The Classical Tibetan Language
Download The Classical Tibetan Language PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get The Classical Tibetan Language book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
The Classical Tibetan Language
Author: Stephan V. Beyer
language: en
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Release Date: 1992-07-01
Among Asian languages, Tibetan is second only to Chinese in the depth of its historical record, with texts dating back as far as the eighth and ninth centuries, written in an alphabetic script that preserves the contemporaneous phonological features of the language. The Classical Tibetan Language is the first comprehensive description of the Tibetan language and is distinctive in that it treats the classical Tibetan language on its own terms rather than by means of descriptive categories appropriate to other languages, as has traditionally been the case. Beyer presents the language as a medium of literary expression with great range, power, subtlety, and humor, not as an abstract object. He also deals comprehensively with a wide variety of linguistic phenomena as they are actually encountered in the classical texts, with numerous examples of idioms, common locutions, translation devices, neologisms, and dialectal variations.
The Classical Tibetan Language
Among Asian languages, Tibetan is second only to Chinese in the depth of its historical record, with texts dating back as far as the eighth and ninth centuries, written in an alphabetic script that preserves the contemporaneous phonological features of the language. The Classical Tibetan Language is the first comprehensive description of the Tibetan language and is distinctive in that it treats the classical Tibetan language on its own terms rather than by means of descriptive categories appropriate to other languages, as has traditionally been the case. Beyer presents the language as a medium of literary expression with great range, power, subtlety, and humor, not as an abstract object. He also deals comprehensively with a wide variety of linguistic phenomena as they are actually encountered in the classical texts, with numerous examples of idioms, common locutions, translation devices, neologisms, and dialectal variations.
An Introduction to Classical Tibetan
Classical Tibetan, with origins dating to the seventh century, is the language found in a huge corpus of surviving Tibetan, mostly Buddhist, texts; native Tibetans still employ this language, today, when writing on religious, medical or historical subjects. This book aims to provide a rapid introduction to the main elements of Classical Tibetan, so that students may begin to access for themselves the vast amount of available material. While designed for guided study, the book will also be of use to those who tackle the language on their own. Steady study over approximately six months should result in an understanding of most grammatical features and allow the student to read the simpler prose texts.