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Tibetic Languages
The Tibetic languages form a well-defined group of languages descended from Old Tibetan (7th to 9th centuries).Tournadre, Nicolas. 2014. "The Tibetic languages and their classification." In ''Trans-Himalayan linguistics, historical and descriptive linguistics of the Himalayan area''. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. According to Tournadre (2014), there are 50 languages, which split into over 200 dialects or could be grouped into 8 dialect continua. These languages are spoken in the Tibetan Plateau and in the Himalayas in Gilgit-Baltistan, Aksai Chin, Ladakh, Nepal, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Bhutan. Classical Tibetan is the major literary language, particularly for its use in Buddhist literature. Tibetan languages are spoken by some 6 million people, not all of whom are Tibetans.preprint With the worldwide spread of Tibetan Buddhism, the Tibetan language has spread into the western world and can be found in many Buddhist publications and prayer materials; with som ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tibetan People
The Tibetan people (; ) are an East Asian ethnic group native to Tibet. Their current population is estimated to be around 6.7 million. In addition to the majority living in Tibet Autonomous Region of China, significant numbers of Tibetans live in the Chinese provinces of Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan, and Yunnan, as well as in India, Nepal, and Bhutan. Tibetan languages belong to the Tibeto-Burman language group. The traditional or mythological explanation of the Tibetan people's origin is that they are the descendants of the human Pha Trelgen Changchup Sempa and rock ogress Ma Drag Sinmo. It is thought that most of the Tibeto-Burman speakers in Southwest China, including Tibetans, are direct descendants from the ancient Qiang people. Most Tibetans practice Tibetan Buddhism, although some observe the indigenous Bon religion and there is a small Muslim minority. Tibetan Buddhism influences Tibetan art, drama and architecture, while the harsh geography of Tibet has produced an adap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bodish Languages
Bodish, named for the Tibetan ethnonym ''Bod'', is a proposed grouping consisting of the Tibetic languages and associated Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Tibet, North India, Nepal, Bhutan, and North Pakistan. It has not been demonstrated that all these languages form a clade, characterized by shared innovations, within Sino-Tibetan. Shafer, who coined the term "Bodish", used it for two different levels in his classification, called "section" and "branch" respectively: * Bodish ** Bodish *** West Bodish *** Central Bodish *** South Bodish *** East Bodish ** Gurung ( Tamangic) ** Tshangla ** Rgyalrongic It is now generally accepted that the languages Shafer placed in the first three subgroups are all descended from Old Tibetan, and should be combined as a Tibetic subgroup, with the East Bodish languages as a sister subgroup. More recent classifications omit Rgyalrongic, which is considered a separate branch of Sino-Tibetan. Bradley (1997) also defined a broad "Bodish" gr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Baltistan
Baltistan ( ur, ; bft, སྦལ་ཏི་སྟཱན, script=Tibt), also known as Baltiyul or Little Tibet ( bft, སྦལ་ཏི་ཡུལ་།, script=Tibt), is a mountainous region in the Pakistani-administered territory of Gilgit–Baltistan. It is located near the Karakoram (south of K2) and borders Gilgit to the west, China's Xinjiang to the north, Indian-administered Ladakh to the southeast, and the Indian-administered Kashmir Valley to the southwest. The average altitude of the region is over . Baltistan is largely administered under the Baltistan Division. Prior to the partition of British India in 1947, Baltistan was part of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, having been conquered by Gulab Singh's armies in 1840. Baltistan and Ladakh were administered jointly under one ''wazarat'' (district) of the state. The region retained its identity in this setup as the Skardu ''tehsil'', with Kargil and Leh being the other two ''tehsils'' of the district. A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Himalayas
The Himalayas, or Himalaya (; ; ), is a mountain range in Asia, separating the plains of the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau. The range has some of the planet's highest peaks, including the very highest, Mount Everest. Over 100 peaks exceeding in elevation lie in the Himalayas. By contrast, the highest peak outside Asia (Aconcagua, in the Andes) is tall. The Himalayas abut or cross five countries: Bhutan, India, Nepal, China, and Pakistan. The sovereignty of the range in the Kashmir region is disputed among India, Pakistan, and China. The Himalayan range is bordered on the northwest by the Karakoram and Hindu Kush ranges, on the north by the Tibetan Plateau, and on the south by the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Some of the world's major rivers, the Indus, the Ganges, and the Tsangpo–Brahmaputra, rise in the vicinity of the Himalayas, and their combined drainage basin is home to some 600 million people; 53 million people live in the Himalayas. The Himalayas have ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tibetan Plateau
The Tibetan Plateau (, also known as the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau or the Qing–Zang Plateau () or as the Himalayan Plateau in India, is a vast elevated plateau located at the intersection of Central, South and East Asia covering most of the Tibet Autonomous Region, most of Qinghai, western half of Sichuan, Southern Gansu provinces in Western China, southern Xinjiang, Bhutan, the Indian regions of Ladakh and Lahaul and Spiti (Himachal Pradesh) as well as Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan, northwestern Nepal, eastern Tajikistan and southern Kyrgyzstan. It stretches approximately north to south and east to west. It is the world's highest and largest plateau above sea level, with an area of (about five times the size of Metropolitan France). With an average elevation exceeding and being surrounded by imposing mountain ranges that harbor the world's two highest summits, Mount Everest and K2, the Tibetan Plateau is often referred to as "the Roof of the World". The Tibetan Plateau ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dialect Continuum
