Old Tibetan documents are the oldest extant monuments of the Tibetan language. Their exploration, although successfully flourishing in the last two decades, has been considerably impeded by often unintelligible and obsolete vocabulary that was bound to the particular cultural and political context of the Tibetan Empire that collapsed in the 840s CE. The present publication aims at clarifying a part of this vocabulary by examining nearly 400 Old Tibetan compounds. In Part I an attempt has been undertaken to define a compound and to provide the first linguistic classification of Old Tibetan compounds. Part II concentrates on a lexicological analysis of the compounds and strives to explain their etymology, word-formation, and usage in Old Tibetan. Contents of Volume 1: Introduction, Indices, References, Part I: Compounding in Old Tibetan, Part II: Old Tibetan Compounds. Lexicological Analysis. Lexemes 1-119

Old Tibetan documents are the oldest extant monuments of the Tibetan language. Their exploration, although successfully flourishing in the last two decades, has been considerably impeded by often unintelligible and obsolete vocabulary that was bound to the particular cultural and political context of the Tibetan Empire that collapsed in the 840s CE. The present publication aims at clarifying a part of this vocabulary by examining nearly 400 Old Tibetan compounds. In Part I an attempt has been undertaken to define a compound and to provide the first linguistic classification of Old Tibetan compounds. Part II concentrates on a lexicological analysis of the compounds and strives to explain their etymology, word-formation, and usage in Old Tibetan. Contents of Volume 1: Part II: Old Tibetan Compounds. Lexicological Analysis. Lexemes 120-394

Among Asian languages, Tibetan is second only to Chinese in the depth of its historical record, with texts dating back as far as the eighth and ninth centuries, written in an alphabetic script that preserves the contemporaneous phonological features of the language. The Classical Tibetan Language is the first comprehensive description of the Tibetan language and is distinctive in that it treats the classical Tibetan language on its own terms rather than by means of descriptive categories appropriate to other languages, as has traditionally been the case. Beyer presents the language as a medium of literary expression with great range, power, subtlety, and humor, not as an abstract object. He also deals comprehensively with a wide variety of linguistic phenomena as they are actually encountered in the classical texts, with numerous examples of idioms, common locutions, translation devices, neologisms, and dialectal variations.

This book presents a comprehensive review of theoretical work on the linguistics and psycholinguistics of compound words and combines it with a series of surveys of compounding in a variety of languages from a wide range of language families. Compounding is an effective way to create and express new meanings. Compound words are segmentable into their constituents so that new items can often be understood on first presentation. However, as keystone, keynote, and keyboard, and breadboard, sandwich-board, and mortarboard show, the relation between components is often far from straightforward. The question then arises, as to how far compound sequences are analysed at each encounter and how far they are stored in the brain as single lexical items? The nature and processing of compounds thus offer an unusually direct route to how language operates in the mind, as well as providing the means of investigating important aspects of morphology, and lexical semantics, and insights to child language acquisition and the organization of the mental lexicon. This book is the first to report on the state of the art on these and other central topics, including the classification and typology of compounds, and cross-linguistic research on the subject in different frameworks and from synchronic and diachronic perspectives.