Reviews

Colloquial Tibetan is a language which has evolved, and continues to evolve, more or less as other languages do. What may be called "Dharma Tibetan", that written language into which Buddhist texts were translated as they were brought from India (principally), and in which Tibetan commentaries and other treatises were written, is a much more fixed form akin to Latin.

Perhaps because of its remoteness from us, no satisfactory Classical Tibetan-English dictionary has previously existed. The relatively small number of westerners interested in reading these texts formerly had either to learn the language thoroughly themselves, or be content with Chandra Das's mixture of Classical and colloquial words, compiled a hundred years ago and revised by two capable clergymen.

Now, however, interest in these texts grows, and Erik Pema Kunsang, who has worked as both translator and interpreter for the last 25 years, publishing more than 40 books, has performed a tremendous service in distilling this work into a computerized dictionary — not only of words, but of phrases used in Classical Tibetan.

The great advantage of this format is that when one searches for a word or phrase, one finds not only the thing itself, but also an array of related phrases containing it; it is thus immediately possible to gain a good idea of the range of meanings which might be conveyed by something previously unfamiliar.

As someone learning to read and translate these texts, I welcome this powerful and unprecedented tool. The previous edition with 66,000 entries was most helpful; how much more so this new expanded version, now increased to 300,000 or more than four times the size.

David Cowey

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