English-Tibetan Dictionary of Modern Tibetan

The liberalization of political and intellectual life in China and the rise of Tibetan exile communities throughout the world have produced a resurgence of spoken and written Tibetan. These developments, together with increasing contacts between Western scholars and Tibetans, have created a widening circle of English-speakers—in government, business, academia, and elsewhere—who need to speak or write Tibetan with precision and clarity. For these people, and for others who want to communicate with Tibetans in their own language, Professor Goldstein's Dictionary will be an indispensable aid.

The first scholarly English-Tibetan dictionary, as well as the only one that is semantically sensitive, this work specifies the Tibetan terms that correspond to the submeanings of a single English term. Containing roughly 16,000 main entries, most of which have multiple subentries, the Dictionary treats a total of 45,000 lexical items. Each entry includes both the written Tibetan orthography and a phonemic notation to indicate pronunciation. Grammatical features are also noted, and all examples of usage are presented with the romanticization of the written Tibetan and phonemic notation of the spoken forms. An introductory essay familiarizes users with the main features of Tibetan grammar.


The liberalization of political and intellectual life in China and the rise of Tibetan exile communities throughout the world have produced a resurgence of spoken and written Tibetan. These developments, together with increasing contacts between Western s