Tibetan Language

This article provides a consistent formal grammatical and ontological description of the model of the Tibetan compounds system, developed and used for automatic syntactic and semantic analysis of Tibetan texts, on the material of a hand-verified corpus. This model covers all types of Tibetan compounds, which were previously introduced by other authors, and introduces a number of new classes of compounds, taking into account their derivation, structure and semantics. The article describes the tools used for ontological modeling of Tibetan compounds; special attention is paid to the problem of modeling the semantics of verbs and verbal compounds. Nominal and verbal compounds are considered separately, it is noted that the importance of verbal compounds for the Tibetan language system is not less than that of nominal compounds. The statistical data on the absolute frequency distribution of the use of compounds of different types in the current version of the corpus annotation and on the amounts of ontology concepts associated with each class of compounds are given.

This paper will discuss whether Tibetan language, intended as the central or "standard" Tibetan variety spoken in Lhasa and in the province of Ü-Tsang, is endangered in the Tibet Autonomous Region and whether the language policy introduced in Tibet by the Chinese Government is an effective strategy to improve education and build a Chinese national identity in the region. An overview of the historical and political context of the education policy introduced in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, will include the conflicts in the Sino-Tibetan relationships in 2008 and their social and cultural background.

This magnificient thangka was an abbatial  commission of the late 16th century at the Ngor monastery, portraying at center two Buddhist hierarchs, the 9th and 10th Abbots of the Ngor monastery, respectively Lha mchog sengge and Dkon mchog lhun grub, surrounded by numerous eminent scholars and lamas of the Ngor and Sa skya lineages.

前  言
人类学家说：人类的历史可分为“史前”时期和“有史”时期，前者指文字发明和使用之前，后者当然是有了文字和有了书面语言的记录。这样的分期可是把文字放在了人类文明史上重中之重的地位。随着社会从采集、狩猎、游牧、农耕、工业化发展到现代的电子化、信息化，相信当今世界没有哪个主体国家或者地区不使用文字了。
最早的文字诞生于约公元前3500年的两河流域，即苏美尔人的楔形文字。此后的数千年中，世界各地陆续出现各种文字系统，汉字至迟在公元前1300年的商代就已存在，考古发现的甲骨文如此成熟，不能不令人把它的发明上推数千年之久；美洲玛雅文字最早的碑刻遗物约在公元328年；古埃及象形文字甚至在公元前3100年就已出现。想象一下，跨越了这么久远的历史，文字给人类带来的好处，文字对人类文明的贡献，一直都是那么辉煌，还有哪种文明创造能超越它的伟绩，它把语言的传播、传承、思维、交际等几大功能发挥得如此淋漓尽致，空间上的传播和时间上的传承，让远隔千山万水的人们能够沟通，让今人能够读懂远古的先哲，的确神奇。
文字当然也随着时代发展，它的形式、载体、形态无论是勇往直前还是迂回曲折，都走到了新的时代、信息的时代、我们的时代。在这样一个追求效率的时代，聪明的人想着“偷懒”，敲键盘的活儿都要省掉，又发明了叫做OCR（光学字符识别器）的玩意儿，这是一个奇特的装置。当人用智慧的双眼辨识手书铅印的文字时，他没有忘记让机器来代承他的辛劳。他努力锻造机器的“火眼金睛”，要它把千幻万变的图案转变为书面语言：这是“千、玖、恕”，不是“干、玫、怒”，那是“ཅ、ཆ、ཇ”，不是“ཙ、ཚ、ཛ”。上天保佑，人的历史又向前迈出了一步，“偷懒”大获成功。
回到本书的专题上来。史记藏文创制于公元7世纪，一个与中原内地鼎盛的唐朝同时代的吐蕃王朝时期。千余年来，藏文经历了多种字形字体的变化，而最典型、文献最丰富的要数历经千年逐渐规范的正楷书体（有头字），目前人们常用的类似雕版印刷而进一步规范的字体，也是本书讨论扫描识别应用的字体。
这本书的具体内容留给读者阅评，略可概括的是，全书相对比较全面地介绍了藏文的字符分类和各类字形的特征，也详细叙述了藏文的识别模型和处理技术，对预处理、识别处理和后处理等标准识别程序均有讨论，还特别介绍了我们实验室开发的实验系统、清华大学开发的TH-OCR 2007多文种文字识别系统。相信本书在民族文字信息化处理蓬勃兴旺的今天，能对伟大祖国的民族文化和技术发展有所奉献。
本书的一个缺点是没有讨论雕版印刷藏文字体的识别，那是因为迄今还没有任何机构任何人开展过这方面的研究。鉴于此，设立在美国的西藏佛教资源中心（Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center）只好暂时采用扫描文档制作PDF文件的方式将大量雕版文献存储备用，拟待OCR技术开展之后再予识别。历史上的雕版印刷文献不知凡几，有如《布敦佛教史》、《雅隆教法史》、《王统世系明鉴》、《汉藏史集》、《贤者喜宴》、《米拉日巴传》、《萨迦班智达传》、《唐东杰布传》、《萨迦世系史》、《西藏王臣记》、《如意宝树史》、《土观宗派源流》、《青史》、《红史》、《新红史》等，还包括各个时代奉为瑰宝的《大藏经》，真希望这是学界和工程界下一个重要的攻关目标。
在本书出版之际，作为实验项目负责人，我要感谢项目团队的每个成员，他们兢兢业业、努力工作，都是有为的年轻人。还要感谢中国科学院倪光南教授、曹佑琦教授和清华大学丁晓青教授，倪教授是中文信息学会的理事长，曹教授是学会常务副理事长兼秘书长，他们热忱地鼎力支持少数民族语言文字信息处理事业，组织会议、举办讲座，对民族语文信息处理研究给予诸多支持。曹教授称赞几位作者首撰少数民族文字识别研究专著，提议请倪教授为本书写序，倪教授慨然惠允，使我们深感学会领导对藏语文信息处理研究的肯定和支持。丁教授是我国文字识别领域的权威专家，不仅开发了汉文识别，又组织开发了藏文、蒙古文和维吾尔文等文字识别系统。她应允为本书赐序，并欣然同意将她与王华博士合著的“多字体印刷藏文识别系统”附于本书，对培养新学，支持藏文和民族文字识别奉献之多，令人感慨。谢谢了！

