Zhang-Zhung language
Zhangzhung is an extinct Sino-Tibetan language that was spoken in Zhangzhung in what is now western Tibet. It is attested in a bilingual text called A Cavern of Treasures and several shorter texts.
A small number of documents preserved in Dunhuang contain an undeciphered language that has been called Old Zhangzhung, but the identification is controversial.
''A Cavern of Treasures'' (''mDzod phug'')
A Cavern of Treasures is a terma uncovered by Shenchen Luga in the early eleventh century. Martin identifies the importance of this scripture for studies of the Zhangzhung language:External relationships
Bradley says Zhangzhung "is now agreed" to have been a Kanauri or West Himalayish language. Guillaume Jacques rebuts earlier hypotheses that Zhangzhung might have originated in eastern Tibet by having determined it to be a non-Qiangic language.Widmer classifies Zhangzhung within the eastern branch of West Himalayish, and lists the following cognates between Zhangzhung and Proto-West Himalayish.
| Gloss | Zhangzhung | Proto-West Himalayish |
| barley | zad | *zat |
| blue | ting | *tiŋ- |
| diminutive suffix | -tse | *-tse ~ *-tsi |
| ear | ra tse | *re |
| fat | tsʰas | *tsʰos |
| girl | tsa med | *tsamet |
| god | sad | *sat |
| gold ? | zang | *zaŋ |
| heart | she | *ɕe |
| old | shang ze | *ɕaŋ |
| red | mang | *maŋ |
| white | shi nom | *ɕi |
Scripts
A number of scripts are recorded as being used for writing the Zhangzhung language. These are the Marchen script and its several descendants:- Marchen or Greater Mar script
- * Marchung or Lesser Mar script
- * Pungchen or Greater Pung script
- * Pungchung or Lesser Pung script
- * Drusha script
Old Zhangzhung
F. W. Thomas suggested that three undeciphered Dunhuang manuscripts in a Tibetan script were written in an older form of the Zhangzhung language. This identification has been accepted by Takeuchi Tsuguhito, who called the language "Old Zhangzhung" and added two further manuscripts.Two of these manuscripts are in the Stein collection of the British Library and three in the Pelliot collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale. In each case, the relevant text is written on the reverse side of a scroll containing an earlier Chinese Buddhist text.
The texts are written in a style of Tibetan script dating from the late 8th or early 9th centuries.
Takeuchi and Nishida claim to have partially deciphered the documents, which they believe to be separate medical texts.
However, David Snellgrove, and more recently Dan Martin, have rejected Thomas's identification of the language of these texts as a variant of Zhangzhung.