Today we’re gonna explore a language with one of the oldest writing system,
the language of one of the major religions, a language with probably the most complicated orthography rules.
my name is Julie, and welcome to the Tibetan language.
First some official info.
Tibetan is not just one language but at least three:
Central Tibetan, spoken by 1.2 million people, mostly in the Tibet Autonomous Region,
Amdo Tibetan, spoken by 1.8 million people in Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan provinces of China
and Khams Tibetan, spoken by 1.4 million people in Qinghai, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces of China.
Those are languages that are actually called Tibetan.
But there are also the Tibetic languages - over 50 distinct languages including languages like
Dzongkha in Bhutan, Sherpa in Nepal or Ladakhi in India.
All the Tibetic languages come from Old Tibetan - a language spoken in the 7th century,
but only Amdo, Kham and Tibetan or U-Tsang, are still named Tibetan and associated with the Tibetan people.
The Lhasa dialect of Central Tibetan is considered to be Standard Tibetan,
which is also official in the Tibet Autonomous region and the language of Tibetan media and education.
But why are there three Tibetan languages?
And what’s their relation to the Old Tibetan?
Tibetan belongs to the huge Sino-Tibetan language family which is as old as the Indo-European family.
The biggest member of this family are the various Chinese languages and dialects,
but it doesn’t mean that Tibetan is intelligible with Chinese.
Their paths split 6 thousand years ago
so they are as similar as English and Hindi are -
they might have some interesting cognates in their basic vocabulary but it’s not really helpful.
According to the most widespread theory,
around 6000 years ago the proto-Sino-Tibetans invented agriculture,
which really boosted their population.
They started spreading South and West -
those became the TIbeto-Burmans,
and those who remained in their original homeland -
Yellow River basin -
became Chinese.
Tibeto-Burman continued to diverge in an extremely varied landscape -
from tropical rainforests where we find languages like Burmese,
to the highest mountains in the world with Tibetic.
The Tibetan plateau was inhabited for millennia
but the first centralised state or even empire
was established by Songtsen Gampo in the 7th century.
He wanted Tibet to become a big player alongside China or India,
and for that he needed to tick out the checklist of the Greatest Empires club:
a large territory - that's a tick;
a centralised religion -
after considering Chinese and Indian buddhism, he went for the Indian version,
probably influenced by his Nepalese wife;
and a writing system,
and since he already was sending scholars to India to study buddhism
he also ordered them to bring the writing system from there as well -
why do the trip twice after all?
Songtsen Gampo achieved his goal of making Tibet great -
and great it was, as Tibet even defeated China in battles
and Songtsen Gampo took a Chinese princess as his wife.
However, after his death Tibet slowly and painfully broke apart
and entered an endless cycle of feudal struggle between various regional kings,
so the Tibetan empire was never great again.
With the empire becoming more and more decentralised
Tibetic languages also started to diverge and break apart,
but some other things remained and grew in importance -
Tibetan buddhism became a major influence in the region
and was even at some point the main religion the Mongol empire,
and still people all over the globe come to listen to Dalai Lama.
And of course the Old or Classical Tibetan, which remains the language of Tibetan buddhism
and the literary language of Tibet to this day.
Another thing you can do today is joining my Patreon and vote for the next language.
And also see new videos before everybody else.
Isn't that amazing?
Spoken Tibetan varies throughout region,
for example Amdo is not even tonal while Central and Khams are.
Central and Khams are generally more similar to each other,
it is said that they have 86% mutual intelligibility,
though I don’t know how the linguists came up with such a precise number,
while Amdo and the two others have 75% mutual intelligibility.
So Khams and Central Tibetan speaker might even be able to understand each other,
but usually won’t understand an Amdo Tibetan speaker.
Amdo preserved more features from the Old Tibetan,
for example Old Tibetan also didn’t have tones.
The written language though is the same for all of them
and is based on Old Tibetan -
yes, that same language from when the writing system was created.
It was adopted from the Gupta script in the seventh century,
by a legendary minister Thon-mi Sambhota.
The most mind-boggling thing is that
since the creation of the script the orthography hasn’t changed much,
making Tibetan the language with the oldest orthography rules.
Imagine then how much the language changed since that time,
so whatever is written, you can know for sure
that it would be read completely differently.
This complication though has a benefit -
speakers of Tibetan are able to read ancient texts without much issues,
Tibetan script was adopted from an Indian script,
so like most of Indian scripts, it’s an abugida.
If you stare at Tibetan for a long time you could even start seeing glimpses of Devanagari.
In Tibetan there are 30 symbols for 30 consonants
which are organised into 7 groups with 4 consonants in each (and 2 in the last).
The letters in each group are organised with a mathematical precision:
the first sound is unvocalised [ka],
the second is unvocalised aspirated [kha],
the third - vocalised [ga],
and the last - nasalised [nga].
This perfect maths only works for the first five groups though.
I pronounce the sound “a” after the consonant sounds
because each consonant inherently contains the “a” with it.
To modify a vowel we need to add special symbol
to get any of the additional 4 vowel sounds [ki], [ku], [ke] or [ko].
The last consonant actually contains the vowel sound only,
so it’s pronounced just [a] by default.
I mean, if you ever encountered an abugida, this is all pretty straightforward for you,
you know how it works.
The complicated thing begins, when, for example
to say “hello” - “tashi delek”
(which by the way means “auspicious goodness”,
and that’s an amazing way to greet people in my opinion) -
so to sat “tashi delek”
you write “བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས bkra shis bde legs”.
