einem Wörterbuch. Erster Band, Die tibetischen Übersetzungen (Leiden, 1944).

28 Nils Simonsson, Indo-tibetischen Studien: Die Methoden der tibetischen Übersetzer, untersucht im Hinblick auf die Bedeutung ihrer Übersetzungen für die Sanskritphilologie I (Uppsala, 1957).

29 J. W. de Jong, 'Fonds Pelliot tibétain Nos 610 et 611', Studies in Indology and Buddhology presented in honour of Professor Susumu Yamaguchi on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday [Yamaguchi hakase kanreki kinen Indogaku bukkyōgaku ronsō] 60–7 (Kyoto, 1955). On other linguistic problems presented by this text, see now also my paper 'Apropos of the Fonds Pelliot tibetain no. 610 fragment of the Tibetan Vimalakīrtinirdeśasūtra', CAJ 10.44–54 (1965).

30 On this ambiguous graph, cf. Meisezahl 210, fn. 3.

31 Laufer long ago pointed out some of the purely mechanical and scribal considerations which help to govern the choice of the ï-graph; see TP 15.53 (1914).

32 Robert Shafer, ‘Prefixes in Tibeto-Burmic’, HJAS 9.45–50 (1946).

33 Robert Shafer, ‘The vocalism of Sino-Tibetan’, JAOS 60.302–37 (1940), especially 312–5.

34 R. A. Miller, ‘The Tibeto-Burman ablaut system’, Transactions of the International Conference of Orientalists in Japan 1.29–56 (1956) ; ‘The Tibeto-Burman infix system’, JAOS 78.193–204 (1958). Cf. Ingelore Kluge, OLZ 58.521 (1963).

35 ‘The significance for comparative grammar of some ablauts in the Tibetan number-system’, TP 43.287–296 (1955).

36 Tor Ulving, ‘Umlaut in Tibetan numerals’, TP 47.75–80 (1959).

37 Sakaki Ryōsaburō, ed., Honyaku myōgi taishū, Mahōvyutpatti nos. 8081, 8083 (Kyoto, 1916).

38 Lg. 30.459 fn. 4 (1954).

39 JAOS 83.493–4 (1963).

40 Fl. 133 fn. 3; but the word is not, as Thomas speculated (18), the Hsia-hsia form for ‘heaven’, which Nishida Tatsuo now reconstructs as *[mʉꚔ]; see his Seikago no kenkyu, Seikago no saikōsei to Seikamoji no kaidoku (Studies in the Hsia-hsia language : The reconstruction of Hsia-hsia and a decipherment of its script) 189 (Kyoto, 1964).