A Rule-based Part-of-speech Tagger for Classical Tibetan

This paper reports on the development of a rule-based part-of-speech tagger for Classical Tibetan. Far from being an obscure tool of minor utility to scholars, the rule-based tagger is a key component of a larger initiative aimed at radically transforming the practice of Tibetan linguistics through the application of corpus and computational methods

Tibetan √lan ‘reply’

Recognizing the parallelism between the conjugation of a verb such as √lug 'pour' (pres. ldug, past blugs, fut. blug, imp. lhugs 'pour' and a verb such as √kru 'wash' (ḥkhrud, bkrus, bkru, khrus), Li Fang-Kuei suggests deriving the present stem ldug from a reconstruction *ḥlug (1933: 149). In this sub-case of Conrady's law, the change of *ḥl to ld- may be analyzed into the following changes: *ḥl > *ḥdl > *ḥld > ld (cf. Conrady 1896: 59, Li 1933: 149, Hill 2011: 446-447, Hill 2013: 193-195). This sound change obscures the synchronic relationship between verb forms beginning with ld- and other present formations, and the resultant synchronic opacity gives rise to analogical forms (e.g. the alternate present blug). Consequently, the dictionaries present a certain level of confusion about the paradigms of lateral initial verbs

The contribution of corpus linguistics to lexicography and the future of Tibetan dictionaries

The first alphabetized dictionary of Tibetan appeared in 1829 (cf. Bray 2008) and the intervening 184 years have witnessed the publication of scores of other Tibetan dictionaries (cf. Simon 1964). Hundreds of Tibetan dictionaries are now available; these include bilin gual dictionaries, both to and from such languages as English, French, German, Latin, Japanese, etc. and specialized dictionaries focusing on medicine, plants, dialects, archaic terms, neologisms, etc. (cf. Walter 2006, McGrath 2008). However, if one classifies Tibetan dictionaries by the methods of their compilation the accomplishments of Tibetan lexicography are less impressive. Methodologies of dictionary compilation divide heuristically into three types. First, some dictionaries lack explicit methodology; these works assemble words in an ad hoc manner and illustrate them with invented examples. Second, there are dictionaries that are compiled over very long periods of time on the basis of collections of slips recording attestations of words as used in context. Third, more recent dictionaries are compiled on the basis of electronic text corpora, which are processed computationally to aid in the precision, consistency and speed of dictionary compilation. These methods may be called respectively the 'informal method', the 'traditional method', and the 'modern method'. The overwhelming majority of Tibetan dictionaries were compiled with the informal method. Only five Tibetan dictionaries use the traditional methodology. No Tibetan dictionary yet compiled makes use of the modern method

A Rule-based Part-of-speech Tagger for Classical Tibetan

This paper reports on the development of a rule-based part-of-speech tagger for Classical Tibetan. Far from being an obscure tool of minor utility to scholars, the rule-based tagger is a key component of a larger initiative aimed at radically transforming the practice of Tibetan linguistics through the application of corpus and computational methods