Yeah, that’s what happens, when you use a writing system from the 7th century.
But to explain the logic behind this,
first let’s see how to form syllables in Tibetan.
You see, the syllables in Indic languages have mostly a consonant + vowel structure,
there are consonants clusters, but they are not that prevalent.
So an abugida,
where each symbol is a consonant + vowel syllable
makes perfect sense to them.
But Tibetan is all about consonant clusters
and it is not that uncommon to see a syllable structure like
consonant + consonant + consonant + vowel + consonant + consonant.
To adequately represent that with an abugida
Tibetans invented smashing or stacking letters together
on both horizontal and vertical planes, like crosswords.
One syllable can contain up to 8 symbols:
the prefix, which comes the first,
then the superscript on top of the root letter,
then the root letter itself,
the subscript under it,
and the vowel symbol under that,
then we move left where we can put the suffix,
then the second suffix
and finally a dot that marks the end of a syllable.
So all that makes this complex syllable [brgyugs].
But that’s Old Tibetan.
When we fast forward 14 centuries
we find that many things have merged and simplified:
the prefix, the superscript and the second suffix are not pronounced anymore,
the subscript and the suffix may or may not be pronounced,
only the root kept it’s original pronunciation,
though it also may be modified by the symbols around it.
To compensate for this simplification Tibetan has developed two tones:
high and low.
So in the alphabet table the first two columns kept the same pronunciation
but got an innate high tone,
the third column from voiced unaspirated
became unvoiced aspirated and got a low tone,
and the last column also got a low tone.
So instead of [brgyugs]
we would now read [gyuk].
By the way, all these pronunciation rules are true for Central Tibetan,
Amdo and Khams will all read this differently.
But let's now hear how modern-day Tibetans speak.
Did you hear the difference between the three Tibetan languages?
Personally, I’m not sure if I can distinguish Khams and Central Tibetan,
but Amdo does sound quite different,
has more of the consonant clusters.
What do you think?
And while you’re writing it in the comments let’s pass to the next section.
When Thonmi Sambhota travelled to India in the 7th century
he not only brought back a writing system for Tibetan,
but he also described and systematised the Tibetan grammar.
He wrote 8 treatises, out of which two remain, the first and the 6th.
These treatises are structured in the way and tradition of Sanskrit grammar books:
they are written in verses, with a predefined syllable count.
Their concept of grammar was not the same as we currently have in the West:
writing and pronunciation rules and grammar rules
are intertwined and are considered one thing.
So interestingly
the first written text in Tibetan
is about how to write a text in Tibetan.
These two surviving treatises are so crucial for the history of Tibetan language,
that the first syllables of their titles are combined to become “Sumtak”
and this literally means grammar in Tibetan.
Now let’s see a simple phrase:
Khong Bodpa red {khong phœpa ree’)
He is Tibetan - (he Tibet-person is)
Tibetan is an SOV language, the verb comes at the end.
Now when we say: Bod-la khong yodred -
He is in Tibet - (Tibet-obl he is),
what happened here:
first, Tibet is in oblique case, so it is marked by particle “la”,
and there are 6 cases in Tibetan in total,
and a particle that you need to use will depend on the sound at the end of the noun,
sometimes there are four options to pick from.
Tibetan also has an Ergative case, and I’m not gonna focus on it here,
but I explain what is ergative in details in my Basque video so check it out.
About Basque by the way, there is a theory
that in some strange way, on a very distant level,
Basque, Caucasus languages, Sino-Tibetan, Na-Dene, Burushaski and Yeniseian
all belong to the same macro-family,
so Tibetan, Basque and Navajo could be related?
Again, you can find more in my Basque and Navajo videos.
Now where was I?
Oh yeah, the example sentence.
You probably saw that instead of “red” to mean “is” we used “yodred” in this phrase.
The difference here is similar to the Spanish “ser” and “estar”,
the first defines something constant, while the other defines a temporary state.
But now we’re gonna see the most unique feature of Tibetan, watch that:
Bod-la khong ‘dug
- I saw that he is in Tibet - (Tibet-obl he is).
So what is happening here?
Tibetan has a very sophisticated evidentiality system.
In other words it grammatically marks where does the information come from.
So “yodred” means a well-established fact that is known for everyone,
and “‘dug” means that the speaker saw it with their own eyes.
There are different degrees of confidence in the information, that the speaker conveys
either the speaker saw it or heard about it, but they are not sure,
came up with it by himself and so on,
and all of this is indicated in the grammar.
Tibetan originally was a mono-syllabic language,
and it still is in some sense,
but most of its words actually have more than one syllable,
but that’s because they’re composed of smaller mono-syllabic basic words.
For example, mouth + hand = food,
fire + tip = flower,
tree + tip = fruit.
It is a very poetic way to form words,
which in my opinion corresponds to the poetic and philosophic nature of the language itself.
So there was my presentation of Tibetan, or more precisely, of the three Tibetan languages -
the Central Tibetan,
the Standard Tibetan across Tibet, the centre of Tibetan Buddhism,
Amdo, with its more conservative features,
and Khams, with Kham people renowned for their extraordinary height -
Kham men are on average 180 cm tall.
I honestly didn’t know where to put this random but rather curious fact
so I put it here, and now you know.
Thank you so much for watching, and see you in our next exploration.