The lexicography of Tibetan
Nathan W. Hill and Edward Garrett
Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of Tibetan lexicography, from the ninth
century to today. While most Tibetan dictionaries were compiled in an ad hoc
manner, some used citation collections. Electronic corpora have been built for
Tibetan, but they have not as yet been used to assist dictionary compilation. The
various obstacles that need to be overcome first in order to be able to compile
corpus-based dictionaries are discussed.
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Lexical characteristics of Tibetan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
History of Tibetan lexicography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Electronic corpora of Tibetan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Corpus-based lexicography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Future prospects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Introduction
Most researchers see Tibetan as a member of a language family which also includes
Burmese and Chinese; this family is known by names including “Tibeto-Burman,”
“Sino-Tibetan,” and “Trans-Himalayan,” of which the last is the most neutral and
accurate (cf. van Driem 2012). In 650 Tibetan was reduced to writing as an
administrative exigency of running the Tibetan empire; the earliest extant documents
N.W. Hill (*) • E. Garrett
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, London, UK
e-mail:
[email protected];
[email protected]
# Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2017
P. Hanks, G.-M. de Schryver (eds.), International Handbook of Modern Lexis and
Lexicography, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-45369-4_109-1
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N.W. Hill and E. Garrett
date from a century later (Hill 2010b, pp. 110–112). Tibetan linguistic history is
conventionally divided between Old Tibetan (eleventh century and earlier) and
Classical Tibetan (later texts). Tibetan boasts a vast literature with a wide variety
of genres, and the family of Tibetan languages spoken today is comparable in size
and diversity to the Romance languages (Tournadre 2008, pp. 282–283).
Description
Lexical characteristics of Tibetan
Old Tibetan did not have tone and the tonal systems of those modern Tibetan
languages that possess them derive transparently from segmental phonology. Tibetan
has agglutinative morphology and ergative alignment (Tournadre 1996); it exhibits
Gruppenflexion, with ten morphological cases (cf. Hill 2012). Tibetan lacks any
agreement systems, but verbal suffixes indicate switch reference (Andersen 1987;
Zadoks 2000, 2002; Haller 2009). Tibetan verbal inflection is complex, with four
verb stems showing a variety of ablaut, stem alternation, prefixes, and suffixes (e.g.,
present ḥdzin, past bzuṅ, future gzuṅ, imperative zuṅs “take”).
Tibetan has its own alphabetic order, which serves as the organizational principal
for all Tibetan dictionaries. The Tibetan alphabet distinguishes 30 consonants (k, kh,
g, ṅ, c, ch, j, ñ, t, th, d, n, p, ph, b, m, ts, tsh, dz, w, ź, z, ḥ, y, r, l, ś, s, h, ʔ) and
5 vowels ([a], i, u, e, o); the alphabet is a good, but no perfect match to Old Tibetan
phonology (cf. Hill 2010b). Alphabetization is complex; letters are arranged both
vertically and horizontally, and a word is not necessarily alphabetized by either the
left-more or the uppermost letter in a syllable. A syllable has a graphic structure that
may be represented C2C3C1G4V5C6C7, of which the sequence C3C1G4V5 is
b2(s3g1r4u5)b6s7. In terms of alphabetizarepresented vertically, for example,
tion, a dictionary entry is placed according to its first syllable; the first syllable is
placed in a relevant section according to C1 and within this section it is placed in a
relevant subsection according to C2 and within this subsection it is placed in a
sub-subsection according to C3, etc. The absence of an element in the relevant
position precedes all possible letters in order, as if there were a null consonant first
among consonants. In the case of vowels, the absence of vowel marking is
interpreted as /a/. These abstract principles lead in practice to a relative alphabetical
order such as ka, kun, kyaṅ, kyi, klu, klub, dkag, dkor, dkyu, bkaṅ, rked, skad, skyon,
bskaṅ, and bskyuṅs, all of which occur before any syllable built with “kh” as C1. The
reader with time on his hands will be able to confirm that this list is correctly ordered
given the order of the 30 consonants and 5 vowels. The task is made a bit easier by
presenting all null consonants and the numbers for syllable position:
Ø2Ø3k1Ø4a5Ø6Ø7,
Ø2Ø3k1Ø4u5n6Ø7,
Ø2Ø3k1y4a5ṅ6Ø7,
Ø2Ø3k1y4i5Ø6Ø7,
Ø2Ø3k1l4u5Ø6Ø7,
Ø2Ø3k1l4u5b6Ø7,
d2Ø3k1Ø4a5g6Ø7,
d2Ø3k1Ø4o5r6Ø7,
d2Ø3k1y4u5Ø6Ø7,
b2Ø3k1Ø4a5ṅ6Ø7,
Ø2r3k1Ø4e5d6Ø7,
Ø2s3k1Ø4a5d6Ø7,
Ø2s3k1y4o5n6Ø7,
b2s3k1Ø4a5ṅ6Ø7,
b 2s 3k 1y 4u 5ṅ 6s 7.
