A New Grammar of Written Tibetan

The Classical Tibetan Language by Stephan V. Beyer

Review by: Roy Andrew Miller
Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 114, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1994), pp. 67-76
Published by: American Oriental Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/604953 .
Accessed: 15/06/2014 11:49

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

American Oriental Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of
the American Oriental Society.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 11:49:07 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 REVIEW ARTICLE

A NEW GRAMMAR OF WRI'l"T'EN

TIBETAN*
RoY ANDREWMILLER
HONOLULU

The publication of a new and impressive attempt at a description of the grammar of Written
("Classical")Tibetanprovidesan opportunityto surveya numberof long-standingissues in this
field, to the treatmentof manyof which the authorbringswelcomenew insightand enthusiasm.
Lack of suitabledocumentationof text-sourcesand failureto acknowledgepreviouslypublished
worklaid undercontribution areamongthe book'sprincipaldrawbacks.

THIS IS AN EXCITINGBOOK, an interesting book, and an
important book. It is difficult to resist the temptation to
go all out and call it brilliant. Beyer is especially suc-
cessful in communicating to the reader his own enthu-
siasm for his subject. He writes about the Tibetan
language and its grammar with an elan that refresh-
ingly, if a bit unexpectedly, has survived his decision
of some fifteen years ago to abandon his academic ca-
reer in favor of the legal profession (he is currently an
attorney and member of the firm of Sidley & Austin in
Chicago). B is amazingly able to write in a genial and
instructive tone about many subjects that, in the hands
of most academic authors, would scarcely lend them-
*selves to novel or vivid presentation: linguistic varia-
tion (p. 18), life in the Tibetan garrisons of Central
Asia (p. 30), the comparative method of the Neogram-
marians (p. 34), the Tibetan subscript-letter wa.zur
(pp. 79-81), linguistic back-formations (pp. 113, 146),
"outer derivation" (pp. 119ff.), morphophonemic alter-
nation (pp. 160ff.), and loan words (pp. 139ff.), to list
only a few high-points of the book. His account of loan
words in particular is representative of his overall ap-
proach. Not only is the reader presented with a good
deal of specific data, but B's treatment, which stresses
the historical-cultural background of the loans, will en-
sure that any naive misunderstandings the reader (or
student) may still have about "hidden Tibet," or "Tibet
the locked-up land," will be cleared up.
* This is a review article of: The Classical Tibetan
Language.
By STEPHAN V. BEYER.SUNY Series in BuddhistStudies. Albany:
OF NEW YORK PRESS, 1992. Pp. xxiv + 503.
STATEUNIVERSITY
$18.95.
67
A long section on the socio-linguistic parameters of
the personal pronouns (pp. 208ff.) is replete with new
data, brilliantly and clearly set forth. The clear-cut
presentation of the difference between the bound-
morpheme -pa 'a person having to do with' (p. 120) and
the bound-morphophoneme-Pa 'nominal' (p. 130) is ab-
solutely first-rate,as is the time-scenario adumbratedin
the treatment of the bound-morphophoneme-PHo 'ad-
jective/agent' (pp. 127-28). Importantvectors of inter-
section between linguistic and literary studies are not
neglected (e.g., word-play, pp. 139, 148-52); and so
much of the book is written with such verve and charm
that it is not difficult to overlook an occasional gaffe
(p. 51: "The Tibetan script is, I believe, aesthetically
one of the most pleasing of the Indic scripts").1 Inevi-
tably, B's contagious enthusiasm for his subject more
than once goes hand-in-handwith a ratherembarrassing
naivet6 that can neither be repressed nor overlooked
(e.g., p. 166 n.: " . . . an attractive speculation that the
aspiration of absolute syllable initials in imperative
stems has something to do, phonologically, with the em-
phasis normally given the expression of a command");
but his frequent interruptionof his text with boxed ci-
tations of trendy authors, a few relevant to his subject
but most merely diverting, is less objectionable than it
might otherwise have been, if only because of its potent
1
Similarly,B is embarrassingly
naivein expressingsurprise
that GenghisKhanshouldhave been made the subjectof a
bstodpa 'encomium'in a Tibetanhistoryof MongolianBud-
dhism("GenghisKhan-of all people,"p. 411); he does not
realizethatthe greatMongoliannationalhero's"badpress"is
entirelya WesternEuropeanartifact.

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 11:49:07 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
68 Journal of the American Oriental Society 114.1 (1994)
evocation of the flower-children days of the 1970s,
when "Tibetan studies" still was an implied synonym
for the counter-culture.2
All linguistic terms are arbitrary.Nevertheless, some
restraint must be exercised if they are not initially to
confuse and eventually even to misinform the reader.
B's elan and enthusiasm have not necessarily served
him and his readers as well in this area as in others. The
problem begins with the "Classical Tibetan"of the title,
and especially pervades B's scheme for the historical
periodization of the language. He explains that he uses
"Classical Tibetan" "in conscious imitation of similar
usage in Chinese literary study" (p. 37); he might have
added that the term was once commonly used by many
in Tibetan studies as well (including the reviewer), who
may or may not have been "in conscious imitation" of
anything. At any rate, my present considered view (and
I think that of many others) is that this Sinological us-
age is itself highly suspect, and the less it is imitated
the better. At least we know texts called (probably too
loosely!) the "Chinese Classics"; but what are the "Ti-
betan Classics"? The language that B writes about so
vividly and whose grammar he explicates so interest-
ingly is "the language of written Tibetan texts" (p. 36);
why not simply and unambiguously call it "WrittenTi-
betan"? Nor is the problem ameliorated by random ref-
erences to a lower-case "classical Tibetan"(e.g., pp. 37,
70 n.). On the diachronic scale we find Old Tibetan
(p. 10 n. and passim) and Middle Tibetan (pp. 132 n.,
139 n., 146 and passim). The ostensibly clear-cut pa-
rametersof the former are blurredby frequent and over-
lapping references to "archaic manuscriptsfrom Central
Asia," which never make clear how (or, if) their lan-
guage differs from Old Tibetan; and so also for what is
dubbed "an archaic chronicle found near Tun-huang"
(p. 202). Middle Tibetan becomes an enormous catch-
all term covering a full nine centuries (p. 19), and
Proto-Tibetan (in the usually accepted sense of the
term) is confused with Pre-Tibetan (p. 10 n.).3 The best,
2 And one of the few of these boxed citationsthatis
genu-
inely to the point,Eliza Doolittle's"I dontwantto talkgram-
mar.I wantto talk like a lady"(p. 28), is miscopied("don't"
for "dont," and "," for ".". Cf. The Complete Plays of Bernard
Shaw (London, 1965), 724b-25a. In his day, GBS would
probablyhavebroughtsuit.
