Introduction (to Special Issue on Tibetan Natural Language Processing)

This introduction surveys research on Tibetan NLP, both in China and in the West, as well as contextualizing the articles contained in the special issue

sGra sbyor bam po gnyis pa, raný sanskrtsko-tibetský glosář buddhistických termínů.

This thesis is concerned with the royal translation project during the early period of the transmission of Buddhism to Tibet. This period is remarkable for both the amount of translated literature and for the high level of standardization. One of the tools for the centralization of translation, the normative treatise sGra sbyor bam po gnyis pa, is the main topic of this thesis. This treatise provides fixed Tibetan equivalents of more than four hundred Sanskrit terms based on their grammatical and hermeneutical explanations. The first fourteen terms will be translated here to shed light on the approaches the Tibetan translators employed in fixing Tibetan terminology. It will be shown that the creators of the normative terminology firmly and creatively based themselves on the earlier Indian Buddhist hermeneutical and grammatical tradition with the intention of producing meaningful Tibetan translations that are firmly grounded in doctrinal considerations. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)Tato bakalářská práce se zabývá císařským překladatelským projektem v raném období transmise buddhismu do Tibetu. Toto období je pozoruhodné jak množstvím přeložené literatury, tak vysokou úrovní standardizace. Jeden z nástrojů centralizace překladu, normativní dílo sGra sbyor bam po gnyis pa, je hlavním tématem této práce. Toto dílo uvádí předepsané tibetské ekvivalenty více než čtyř set sanskrtských termínů na základě jejich gramatických a hermeneutických vysvětlení. Bude zde přeloženo prvních čtrnáct termínů, aby byly osvětleny přístupy, které tibetští překladatelé použili při vytváření tibetské terminologie. Bude ukázáno, že tvůrci normativní terminologie pevně a kreativně vycházeli z dřívější indické buddhistické hermeneutické a gramatické tradice se záměrem vytvořit smysluplné tibetské překlady, které by byly pevně zakotveny v doktrinálních vysvětleních. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)Institute of Asian StudiesÚstav asijských studiíFilozofická fakultaFaculty of Art

North East Indian Linguistics 8 (NEIL 8)

This is the eighth volume of North East Indian Linguistics, a series of volumes for publishing current research on the languages of North East India, the first volume of which was published in 2008. The papers in this volume were presented at the 9th conference of the North East Indian Linguistics Society (NEILS), held at Tezpur University in February 2016. The papers for this anniversary volume continue the NEILS tradition of research by both local and international scholars on a wide range of languages and topics. This eighth volume includes papers on small community languages and large regional languages from across North East India, and present detailed phonological, semantic and morphosyntactic studies of structures that are characteristic of particular languages or language groups alongside sociolinguistic studies that explore language attitudes in contexts of language shift

Smart lexicography for low-resource languages: lessons learned from Sanskrit and Tibetan

Traditional lexicography requires titanic efforts and enormous resources. For many languages, such resources have never been available. As a result, they have received only limited lexicographic coverage. Today, these languages can take advantage of many of the same digital tools and strategies that have simplified and expedited dictionary-making for mainstream languages. However, the resource gap remains evident even in the digital era, with basic corpus processing tasks that lie at the foundation of contemporary ‘smart lexicography’ still constituting a challenge for many under-resourced languages. Drawing on my own experience in Sanskrit and Tibetan lexicography, this paper aims to offer some guidance as to the advantages and limitations of the application of smart lexicography to under-resourced languages. In particular, this paper suggests that in order to optimize resources, it may be advisable to prioritize high-quality lexical annotation of the corpus over highly curated dictionary entries, and to let digital tools take care of the lexicographic representation of the annotated linguistic information

Elevation as a category of grammar: Sanzhi Dargwa and beyond

Nakh-Daghestanian languages have encountered growing interest from typologists and linguists from other subdiscplines, and more and more languages from the Nakh-Daghestanian language family are being studied. This paper provides a grammatical overview of the hitherto undescribed Sanzhi Dargwa language, followed by a detailed analysis of the grammaticalized expression of spatial elevation in Sanzhi. Spatial elevation, a topic that has not received substantial attention in Caucasian linguistics, manifests itself across different parts of speech in Sanzhi Dargwa and related languages. In Sanzhi, elevation is a deictic category in partial opposition with participant-oriented deixis/horizontally-oriented directional deixis. This paper treats the spatial uses of demonstratives, spatial preverbs and spatial cases that express elevation as well as the semantic extension of this spatial category into other, non-spatial domains. It further compares the Sanzhi data to other Caucasian and non-Caucasian languages and makes suggestions for investigating elevation as a subcategory within a broader category of topographical deixis

Methods in Contemporary Linguistics

The present volume is a broad overview of methods and methodologies in linguistics, illustrated with examples from concrete research. It collects insights gained from a broad range of linguistic sub-disciplines, ranging from core disciplines to topics in cross-linguistic and language-internal diversity or to contributions towards language, space and society. Given its critical and innovative nature, the volume is a valuable source for students and researchers of a broad range of linguistic interests