The lexicography of Tibetan
3
Since digital Tibetan text is now preferentially encoded as Unicode, it is desirable
to sort Tibetan in conformance with the requirements of the Unicode Standard. To
this end, the Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA) should be employed
(http://unicode.org/reports/tr10/). On its own, the UCA supplied Default Unicode
Collation Element Table (DUCET) will not sort Tibetan words correctly. However,
language-specific collation elements, that is, clusterings of one or more Unicode
characters to be treated as single items for the purpose of determining sort weight,
can be defined and included in customized collation rules which specify those cases
where the sort order for a language differs from the default (http://www.unicode.org/
reports/tr35/tr35-collation.html#Rules). Using this approach, Pema Geyleg and
Robert Chilton devised a collation rule set for Dzongkha, a language which shares
the same script and sort order as Tibetan. Chris Tomlinson’s open-source implementation of Tibetan sorting (https://github.com/tibetan-nlp/sorting-and-conversion),
which is based on the International Components for Unicode for Java (ICU4J),
exploits this rule set in order to correctly sort Tibetan text.
Tibetan syllables are distinguished with explicit punctuation, but word breaks are
not overtly marked. The limitation of onset clusters to word initial syllables provides
a possible definition for a language specific phonemic word; most lexemes so
defined would be disyllabic. However, the lexemes that head noun phrases and
function as syntactic constituents in a sentence, that is, syntactic words, are often
much longer. Because of the lack of explicit word delimitation, dictionaries normally
include entries that consist of anything from individual bound morphemes up to
entire phrases or conventional expressions without distinction. The absence of
explicit word breaking creates at least two hurdles for Tibetan NLP. First, some
word breaking must be imposed on the data, both an intellectual and a practical
challenge. Second, however one defines a word, a page break may bisect a word.
Thus, the use of a page-driven structure in electronic texts poses a challenge to the
explicit encoding of word breaks. The analysis of Tibetan part-of-speech categories
has scarcely begun and no Tibetan dictionary gives a part-of-speech label to each of
its entries. For the treatment of word breaking and the analysis of part-of-speech
categories in the project “Tibetan in Digital Communication,” the first project to
publicly release a part-of-speech tagged Tibetan corpus, see Hill and Garrett (2017a).
History of Tibetan lexicography
Methodologies of dictionary compilation divide heuristically into three types. First,
some dictionaries lack explicit methodology and assemble words in an ad hoc
manner. Second, there are dictionaries that are compiled over very long periods of
time on the basis of collections of slips recording attestations of words as used in
context. Third, more recent dictionaries are compiled on the basis of electronic text
corpora. These methods may be called respectively the “informal method,” the
“traditional method,” and the “modern method.” The overwhelming majority of
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N.W. Hill and E. Garrett
Tibetan dictionaries were compiled with the informal method. Only a very few
Tibetan dictionaries use the traditional methodology. No Tibetan dictionary yet
compiled makes use of the modern method.
