PREFATORY NOTE.
Lewin, in his ‘Manual of Tibetan,’ 1879, preface, states: “Tibet and its language are still comparatively unknown … the familiar tongue of the people, their folk-lore, songs and ballads are all unknown.”
Far from contradicting this saying, Jäschke, the greatest Tibetan scholar of his time, stated two years later, in 1881, in the preface to the third edition of his Tibetan Dictionary: “(To) the student who has for immediate object to learn how to read and write the Tibetan language … existing dictionaries (are) almost if not quite useless.”
Since Jäschke’s third edition, two new Tibetan dictionaries have appeared. Walsh in an article in the J.A.S.B., Vol. 72, Pt. 1, n. 2, 1903, reviewing the last one of these, the one by Sarat Chandra Das, says, p. 78: “Although the present Dictionary has fulfilled what it purposed to be, namely, a complete Dictionary of literary Tibetan, so far as our present sources of knowledge go, it does not fulfil the requirements of a standard dictionary of the entire language, and the standard dictionary of the modern and current Tibetan language has yet to be written.”
Laufer, ‘Roman einer Tibetischen Königin,’ 1911, p. 27 et seq., says: “We have here to open a road through the jungles, unaided and by ourselves; we have to work through text after text and note down expressions and idioms as we meet them,” etc.
Grünwedel in ‘Padmasambhava und Verwandtes,’ 1912, pp. 9–10, endorses Laufer’s remarks and adds about the difficulty of translating from Tibetan: “Ignorance regarding the subject-matter, mistakes and misunderstandings in the text itself, and, finally, the insufficiently explored idiomatic element of the language, of which the history is as yet poorly known, these are the main shoals.… Of all the dictionaries only Jäschke’s has really achieved something in the matter of idiom.”
As a matter of fact the printed materials available for the home student do not at present enable him, if without the help of a native teacher, to translate, accurately and without skipping the difficulties, any modern Tibetan book (not even the so-called Tibetan Primers in use in Darjeeling) if such books do not happen to belong to those excerpted in the existing dictionaries. Jäschke’s, which is the best from this point of view, mentions only 25 titles of texts used as his sources. Comparing this with the more than 1000 titles quoted by Skeat as the sources for the material for his Etymological Dictionary of the [[iv]]English language we at once see the inadequacy of such material in the case of Tibetan.
It is true that at present more showy results can be obtained by the wholesale translation of texts (more with a view to making known their general contents, than to the furnishing of a precise philological, lexicographical and grammatical analysis), and it is certain that the results of such work of translation would be more attractive and interesting to the wider public. Yet one of the most valuable contributions towards laying a sound basis for future Tibetan scholarship is the painstaking, laborious and to a certain extent inglorious and humdrum drudging away at small texts with scrupulous attention to the smallest minutiae, for a secure fixing of illustrative examples by co-ordinating correctness of text, full discussion of meanings, sharp formulation of definitions and subtle analysis of all questions and problems involved.
The following essay is a first contribution towards an attempt to serve such an ideal. [[v]]