江 荻
2009年九月
於北京中关村

Translation of two Tibetan devotional texts in praise of the goddess Tara written in the 15th century by His Holiness Gendun Drubpa, the First Dalai Lama. The texts are presented in Tibetan and in English translation, with individual words and phrases defined for each verse.

https://www.tibshelf.org/theguidebooktothehiddenlandofpemoko
The Guidebook to the Hidden Land of Pemoko is a revealed treasure text included in the Jatson Nyinpo’s Embodiment of the Precious Ones, the Konchok Chidu. It is a prediction text about the future degenerate times and purportedly the first guidebook to the hidden land of Pemoko.

The dichotomy between China’s claim to respect, protect and promote Tibetan culture in the education system and its actual practice of alienating Tibetans from their linguistic and cultural heritage and identity through a vigorous imposition of Chinese curricula under its Han-Chinese nationalist agenda has only resulted in a failure to achieve the kind of domination it seeks over the Tibetan people.

https://www.tibshelf.org/rigpai-reltri
Rigpai Reltri was the younger son of Do Khyentse Yeshe Dorje. He was recognized as the reincarnation of Jigme Lingpa's son, Jigme Nyinche Wozer, and became a well-respected guru in Minyak during his time. Rigpai Reltri was a lineage holder of his father's treasure cycle of The Heart Essence of the Exceeding Secret Ḍākinī, or the Yangsang Khandro Tugtik, containing The Self-Liberation of Fixation, or Dzinpa Rangdrol. He entrusted this lineage to his younger son Do Rinpoche Gyepa Dorje.

Standard Tibetan'-a state-building project of the Tibetan Empire-dates to the 7th-11th centuries CE. This medieval variety of Central Tibetan remains a cultural touchstone that unites the Tibetan people to this day. Its traditional spellings and grammars are still the reference point that define 'proper' Tibetan. However, while this standard has been maintained for writing, speech forms have continued to evolve and change. Over the span of the last 1,000 years, these roads-one maintained prescriptively, the other developed naturally-have diverged. In Himalayan settlements especially, movement, migration, and mixture have quickened the pace of language change. The result is diglossia-two horns of a dilemma, two competing standards, two diverging roads between which the borders grow ever taller and thicker. This paper takes a closer look at the borders between traditional 'Standard Tibetan' and modern 'Diaspora Tibetan', and the dilemmas they create for education and literacy.