In the land of snows lexicography enjoys an august history. After the official
conversion of Tibet to Buddhism circa 779, the imperium found it useful to standardize terminology to facilitate the translation of Buddhist works, mainly in
Sanskrit, into Tibetan. Three lexicographical works assisted this translation work:
the Bye brag tu rtogs byed chen po (Mahāvyutpatti), the Bye brag tu rtogs byed ḥbriṅ
po, and the Bye brag tu rtogs byed chuṅ ṅu. The second work is better known under
the title Sgra sbyor bam po gñis pa. The third work is no longer extant. The two
extant works were in circulation at least by 814 (Uray 1989; Scherrer-Schaub 2002;
Hermann-Pfandt 2008). Sanskrit-Tibetan bilingual lexicography continued form that
time until our day (cf. Seyfort Ruegg 1998).
Modern bilingual Tibetan-Sanskrit dictionaries include some of the finest works
of Tibetan lexicography. Lokesh Chandra compiled a 12-volume Tibetan-Sanskrit
dictionary on the basis of canonical Buddhist texts available in both languages
(Chandra 1958–1961). This work was continued with seven supplementary volumes
(Chandra 1992–1994) and a one volume Sanskrit-Tibetan index (Chandra 2007).
Attestations are given for each entry. In addition, Negi (1993–2004) compiled
another Tibetan-Sanskrit dictionary, this one in 16 volumes. Negi includes extensive
quotations in addition to citations and made reference to a larger number of texts than
Chandra. In addition to these two Tibetan-Sanskrit dictionaries, there are bilingual
indices available for a number of Tibetan translations of Sanskrit Buddhist texts,
including: Abhidharmakośabhāṣya (Hirakawa 1973–1978), Bodhicaryāvatāra
(Weller 1952–1955), Kāśyapaparivarta (Weller 1933), Mahāyānasūtrālaṅkāra
(Nagao 1958–1961), Meghadūta (Chimpa et al. 2011), Nyāyabindu (Obermiller
1970[1927–28]),
Prasannapadā
Mādhyamakavṛtti
(Yamaguchi
1974),
Yogācārabhūmi (Yokoyama 1996), Laṅkāvatārasūtra (Suzuki 2000),
Sukhāvatī vyūhasūtra (Inagaki 1984), and Saddharmapuṇḍarī kasūtra (Ejima et al.
1985–1993), among others. Apart from works treating Sanskrit, a highlight in the
history of Tibetan multilingual lexicography is the inclusion of Tibetan as one of the
five languages in the monumental pentaglot dictionary of the Qianlong period
(cf. Corff et al. 2013).
As is common across the world, monolingual lexicography has more recent
origins than the compilation of multilingual works. As Tibetan changed through
time a genre arose which explained archaisms with newer terms. The earliest of these
“old-new-terminologies” (bdra-gsar-rñiṅ) is the Li śi gur khaṅ by Rin chen bkra śis
written in 1536 (cf. Taube 1978). The writing out of verb paradigms, which had been
phonetically leveled in many dialects, dates to the late eighteenth century, the earliest
author of this genre being A kya yoṅs ḥdzin dbyaṅs can dgaḥ baḥi blo gros
(1740–1827, cf. Hill 2010a, p. xxiii). Chos kyi grags pa (1980[1949]) wrote the
first monolingual Tibetan dictionary to be organized alphabetically. Until recently,
this was used very widely by Tibetan as well as Western scholars. A Tibetan-Tibetan
dictionary of lasting importance is that edited by Blo mthun bsam gtan (1979). This
excellent dictionary includes carefully written definitions and a more sophisticated
The lexicography of Tibetan
5
and reliable handling of verbs than found in most dictionaries. Its relatively small
size means that obscure words are not to be found, but it has a strength in colloquial
words and eastern dialect forms. The methodological high water mark of monolingual works is probably Ṅag dbaṅ tshul khrims’ (1997) dictionary of difficult and
archaic words. The author provides attestations and cites the works they are found in,
but does not specify page and line numbers and has an inadequate bibliography;
consequently, these citations are not easily verified.
