Lhasa Tibetan

Lhasa Tibetan(Tibetan:ལྷ་སའི་སྐད་,Wylie:Lha-sa'i skad,THL:Lhaséké,ZYPY:Lasägä) orStandard Tibetan(Tibetan:བོད་སྐད་,Wylie:Bod skad,THL:Böké,ZYPY:Pögä,IPA:[pʰø̀k˭ɛʔ], orTibetan:བོད་ཡིག་,Wylie:Bod yig,THL:Böyik,ZYPY:Pöyig)is the Tibetan dialect spoken by educated people ofLhasa, the capital of theTibetan Autonomous Region.It is an official language of the Tibet Autonomous Region.
In the traditional "three-branched" classification of theTibetic languages, the Lhasa dialect belongs to theCentral Tibetanbranch (the other two beingKhams TibetanandAmdo Tibetan).In terms ofmutual intelligibility, speakers of Khams Tibetan are able to communicate at a basic level with Lhasa Tibetan, while Amdo speakers cannot.Both Lhasa Tibetan and Khams Tibetan evolved to becometonaland do not preserve the word-initialconsonant clusters, which makes them very far fromClassical Tibetan, especially when compared to the moreconservativeAmdo Tibetan.
Like many languages, Lhasa Tibetan has a variety oflanguage registers:
Tibetan is anergative language, with what can loosely be termedsubject–object–verb (SOV) word order.Grammatical constituentsbroadly havehead-finalword order:
Tibetan nouns do not possessgrammatical gender, although this may be marked lexically, nor do they inflect fornumber. However, definite human nouns may take a plural markerཚོ<tsho>.
Tibetan has been described as having six cases:absolutive,agentive,genitive,ablative,associativeandoblique. These are generally marked by particles, which are attached to entire noun phrases, rather than individual nouns. These suffixes may vary in form based on the final sound of the root.
Personal pronouns are inflected fornumber, showing singular, dual and plural forms. They can have between one and threeregisters.
The Standard Tibetan language distinguishes three levels ofdemonstrative: proximalའདི<'di>"this", medialདེ<de>"that", and distalཕ་གི<pha-gi>"that over there (yonder)". These can also take case suffixes.
Verbs in Tibetan always come at the end of theclause. Verbs do not show agreement inperson,numberorgenderin Tibetan. There is also novoicedistinction between active andpassive; Tibetan verbs are neutral with regard to voice.
Tibetan verbs can be divided into classes based onvolitionandvalency. The volition of the verb has a major effect on itsmorphologyandsyntax. Volitional verbs haveimperativeforms, whilst non-volitional verbs do not: compareལྟོས་ཤིག<ltos shig>"Look!" with the non-existent *མཐོང་ཤིག<mthong shig>"*See!". Additionally, only volitional verbs can take the egophoric copulaཡིན<yin>.
Verbs in Tibetan can be split into monovalent and divalent verbs; some may also act as both, such asཆག<chag>"break". This interacts with the volition of the verb to condition which nouns take theergative caseand which must take theabsolutive, remaining unmarked.Nonetheless, distinction intransitivityis orthogonal to volition; both the volitional and non-volitional classes contain transitive as well as intransitive verbs.
Theaspectof the verb affects which verbal suffixes and which final auxiliary copulae are attached. Morphologically, verbs in the unaccomplished aspect are marked by the suffixགི<gi>or its other forms, identical to thegenitive casefor nouns, whereas accomplished aspect verbs do not use this suffix. Each can be broken down into two subcategories: under the unaccomplished aspect,futureandprogressive/general; under the accomplished aspect,perfectandaorist or simple perfective.
Evidentialityis a well-known feature of Tibetan verb morphology, gaining much scholarly attention,and contributing substantially to the understanding of evidentiality across languages.The evidentials in Standard Tibetan interact with aspect in a system marked by final copulae, with the following resultant modalities being a feature of Standard Tibetan, as classified byNicolas Tournadre:
Unlike many other languages ofEast Asiasuch asBurmese,Chinese,Japanese,KoreanandVietnamese, there are no numeral auxiliaries ormeasure wordsused in counting in Tibetan. However, 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 VedicSanskrit, are expressed by symbolical words.