""The Sherpa-English and English-Sherpa Dictionary (SEESD) is the product of a very fruitful collaboration between two Sherpa scholars and two European linguists who are specialists in the Tibetic languages. The SEESD is the only Sherpa dictionary which provides both Tibetan and Nepali equivalents as well as the Tibetan etymology. Sherpa words are presented in a romanization system with a notation of tones.
The SEESD includes a brief description of the Sherpa-speaking area, dialectal variation, and the linguistic affiliation of the language.
It is the first publication to provide information about the phonological correspondences of Literary Tibetan in Sherpa. These correspondences, as well as the basic lexicon, clearly show that Sherpa is derived from Old Tibetan and is closely related to Classical Literary Tibetan. The specificities of Sherpa verb morphology are described in great detail in an appendix of this dictionary.

TOURNADRE Nicolas, L. N. Sherpa, G. Chodrak & Guillaume OISEL, 2009. Sherpa-English English-Sherpa Dictionary with Literary Tibetan and Nepali Equivalents, Kathmandu: Vajra Pub, 296 p.

https://www.vajrabookshop.com/more_info.php?category_cd=39&product_cd=1495&MODE=CART""

Denjongke, also known as Lhoke, Sikkimese Bhutia or simply Sikkimese, is a Tibetic language spoken in Sikkim, India. This paper presents the results of an acoustic study of F1 values in front unrounded vowels the exact behavior of which was left somewhat unresolved in my previous study (Yliniemi 2005). Minimal triplets in the new data confirm that a three-way opposition /iː/ /eː/ /ɛː/ has to be posited but this opposition appears to be restricted to long vowels, whereas short vowels have only a two-way opposition. Comparison of example words with Written Tibetan rhymes provides an initial understanding of how Written Tibetan rhymes are reflected within Denjongke front unrounded vowels.

К читателю: данную серию очерков может читать любой желающий, однако написана она, прежде всего, для тех, кто уже имеет некоторое представление о тибетском языке, а также для лингвистов. Поэтому, если Вы — новичок в тибетологии и тибетском языкознании, Вы можете прочитать (пролистать) всю серию очерков, сначала пропуская непонятные и кажущиеся "слишком абстрактными" места, с тем, чтобы возвратиться к ним лишь тогда, когда столкнетесь на практике с соответствующими явлениями (поскольку не каждый параграф очерка снабжен простейшими примерами).

In both popular and academic discourse, Karma Kagyu Tibetan Buddhism is known for its meditation practices and sometime is considered anti-scholastic. However, I claim that the Karma Kagyu does have a historical scholastic lineage and that the Sixteenth Karmapa attempted to revive it during the twentieth century. This thesis is a critical analysis of the Karma Kagyu scholastic tradition from the medieval period to the present day. Throughout I adhere to the cross-cultural and comparative concept of “scholasticism” as defined by José Cabezón, and khepa as discussed by Sakya Pandita (1182-1251). Khepa (mkhas pa) is a crucial but ambiguous Tibetan term that includes meanings of “scholarship” and “scholasticism.”
The history of the Karma Kagyu scholastic tradition can be broken into three periods: an early period of invention, a middle period of decline and loss, and a recent period of revitalization. The Third Karmapa (1303-1339) established a formal academic tradition during the fourteenth century and this tradition declined by the seventeenth century under the rule of the Fifth Dalai Lama (1617-1682). This decline was a result of the Tibetan Civil War between the Ü and Tsang regions of central Tibet and was perpetuated by a hegemonic Buddhist sectarian ideology that suppressed non-Geluk scholastics.
This history explains why there are so few Karma Kagyu scholars and monastic institutes, or shédra, in-exile post-1959. It also highlights the work of the Sixteenth Karmapa (1924-1981) to restore the Karma Kagyu scholastic tradition and hybridize it with modern curricula and educational institutions during this same period but itself began to decline in 1993, negatively influenced by both the Seventeenth Karmapa succession controversy and a strong antagonism between Karma Kagyu monasticism and scholasticism. This latter tension is embodied by the difficult relations between Rumtek Monastery and Rumtek Shédra. My analysis of the Sixteenth Karmpa’s efforts to revive the scholastic tradition in-exile rely to some extent on a positive understanding of the theoretical framework of The Invention of Tradition (1983) by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger in which “invention” is not a deceptive act but a creative hybrid of old and new.