The first Tibetan dictionary by a western author is a manuscript Tibetan-Latin
dictionary by the Capuchin missionaries Giuseppe da Ascoli, Franceso Maria da
Tours, and F. Domenico da Fano (1674–1728), compiled between 1708 and 1713.
This dictionary unfortunately remains unpublished but according to Simon (1964,
p. 85) an extract is held at the Bibliothèque Nationale (Fonds Tibétain No. 542). A
Tibetan-Italian dictionary was compiled by F. Francesco Orazio della Penna
(1680–1745), a student of da Fano. The text of this work was translated into English
and considerably mangled. The English version became the first published Tibetan
dictionary (Schroeter 1826) but the original remains unpublished. Schroeter died
while revising the work and learning Tibetan; the editors who saw the work through
publication knew no Tibetan (cf. Simon 1964; Bray 2008).
These first two dictionaries and others of the nineteenth and early twentieth
century are well discussed by Simon (1964). Jäschke’s dictionary from this period
is the first Tibetan dictionary of real caliber and as a work of lexicography is almost
unrivaled to this day. Subsequent years have witnessed the publication of scores of
other Tibetan dictionaries (cf. Simon 1964; Viehbeck 2017). Hundreds of Tibetan
dictionaries are now available; these include bilingual dictionaries, both to and from
such languages as English, French, German, Latin, Japanese, etc. and specialized
dictionaries focusing on medicine, plants, dialects, archaic terms, neologisms, etc.
(cf. Walter 2006; McGrath 2008). None of these works matches the methodological
rigor or sophistication of Jäschke, and many are directly derivative of his work.
The single most impressive work of Tibetan lexicography is the ongoing
Wörterbuch der tibetischen schriftsprache published by the Bayerische Akademie
der Wissenschaften (Francke et al. 2005–). Helmut Hoffmann founded the project in
1954; the first fascicle was published in 2005. The 34 fascicles published by 2016
cover from ka until dharma. Each entry gives copious citations of original sources
precisely cited to page and line number. The use of previous dictionaries is carefully
distinguished from the evidence of textual attestations. In addition, very thorough
reference to previous scholarship is given when relevant. The compilation of the
dictionary is discussed by Uebach and Panglung (1998), to which Maurer and
Schneider (2007) and Schneider and Maurer (2012) provided a more recent
perspective.
Electronic corpora of Tibetan
The Tibetan language is served by a number of electronic text corpora, but to-date
only one such corpus includes word breaking and part-of-speech tagging. The largest
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N.W. Hill and E. Garrett
electronic corpus is by far the ever-expanding e-text library of the Buddhist Digital
Resource Center (http://www.tbrc.org), which as of December 27, 2014, consisted of
959,020 pages of text. These texts are encoded in Unicode and stored in XML files.
The material for this collection comes from two sources: OCRed modern printed
texts and the digital files of publishers of Tibetan texts. The BDRC provides a
dedicated search interface; the corpus itself is also now available for download
(Wallman et al. 2017).
The Old Tibetan Documents Online (OTDO) is a collection of 109 Old Tibetan
texts (http: //otdo.aa.tufs.ac.jp/ and http://otdo.aa-ken.jp/). The texts include documents discovered at the library cave at Dunhuang and imperial inscriptions form
central Tibet. These materials are not included in any other digital corpus. OTDO
texts are encoded in a purposed designed Roman transcription. The OTDO includes
a search interface; the corpus is downloadable.
Otani Tibetan E-Texts (http://web1.otani.ac.jp/cri/twrpw/results/e-texts/) consists
of 14 texts input from xylographs held at the Otani University library. The bulk of
this collection is historical and biographical classics. These texts, in Unicode, are
available for download. The collection is not searchable online.
Since 1988 the Asian Classics Input Project (ACIP) has manually transcribed
texts from the Buddhist Canon into a purpose designed Roman transcription.
