Standard Tibetan - Scholarship

Scholarship

In the 18th and 19th centuries several Western linguists arrived in Tibet:

  • The Capuchin friars who settled in Lhasa for a quarter of 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 hisAlphabetum Tibetanum (Rome, 1762, 4t0), a ponderous and confused compilation, which may be still referred to, but with great caution.
  • The Hungarian Alexander Csoma de Kőrös (1784–1842), who published the first Tibetan–European language dictionary (Classical Tibetan and English in this case) and grammar, Essay Towards a Dictionary, Tibetan and English.
  • H. A. Jäschke of the Moravian mission which was established in Ladak in 1857, Tibetan Grammar and A Tibetan–English Dictionary.
  • At St Petersburg, Isaac Jacob Schmidt published his Grammatik der tibetischen Sprache in 1839 and his Tibetisch-deutsches Wörterbuch in 1841. His 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 rol-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.
  • Theos Bernard, a PhD scholar of religion from Columbia University, explorer and practitioner of Yoga and Tibetan Buddhism, published, after his 1936/37 trip to India and Tibet, A Simplified Grammar of the Literary Tibetan Language, 1946. See the 'Books' section.

Indian indologist and linguist Rahul Sankrityayan wrote a Tibetan grammar in Hindi. Some of his other works on Tibetan were:

  1. Tibbati Bal-Siksha - 1933
  2. Pathavali (Vol. 1,2 & 3) - 1933
  3. Tibbati Vyakaran - 1933
  4. Tibbat May Budh Dharm-1948

Read more about this topic:  Standard Tibetan

Famous quotes containing the word scholarship:

    “American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.”
    —Camille Paglia (b. 1947)

    “The best hopes of any community rest upon that class of its gifted young men who are not encumbered with large possessions.... I now speak of extensive scholarship and ripe culture in science and art.... It is not large possessions, it is large expectations, or rather large hopes, that stimulate the ambition of the young.”
    —Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)

    “Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)