The life of Do Khyentse Yeshe Dorje (mdo mkhyen brtse ye shes rdo rje, 1800-1866) and his adventures are chronicled in articles, book entries, and short stories. For their own intents and purposes, they solely focus on his life-i.e. he is the protagonist in his personal story. He is the treasure revealer (gter ston), the madman (smyon pa), and an incarnation of Jigme Lingpa ('jigs med gling pa, 1730-1798). There is no reason why those compositions would not address him specifically, but we know that a personal lineage and a lineage of revealed treasure (gter ma) teachings usually does not end with the revealer. The progenitor commonly entrusts the teachings to another person or passes on the teachings to people if the right conditions are met for such an event. This is what happened for Do Khyentse Yeshe Dorje as he entrusted and passed on his teachings, even through his family line.

This file is the combined front matter and introductions from a four-volume collection of important articles in Sino-Tibetan linguistics, with introductions contextualising the articles and talking about what has been done since the articles were published. This was done as a tribute to the earlier generation of linguists for their contributions, but also as a starting point for young scholars getting into the field and for veterans who just want to have easy access to classic articles.

The program for the forthcoming 15th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies (Paris, 7-13 July 2019). Please note that this program is subject to a small number of corrections and emendations that will be posted in due time.

A Textbook in Classical Tibetan is the first comprehensive course book in the Classical Tibetan language written in English. The textbook describes the grammar of pre-16th-century Classical Tibetan works for beginners and students of intermediate level. It is intended to cover the most essential topics that can be mastered within two semesters of an academic class.

The meticulously researched study is devoted to one of the most remarkable personages in the history of the internecine strife between the secular and ecclesiastic factions of the Tibetan religious-political system of the seventeenth century, aided and abetted by internal and external forces. This person was the short-lived Sixth Dalai Lama Blo-bzang Rin-chen Tshangs-dbyangs rgya-mtsho (1683-1706), of whom it is unknown whether he died a natural death (after some illness) or was murdered. Similarly, his famous love songs may have been genuine poetic works by him or popular songs ascribed to him in a commonly used and politically motivated ruse to get rid of him.

After a short survey of the types of Tibetan songs, their stylistic forms and contents, largely modelled after the Indian kavya genre, the author lists the various editions of the sixty-six songs as a preamble to his own critical edition. Each song is given in Tibetan, followed by an English translation, and copious annotations that at every turn reveal the author's profound knowledge and appreciation of his chosen subject as well as its contextual place in the vast Indo-Tibetan literary tradition.

The appendices contain the transliterated text of a photo-static copy, in the author's possession, of a unique document kept in the library pertaining to the Tibetan Language Section of the Central Academy of National Minorities in Beijing (pp. 283-338) and an Apparatus Criticus and Explanatory Notes to the aforementioned text (pp. 341-448). This "Apparatus," too, is a mine of information. The bibliography lists works both in Western languages and in Chinese. 
H. Guenther

The study examines the beginnings of a Tibetan-language newspaper history by analyzing the Yul phyogs so so’i gsar ‘gyur me long, i.e. the “Mirror of News from Various Regions [of the World]” (in short: Melong), in a socio-historical context. The Melong was produced between 1925 and 1963 from the Indo-Tibetan border town of Kalimpong, by the Christian convert Babu Tharchin. It developed into one of most influential early newspapers in Tibetan-language. Different from its precursors, the Melong was not only envisioned as a medium to propagate religious contents (such as Christian missionaries had done) or political propaganda (such as the Republicans in China had done). The Melong’s main editor Tharchin attributed value to the newspaper itself: as a medium of an active public of a nation state. After giving a concise history of mediated communication on the Tibetan plateau with a focus on print media, the production environment of the Melong’s print shop “Tibet Mirror Press” in Kalimpong is examined. Here, Tharchin, with his workshop, is identified as one of the first commercial print-publishers for the Tibetan language. His partly commercial outlook gave way to a new agency of a mass audience, in theory levelling people as equal potential customers, disregarding traditional socio-cultural hierarchies. A detailed content analysis of editorial comments published in the newspaper underlines this trend. The same data allows insights into how Tibet as a nation state was imagined within the Melong, at the same time appropriating contents in language and style to specific communicative protocols established amongst Tibetan-language speakers. Five case studies based on the general content of the newspaper further highlight the strategies for making foreign concepts understood; whilst in the process changing the newspaper. These are: religion (Christianity), knowledge production (discourses on the shape of the earth), world politics (coverage of the Second World War), economics (advertisements), and time (the newspaper as prophecy). On one hand, the study thus investigates transformation processes of the participating community, Tibet. On the other hand, it investigates, how, in the process, the global product newspaper was adapted for a Tibetan-speaking audience, analyzing transformation processes of the genre newspaper. Due to the state of available source material, the study focuses on the imaginations of Tibet within the contents of the newspaper and thus combines Benedict Anderson’s theses of “imagined communities” with a transcultural approach.

