74 E. H. Walsh —Tibetan Language, Sf Recent Dictionaries. [No. 2, 
of current words and new colloquial phrases have been added in the 
present Dictionary, this has been, so to speak, incidental; the primary 
object of the Dictionary and its scope being purely literary. This is 
clearly stated in the Preface. The Dictionary owed its inception to the 
recommendation of Csoma de Koros in the preface to his Dictionary, in 
1834, that at a further date “ the Tibetan Dictionary may be much im¬ 
proved, enlarged, and illustrated by the addition of Sanskrit terms.” “ In 
the year 1889,” says Sarat Chandra Das, “ I brought these opinions of that 
original investigator to the notice of Sir Alfred Croft, K.C.I.E., the then 
Director of Public Instruction in Bengal, and explained to him the 
necessity of compiling a Tibetan-English Dictionary on the lines in¬ 
dicated by Csoma de Koros, and particularly to assist European scholars 
in the thorough exploration of the vast literature of Tibet.” This new 
matter was also based on four dictionaries of classical Tibetan which 
Rai Sarat Chandra Das brought with him from Tibet. 
The reason for the existence of these Sanskrit terms in the old 
literary Tibetan, as has been already noticed, is that all the earlier 
Tibetan literature consists of translations from Sanskrit works on the 
Buddhist religion. These early books were written in a series of triplets 
of lines. 
The centre line being generally the Sanskrit, the upper line the 
phonetic sound of the Sanskrit in Tibetan (a phonetic transliteration), 
and the bottom line the translation of the Sanskrit into Tibetan. This 
is the usual arrangement, though the Sanskrit is also sometimes the top 
line of the three. The transliterated words of the upper line are what 
form the “Sanskrit terms,” and the interest that attaches to these 
Sanskrit terms in Tibetan is that the translation then given shews what 
was held to be the meaning in the seventh century of various philoso¬ 
phical terms, whose exact meaning may have since become altered or 
uncertain. This interest, however, is purely literary and philosophical. 
In addition to these actually transliterated Sanskrit words, there 
are a number of Sanskrit synonyms. These Sanskrit equivalents, as 
is stated in the Reviser’s Preface, have been taken from one celebrated 
Sanskrit-Tibetan Dictionary, and supplemented by Pandit Satish Chan¬ 
dra Acharya Vidyabhushan, who has also in numerous instances append¬ 
ed a literal English rendering of the Sanskrit terms. 
It is difficult to estimate exactly the amount of new matter which 
the present Dictionary contains as compared with its predecessor 
Jaschke and its contemporary Desgodins. 
It contains 1353 pages as compared with 608 in Jaschke’s (Tibetan- 
English portion) and 1087 in Desgodins. Such comparison is however 
misleading, as owing to different size of type and spacing the amount of 