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of Variety (linguistics), language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties may not be. This is a typical occurrence with widely spread languages and language families around the world, when these languages did not spread recently. Some prominent examples include the Indo-Aryan languages across large parts of India, varieties of Arabic across north Africa and southwest Asia, the Turkic languages, the Varieties of Chinese, Chinese languages or dialects, and subgroups of the Romance languages, Romance, Germanic languages, Germanic and Slavic languages, Slavic families in Europe. Leonard Bloomfield used the name dialect area. Charles F. Hockett used the term L-complex. Dialect continua typically occur in long-settled agrarian populations, as innovations spread from t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lahuli–Spiti Languages
The Lahuli–Spiti languages are a subgroup of the Tibetic languages spoken in the Lahaul and Spiti region of Himachal Pradesh, India, belonging to the South-Western group of Tibetic languages, earlier classified as Western Innovative Tibetan. They are more closely related to Standard Tibetan than to the neighboring Ladakhi–Balti languages spoken further north. According to Tournadre (2014),Nicolas Tournadre. 2014. The Tibetic languages and their classification. In Nathan W. Hill and Thomas Owen-Smith (eds.), Trans-Himalayan Linguistics: Historical and Descriptive Linguistics of the Himalayan Area, 105–129. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. the Lahuli–Spiti languages include: * Lahuli (Stod Bhoti) *Spiti * Nyamkat *Bhoti Kinnauri Bhoti Kinnauri (or Nyamkat, or the Nyam language) is a Tibetic language spoken in the Lahaul and Spiti region of Himachal Pradesh, India. It forms a closely knit group with other Lahuli–Spiti languages, and is fairly close to Standard Tibetan .. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ladakhi–Balti Languages
The Ladakhi–Balti languages (ལ་དྭགས་དང་སྦལ་ཏི་སྐད)or Western Archaic Tibetan languages are a subgroup of the Tibetic languages spoken in the Ladakh region of India and in the Gilgit-Baltistan territory of Pakistan. The Ladakhi, Zangskari, Changthang skat is easily mutually intelligible to each other. The Purgi language is intermediate between Balti language and the Ladakhi language and the Purgi language is intelligible to both Ladakhi and Balti speakers. The Purgi language and the Shamskat are very close to each other among these language groups. However, the Ladakhi and Balti languages are slightly lesser intelligible to each other because of the accent, however the vocabulary is the same among these two languages. The group includes: * Ladakhi or Bauti/Bhoti (Ladakh) * Zangskari (Ladakh) * Purgi (Ladakh, Baltistan) * Balti (Baltistan, Ladakh) * Chorbat Skad (Baltistan) * Changthang (Tibet, Ladakh, Baltistan) * Skardu Skad (Baltist ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dzongkha
Dzongkha (; ) is a Sino-Tibetan language that is the official and national language of Bhutan. It is written using the Tibetan script. The word means "the language of the fortress", from ' "fortress" and ' "language". , Dzongkha had 171,080 native speakers and about 640,000 total speakers. Dzongkha is considered a South Tibetic language. It is closely related to and partially intelligible with Sikkimese, and to some other Bhutanese languages such as Chocha Ngacha, Brokpa, Brokkat and Lakha. It has a more distant relationship to Standard Tibetan. Spoken Dzongkha and Tibetan are around 50 to 80 percent mutually intelligible. Usage Dzongkha and its dialects are the native tongue of eight western districts of Bhutan (''viz.'' Wangdue Phodrang, , Thimphu, Gasa, Paro, Ha, Dagana and Chukha). There are also some native speakers near the Indian town of Kalimpong, once part of Bhutan but now in North Bengal and in Sikkim. Dzongkha was declared the national language of Bhutan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Khams Tibetan
Khams Tibetan () is the Tibetic languages, Tibetic language used by the majority of the people in Kham. Khams is one of the three branches of the traditional classification of Tibetic languages (the other two being Amdo Tibetan and Ü-Tsang). In terms of mutual intelligibility, Khams could communicate at a basic level with the Ü-Tsang branch (including Lhasa Tibetan). Both Khams Tibetan and Lhasa Tibetan evolve to not preserve the word-initial consonant clusters, which makes them very far from Classical Tibetan, especially when compared to the more Linguistic conservatism, conservative Amdo Tibetan. Also, Kham and Lhasa Tibetan evolved to be tonal language, tonal, which Classical Tibetan was not. Distribution Kham Tibetan is spoken in Kham, which is now divided between the eastern part of Tibet Autonomous Region, the southern part of Qinghai, the western part of Sichuan, and the northwestern part of Yunnan, China. Khampa Tibetan is also spoken by about 1,000 people in two encl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Amdo Tibetan
Amdo Tibetan (; also called ''Am kä'') is the Tibetic language spoken in Amdo (now mostly in Qinghai, some in Ngawa and Gannan). It has two dialects, the farmer dialect and the nomad dialect. Amdo is one of the three branches of traditional classification of Tibetic languages (the other two being Khams Tibetan and Ü-Tsang). In terms of mutual intelligibility, Amdo could not communicate even at a basic level with the Ü-Tsang branch (including Lhasa Tibetan). The nomad dialect of Amdo Tibetan is closer to classical written Tibetan as it preserves the word-initial consonant clusters and it is non- tonal, both now elided in the Ü-Tsang branch (including Lhasa Tibetan). Hence, its conservatism in phonology becomes a source of pride among Amdo Tibetans. Dialects Dialects are: *North Kokonor (Kangtsa, Themchen, Arik, etc.) *West Kokonor ( Dulan, Na'gormo, etc.), *Southeast Kokonor ( Jainca, Thrika, Hualong, etc.) *Labrang (Labrang, Luchu) *Golok (Machen, Matö, Gabde) *Ngapa ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
