Tibetan English English Tibetan Dictionary

The liberalization of political and intellectual life in China and the rise of Tibetan exile communities throughout the world have produced a resurgence of spoken and written Tibetan. These developments, together with increasing contacts between Western scholars and Tibetans, have created a widening circle of English-speakers—in government, business, academia, and elsewhere—who need to speak or write Tibetan with precision and clarity. For these people, and for others who want to communicate with Tibetans in their own language, Professor Goldstein's Dictionary will be an indispensable aid. The first scholarly English-Tibetan dictionary, as well as the only one that is semantically sensitive, this work specifies the Tibetan terms that correspond to the submeanings of a single English term. Containing roughly 16,000 main entries, most of which have multiple subentries, the Dictionary treats a total of 45,000 lexical items. Each entry includes both the written Tibetan orthography and a phonemic notation to indicate pronunciation. Grammatical features are also noted, and all examples of usage are presented with the romanticization of the written Tibetan and phonemic notation of the spoken forms. An introductory essay familiarizes users with the main features of Tibetan grammar.

Assembled by a missionary during the mid-19th century, this dictionary has an outstanding reputation. Practical and nontechnical, it offers a full sense of Tibetan words in their common usage. Each word is defined in terms of both its written and conversational usage. An English-Tibetan vocabulary offers pronunciations for hundreds of words.

Here the Tibetan words are given in alphabetical order, with their accepted sanskrit equivalents followed by the english meaning. All the technical terms are illustrated from extracts form sanskrit Buddhist and Tibetan works.