Tibetan.

• Author: MILLER, ROY ANDREW
• Position: Review

Tibetan. By PHILIP DENWOOD. London Oriental and African Language Library, vol. 3. Philadelphia: JOHN BENJAMINS, 1999. Pp. xviii + 372. $99.

Anyonc interested in demotic Tibetan will encounter serious problems in this new monograph, not the least of which will be the identity of the language that the author is describing. Denwood gets off to a bad start by flatly equating "'Central Tibetan' and/or 'Lhasa Tibetan'" (p. 34); he attempts to protect himself with generalized hedging ("the town could hardly have a uniform dialect"; "informants...may not always hold identical views on what constitutes Lhasa Tibetan or Central Tibetan" (p. 35); but he never mentions the specific isoglosses separating Central Tibetan from Lhasa that have been clear in the literature since the mid-1950s. As early as 1985 A. Rona-Tas lamented, "[l]eider vermischt man noch heute die zwei verschiedenen Begriffe bzw. Namen [i.e., Central Tibetan and Lhasa]" (WSTB 13 [1985]: 160); plus ca change.... Denwood labels all his transcriptions of the modern language "Lhasa Tibetan" without question or quibble. Unfortunately, this is hardly the case.

What we actually find in D's hundreds of transcribed examples is rather the well-known koine of the post-1956 Tibetan diaspora, a language that in most of its phonological particularities is essentially Central Tibetan, sporadically modified from time to time with smatterings of Lhasa-like forms depending upon the taste, background, and social circumstances of the individual speaker. And in a number of points D's language appears to agree with no Lhasa (or even Lhasa-like) locutions ever recorded elsewhere by anyone else.

For the genitive and instrumental forms of the 1st per. sg. the received version of Lhasa familiar from the current Western literature has n[epsilon][epsilon] and n[epsilon][epsilon], resp. (typically in M. C. Goldstein and N. Narkyid, English-Tibetan Dictionary of Modern Tibetan [Berkeley, 1984], 286, 208; A. Agha, Structural Form and Utterance Context in Lhasa Tibetan [New York, 1993], 99). D has [_n[epsilon]:] throughout for both forms, overlooking (or denying?) the morphological difference between them, but at the same time apparently hearing a fronting of the initial [n] of [na] 'I' to [n] that hardly anyone else has ever noticed (or when they have, they have treated it not, as does D, as a significant distinction but only as an allophone: thus, A. M. Han, An Investigation of the Tones of Lhasa Tibetan [Huntington Beach, Cal., 1980]. 35, 38). In too many other cases neither the segmentals nor the suprasegmentals for routine lexical items as heard by D agree in detail with those for the same words as rep orted by others. For 'a native of Lhasa' D has [""[epsilon] sa:] (p. 91); for the same word Hu Tan, "Researches sur les tons du tibetain (dialecte de Lhasa)," Cahiers de linguistique, Asie orientale 11.1 (1982):28, has ["" sa? ]. For '8' D has [_gi[epsilon]:] (p. 80); Hu has [[epsilon]?] (p. 35). For 'language, voice' D has variously [kj[epsilon]:] and [kje:] (p. 79), but Goldstein and Narkyid have/q[epsilon][epsilon]/ (p. 241a), and Hari has [k[epsilon]?] (p. 191a).

Particularly in view of this great uncertainty about the overt shapes of many of the very ordinary words in his version of Lhasa Tibetan, it is all the more difficult to understand why D retranscribes, and thus alters into his own idiosyncratic version of the language, citations he draws from the literature where the original he is thus tampering with is surely closer to the real thing than are his data (e.g., p. 236, where he silently rewrites as [trAci: _drare _du:] an example drawn from Agha [p. 124], where it appeared as [tAsii tore tuu]).

Perhaps the most striking phonological isogloss separating the Central Tibetan koine from genuine Lhasa Tibetan is the correspondence of retroflex stops [t, t', d] in the former with retroflex affricates in the latter. Reported for Lhasa in Chinese transcriptions from early on (Laufer, TP 17 [1916]: 409, 436), then in modern times canonically described in Y. R. Chao's well-known monograph Love Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama, Academia Sinica Monographs, series A, no. 5 (Peking, 1950), and later verified by numerous in situ investigators, including Chin P'eng, Schubert and Richter, Hu Tan, and Huang Pufan, these characteristic affricate...