According to a now dead link that is cited on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Michael_Roach#cite_note-BiA2-13, accessed December 29, 2014) in 2011 the
project had input over 8500 texts, circa 500,000 pages. More recent information is
not available on the ACIP homepage (http://www.asianclassics.org). Despite a
complex editorial procedure designed to reduce copying errors, their texts are not
universally regarded as reliable.
A digital version of the Derge Kanjur (an edition of the Tibetan Buddhist canon),
prepared by the British Library and SOAS, University of London, is hosted by the
Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library of the University of Virginia (http://www.
thlib.org/encyclopedias/literary/canons/kt/catalog.php#cat=d/k). The data are in
Unicode and stored in XML. There is a search facility. Unfortunately, the edition
currently online contains many typos. The BDRC in collaboration with Eusukhia
(http://esukhia.org) have proofread these materials, but the corrected version is not
yet available for public download or consultation.
The one currently available part-of-speech tagged Tibetan corpus was compiled
as part of the research project “Tibetan in Digital Communication” funded by the
UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and based at SOAS, University of
London. In addition to the corpus, the project developed a number of digital tools
allowing the corpus to be employed in many areas of humanities research, and
enabling other researchers to more easily develop their own corpora or software
tools. These tools included an online corpus management system, a word tokenizer,
and a part-of-speech tagger (https://github.com/tibetan-nlp and Hill and Garrett
2017a, b, c).
The lexicography of Tibetan
7
Corpus-based lexicography
While the size and coverage of Tibetan’s digital corpus is extraordinary, until now its
lexicographic utility has been limited. Without a part-of-speech tagged corpus, it can
be very laborious to navigate through vast volumes of data. For example, a search for
the syllable gyis will invariably flag up the agentive case marker gyis as well as the
imperative form of the verb bgyid (“to do”). If one is studying the imperative of the
verb bgyid, then one has no choice but to look through hundreds of examples of the
agentive case marker. A part-of-speech tagger solves this problem by using rules or
statistics to distinguish homonyms.
The SOAS project created a part-of-speech tagger which applies a sequence of
tag-removing rules to arrive at an analysis of a sentence. First implemented using
regular expressions and subsequently rewritten in Constraint Grammar (http://beta.
visl.sdu.dk/constraint_grammar.html), the part-of-speech tagger consists of a series
of contextual rules. For example, the tagger includes a number of rules designed to
distinguish between negation and nominals, including correctly categorizing ma as
either [neg] or “mother” [n.count], and mi as either [neg] or “person” [n.count].
Some of these rules are shown below; for the sake of non-Tibetan readers the Tibetan
script is written in Roman bold:
#056: Isolating ma [neg] in the phrase skad cig ma gcig 'one moment'
REMOVE (n.count) (-2 ("<skad>")) (-1 ("<cig>")) (0 ma)
(1 ("<gcig>")) ;
#063: Identifying ma [neg] in the prohibitive
SELECT (neg) (0 ma) (1C (v.pres)) (2 (cv.imp)) ;
REMOVE (d.indef) (-2 ma) (-1C (v.pres)) (0 (cv.imp)) ;
#066: Isolating ma [n.count] and mi [n.count] before case markers
REMOVE (neg) (0 mami) (1 case.xxx LINK NOT 0 v.xxx) ;
Rule #056 says that ma must be negation when occurring in a certain fixed phrase
(skad cig ma gcig), that is, when preceded by two specific words (skad cig) and
followed by another (gcig). The first part of rule #063 says that if the first word after
ma is a certain (hence, “C”) [v.pres], and the second word after ma is a possible [cv.
imp], then assign [neg] to ma; while the second part of the rule makes sure that in this
same context, homonymous [cv.imp]/[d.indef] should be assigned [cv.imp]. Finally,
rule #066 says that a ma or mi should be a nominal if it is followed by a possible case
marker that cannot also be a verb.
The SOAS part-of-speech tagger achieves >99.8% accuracy. That is, the tagger
almost never removes a tag for a word if the tag is correct. However, the tagger is
often unable to decide on a single tag for a word. The average word has 1.41 tags,
which means that while many words are assigned a single (and almost always
correct) tag, others are left with 2, 3, or more possible tags.