The written numerals are a variant of theHindu–Arabic numeral system, forming a base-10 positional counting systemthat is attested early on in Classical Tibetan texts.
Tibetan makes use of a special connector particle for the units above each multiple of ten. Between 100 and 199, the connectiveདངdang, literally "and", is used after the hundred portion.Aboveས་ཡsayamillion, the numbers are treated as nouns and thus have their multiples following the word.
The numbers 1, 2, 3 and 10 change spelling when combined with other numerals, reflecting a change in pronunciation in combination.
Ordinal numbers are formed by adding a suffix to the cardinal number,པ(-pa), with the exception of the ordinal number "first", which has its own lexeme,དང་པོ(dang po).
Tibetan is written with anIndic script, with a historically conservative orthography that reflectsOld Tibetanphonology and helps unify the Tibetan-language area. It is also helpful in reconstructingProto Sino-TibetanandOld Chinese.
Wylie transliterationis the most common system ofromanizationused by Western scholars in rendering written Tibetan using theLatin alphabet(such as employed on much of this page), while linguists tend to use other special transliteration systems of their own.  As for transcriptions meant to approximate the pronunciation,Tibetan pinyinis the official romanization system employed by the government of thePeople's Republic of China, while English language materials use the THL transcriptionsystem. Certain names may also retain irregular transcriptions, such asChomolungmaforMount Everest.
Tibetan orthographic syllable structure is (C1C2)C3(C4)V(C5C6)Not all combinations are licit.
The following summarizes the sound system of the dialect of Tibetan spoken inLhasa, the most influential variety of the spoken language.
The structure of a Lhasa Tibetansyllableis relatively simple;noconsonant clusteris allowedand codas are only allowed with a single consonant.Vowels can be either short or long, andlong vowelsmay further benasalized.Vowel harmonyis observed in two syllable words as well as verbs with afiniteending.
Also,tonesarecontrastivein this language, where at least two tonemes are distinguished.Although the four-tone analysis is favored by linguists in China,DeLancey(2003) suggests that the falling tone and the final[k]or[ʔ]are incontrastive distribution, describing Lhasa Tibetan syllables as either high or low.
The vowels of Lhasa Tibetan have been characterized and described in several different ways, and it continues to be a topic of ongoing research.
Tournadre and Sangda Dorje describe eight vowels in the standard language:
Three additional vowels are sometimes described as significantly distinct:[ʌ]or[ə], which is normally an allophone of/a/;[ɔ], which is normally an allophone of/o/; and[ɛ̈](an unrounded, centralised, mid front vowel), which is normally an allophone of/e/. These sounds normally occur in closed syllables; because Tibetan does not allowgeminated consonants, there are cases in which one syllable ends with the same sound as the one following it. The result is that the first is pronounced as an open syllable but retains the vowel typical of a closed syllable. For instance,ཞབསzhabs(foot) is pronounced[ɕʌp]andཔདpad(borrowing from Sanskritpadma,lotus) is pronounced[pɛʔ], but the compound word,ཞབས་པདzhabs pad(lotus-foot, government minister) is pronounced[ɕʌpɛʔ]. This process can result inminimal pairsinvolving sounds that are otherwise allophones.
Sources vary on whether the[ɛ̈]phone (resulting from/e/in a closed syllable) and the[ɛ]phone (resulting from/a/through thei-mutation) are distinct or basically identical.
Phonemic vowel length exists in Lhasa Tibetan but in a restricted set of circumstances. Assimilation of Classical Tibetan's suffixes, normally 'i(འི་), at the end of a word produces a long vowel in Lhasa Tibetan; the feature is sometimes omitted in phonetic transcriptions. In normal spoken pronunciation, a lengthening of the vowel is also frequently substituted for the sounds[r]and[l]when they occur at the end of a syllable.
