78 
E. H. Walsh —Tibetan Language , fy Recent Dictionaries . [No. 2, 
will have a special value when the Standard Dictionary of Modern 
Tibetan comes to he compiled. 
Part II. 
From what has been already said, it will he seen that although the 
present Dictionary has fulfilled what it purposed to be, namely, a com¬ 
plete Dictionary of Literary Tibetan, so far as our present sources of 
knowledge go, it does not fulfil the requirements of a Standard Diction¬ 
ary of the entire language, and the Standard Dictionary of the 
Modern and Current Tibetan language has yet to be written. As 
already noted, Literary Tibetan, of which probably three-fourths of the 
present Dictionary consists, is not intelligible to the modern Tibetan. 
One might as well address the Modern Londoner in the once literary 
language of Norman French, or, for comparison with later Tibetan 
literary works, in the later but still more or less unintelligible language 
of Langland, Mandeville, or Chaucer. 
It therefore remains to see what a Dictionary of Current and Modern 
Tibetan should consist of. These requirements I propose now to 
consider. 
(1) All purely literary words and references should be excluded. 
(2) The ivords and idioms taken as the Standard Tibetan should be 
those of the language of Lhasa and Central Tibet , and all variants from 
these in other dialects should bear a distinguishing mark shewing the 
dialect to which they belong. 
On this point it is perhaps necessary to notice briefly the question 
of dialects. Even with our present knowledge of this subject, the 
number of different dialects prevalent in different parts of Tibet is very 
large, and a further acquaintance with the country would doubtless 
disclose many more. Desgodins who had himself many years’ acquaint¬ 
ance both with the dialects of the Eastern Provinces, and also those of 
Central Tibet, as spoken by the merchants who come over the Darjeeling 
Frontier, has referred to this difficulty in the Preface to his Grammar of 
Spoken Tibetan, to which I have already referred; and I cannot do 
better than translate the following extract carrying, as it does, the 
weight of his authority. “ Even if there were, as in China, a sort of 
Mandarine language known and spoken almost everywhere ! But no ; 
every country has its dialect or its particular patois. All that one can 
affirm is that the dialects of the two Eastern Provinces, Khams and D, 
have sufficient affinity between themselves ; while they differ considerably 
from those of the Western Provinces, Tsang and Ngari. These differences 
are sufficiently great for an inhabitant of Tashilhunpo who arrives for 
the first time at Bathang or Tachienlu to be obliged to take a Tibetan 