3 A fairlydetailedandgenerallyusefulperiodizationcover-
ing the entirehistoryof the Tibetanlanguagehas long been
availablein the literature(Language44 [1968]: 147 n. 1). B
mighthave consultedit to considerableadvantage;in particu-
lar it wouldhave helpedto whittledownthe nine centuriesof
his "MiddleTibetan."
This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 11:49:07 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
because it is the most straightforward,categorization of
Old Tibetan (as distinct from Written Tibetan) defines it
as that early variety of the language that had six or
seven vowels (a, i, ,i u, e, o, and possibly ii); an auto-
matic yod-glide between labials and i, i; and the so-
called da-drag. But the "extra" vowels that figure in
every Old Tibetan manuscript are never mentioned
("There are five vowels in Old Tibetan-u, o, a, i, and
e," p. 55); the yod-glide is treated only superficially and
in passing; and the references to the da-drag (pp. 168
n., 175-76, 187, inter alia) are scattered and perplex-
ing, never clearly making the essential point that this
phenomenon too represents one of the critical distin-
guishing features of Old Tibetan phonology.
Related problems involving terminological precision
similarly complicate B's discussion of the word, word-
classes, and word-categories. Here the potential for
serious misunderstanding is great indeed, particularly
when B begins to base his grammatical analysis on
meaning (which is generally a perilous pursuit) and at
the same time substitutes translation into English for
linguistic meaning (which is always fatal). His ?7,
"Words" (pp. 97-159) is an important discussion, and
central to his grammar,but it is shot through with inter-
nal contradictions arising from an essential confusion
between 'meaning' and '[English] translation', which of
course are not and never can be one and the same. No
amount of trendy "new-speak" terminology, whether
"the reading of texts" (p. 1), or "lexicalization" (p. 4),
or "processing" (pp. 197, 199 n.), or "semantic nu-
cleus" (pp. 137-38), can disguise the rents and fissures
that arise in B's argumentationwhen he attempts to pour
the new wine of his often genuinely original and useful
analysis into the old bottles of translation-based gram-
mar: immediately they leak badly. Nor does the invoca-
tion of the mental processes of "the Tibetan reader"
(p. 304) do much except remind one of HermannPaul's
quest after this same will-of-the-linguistic wisp.
References to "semantically exocentric units" (pp. 92
n., 101 n.) and the like show that B has read (or heard)
something of Bloomfieldian linguistics, but then end up
doubly disappointing when the promise they hold out of
a rigorously descriptive form- and syntactical-based
system is betrayed by the trivializations inherent in
"meaning = translation" (e.g., "the head member may
not substitute for the whole collocation without chang-
ing the meaning of what is asserted," p. 102 n., which
really only means, "without changing the usual English
translation").If gzi is translated'basis', and if this trans-
lation is confused with the linguistic meaning of gzi,
then to be sure, as B alleges (p. 104), noun compound-
ing of the type chos gzi "yields a noun with a new
meaning... 'religion basis -- monastery"'; but not if
 MILLER: A New Grammar of Written Tibetan
we translate the new compound word (equally or even
more accurately) as 'foundation' (as in Stift)! To be told
that "[m]any . . . compounds consist of a transitive verb
and its patient participant [sic] functioning as a single
semantic unit" (p. 106) sounds quite splendid, until the
examples cited (e.g., "sgra-sgyur 'change words -
translate"') make it clear that for B "a single semantic
unit" means nothing more subtle or revealing of gram-
matical structure than "a single word English-language
translation." Where does this leave people with lan-
guages that, similar to Tibetan, have "words meaning
'translate"' that are themselves one or another type of
compound (cf. Sino-Jap. hon-yaku, tsu-yaku, not to
mention yaku-sur.u, etc.). For B, "rdo-rin 'long stone
- monument' and rdo-rdze 'noble stone -> vajra' are
new words. They are lexicalized and semantically exo-
centric: their meaning is unpredictable" (p. 102). For
others of us, these and similar collocations are less spe-
cifically Tibetan linguistic-grammatical analytical data
than they are specifically Tibetan cultural and socio-
religious artifacts, and it would be more fruitful to ap-
proach them and others of their ilk with full regard for
what they are rather than with the goal of justifying, or
"predicting," their now-canonical English translations.
The lexical pairing of gter 'treasure'and gter-ma 'Hid-
den Text' (p. 126) tells us a good deal about the later
Tibetan cult of apocrypha, but the pairing itself is
essentially a cultural artifact; neither item embodies
any especially significant linguistic feature.
Particularly unfortunate, because it is irretrievably
mired down in this same confusion between English
translation and linguistic meaning, is B's key postula-
tion of a distinction between "grammatical"and "lexi-
cal" words in Tibetan. This he alleges to be "precisely
that drawn by the Chinese philologists between shih-
tzu, words with a concrete significance, and hsii-tzu,
'empty words' themselves empty of definable meaning
[sic]" (pp. 98 and 98 n.). Again, Sinology proves to be
a false friend. As it happens, B is not the first Tibet-
anist to fall into this trap; also as luck would have it,
the entire question of a supposed congruity between
Chinese "full" and "empty" words and Tibetan gram-
mar was fully ventilated a decade ago in one of the few
important papers that B does not include in his "Bibli-
ography," my refutation of Zimmermann's 1979 at-
tempt to recycle and redirect Lucien Tesniere's 1959
basic misunderstanding of the whole business toward
Tibetan.4 Chinese shih W and hsii MJ,'true, real' and
4 Heinz
Zimmermann, Wortart und Sprachstruktur im Ti-
betischen, Freiburger Beitrage zur Indologie, Bd. 10 (1979);
This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 11:49:07 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
69
'vacuous, barren, wasted' begin as technical terms in
Sung-period poetics; they are not specifically distin-
guished as linguistic terms until ca. 1000; and the
original dichotomy that they embody was principally
that of objective concepts or objects as against subjec-
tive emotions. Their transmutation into Chinese lin-
guistic usage has been adequately described, and need
not be repeated here; suffice it to point out that, as
usual, Bloomfield understood the problem quite accu-
rately; but almost everywhere else in the literature it
has gone sadly amiss, as now again in B. Those who
refuse to learn from history (or in this case, from the
literature) are forced to repeat its mistakes.
The "Foreword"enthusiasticallypromises that "a dis-
tinctive feature of Steve's approach to the Tibetan lan-
guage is his almost complete abandonment of the
morphological and syntactic categories, borrowed from
Indo-European grammars, that have traditionally in-
formed textbooks of Tibetan" (p. xxi): yes, and no.
Indeed, the more one reads in B, the more one is reas-
sured that his is not really the "Tibetanbaby out with the
Indo-Europeanbathwater"approachthat the "Foreword"
threatens.B more than once deftly conceals many of the
old grammaticalskeletons under bright new terminolog-
ical garments. The traditional, long-standing, and emi-
nently informative alignment of Sanskrit case-forms and
karaka-categories appears as "the five primary partici-
pant roles in the classical language" (p. 193); the hand is
the hand of B, but the voice is the voice of Panini.
B's initially somewhat startling decision to treat all
parts of all verb roots as morphophonemes (p. 161)
turns out, upon study, actually to be very Indic; and a
good thing, too, if only because of its enormously en-
abling effect upon the overall description. His treat-
ment of the Tibetan verb throughout these pages is
without question the most impressive contribution that
Lucien Tesniere, Elements de syntaxe structurale (Paris,
1959), p. 53, ?28.1-3; refuted in the reviewer's "Linguistic Is-
sues in the Study of Tibetan Grammar,"Wiener Zeitschriftfur
die Kunde Siidasiens und Archiv fir Indische Philosophie 26
(1982): 83-116, esp. pp. 93ff. This problem of the essential
misunderstanding of Chin. shih-tsu and hsii-tsu goes on and
on; apparently it is something each new generation prefers to
discover for itself. Most recently Naoki Sakai, Voices of the
Past: The Status of Language in Eighteenth-CenturyJapanese
Discourse (Ithaca, 1991), 86 n. 39, not only proposes com-
pletely preposterous translations for these two terms ("real
grapheme" as opposed to "unreal grapheme"!) but then goes
on to offer his misunderstanding as a justification for casting
aspersions on the work of one of Japan's greatest Sinologists,
It6 Jinsai (1627-1705).
70 Journal of the American Oriental Society 114.1 (1994)
B makes to Tibetan linguistics; it is the best single
thing in the whole book, and at the same time, it is the
most Indic. Future generations of students will have
reason to thank B for his (somewhat misleadingly en-
titled) section on "Paradigms," pp. 164ff., with its
ground-breaking approach to hypothesized roots and
observed tense stems, among many other essentially
Indic approaches that he builds upon.
Sometimes B shows himself a bit ashamed of being
so much in debt to Indic models. When, for example, he
writes that "the Tibetan grammaticaltradition has noted
the relationship between such propositions as ... The
woodsman cut the tree with an axe' and ... 'The wood-
man's axe cut the tree"' (p. 268 n.), he of course must
realize that in all this the Tibetan schoolmen were them-
selves only following their own way down well laid-out
Indic paths.
But in a certain sense, this is all to the good. It is not
necessary to disguise Tibetan as Sanskrit in order to
draw with profit upon the enormously rich linguistic re-
sources that have accumulated over the centuries as a
consequence of the familiarity of the Tibetan schools
with Indic linguistic science; it is all a matter of degree
and taste. External models in grammatical analysis are
always danger-fraught ("looking for the ablative abso-
lute in New Guinea," etc.). But when the models are
sound and not trivial (and surely no one can call the In-
dic models trivial), and when the imitators understand
their models well (and the Tibetans were often bril-
liantly informed about Indic linguistic science), then
the results of viewing one language in terms of another
can often be more than useful.5 Admirable also, if often
annoyingly unspecific and maddeningly scattered, are
B's frequent allusions (alas! never citations) to the (for
him) somewhat amorphous and shadowy figures whom
he lumps together without regard for period or identity
simply as "the Tibetan grammarians"(e.g., pp. 39, 43,
79, 231 n., 235, and passim). The charge that these men
"blurred"the distinction between sound and graph, and
used "the term yi-ge indiscriminately" (p. 39) is an old
canard that dies hard; actually, it is an unfounded slur.6
5 Not without relevance to this
point is the reviewer's "On the
Utility of the Tibetan Grammarians"in Tibetan History and
Language, Studies dedicated to Uray Gdza on his Seventieth
Birthday, ed., Ernst Steinkellner, Wiener Studien zur Tibetolo-
gie und Buddhismuskunde,Heft 26 (Vienna, 1991), 353-82; cf.
also ?1 "Introduction"in his forthcoming Prolegomena to the
First Two Tibetan Grammatical Treatises, Wiener Studien zur
Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde,Heft 30, now in the press.
6 On this point at least little doubt would have seemed to re-
main after the publication of the reviewer's two papers
This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 11:49:07 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
On the other hand, B's account of the origins of writing
in Tibet (pp. 40-41) and of the Sum cu pa (the "First
GrammaticalTreatise") (pp. 187-88) are without ques-
tion the best presentation of these now moot topics yet
to appear in the non-specialized literature, particularly
interesting since (as perhaps B does not realize) in these
lines he has clearly set himself on a collision course
with the Bonzen (in both the German and the Japanese
senses of that term) of Far Eastern Tibetology, from
whom he will surely hear salvos shortly.
Familiarity with the Rtags kyi .hjug pa ("Second
Grammatical Treatise") is hinted at from time to time
(e.g., pp. 87-88, 90 n., 161, 163, all of which in one
manner or another recapitulate that treatise's sl. 12-15,
but never overtly mention the text); and B's treatment
of prefixed verbal g- - d- as phonologically-determined
allomorphs of a morphophonemic G- (pp. 87-88, 161,
163 and passim) is essentially a recasting of sl. 13 of
this same text, with the important exception that who-
ever wrote the Rtags kyi .hjugpa did not take the addi-
tional rather risky step of implying the priority of one
allomorph over another that B ventures when he writes
G-. Impressively if probably fortuitously, B's treatment
of the allomorph that he writes and defines as -Pa
'nominal' (pp. 130-31) includes more than one forma-
tion that is immediately relevant to the bhlva-analysis
lavished upon the Rtags kyi hjug pa by generations of
Tibetan schoolmen, but which has only recently begun
to be appreciated in the Tibetology of Japan and the
West, e.g., bdug pa 'the burning of incense', etc.7
In the realm of phonology, B's allusions to the gram-
mariansare equally frequentbut somewhat less success-
ful; partly this is because phonology was never the
grammarians'strongest suit. Phonological and phonetic
statementsby the si tu Mahapandita,i.e., Chos kyi hbyufi
gnas (1699 or 1700-1744), are recapitulated,but not al-
ways in a manner that is completely fair to their enor-
mously erudite author (pp. 26 n.; 57 n.). More careful
perusal of published studies now over thirty years old8
"Phone, Phoneme and Graph in the Old Tibetan Grammari-
ans," Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientarum Hungaricae 34
(1980): 153-62 (appeared June, 1981), and "Phonemic The-
ory and OrthographicPractice in Old Tibetan," Journal of the
Tibetan Society 1 (1982): 45-62.
7 Cf. Tom J. F. Tillemans and Derek D.
Herforth, Agents
and Actions in Classical Tibetan: The Indigenous Grammari-
ans on bdag and gian and bya byed las gsum (Vienna, 1989),
and this reviewer's "Indic Models in Tibetan Grammars,"
JAOS 112 (1992): 103-9.
8 "The Si-Tu
Mahapanditaon Tibetan Phonology," in Yuasa
Hachiro hakushi koki kinen ronbunshu(Tokyo, 1962), 921-33,
 MILLER: A New Grammar of Written Tibetan
would have shown that the Mahapandita'streatment of
the glottal stop is not due to "an idiosyncrasy of the Ti-
betan descriptive apparatus"(p. 57 n.), and would also
have absolved the Tibetan master of complicity in what
is B's one totally unacceptablephonological proposition,
i.e., that the Written Tibetan graph generally transcribed
h was invented in order to write "the absence of a
phoneme by the presence of a graph" (p. 45 n.; simi-
larly p. 43 n. and passim, frequently with furtherinvo-
cation of yet another misleading Sinological model, the
"smooth vocalic ingress" of Karlgren and his epigones,
which makes quite as little sense for Middle Chinese as
B's "h as a 0" does for Written Tibetan).
Equally unacceptable is the bulk of B's account of the
phonological function and phonetic realization of the
Written Tibetan phoneme represented by this same
much-mooted graph. Almost every allegation about
Written Tibetan h in the several long, rambling, and
repetitious notes that cover most of pp. 43-49 is either
inaccurate or at best misleading. Pace B, the graph in
question is not called "a-tshunf[sic, for ha-tshun] 'little
a' by the Tibetan grammarians." They used this term
only for the small subscript ("little") h that writes the
Sanskrit long vowels; in describing Tibetan the gram-
marians never (at least in my experience of reading
them) named it, they simply pronounced, i.e., listed it.
For Tibetan proper, the notorious "little a" terminology
is a late and non-grammatical lexical artifact, originat-
ing in the need to teach Tibetan to foreigners (Mongols,
Chinese, Americans), who always find h easier to name
than to pronounce. Nor does "Ngos lo-tsa-ba Gzon-nu-
dpal note particularly that the Sanskrit alphabet was
adapted to Tibetan by including the smooth vocalic in-
gress among the consonants"; this is not remotely what
the Tibetan text that B immediately thereafter quotes
says.9 Dragunov half a century ago presented a well-
worked-out phonological solution for h in a too-often
overlooked paper that B could have employed to good
reprinted with addenda and corrigenda in the reviewer's
Studies in the Grammatical Tradition in Tibet, Amsterdam
Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, series
III, vol. 6 (1976), 19-31. B cites lines 28 and 29 of this text, as
edited and translated in 1962, but he does not explain why he
prefers to render (phye bahi, btsum pahi) rtsol ba as "(open,
closed) articulations,"despite the text's explicit employment of
rtsol ba as '(articulation) process', i.e., the last of the normal
tripartiteIndic phonological scheme of (1) point of articulation
(gnas = sthdna), (2) articulator proper (mgrin pa = kantha),
and (3) process of articulation.
9 "The Si-tu
Mahapandita..." 932-33; reprinted in
Studies, 30-31.
This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 11:49:07 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
71
advantage.10 His postulation of Old Tibetan /h/ as a
voiced glottal spirant [y] before and between vowels
but as prenasalation [n] before consonants has later
been substantiatedby a variety of philological materials
not available to Dragunov. Most misleading of all is B's
allegation that the graph h was originally and anciently
employed as "a place-holding graph, indicating the ab-
sence of a consonant" (p. 44). In support of this prima
facie astonishing claim he cites two varieties of Chi-
nese-transcription evidence. In the case of the first, he
has missed the point that Lo Ch'ang-p'ei made in 1951,
to the effect that Karlgren's "Ancient Chinese" initial
*j- was phonemically */yj-/;ll in the case of the second
(intervocalic), the use of h "when transcribing Middle
Chinese diphthongs" hardly proves that h was zero: the
question that must first be asked is, how else could the
Tibetans have rendered foreign diphthongs except by
using h? All these problems about h have already been
more than adequately discussed and explained in the
existing literature. B should have used his energy and
the space available in his book for more of his own
original contributions, in which he often shows himself
a master, rather than, as in this matter of h, unsuccess-
fully attempting to reopen old, actually well-settled,
controversies.
Any grammaris a linguistic document;and confronted
with a linguistic document one will, these days at least,
always have to ask, what kind of linguistics is it? Fortu-
nately, B's enthusiasm remains firmly rooted in Tibetan
itself, not in displaying his familiaritywith the latest fads
in linguistics, so that we are sparedtransformations,gen-
erations, deep structures,and stratificationsas well. And
it would probably be reading more into B's text than he
intended if one were to suggest that his frequent (and
mostly quite general) allusions to "semantic"this-or-that
betray any serious inclination toward the doctrines of the
latter-dayneo-Chomskyites. Actually, the linguistics one
finds in these pages is by-and-large good old-fashioned
American descriptivism of the 1950s, generally the gos-
pel a la Bloomfield, though he is never mentioned, and
(as already noted, supra) new terms that help obscure
many links with the past have been coined whenever pos-
sible (e.g., "equative"[pp. 253, 255-58] for the copula).
10A. A.
Dragunov,"Osobennostifonologiceskojsistemy
drevne-tibetskogo jazyka," Zapiski Instituta Vostokovedenija
Akademii Nauk SSSR 7 (1939): 292 note 1; cf. the citation and
discussion of the Dragunov paper in Language 31 (1955):
481-82.
1l Lo Ch'ang-p'ei, "Evidence for Amending B. Karlgren's
Ancient Chinese j- to yj-," HJAS 14 (1951): 285-90; cf. the
citation and discussion in Language 31 (1955): 481.
72 Journal of the American Oriental Society 114.1 (1994)
Even "Immediate Constituent" syntactic analysis, the
Bloomfieldian "Great Satan" that was the first of the
fallen angels to bite the dirt at M.I.T., is readily and illu-
minatingly invoked in these pages (e.g., pp. 191 n.; 193,
200 n.; 303 [a particularly spectacular example of I-C
bracketing!], and passim; it might also have been in-
voked and would have facilitated the description at pp.
235 n. and 241, as well as at p. 272, where far more than
"change in word order" is at issue). In a word, B's lin-
guistics is old-fashioned, solid, reliable, and useful; only
the names have been changed "to protect the innocent."
Especially in view of B's almost entirely sound and
traditional approach to questions of general linguistics
and linguistic theory, it is a particular disappointment
to find his analysis frequently running aground on a
major methodological block-of-stumbling that often
threatens to vitiate his entire voyage.
The language that B is describing is a written lan-
guage. It is a dead language. No one now alive has ever
heard it. Its written records give us data only about its
segmental phonology (vowels, consonants), but tell us
nothing about its stress, tone, pitch, or other presumably
related suprasegmentals.'2Linguistic analysis-"gram-
mars"-can operate only with data that exist, not with
entities that are missing from our texts, whether the texts
are older written records or contemporary field-notes.
Nevertheless, B early (pp. 5, 74 n., 90-92) and through-
out his grammarattemptsto anchor vital segments of his
12 Most (if not
all) modern Tibetan languages and dialects
have phonemically significant tone. But on this topic, which
might possibly have provided him with a way out of his
"stress" dilemma, B is curiously silent. Indeed, and unless I
have missed something in this entirely unindexed book, tone in
Tibetan is mentioned only once, and then in a curiously off-
hand manner: a single passage that refers to "apparentlypho-
nemic tones in Lhasa City" (p. 22 n.). Why "apparently"?
Surely there is no doubt about the existence of tone as a signifi-
cant phonological feature not only in the several attested vari-
eties of Lhasa City speech but also in the Central Tibetan koine
and many other modern vernaculars as well. Conversely, the
striking absence of tone from such modern Tibetan languages
as Ladakhi might, if B had noted it, have provided a more use-
ful (because more general) classificatory criterion than many of
the segmental isoglosses cited in ?3,7-28. Vowel harmony is
still another possibility from the domain of the phonological
suprasegmentals that remains unexploited by B; it has the
added attractionthat, unlike stress and tone, it did at least upon
occasion make its way into the Old Tibetan written records.
But if one persists (as one must) in the search for an overt
linguistic marking of compounds, attention must ultimately
be directed to the here entirely neglected morphological
This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 11:49:07 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
description and analysis of Written Tibetan onto a chi-
mera, onto something that we do not know anything
about because it is not in our texts, i.e., "stress." We are
asked to believe in an analysis keyed to differences be-
tween "a single STRESSGROUP"and "a DISYLLABICSTRESS
GROUP"; this latter "sometimes creates a COMPOUND,
which is a new stress group with a new meaning"
(p. 91). We are told of "the basic disyllabic rhythm of
the language" (p. 190 n.); but what we are never told is
how B knows all these details about the suprasegmental
features of what he at the same time (and quite correctly)
insists is "above all a written rather than a spoken lan-
guage... freed from the constraints imposed by the
transience and noise of spoken messages" (p. 194)-
freed also, one may only add, from all the information
and any of the linguistic-analytic clews that may well
have been present in the now-lost and unrecoverable
suprasegmentals that very probably did exist when Writ-
ten Tibetan was Spoken Tibetan.
To have attempted to anchor his analysis to stress or
a similar suprasegmental feature in New Tibetan (but if
so, then to which of its hundreds of surviving vari-
eties?) would have been another thing.13 But as this
question of stress now stands in these pages, it leads us
nowhere, because that which B has made into the key-
stone of his grammatical edifice simply does not exist.
And with this chimera of Written Tibetan stress, out
also must go a great deal of B's superficially seductive
but essentially unfounded analysis of "old word" vs.
"new word" and "compounds" vs. "collocations of
phenomenon of combining forms (cf. Language 30 [1954]:
458-60). If indeed rdo-rdie 'noble stone' -- 'vajra' is a "new
word" (as at p. 102 n.), one suspects that its "newness" is less
a reflection of its meaning (and even less of its translation)than
of the fact that in Central Tibetan and Lhasa generally the ini-
tial morpheme in the compound has a morphologically deter-
mined allomorph, i.e., a combining form, as dbr-, var. thbr-, as
against its isolation form do, var. tho.
13 It may perhaps be suggested that some feature of signifi-
cance for the history of the language, and possibly even for
the analysis of its older grammar, has survived in the tradi-
tional "readings" of Written Tibetan texts undertaken by the
blamas when engaged in liturgical performances. This is by
no means impossible; little in the history of any language ever
is. But if that is what is supposed to be at issue in these many
passages mentioning "stress," it should have been made
clear-or at least mentioned. But in the absence of corroborat-
ing detail, such a hypothesis would for the moment at least
seem quite as unlikely as would be an attempt to employ the
pronunciation of Latin in Anglican cathedrals (with Te Deum
homophonous with "tedium," etc.) as a basis for the analysis
of the grammarof Vergil or Cicero.
 MILLER: A New Grammar of Written Tibetan
words." Too often, an undefined and wholly nebulous
entity that B calls "meaning," which is really only
translation into English, is made into an unsteady ana-
lytical tool; and when this already tricky device is then
further attached to the absence or presence of an invis-
ible and unknown "stress," the self-defeating circular-
ity of the resulting argument becomes mind-boggling.
But apart from the major methodological miscar-
riage involved with this question of stress in Written
Tibetan, B's departures from received linguistic canons
are refreshingly few. Only rarely does B fall into the
too-tired Tibetological trap of referring to the language
as if it consisted of "pronouncing letters" (pp. 33 n.,
39ff., 75, 77). His "Telegram Principle" (p. 195: "re-
dundant elements of the message may be-and fre-
quently are-omitted") is more praxis than principle,
and at best (or worst?) eminently circular (what may be
omitted? that which is redundant; what is redundant?
that which may be omitted). It may well be that certain
types of compounds "sometimes provide glimpses of
Tibetan patterns of thought" (p. 107 n.), but even if so,
WT snin chun 'heart, small' > ' be afraid' (loc. cit.) is
probably not a good case in point, unless we are
willing to equate Chinese and Tibetan "patterns of
thought" (cf. NChin. hsiao hsin '/Jx' id.). References
to "naturalprocesses" in linguistic matters (e.g., pp. 75
n., 82, 82 n.) are invitations to misunderstanding, no
matter how carefully qualified; so also are allusions to
a tendency of "preinitials ... to WEAKEN over time"
(p. 75 n.), where covert confusion between language
and script further clouds the issue. B tells us that "the
process of devoicing affects only those initials that
were originally voiced in Old Tibetan, and has had no
effect on Old Tibetan unvoiced initials" (p. 27 n.): but
how could it have happened otherwise?
B exemplifies his belief that "the reader of classical
Tibetan texts should have some sense of the place of the
language in the speech communities of the world"
(p. xxiii) by devoting a good amount of space to puta-
tive comparisons of Written Tibetan forms with words
in other languages (pp. 8-18 and passim). In the main
he limits himself to Tibeto-Burman and Himalayan
comparisons; when he ventures into "Sino-Tibetan"the
results are less informative (e.g., p. 99 n. on Chin. sef_
'color', which is totally anachronistic, invoking a wholly
unfounded epigraphic exegesis ["the graph for 'man'
above and the graph for 'seal, stamp' below, to indicate
printing ink"] that would push the history of printing in
China at least back into the Chou period!; pp. 114-15
on Chin. hsin . 'bitter',Bur. asan 'liver' is a comparison
that has been "in all the books" for so long now that no
one any longer notices that it lacks the necessary seman-
tic tertium quid; p. 138 on "Old Chinese *nan 'diffi-
This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 11:49:07 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
73
culty', Old Chinese *nar 'expel demons' is only another
Sinological chimera that moreover lacks semantic veri-
similitude; p. 139 unequivocally "identifies" WT mihu
'pupil (of the eye)' as "simply" a loan from Chinese:
why, and how can one be as positive on this as B is?).
On the question of a genetic relationship between Ti-
betan and Chinese, B is careful but also quite certain:
"Tibetan is more distantly related to Burmese; even
more distantly to languages spoken by Naked Nagas and
other hill tribes of Assam; and more distantly still to
Chinese" (p. 7). But his examples of what he calls "SYs-
TEMATICcorrespondences" between Chinese and Tibetan
are the usual ones from the older literature, and mostly
self-destructing: "the word[s] for 'three' (Old Tibetan
gsum, Old Chinese *sdm) ... both begin with a dental
fricative" (p. 9). But of course they do not, and no
amount of historical-phonological Turniibungcan ever
get the g- out of the Tibetan or add it to the Chinese.
The striking historical evidence that doublets such as
Written Tibetan dgu - rgu '9' (noted p. 75 n., but there
ascribed to "phonetic weakening"!) provide for the pos-
sibility that all the Tibetan numerals are nothing more
than the result of loans from late Old Chinese into pre-
Tibeto-Burmanat a period just prior to a later and often
diverse prefixation within some of the borrowing lan-
guages (a process that early proliferated in the Tibetan
domain of Tibeto-Burmanbut one that at the same time
atrophied in the Burmese sector) is passed over in si-
lence. Thus, Chinese *sam '3', *nguo '5', and *kieu '9'
would, for example, have originally been borrowed as
*sum, *nga, and *ku (these forms are directly and quite
simply reflected in Written Burmese sum, nga, and
kui); but pre-Tibetanbegan to add various prefixes, and
to yield g-sum '3', l-nga '5', and variously *d- + *ku >
dgu - *r- + ku > rgu '9', etc. What begins (p. 8) as a
promisingly succinct account for students of the com-
parative method of the Neogrammarianstoo soon there-
after crashes in flames ("the only way actually to
demonstratethat two or more languages are cognate de-
scendants of a common ancestral language is to recon-
struct the common language from which they
descended," p. 9). If this were true, anything would be
possible, and Coblin would have been right.14After all
this, one fears that students using this book will only be
14 In A
Sinologist's Handlist of Sino-Tibetan Lexical Com-
parisons, Monumenta Serica Monograph Series, XVIII (Net-
tal, 1986), Weldon S. Coblin attempts to "prove" a genetic
relationship between Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese by writ-
ing long strings of consonants and vowels which he misrepre-
sents as historical reconstructions; he then takes these strings
"as a starting point ... to explain in detail the subsequent
74 Journal of the American Oriental Society 114.1 (1994)
bewildered-and eventually disillusioned-when they
are told that "Old Tibetan gtsig Burmese tats
'one .. . [and] Old Tibetan gnis Burmese hnats '2"' are
"apparent cognates" of a variety "not hard to find"
(p. 12 n.). What, many will ask, do the words g6ig/tats
and giis/hnats have to do with one another except
for "meaning the same"? Nor does the circular phono-
logical scenario Tib. *gtig > *gtyig > g'ig suggested
later (p. 83) do anything to clarify the matter.
But probably the most unfortunate single conse-
quence of B's well-intentioned attempt to introduce
the literature of "Tibeto-Burman"and "Sino-Tibetan"
comparativism to his readers is his endorsement of
the concept of the "word family" (pp. 137-38 and
passim). For all B's promises about identifying words
"sharing a simple semantic nucleus," the examples he
employs in order to illustrate this section do not man-
age to eradicate the impression that the only require-
ment for establishing a Tibetan "word family" is to
have access to a dictionary and a vivid imagination:
"Related to NPHYO 'roam about, gambol' we find both
Nphyos-ma 'bride price' and Nphyon-ma 'prostitute"'
(p. 137). Whether such lexical collocations really, as B
alleges, "provide unexpected light on the Tibetan se-
mantic world," or whether they merely tell us some-
thing about ourselves, is a question that each reader
must answer independently.
Chapters ??9-12, pp. 191-382, dealing with
"Phrases," "Simple" and "Complex Propositions," and
"Sentences," are in a sense the heart of B's book. They
deserve extended discussion in hundreds of matters of
detail, at a length that would far exceed even this re-
view. The syntactic insights of this long section will
prove rewarding to every student and would-be reader
of Written Tibetan; one's interest is excited and new
developments of the various elements in the system.... The
importance of the reconstructive exercise lies not in the
detail ...but in the fact that the exercise can be successfully
carried out" (p. 8). Arguing in this fashion, Coblin is able with
equal success to derive both Written Tibetan bdun and Written
Burmese hnac from *tshjit '7', and simultaneously also brgyad
and hrac from *priat '8', even though his "Written Burmese
hnac '7"' is only his carelessmiscopyingand misglossingof
hnac '2': i.e., his "exercise" works as well with false data as
with real words. Unfortunately, B's epitome of the compara-
tive methodmay easily be readby studentsas endorsingthis
varietyof mumbo-jumbo. For a recentsurveyof the question
of a Sino-Tibetan linguistic relationship, see the reviewer,
"The Sino-Tibetan Hypothesis," Bulletin of the Institute of
History and Philology, Academia Sinica, 59.2 (1988): 509-40
(published, 1991).
This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 11:49:07 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
light thrown on thorny old issues on every page.
Again, there are problems. Much of the analysis is
predicated upon a consideration not exclusively of
what appears in the text but rather of what "is or may
be omitted" (pp. 191ff., esp. pp. 255, 258 n., 264 and
n., 353, and passim). This technique of syntactic analy-
sis raises serious questions even when applied to a liv-
ing language, either one the linguist knows well or for
which "native-speaker" informants are at hand. Ber-
nard Bloch was (as usual) right when he pointed out
that one has "to analyze the sentences [heard] on the
basis of the words that they actually contain, without
reference to other words that might have been used in-
stead of or beside these."15 How does B know what
may or may not have been omitted in a dead language
like Written Tibetan? And the same is true of many of
his statements concerning differences in word order
(e.g., pp. 272ff.). Citations of parallel texts, one with a
given lexical or morphological element, one without,
or of otherwise parallel texts displaying different word
orders, would facilitate convincing arguments concern-
ing the semantic force of "omissions" or "changes in
order";but no such citations are ever given. We would
like to believe that B has concrete text-sources for the
hundreds of contrastive and differentiating examples he
cites in evidence for his views, particularly for such
enormously convolute structures as those treated at
pp. 302ff. But how much more convincing all this
would have been if he had shared the details of his
sources with us. Otherwise the nagging suspicion
arises that some (one hopes, surely not all!) of his ex-
amples have simply been made up, and so are actually
worse than useless. A generally welcome section on
"Metrics" distinguishes the final ?13, "Beyond the
Sentence," pp. 383-423, even though the old bugbear
of "the single primary stress ... [of] . . [e]very word
in classical Tibetan" (p. 408) gets it all off to a bad
start. Nor will everyone agree with B's somewhat se-
vere view of "rather dry and academic metaphors, in
the Indic style" (p. 400), another instance of a naive
value judgment owing more to enthusiasm (for Tibet)
than to information (about India).16
The reader who has persisted this long will by now
have gathered that this is a rarely interesting and
amazingly informative book; but it must in all honesty
be pointed out that it is also-and almost equally
15Letterof 28 October1948, cited in
Nihongo,In Defence
of Japanese(London,1986), [i].
16One wonders
e.g., if this severeview of In-
particularly,
dic metaphorwouldhavesurviveda readingof EdwinGerow,
A Glossaryof IndianFiguresof Speech(TheHague,1971).
 MILLER: A New Grammar of Written Tibetan
consistently-frustrating and annoying to use. There is
much pointless repetition and duplication (e.g., p. 134
reproducedat p. 401), and evidence throughoutof inde-
cision about what to place in the text and what to rele-
gate to the footnotes (e.g., the long note that occupies
pp. 101-2 should surely have been text; text and note
on pp. 103-4 belong together in one place, but not in
both; etc.). The fuller account of the Madhyavyutpatti,
pp. 143ff., surely should have come before the brief
notice of idem at p. 110. A commendably substantial
and mostly carefully done "Bibliography" occupies
pp. 424-98, but it is all but impossible to find anything
here, since the alphabetical-by-authorsorder has been
fragmented into 26 subsections, including such will-o'-
the-wisp categories as "19: Literaturein Motion," "22:
Tibetan Grammar in Context," and "26: Odds and
Ends." There is no index, no effective system of cross-
referencing, and no possible way in which to relocate
some passage of interest or some treatment of a key
word or expression short of keeping one's own index-
notes as one reads through the book, a first-aid measure
that is strongly urged upon the interested reader.
