This article's factual accuracy is disputed .(February 2024) |
Classical Tibetan | |
---|---|
Region | Tibet, North Nepal, Sikkim |
Era | 11th–19th centuries |
Early form | |
Tibetan script | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | xct |
xct | |
Glottolog | clas1254 |
Classical Tibetan refers to the language of any text written in Tibetic after the Old Tibetan period. Though it extends from the 12th century until the modern day, [1] it particularly refers to the language of early canonical texts translated from other languages, especially Sanskrit. The phonology implied by Classical Tibetan orthography is very similar to the phonology of Old Tibetan, but the grammar varies greatly depending on period and geographic origin of the author. Such variation is an under-researched topic.[ citation needed ]
In 816 AD, during the reign of King Sadnalegs, literary Tibetan underwent a thorough reform aimed at standardizing the language and vocabulary of the translations being made from Sanskrit, which was one of the main influences for literary standards in what is now called Classical Tibetan. [2]
Nominalizing suffixes — pa or ba and ma — are required by the noun or adjective that is to be singled out;
The plural is denoted, when required, by adding the morpheme -rnams; when the collective nature of the plurality is stressed the morpheme -dag is instead used. These two morphemes combine readily (e.g. rnams-dag'a group with several members', and dag-rnams'several groups'). [3]
The classical written language has ten cases. [4]
Case markers are affixed to entire noun phrases, not to individual words (i.e. Gruppenflexion).
Traditional Tibetan grammarians do not distinguish case markers in this manner, but rather distribute these case morphemes (excluding -dang and -bas) into the eight cases of Sanskrit.
There are personal, demonstrative, interrogative and reflexive pronouns, as well as an indefinite article, which is plainly related to the numeral for "one." [5]
As an example of the pronominal system of classical Tibetan, the Milarepa rnam thar, exhibits the following personal pronouns. [6]
Person | Singular | Plural |
---|---|---|
First person | ང་nga | ངེད་ nged |
First + Second | རང་རེ་rang-re | |
Second person | ཁྱོད་khyod | ཁྱེད་khyed |
Third person | ཁོ་kho | ཁོང་khong |
Like in French, the plural (ཁྱེད་khyed) can be used as a polite singular. [6]
Verbs do not inflect for person or number. Morphologically there are up to four separate stem forms, which the Tibetan grammarians, influenced by Sanskrit grammatical terminology, call the "present" (lta-da), "past" ('das-pa), "future" (ma-'ongs-pa), and "imperative" (skul-tshigs), although the precise semantics of these stems is still controversial. The so-called future stem is not a true future, but conveys the sense of necessity or obligation.
The majority of Tibetan verbs fall into one of two categories, those that express implicitly or explicitly the involvement of an agent, marked in a sentence by the instrumental particle (kyis, etc.) and those that express an action that does not involve an agent. Tibetan grammarians refer to these categories as tha-dad-pa and tha-mi-dad-pa respectively. Although these two categories often seem to overlap with the English[ citation needed ] grammatical concepts of transitive and intransitive, most modern writers on Tibetan grammar have adopted the terms "voluntary" and "involuntary", based on native Tibetan descriptions.[ citation needed ] Most involuntary verbs lack an imperative stem.
Many verbs exhibit stem ablaut among the four stem forms, thus a or e in the present tends to become o in the imperative byed, byas, bya, byos ('to do'), an e in the present changes to a in the past and future (len, blangs, blang, longs 'to take'); in some verbs a present in i changes to u in the other stems ('dzin, bzung, gzung, zung 'to take'). Additionally, the stems of verbs are also distinguished by the addition of various prefixes and suffixes, thus sgrub (present), bsgrubs (past), bsgrub (future), 'sgrubs (imperative). Though the final -s suffix, when used, is quite regular for the past and imperative, the specific prefixes to be used with any given verb are less predictable; while there is a clear pattern of b- for a past stem and g- for a future stem, this usage is not consistent. [7]
Meaning | present | past | future | imperative |
---|---|---|---|---|
do | བྱེད་byed | བྱས་byas | བྱ་bya | བྱོས་byos |
take | ལེན་len | བླངས་blangs | བླང་blang | ལོངས་longs |
take | འཛིན་'dzin | བཟུངས་bzungs | གཟུང་gzung | ཟུངས་zungs |
accomplish | སྒྲུབ་sgrub | བསྒྲུབས་bsgrubs | བསྒྲུབ་bsgrub | སྒྲུབས་sgrubs |
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 both in the classical language and in the modern dialects. [8]
Verbs are negated by two prepositional particles: mi and ma. Mi is used with present and future stems. The particle ma is used with the past stem; prohibitions do not employ the imperative stem, rather the present stem is negated with ma. There is also a negative stative verb med'there is not, there does not exist', the counterpart to the stative verb yod'there is, there exists'.
As with nouns, Tibetan also has a complex system of honorific and polite verbal forms. Thus, many verbs for everyday actions have a completely different form to express the superior status, whether actual or out of courtesy, of the agent of the action, thus lta'see', hon. gzigs; byed'do', hon. mdzad. Where a specific honorific verb stem does not exist, the same effect is brought about by compounding a standard verbal stem with an appropriate general honorific stem such as mdzad.
In linguistics, an allomorph is a variant phonetic form of a morpheme, or in other words, a unit of meaning that varies in sound and spelling without changing the meaning. The term allomorph describes the realization of phonological variations for a specific morpheme. The different allomorphs that a morpheme can become are governed by morphophonemic rules. These phonological rules determine what phonetic form, or specific pronunciation, a morpheme will take based on the phonological or morphological context in which it appears.
An analytic language is a type of natural language in which a series of root/stem words is accompanied by prepositions, postpositions, particles and modifiers, using affixes very rarely. This is opposed to synthetic languages, which synthesize many concepts into a single word, using affixes regularly. Syntactic roles are assigned to words primarily by word order. For example, by changing the individual words in the Latin phrase fēl-is pisc-em cēpit "the cat caught the fish" to fēl-em pisc-is cēpit "the fish caught the cat", the fish becomes the subject, while the cat becomes the object. This transformation is not possible in an analytic language without altering the word order. Typically, analytic languages have a low morpheme-per-word ratio, especially with respect to inflectional morphemes. No natural language, however, is purely analytic or purely synthetic.
The imperative mood is a grammatical mood that forms a command or request.
Neo-Mandaic, also known as Modern Mandaic, sometimes called the "ratna", is the modern reflex of the Mandaic language, the liturgical language of the Mandaean religious community of Iraq and Iran. Although severely endangered, it survives today as the first language of a small number of Mandaeans in Iran and in the Mandaean diaspora. All Neo-Mandaic speakers are multilingual in the languages of their neighbors, Arabic and Persian, and the influence of these languages upon the grammar of Neo-Mandaic is considerable, particularly in the lexicon and the morphology of the noun. Nevertheless, Neo-Mandaic is more conservative even in these regards than most other Neo-Aramaic languages.
The Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, Abhidharmakośa for short, is a key text on the Abhidharma written in Sanskrit by the Indian Buddhist scholar Vasubandhu in the 4th or 5th century CE. The Kośa summarizes the Sarvāstivādin Abhidharma in eight chapters with a total of around 600 verses and then comments on it. This text was widely respected and used by schools of Buddhism in India, Tibet and East Asia. Over time, the Abhidharmakośa became the main source of Abhidharma and Sravakayana Buddhism for later Mahāyāna Buddhists.
Proto-Indo-European verbs reflect a complex system of morphology, more complicated than the substantive, with verbs categorized according to their aspect, using multiple grammatical moods and voices, and being conjugated according to person, number and tense. In addition to finite forms thus formed, non-finite forms such as participles are also extensively used.
Japanese verbs, like the verbs of many other languages, can be morphologically modified to change their meaning or grammatical function – a process known as conjugation. In Japanese, the beginning of a word is preserved during conjugation, while the ending of the word is altered in some way to change the meaning. Japanese verb conjugations are independent of person, number and gender ; the conjugated forms can express meanings such as negation, present and past tense, volition, passive voice, causation, imperative and conditional mood, and ability. There are also special forms for conjunction with other verbs, and for combination with particles for additional meanings.
The grammar of Classical Nahuatl is agglutinative, head-marking, and makes extensive use of compounding, noun incorporation and derivation. That is, it can add many different prefixes and suffixes to a root until very long words are formed. Very long verbal forms or nouns created by incorporation, and accumulation of prefixes are common in literary works. New words can thus be easily created.
