Róna-Tas А. Tibeto-Mongolica: the Tibetan loanwords of Monguor and the development of the archaic Tibetan dialects

The Hague: Mouton, 1966. — 232 р.Loan words are considered very valuable evidence in the diachronic study of languages. The Germanic loan words in Finnish, for example, provide us with a check on important details of the linguistic reconstruction of Germanic as well as of the probable phonetic structure of Pro to-Finnic.'
In his Tibcto-Mongolica Dr. Rona-Tas tries to elucidate the history- of Tibetan with the aid of the numerous Tibetan loan words occurring in Monguor, the Mongol language spoken in Kansu. The Tibetan literary' language is much older than our records of Mongolian, and material for its study is very rich. Some scholars have regarded written Tibetan as an artificial language, and this might be true in so far as many of its terms and expressions have been coined by the translators in order to render Buddhist Sanskrit terms and expressions and would often be difficult or even impossible to understand with no knowledge of their Sanskrit models. On the other hand, our knowledge of Tibetan dialects is far from sufficient and much of the linguistic material available has been as sembled by non-specialists and often published in less reliable form.