The vowels/i/,/y/,/e/,/ø/, and/ɛ/each have nasalized forms:/ĩ/,/ỹ/,/ẽ/,/ø̃/, and/ɛ̃/, respectively.These historically result from/in/,/un/,/en/,/on/,/an/, and are reflected in the written language. The vowel quality of/un/,/on/and/an/has shifted, since historical/n/, along with all other coronal final consonants, caused a form ofumlautin the Ü/Dbus branch ofCentral Tibetan.In some unusual cases, the vowels/a/,/u/, and/o/may also be nasalised.
The Lhasa dialect is usually described as having two tones: high and low. However, in monosyllabic words, each tone can occur with two distinct contours. The high tone can be pronounced with either a flat or a falling contour, and the low tone can be pronounced with either a flat or rising-falling contour, the latter being a tone that rises to a medium level before falling again. It is normally safe to distinguish only between the two tones because there are very fewminimal pairsthat differ only because of contour. The difference occurs only in certain words ending in the sounds [m] or [ŋ]; for instance, the wordkham(Tibetan:ཁམ་, "piece") is pronounced[kʰám]with a high flat tone, whereas the wordKhams(Tibetan:ཁམས་, "theKhamregion") is pronounced[kʰâm]with a high falling tone.
In polysyllabic words, tone is not important except in the first syllable. This means that from the point of view of phonologicaltypology, Tibetan could more accurately be described as apitch-accent languagethan a truetone language, in the latter of which all syllables in a word can carry their own tone.
The Lhasa Tibetan verbal system distinguishes four tenses and three evidential moods.
The threemoodsmay all occur with all three grammatical persons, though early descriptions associated the personal modal category with European first-person agreement.
In the 18th and 19th centuries several Western linguists arrived in Tibet:
Indianindologistand linguistRahul Sankrityayanwrote a Tibetan grammar inHindi. Some of his other works on Tibetan were:
In much of Tibet,primary educationis conducted either primarily or entirely in the Tibetan language, and bilingual education is rarely introduced before students reachmiddle school. However, Chinese is the language of instruction of most Tibetansecondary schools. In April 2020, classroom instruction was switched from Tibetan to Mandarin Chinese inNgaba, Sichuan.Students who continue on totertiary educationhave the option of studyinghumanisticdisciplines in Tibetan at a number of minority colleges in China.This contrasts with Tibetan schools inDharamsala, India, where the Ministry of Human Resource Development curriculum requires academic subjects to be taught in English from middle school.
In February 2008,Norman Baker, a British Member of Parliament, released a statement to markInternational Mother Language Dayclaiming, "The Chinese government are following a deliberate policy of extinguishing all that is Tibetan, including their own language in their own country" and he asserted a right for Tibetans to express themselves "in their mother tongue".However,TibetologistElliot Sperling has noted that "within certain limits thePRCdoes make efforts to accommodate Tibetan cultural expression" and "the cultural activity taking place all over the Tibetan plateau cannot be ignored."
Some scholars also question such claims because most Tibetans continue to reside in rural areas where Chinese is rarely spoken, as opposed to Lhasa and other Tibetan cities where Chinese can often be heard. In theTexas Journal of International Law,Barry Sautmanstated that "none of the many recent studies of endangered languages deems Tibetan to be imperiled, and language maintenance among Tibetans contrasts with language loss even in the remote areas of Western states renowned for liberal policies... claims that primary schools in Tibet teach Mandarin are in error. Tibetan was the main language of instruction in 98% ofTAR primary schoolsin 1996; today, Mandarin is introduced in early grades only in urban schools.... Because less than four out of ten TAR Tibetans reach secondary school, primary school matters most for their cultural formation."
An incomplete list of machine translation software or applications that can translate Tibetan language from/to a variety of other languages.
From Article 1 of theUniversal Declaration of Human Rightsin Tibetan, written in theTibetan script: