View Shopping Cart Your Famous Chinese Account Shopping Help Famous Chinese Homepage China Chinese Chinese Culture Chinese Restaurant & Chinese Food Travel to China Chinese Economy & Chinese Trade Chinese Medicine & Chinese Herb Chinese Art
logo
Search
March 8, 2014
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
10 Books
Tibetan language

Wikipedia

 
The Tibetan language is typically classified as member of the Tibeto-Burman branch of the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family. It is a mildly tonal language using two to four tones depending on dialect. It is described as primarily analytic language|isolating but agglutinative in some degree. It is spoken by approximately 6 million Tibetan people across the Tibetan Plateau as well as by approximately 150,000 exile speakers.



  • P'al-skad: the vernacular speech.

  • Rje-sa ("polite respectful speech"): the formal spoken style.

  • Ch'os-skad ("book language"): the literary style in which the scriptures and other classical works are written.




Tibetan is not a uniform speech, but comprises several dialect groups:
  • Gtsang (Tsang): lingua franca.

  • * Old name: central dialects, dialects of Lhasa

  • * Distribution: U and Tsang (including Spiti)

  • * Most sub-dialects of Tibetan spoken in the frontier Himalayas|Himalayan districts and states outside Tibet are affiliated with Gtsang:

  • ** Kunawar and Bashahr,

  • ** Garhwal,

  • ** Kumaon,

  • ** Nepal

  • *** the Sherpa (eastern Nepal)

  • *** the Tamang (eastern Nepal)

  • ** Danjong-k? dialect, found in Sikkim

  • ** Lho-k? or Duk-ka dialect, found in Bhutan

  • Dbus

  • * Old name: the western dialects

  • * Distribution: traditionally Ladakh, Lahul and Spiti|Lahul, Baltistan and Burig

  • Mngahris (Ngari)

  • * Old name: the eastern dialects

  • * Distribution: Khams

  • Other sub-dialects:

  • * Farther east the Monpa and Takpa of Tawang in the eastern Assam Himalayas appears to form a transition between the central and the Sifan of dialects on the Chinese frontier, which includes the Minyak, Sungpan, Lifan and Tochu dialects.

  • * On the north bordering on Turkestan the dialect of the nomadic Hor-pa tribes is much mixed with Turkic ingredients.





Tibetan is written with a Sanskrit-derived script — see Tibetan script for details.

Wylie transliteration is the most common system of romanization used by Western scholars in rendering written Tibetan using the Latin alphabet (such as employed on much of this page).



By means of agglutination, the Tibetan language has developed a considerable grammatical system of word suffixes and is no longer strictly analytic language|isolating in structure.
Agglomerations of consonants are often met with as initials, giving the appearance of telescoped words -- an appearance which historical etymology often confirms.
Many of these initial consonants are silent in the Gtsang dialects, or have been resolved into a simpler one of another character.
The language is much ruled by laws of euphony, which have been strictly formulated by native grammarians.
  • Among the initials, five -- ག g, ད d, བ b, མ m, འ ' -- are regarded as prefixes, and are called so for all purposes, though they belong sometimes to the stem. As a rule, none of these letters can be placed before any of the same organic class.

  • Post-positions -- pa or be and ma -- are required by the noun (noun substantive|substantive or adjective) that is to be singled out;

  • po or bo (masculine) and mo (feminine) are used for distinction of gender or for emphasis.

The cases of nouns are indicated by suffixes, which vary their initials according to the final of the nouns.

The plural is denoted when required by adding one of several words of plurality. When several words are connected in a sentence they seldom require more than one case element, and that comes last.

There are personal, demonstrative, interrogative and reflexive pronouns, as well as an indefinite article, which is also the numeral for "one." The personal pronouns are replaced by various terms of respect when speaking to or before superiors, and there are many words besides which are only employed in ceremonial language.

The verb, which is properly a kind of noun or participle, has no element of person, and denotes the conditions of tense and mood by an external and internal inflexion, or the addition of auxiliary verbs and suffixes when the stem is not susceptible of inflexion, so that instead of saying "I go", a Tibetan says what would literally be translated as "my going". The conditions which approximate most closely to our present, perfect, future and imperative are marked either by aspiration (phonetics)|aspiration of the initial, or by one of the five prefix consonants according to the rules of euphony.

As to the internal vowel, a or e in the present tends to become o in the imperative, the e changing to a in the past and future; i and u are less liable to change. A final s is also occasionally added.

Only a limited number of verbs are capable of four changes; some cannot assume more than three, some two, and many only one. This relative deficiency is made up by the addition of auxiliaries or suffixes. There are no numeral auxiliaries or segregatives used in counting, as in many languages of East Asia, though words expressive of a collective or integral are often used after the tens, sometimes after a smaller number.

In scientific and astrological works, the numerals, as in Sanskrit, are expressed by symbolical words.

Sentential grammatical units have Subject Object Verb|SOV word order:
  • the substantive > the adjective > the verb

  • the object and the adverb > the verb

  • the genitive > the noun on which it depends

This contrasts with the order in the isolating Chinese, where the order is subject, verb, object. A causal or active verb requires before it the instrumental instead of the nominative case, which goes only before a neuter or intransitive verb.



The chief differences between the classical language of the Tibetan translators of the 9th century and the present day vernacular are in vocabulary, phraseology and grammatical structure. These changes occurred despite the strong conservative force exerted by the ancient religious texts which have remained the language of monastic study.

The concurrence of the evidence indicated above enables us to form the following outline of the evolution of Tibetan. In the 9th century, as shown by a bilingual Tibeto-Chinese language|Chinese edict found at Lhasa, there was relatively little difference between the spoken and the written language. Soon afterwards, when the language was extended to the western valleys, many of the prefixed and most of the important consonants vanished from the spoken words. The ya-tag and ra-tag (the y and r subscript), and the s after vowels and consonants, were still in force.

The next change took place in Gtsang dialects: The ra-tags were altered into cerebral dental consonant|dentals, and the ya-tags became ?.

Later on the superscribed letters and finals d and s disappeared, except in the east and west. It was at this stage that the language spread in Lahul and Spiti, where the superscribed letters were silent, the d and g finals were hardly heard, and as, os, us were ai, oi, ui. The words introduced from Tibet into the border languages at that time differ greatly from those introduced at an earlier period.

The other changes are more recent and restricted to U and Tsang. The vowel sounds ai, oi, ui have become ?, ?, iZ; and a, o, u before the finals d and n are now a, ?, ?. The medials have become aspirate tenues with a low intonation, which also marks the words having a simple initial consonant; while the former aspirates and the complex initials simplified in speech are uttered with a high tone, shrill and rapidly. An inhabitant of Lhasa, for example, finds the distinction between s and z, or between s andz, not in the consonant, but in the tone, pronouncing s and s with a high note and l and l with a low one.



From the inscriptions issued up at Lhasa in paired Tibetan and Chinese in 822, we know the now-silent letters were indeed pronounced:
  • Tibetan spudgyal, now pugyal, is rendered suh-pot-ye in Chinese symbols;

  • khri, now Ii, is kieh-li;

  • hbrong is puh-iung;

  • snyan is sheh-njoh and su-njoh;

  • srong is su-lun, su-lung and si-lung.

(Note: the above Chinese Romanizations are renderings of Middle Chinese pronunciation.)




Since at least around the 7th century when the Chinese came into contact with the Tibetans, phonetics and grammar of Tibetan have been studied and documented. Tibetans also studied their own language, mostly for translation purpose for diplomacy (with India and China) or religion (from Buddhism).

Western world|Western linguists who arrived at Tibet in the 18th and 19th century include:
  • Hungarian Alexander Csoma de K?r?s (1784-1842) published the first Tibetan-European language dictionary (Classical Tibetan and English in this case) and grammar.

  • H. A. Jeaschke of the Moravians (religion)|Moravian mission which was established in Ladak in 1857: modern Tibetan

  • The Capuchin friars who were settled in Lhasa for a quarter of a century from 1719

  • * Francisco Orazio della Penna, well known from his accurate description of Tibet

  • * Cassian di Macerata sent home materials which were utilized by the Augustine friar Aug. Antonio Georgi of Rimini (1711-1797) in his Alphabetum Tibetanum (Rome, 1762, 4t0), a ponderous and confused compilation, which may be still referred to, but with great caution.

  • At St Petersburg, J. J. Schmidt published his Grammatik der tibetischen Sprache in 1839 and his Tibetisch-deutsches Worterbuch in 1841, but neither of these works justified the great pretensions of the author, whose access to Mongolian sources had enabled him to enrich the results of his labours with a certain amount of information unknown to his predecessors.

  • * His Tibetische Studien (1851-1868) is a valuable collection of documents and observations.

  • In France, P. E. Foucaux published in 1847 a translation from the Rgya tcher rot-pa, the Tibetan version of the Lalita Vistara, and in 1858 a Grammaire thibitaine

  • Ant. Schiefner of St Petersburg in 1849 his series of translations and researches.


See also: Languages of China, Qomolangma



interwiki|code=bo
  • http://www.isw.unibe.ch/tibet/ The Tibetan Dialects Project

  • * http://www.isw.unibe.ch/tibet/CDTD.htm The Comparative Dictionary of Tibetan Dialects (CDTD)

  • http://iris.lib.virginia.edu/tibet/xml/show.php?xml=/collections/langling/languages/index.xml&l=9 Languages on the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas - Nicolas Tournadre

  • http://wordbridge.com/Tibeng/ http://wordbridge.com/Tibeng/ Audio of Simple Phrases

  • http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tibetan.htm http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tibetan.htm The Tibetan Alphabet

  • http://www.geocities.com/tibetanlanguage/language.html http://www.geocities.com/tibetanlanguage/language.html A Free Tibetan Grammar and Phrasebook

  • http://www.nitartha.org/dictionary_searchback.html http://www.nitartha.org/dictionary_searchback.html The Rangjung Yeshe Tibetan-English Dharma Dictionary

  • http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=fc02e2e3-14bb-46c1-afee-3732d6249647&DisplayLang=en GB18030 Support Package for Windows 2000/XP, including Chinese, Tibetan, Yi, Mongolian and Thai font by Microsoft




  • http://www.snowlionpub.com/search.php?isbn=MASTTI Manual of Standard Tibetan, Nicolas Tournadre and Sangda Dorje, December 2003, Paperback, 644 pages, ISBN 1559391898

  • Tibetan-English Dictionary (With Sanskrit Synonyms), Sarat Chandra Das, Motilal Banarsidass Pub, January 1, 2000, Paperback, 1353 pages, ISBN 8120817133


1911

de:Tibetische Sprache eo:Tibeta lingvo fr:Tib?tain ja:チベット語
pl:J%C4%99zyk tybeta%C5%84ski zh-cn:藏语 sv:Tibetanska ru:Тибетский язык

Category:Sino-Tibetan languages
Category:Languages of China
Category:Bodic languages

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Tibetan language".


Last Modified:   2005-04-12


Search
All informatin on the site is © FamousChinese.com 2002-2005. Last revised: January 2, 2004
Are you interested in our site or/and want to use our information? please read how to contact us and our copyrights.
To post your business in our web site? please click here. To send any comments to us, please use the Feedback.
To let us provide you with high quality information, you can help us by making a more or less donation: