A Tibetan-English Dictionary with Sanskrit Synonyms

Abstract

THE chief attraction which the Tibetan language possesses for the western reader is that it is the Latin of Central Asia, and preserves in its bulky literature the old-world lore and vestiges of early culture which the priestly schoolmen of Tibet believed to be all that was worth knowing, not only about their own country, but of the outside world, and more especially ancient India, regarding which so little is known to us. For Tibet, upon receiving its Buddhism from India in the seventh century A.D., adopted at the same time the Indian characters for the purpose of reducing its hitherto unwritten Mongolian language into writing, and forthwith translated into its new vernacular the Indian Buddhist scriptures and other works, the originals of which were afterwards destroyed by the fanatical Mohammedan invaders on the expulsion of Buddhism, from India in the twelfth century A.D. From these scripts, thus preserved in their Tibetan translations, much invaluable information has already been gleaned by European scholars; but owing to a habit of the learned monks to translate most of the proper names, of persons, places, and things, root by root etymologically into the Tibetan, it so happens that without a copious Tibeto-Sanskrit lexicon to re-convert these translated names into their recognisable Indian equivalents, a great deal of the mass of information locked up in the Tibetan volumes, now accumulating in our national libraries, remains to some extent sealed.

A Tibetan-English Dictionary with Sanskrit Synonyms.

By Sarat Chandra Das. Revised and edited by G. Sandberg, B.A., and A. W. Heyde. Pp. xxxiv + 1353. (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1902.)