J903.] E. H. Walsh —Tibetan Language, Sf Recent Dictionaries . 69 
already noted, is in scientific order ; and most important of all, 
it incorporates the colloquial and business language of the present day, 
and also differentiates between the words and idioms in use in Central 
Tibet and those peculiar to, or prevalent in the Western Dialects, with 
which the Moravian Mission was chiefly concerned. To quote from the 
preface, his studies were with the object of making a translation of the 
Bible into Tibetan, and for this purpose to ascertain “ the exact range 
of words in their ordinary and common usage ” for which purpose lie 
traced them through their consecutive historical applications till he 
“reached their last signification in their modern equivalents, as these 
are embodied in the provincial dialects of our own time;” and he 
further exemplified the usages of such words with copious illustrations 
and examples. 
Though, as has been already said, Jaschke represents the sum 
total of our knowledge of the Tibetan language up to the compilation of the 
present Dictionary, and was the ground-work on which the compiler and 
revisers of the present Dictionary framed their work, there was being 
written at the same time another Dictionary, from an entirely indepen¬ 
dent source, which the author and revisers had not seen, and were not 
acquainted with. This was the Dictionary in Tibetan, Latin, and French 
of Father Desgodins 1 published at Hongkong in 1899. 
i-jj This Dictionary was commenced in 1852 by M. Renou, the founder 
of the French Tibetan Mission, on the Chinese Frontier. When Csoma 
de Koros’ Dictionary appeared, M. Fage, one of the Mission, united in one 
manuscript the words of Csoma’s Dictionary, and also added the results 
of their own independent investigations. At the same time he altered 
the alphabetical arrangement of the words to that followed by the 
Tibetans which, as has been already alluded to, was subsequently but 
quite independently done by Jaschke in his Dictionary. In 1883 
Father Desgodins left the Chinese Frontier of Tibet and founded the 
Catholic Mission at Pedong, on the borders of Sikhim, in the Kalim- 
pong Sub-Division of Darjeeling. He then obtained a copy of Jasclike’s 
Dictionary which had been recently published, and noted all that he 
found new in Jaschke on to M. Fage’s Dictionary, as noted up to date 
by the Mission. The additional matter derived from this source is 
marked in the dictionary by a letter (J.), and it is interesting to note 
how few words or phrases bear this mark, which shews the similarity 
of the results obtained by two entirely independent sets of scholars^ 
working the one at the extreme Eastern and the other at the extreme 
Western frontiers of Tibet. 
v - «• t r . ' 
1 Dictionaire Thibetain-Latin-Frainjais, par les Missionaires Cafcholiques du 
Thibet-Honkong-Imprimerie de la Societe des Missions Etrangeres. 1899. 