A number of different languages in outside of the Indo-European family were analyzed based on how difficult it would be for a native English speaker to learn them. They were then rated on a purely impressionistic 1-6 scale of easiest to most difficult. Extensive phonological, morphological, syntactic and even semantic analysis was done for many of these tongues to highlight areas of difficulty for English learners. Very long: 101 pages.

There are at least two kind of N+V sequences in Lhasa Tibetan. One is an ordinary object verb sequence (OV) and the other is a complex predicate (CP). This thesis describes the properties of complex predicates in Lhasa Tibetan and provides diagnostic tests to differentiate N+V sequences. Compare these two sentences:
1 ■("ངས་ " @"ngas " @■("1SG " &"ergative " )) ■("ཁྱེད་རང་ " @"khyed.rang " @■("2SG " &"self " )) ■("ལ་ " @"la " @■("dative " )) ■("དངུལ་ " @"dngul " @■("money " )) ■("སྟེར་ " @"ster " @■("give " )) ■("པ་ཡིན " @"pa.yin " @■("PRF " )) ■("། " ) (OV)
I gave money to you.
2 ■("ཁོས་ " @"khos " @■("3SG " &"ergative " )) ■("ཁོང་ཚོ་ " @"khong.tsho " @■("3SG " &"plural " )) ■("ལ་ " @"la " @■("LOC " )) ■("མགོ་སྐོར་ " @"mgo.skor " @■("deception " )) ■("བཏང་ " @"btang " @■("do " )) ■("བ་རེད " @"ba.red " @■("PRF " )) ■("། " ) (CP)
He cheated them.
The N+V sequences in question are dngul ster ‘money give’ in (1) and mgo.skor btang ‘deception send’ in (2).   
Previously there were no structural tests that could be used to differentiate OVs from CPs. Speakers and researchers have mostly relied on intuition or (non-) compositionality. This thesis offers 20 tests to apply to N+V sequences in order to differentiate CPs from OVs. Some tests prove definitive and others prove inconclusive. There are three main categories of tests. These are tests focused on the nominal (host) component, tests focused on the verbal (verbalizer) component, and tests focused on the syntax of the construction as a whole. These tests yield three findings:
Unlike OVs, the CPs resist nominal modification (but this is not always the case).
Verbalizers behave syntactically just like a regular single stem verbs.
The CP as a whole resists reordering and separation by argument level constituents.
Both Mohanan (1994, 2007) and Butt (2003, 2010) have written on light verbs and complex predicates in other languages and some of their ideas are applied to N+V sequences in Lhasa Tibetan. CPs in Lhasa Tibetan consist of a host (the nominal component) and a verbalizer (the verbal component, often called a light verb). They can be both compositional and non-compositional. The majority of CPs in Lhasa Tibetan use one of the three most common verbalizers. Of more than 1100 verbal entries that make up the data used in this study, 70% were CP-like constructions; and of those, more than 70% used the most common three verbalizers. There are however, a large number of candidate constructions which use less common verbalizers.
According to the tests developed in this thesis, some constructions which have been called CPs are better labeled OVs and others which are borderline are shown to have the same properties as other prototypical CPs.

The Sino-Tibetan [Trans-Himalayan] language phylum consists of large number of independent branches with no agreed internal structure. It is usually characterised as sesquisyllabic, i.e. typical word forms, especially nominals, have one or more presyllables and a root, the presyllable consisting of a single consonant. Such a structure, which is globally rare, also characterises almost all branches of Austroasiatic, the phylum with which it is intertwined across the central part of its range. However, the incidence of sesquisyllabism is sporadic in Sino-Tibetan, characterising east-central laguages and being absent in the diverse languages in the west of its range, typically in Nepal. In the easternmost Sino-Tibetan languages the trend towards monosyllabism has all but eliminated sesquisyllabism. The paper argues that sesquisyllabic structures are a consequence of the interaction with Austroasiatic and not an underlying characteristic of the phylum. The presence or absence of these structures is tabulated and mapped in each potential branch of Sino-Tibetan, to demonstrate their geography and the overlap with Austroasiatic. It is underlined that if this argument is accepted, then the whole process of reconstruction of PST, which in many cases hangs on the citation of a very few languages, is unreliable and the pathways to the proto-language must be radically rethought.