Beyer S. The Classical Tibetan Language

SUNY, 1992. — 503 p.This book is intended to describe the reading of texts in the classical Tibetan language. It is not a complete survey of all aspects of Tibetan grammar, although I have tried to include everything I thought it was important to know. It is intended to describe the READING of classical Tibetan; therefore it will not attempt to teach the reader to speak either Old Tibetan or some modern Tibetan dialect. Rather my aim has been to provide procedures for the
understanding of Text that is, coherent discourses with literary or philosophical content, whose authors used the resources of their language to convey meaning. Moreover, this book describes the reading of classical Tibetan. I have excluded from systematic consideration the modern newspaper language at one end and the language of translated Indic texts at the other. This leaves a sufficiently immense corpus of written Tibetan material for us to work from.