Toponyms and Anthroponyms from Tibetan-language Newspapers of the 1950s and 1960s: Three Name Lists

Tibet was in close contact with neighbouring civilisations for all its known history. This cultural exchange tremendously impacted the religion, culture and language spoken on the Tibetan plateau. Buddhism was the most significant import, leaving a strong imprint in the Tibetan language, including many loanwords and Indic names. One of the more difficult things in the Tibetan language is naming foreign people and places beyond its semioticised cultural sphere. In past centuries, important places, such as along the Silk Road, in Mongolia, or India, received their Tibetan names. Similarly, the Indian Buddhist deities, saints and sages received Tibetan names. However, in modern times and increasingly in the mid-twentieth century, following the integration of Tibet into Communist China, Tibet and a Tibetan readership became exposed to an enormous number of Chinese and international toponyms and anthroponyms. In the Divergent Discourses project, while preparing Ground Truth transcriptions of samples of the project's newspaper corpus to train a text recognition model, we compiled a list of 1,299 anthroponyms and toponyms found in the newspapers. We discovered, perhaps not too surprisingly, that many of these proper names were rendered in multiple ways into Tibetan. This not only causes difficulties in studying or text-mining the newspaper corpus but also show the wide variety of approaches used to introduce these names into the Tibetan language. This also points to the channels through which these terms travelled, the practice of newspaper editing/translating in Tibet, and the early state of minority language policies in the PRC of the 1950s and 1960s. The three files in this release contain three lists bringing together Tibetan and foreign anthroponyms and foreign toponyms alongside their original, English and Chinese forms.

•    Diverge Tibetan Anthroponyms v1 contains 96 Tibetan names with their corresponding Chinese (including some variants) and English forms. Different from the other list, these names do not denote historical persons.
•    Diverge Foreign Anthroponyms v1 contains 416 foreign person names in Tibetan with their original and Chinese forms.
•    Diverge Foreign Toponyms v1 contains 787 foreign place names in Tibetan with their original and Chinese forms.

Occasionally, links to corresponding entries in the Integrated Authority File are added.

The three files in this release contain three lists bringing together Tibetan and foreign anthroponyms and foreign toponyms alongside their original, English and Chinese forms.

The lists were compiled for the Divergent Discourses Project, which received funding from AHRC and DFG.

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Divergent-Discourses/Tibetan_places/compare/v1.0...v2.0