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Sep. 8th, 2006 01:29 pm
A gyag by any other name...
I had time to kill before last night's dinner date so holed up in a used bookstore for about an hour. While there, I took pity on A basic grammar of modern spoken Tibetan "by Tashi". The owner has one of those progressive pricing structures where anything that's been on the shelves for more than a year is half-off. $6 was a bit much for the little thing, but at $3 it's a completely different story.
The title is a joke; I don't see how anyone could ever learn to speak Tibetan from this work. True, you can never really learn to speak a language from a textbook, but you can lay track; Tashi's book doesn't even give you the sleepers. The Tibetan portions are entirely in native script with only a tiny handful of transcriptions to help you along.
Why does this matter? Because Tibetan shares with other scripts in the area the dubious distinction of having an orthography even more perversely conservative than that of English. Our spelling system stabilised in the 17th century; many of these languages are trapped in the 10th--or even earlier. As you can imagine, pronunciation has changed a lot since then--and nowhere moreso than in Lhasa, whose dialect is closest thing to "standard" spoken Tibetan.
This situation explains the tremendous mismatch between transliteration and phonetic transcription as in the names of the famous monasteries Dga'-ldan/Ganden and 'Bras-spungs/Drepung. Tashi's book simply gives you the traditional values for the characters; nowhere does he explain, for instance, that initial and final consonants are often silent, that consonants often influence the quality of the preceding vowel, that r often causes retroflexion or lengthening, and so forth.
But I'm not really interested in learning to speak Tibetan anyway. I've already got an excellent grammar of the classical language--Stephen V. Beyer's book, which is one of the best-written grammatical descriptions I own--and I'm curious to see how the modern colloquial has diverged. I'm already noticing some fascinating developments, like epistemic distinctions in the tense/aspect markers. (E.g., V-pa-red lit. "it is that..." for things not witnessed vs. V-song "gone V" for first-hand visual knowledge.)
I also wouldn't mind learning the script and Tashi's near-complete avoidance of transcriptions would help me do that. Besides, once you know the spelling, deriving the pronunciation isn't that hard; you simply apply the rules for 1,000 of sound change. Going the other way, however, is a bitch and a half. I don't see how any modern speaker learns to spell worth a damn. Reading informal texts (like handwritten notes) must be incredibly difficult because of all the errors.
The title is a joke; I don't see how anyone could ever learn to speak Tibetan from this work. True, you can never really learn to speak a language from a textbook, but you can lay track; Tashi's book doesn't even give you the sleepers. The Tibetan portions are entirely in native script with only a tiny handful of transcriptions to help you along.
Why does this matter? Because Tibetan shares with other scripts in the area the dubious distinction of having an orthography even more perversely conservative than that of English. Our spelling system stabilised in the 17th century; many of these languages are trapped in the 10th--or even earlier. As you can imagine, pronunciation has changed a lot since then--and nowhere moreso than in Lhasa, whose dialect is closest thing to "standard" spoken Tibetan.
This situation explains the tremendous mismatch between transliteration and phonetic transcription as in the names of the famous monasteries Dga'-ldan/Ganden and 'Bras-spungs/Drepung. Tashi's book simply gives you the traditional values for the characters; nowhere does he explain, for instance, that initial and final consonants are often silent, that consonants often influence the quality of the preceding vowel, that r often causes retroflexion or lengthening, and so forth.
But I'm not really interested in learning to speak Tibetan anyway. I've already got an excellent grammar of the classical language--Stephen V. Beyer's book, which is one of the best-written grammatical descriptions I own--and I'm curious to see how the modern colloquial has diverged. I'm already noticing some fascinating developments, like epistemic distinctions in the tense/aspect markers. (E.g., V-pa-red lit. "it is that..." for things not witnessed vs. V-song "gone V" for first-hand visual knowledge.)
I also wouldn't mind learning the script and Tashi's near-complete avoidance of transcriptions would help me do that. Besides, once you know the spelling, deriving the pronunciation isn't that hard; you simply apply the rules for 1,000 of sound change. Going the other way, however, is a bitch and a half. I don't see how any modern speaker learns to spell worth a damn. Reading informal texts (like handwritten notes) must be incredibly difficult because of all the errors.
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