8
N.W. Hill and E. Garrett
The SOAS corpus consists of no more than one million words, making the handtagged Tibetan corpus rather small by the standards of corpus linguistics, with many
infrequent words and senses simply not occurring in the sample. To expand the
corpus and thereby provide a more secure footing for informed lexicographic
investigations, the SOAS part-of-speech tagger has been unleashed on the additional
corpora mentioned above. To the extent that these corpora share features in common
with the hand-tagged corpus, the exercise has been successful.
Future prospects
The previous section discussed a part-of-speech tagger which facilitates Tibetan
lexicographic research through the disambiguation of homophones. However, partof-speech tagging alone has limited payoff; other techniques from computational
linguistics will also need to be developed or adapted for Tibetan.
One obstacle is that despite the existence of numerous dictionaries organized and
alphabetized into a list of entries by head word, no serious attempt has yet been made
to uncover and articulate principles of lemmatization for Tibetan, that is, the
systematic grouping of related word forms under the same lexical entry. The partof-speech tagger for Tibetan does not yet tag the variant forms of a word under the
same lemma. For example, the stems of “cut” in Classical Tibetan are gcod, bcad,
gcad, and chod; all of these forms should be listed under the same lemma. Old
Tibetan poses further lemmatization challenges. For example, syllable boundaries
are not as consistently marked as they are in Classical Tibetan; we find rdzogso
instead of rdzogs-so, phulo instead of phul-lo, and so on. Once the conditions of
these mergers are understood, rules can be written to expand the merged syllables
into full forms that refer to the correct lemma: if phulo expands to disyllabic phu-lo,
the first phu must be classed as a variant form of phul. Since it would be absurd to
create a dictionary without at the very least cross-referencing the variant forms of a
word, work on lemmatization, whether automatic or manual, must be prioritized.
A second obstacle towards further progress is the problem of Tibetan word
segmentation. As with Chinese, Tibetan text does not use whitespace or other
mechanisms to mark word boundaries. As with Chinese, the automatic determination of word boundaries by computer is a “hard problem.” Various solutions to this
problem have been explored. One approach has followed Huidan et al. (2011) by
re-casting Tibetan word segmentation as a syllable tagging problem, with each
syllable in search of an appropriate word-internal position label. For example, the
only syllable of a monosyllabic word is tagged with “S” for “single syllable,” and the
first, middle, and end syllables of multisyllabic words are tagged with “B,” “M,” and
“E,” respectively. The machine then applies the syllable tagging patterns it learns
from a training corpus to the new texts it is exposed to. Another approach leaves less
to chance, exploiting simultaneous left-to-right and right-to-left maximal dictionarybased matching using the Aho-Corasick algorithm (https://github.com/tibetan-nlp).
The urgency of the word segmentation problem is underscored by two facts: first,
that automatic part-of-speech tagging currently performs better for Tibetan than
The lexicography of Tibetan
9
automatic word segmentation; and second, that mistakes in word segmentation tend
to feed mistakes in part-of-speech tagging, since the latter process requires a
segmented corpus. One direction for future research then would be to find a way
to improve both processes by allowing them to work in tandem, each to the benefit of
the other.
A third obstacle relates to the challenges presented by new, unseen texts.
Unknown words and named entities can wreak havoc for dictionary-based methods,
and further problems are introduced by the consideration of data representing diverse
genres, text types, and linguistic epochs. Whether existing tools can be shown to be
successful in the face of such diversity remains to be established.
No Tibetan dictionary has yet been compiled which benefits from the advances in
corpus linguistics which have revolutionized the lexicography of better studied
languages. The challenge for Tibetan lexicography is to transition to the modern
method of lexicography by exploiting the vast collections of digital Tibetan materials
now available online. With Tibetan computational linguistics in its infancy, and
generally not a priority for commercial or governmental funding, progress has
necessarily been slow. However, the path forward is clear and the obstacles to
surmount evident. Future prospects for Tibetan lexicography are bright.
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