Lhasa Tibetan or Standard Tibetan is the Tibetan dialect spoken by educated people of Lhasa, the capital of the Tibetan Autonomous Region. It is an official language of the Tibet Autonomous Region.
Tibetan grammar describes the morphology, syntax and other grammatical features of Lhasa Tibetan, a Sino-Tibetan language. Lhasa Tibetan is typologically an ergative–absolutive language. Nouns are generally unmarked for grammatical number, but are marked for case. Adjectives are never marked and appear after the noun. Demonstratives also come after the noun but these are marked for number. Verbs are possibly the most complicated part of Tibetan grammar in terms of morphology. The dialect described here is the colloquial language of Central Tibet, especially Lhasa and the surrounding area, but the spelling used reflects classical Tibetan, not the colloquial pronunciation.
Sanskrit has inherited from its parent, the Proto-Indo-European language, an elaborate system of verbal morphology, much of which has been preserved in Sanskrit as a whole, unlike in other kindred languages, such as Ancient Greek or Latin. Sanskrit verbs thus have an inflection system for different combinations of tense, aspect, mood, voice, number, and person. Non-finite forms such as participles are also extensively used.
Vedic Sanskrit is the name given by modern scholarship to the oldest attested descendant of the Proto-Indo-Aryan language. Sanskrit is the language that is found in the four Vedas, in particular, the Rigveda, the oldest of them, dated to have been composed roughly over the period from 1500 to 1000 BCE. Before its standardization as Sanskrit, the Vedic language was a purely spoken language during that period used before the introduction of writing in the language.
The Nukak language is a language of uncertain classification, perhaps part of the macrofamily Puinave-Maku. It is very closely related to Kakwa.
The grammar of the Otomi language displays a mixture of elements of synthetic and analytic structures. Particularly the phrase-level morphology is synthetic, whereas the sentence-level is analytic. Simultaneously, the language is head-marking in terms of its verbal morphology, but not in its nominal morphology, which is more analytic. Otomi recognizes three large open word classes of nouns, verbs, and particles. There is a small closed class of property words, variously analyzed as adjectives or stative verbs.
Verbs in the Korean language come in last place in a clause. Verbs are the most complex part of speech, and a properly conjugated verb may stand on its own as a complete sentence. This article uses the Yale romanization in bold to show morphology.
Yolmo (Hyolmo) or Helambu Sherpa, is a Tibeto-Burman language of the Hyolmo people of Nepal. Yolmo is spoken predominantly in the Helambu and Melamchi valleys in northern Nuwakot District and northwestern Sindhupalchowk District. Dialects are also spoken by smaller populations in Lamjung District and Ilam District and also in Ramecchap District. It is very similar to Kyirong Tibetan and less similar to Standard Tibetan and Sherpa. There are approximately 10,000 Yolmo speakers, although some dialects have larger populations than others.
Old Tibetan refers to the earliest attested form of Tibetan language, reflected in documents from the adoption of writing by the Tibetan Empire in the mid-7th century to the early 9th century. In 816 CE, during the reign of Tibetan King Sadnalegs, literary Tibetan underwent comprehensive standardization, resulting in Classical Tibetan.
Telugu is an agglutinative language with person, tense, case and number being inflected on the end of nouns and verbs. Its word order is usually subject-object-verb, with the direct object following the indirect object. The grammatical function of the words are marked by suffixes that indicate case and postpositions that follow the oblique stem. It is also head-final and a pro-drop language.
Belanda Bor, or just Bor, is a Luo language of South Sudan. Most speakers also use Belanda Viri, which is a Ubangian language and not at all related.
Pawo Tsuglag Threngwa (1504–1566), the second Nenang Pawo, was a Tibetan historian of the Karma Kagyu. He was a disciple of Mikyö Dorje, 8th Karmapa Lama. He was the author of the famous mkhas pa'i dga' ston, A Scholar's Feast, addressing history of Buddhism in India and its spread in Tibet, as well as the history of Tibet.
Of Tsuklak Trengwa's many students, his chief disciples included the Ninth Karmapa Wangchuk Dorje, the Fifth Zhamar Konchok Yenlag, and the Third Tsurpu Gyeltsab, Drakpa Peljor.