Commentaries on the first Tibetan grammatical treatises “Sum cu pa” and “Rtags kyi ‘jug pa”

Abstract

The article describes establishment and development of the tradition of compiling commentaries on the Tibetan grammatical treatises. The compilation of commentaries is a special feature of many ancient and medieval linguistic traditions — Indian, Chinese, Tibetan etc. The Tibetan tradition of compiling commentaries on the grammatical literature began its development after the creation of the first main grammatical treatises “Sum cu pa” and “Rtags kyi ‘jug pa” attributed to Thon mi Sambhoa. The necessity of making commentaries stems from the briefness and complexity of the first grammatical treatises. One of the earliest surviving grammatical texts, written in the same vein as the first treatises, is a fragment of Blo ldan shes rab’s work (1059–1109). The number of commentaries, developing the tradition of the first grammatical treatises, continues to increase. The article deals with the most important Tibetan commentaries; describes different types and styles of commentaries — annotational commentary (mchan ‘grel), commentary on difficult points (dka’ ‘grel/ bka’ gnad ‘grel), commentary that gets the inner meaning (don ‘grel), word for word commentary (tshig ‘grel/ ‘bru ‘grel). Commentaries on the first grammatical treatises are regarded as works, consisting of two and more texts (main text and commentaries). The article deals with the structure and content of the Tibetan grammars “Sum cu pa” and “Rtags kyi ‘jug pa”; compares structural features of the first grammatical treatises and their most important commentaries; describes commenting techniques.

Keywords:

the history of linguistics, the Tibetan language, the Tibetan linguistic tradition, Tibetan grammatical commentaries