Finally, no review of B's book, no matter how gener-
ous and favorably disposed, can conclude without men-
tioning the most serious single problem of these pages,
one that urgently calls for amelioration in the revised
second edition that should certainly be rendered neces-
sary if this important and interesting contribution to
Tibetan linguistic studies is received with anything re-
sembling the welcome it deserves. This is B's almost
total failure to acknowledge the published work of oth-
ers, upon which he draws so frequently and at such
length that accusations, not entirely unfounded, of pla-
giarism are certain to be heard.
To be sure, the authors and publications at issue are
mostly listed in the "Bibliography";but does this excuse
taking over the work of others virtually intact without
specific acknowledgment? B reprints a pericope from
the Tibetan Madhyavyutpatti as edited and translated
(in a truly heroic leger-de-main philologique) by N. Si-
monsson in 1957; his translation differs from Simons-
son's understandingof the passage only in one small but
importantpoint, in which detail B is surely wrong.17On
17 It is
impossibleto believe that the text and translation
on B's p. 110 are not drawn directly from Nils Simonsson,
Indo-tibetische Studien, vol. I: Die Methoden der tibetischen
Ubersetzer, untersucht im Hinblick auf die Bedeutung ihrer
Ubersetzungfir die Sanskritphilologie (Uppsala, 1957), 255-
56 (Simonsson's ?20). And once having gone to Simonsson, B
ought to have studied it more carefully. Simonsson's under-
standing of the passage is surely superior to that of B; nothing
This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 11:49:07 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
75
pp. 143-44 and 153 he further borrows, without ac-
knowledgment, directly from Simonsson's book, in the
last instance making specific citation of-but no refer-
ence at all to-Simonsson's ground-breaking collation
of the discrepancies between the later canonical Tibetan
Saddharmapundarika and an Old Tibetan manuscript
version. A student reading these passages will surely
conclude that all this is B's work. The single listing of
Simonsson's book on p. 487 (under "21: Tibetan Herme-
neutics"!) gives the uninformed reader no clue to what
has gone on. B owes it to his readers and to himself to
document these and hundredsof other passages through-
out his book, properly crediting their authors, and in the
process disarming them as potential grounds for charges
of plagiarism.
This began as a favorable review; and despite the
many problems it has been forced to discuss, it still in-
tends to conclude as one. There would be no point in
going into all these matters of detail if B's book did not
appear to be a valuable and important contribution to
Tibetan studies. Obviously, it is. But equally obvi-
ously, a revised new second edition needs to replace it
as soon as possible. In that new edition, B would do
well first of all to reconsider his reliance upon "mean-
ing" as a key-stone in his linguistic analysis, particu-
larly so long as "meaning" means no more than
English translations; at the same time he ought to cast
about for something real and concrete with which to
replace the chimera of Old Tibetan "stress." Other nec-
essary changes and alterations will be less major.
When B has incorporatedmost of his present notes into
in the text correspondsto B's "(the way) to affix" (Simonsson's
"Ubereinstimmungmit dem Sinn" is exactly what the original
says); and from B's commentary one would hardly guess that
the overall point of the passage is precisely the same as that
made by Whitney: "Sometimes, indeed, the value of a root is
hardly perceptibly modified by the addition of the prefix" (Skt.
Gr., ?1077[b]). All that the text in question is really attempting
to do is justify a number of canonical translations in which
prefixes such as pari, sam, upa, etc., carry no overt Tibetan
equivalent; thus, parikha = hobs 'ditch, trench, pit' (Mhv.
5126); parigata = btab pa 'visited by, afflicted with' (Mhv.
7155); and even more interestingly, cases in which the early
canonical translatorsstill permitted a choice between two ver-
sions, e.g., parikheda = mi dgah ba ham yonissu skyo ba 'not to
rejoice', or, 'to be completely vexed, weary' (Mhv. 6812). On
this question of providing proper attributionof and credit for
previously published work by others, the reviewer should point
out thatthe issue is not entirelyone of self-interest,sincehe is
one of the very fortunate few whose work is ever cited by
name (even if not by title) in these pages (p. 178 n.).
76 Journal of the American Oriental Society 114.1 (1994)

his text, compiled suitable word- and subject-indices,

only by the titles of their Tibetan translations (pp. 218, 225,
and-most importantly-added specific acknowledg-
227) is annoying, but not half so annoying as citing Tibetan
ment of all previously published sources directly used
originals only in English translations ("another archaic manu-
or otherwise alluded to, along with specific identifica-
script, also preserved at Tun-huang, entitled The Proverbs of
tions for the text-sources of his examples, particularly
Mother Sum-pa . . ," p. 277). Most in need of urgent repair is
in his discussions of syntax, there is no reason why B's
the publisher's blurb on the back cover, with its preposterous
new grammarof Written Tibetan should not be as use-
allegation that "[a]mong Asian languages, Tibetan is second
ful to and as appreciated by this (and even the next)
only to Chinese in the depth of its historical record, with texts
generation of students as it is now exciting, interesting,
dating back as far as the eighth and ninth centuries...." Even
and impressive for the rest of us.18
if we charitably understand "Asian" to mean "Far Eastern,"
this would consign to oblivion not only the entire eighth-
18 A few minor howlers that call for future correction century Old Japanese literature, but all the Yenisei (seventh
may
be relegated to a note: 'transcribe'and 'transliterate'are too fre- century) and Orxon (eighth century) Old Turkish inscriptions,
quently confused (e.g., pp. 45 n., 47 n.); the gloss of t'u-fan as as well; and if "Asia" is taken literally, what ever happened to
'agriculturalbarbarians'(p. 17) is without philological founda- Sanskrit (not to speak of Sumerian)?
tion and borders upon the fantastic; referring to Chinese texts

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 11:49:07 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions