Lepcha Orthography: An Earlier And A Later Stage

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1997. - 8 p.It is remarkable that the language of the Lepchas, with only 34,894 speakers recorded for it in 1909, "roughly estimated as follows: - Sikkim.25,000; Darjeeling.9,894" (Linguistic survey of India П1/1 p.233), when Nepali was just beginning to oust the numerous tribal languages of Sikkim and eastern Nepal, should be so prominent in Sino-Tibetan reconstruction; but both Bodman (1980, 1988) and Chang and Chang (1975) have made quite wide use of Lepcha cognates. Indeed, Chang and Chang (1975:398) declare that "the frequent usefulness of comparisons with Lepcha will be apparent in our discussions below". One of Bodman's (1980:73) examples, "ta-rók 'six', Tibetan drug, Chinese *C-ru£", appears in §2.2.1 below. Where romanised, all my Lepcha examples are in accordance with Mainwaring (1876), though with slight modifications, including those cited from Grimwedel's editing of Mainwaring (1898).The Lepcha language is also remarkable for having a script of its own, a distinction that it shares with only two other languages of the Himalayas, Newari and Limbu (see Sprigg 1983:306-308 and Sprigg 1986:27-29). The Lepcha script, it has been claimed, was devised by the third Rajah of Sikkim, Chador Namgyal (1700-1717) (Risley 1894:13). If this account of its origin is correct, the script had been in existence for at least a hundred years by the time that the two earliest datable texts known to me were written; they are eyewitness accounts of the murder of the Lepcha Prime Minister of Sikkim, in 1826 (Risley 1894:19), and together form item 190 in the Foreign Department's 'Persian' section of the National Archive, Delhi, dated 14 April 1828. The one I have cited in this article, as item (i), is headed gyâ-mû-nun shu 'submitted by Gyamu'.

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