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 1,271 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 414 foreign person names in Tibetan with their original and Chinese forms. Diverge Foreign Toponyms v1 contains 760 foreign place names in Tibetan with their original and Chinese forms. Occasionally, links to corresponding entries in the Integrated Authority File are added.纵观已知历史，西藏始终与周边文明保持密切互动。此类跨文明交流对青藏高原的宗教、文化及本土语言产生了深远影响。佛教是其中影响最为深远的外来文化输入，其在藏语体系中留下了深刻烙印，包括大量借词与印度语源专有名称。藏语的一大译介难点，在于为其符号化文化圈层之外的外国人物与地点拟定译名。数个世纪以来，丝绸之路沿线、蒙古及印度等重要区域均被赋予了专属藏语译名；同理，印度佛教神祇、圣徒与先贤也拥有了对应的藏语名称。 及至现代，尤其是20世纪中期西藏并入中华人民共和国后，西藏地区与藏族受众接触到了海量汉语及国际地名、人名。在「分歧话语（Divergent Discourses）」项目中，为制作项目报纸语料库样本的基准真值（Ground Truth）转录文本以训练文本识别模型，我们从该语料库的报纸文本中整理出一份涵盖1271个人名与地名的列表。不出所料，我们发现其中大量专有名词在藏语中存在多种译写形式。这不仅为该报纸语料库的研究与文本挖掘工作造成了阻碍，同时也反映出将外来名称引入藏语时所采用的多元译介路径。此外，该现象还揭示了这些术语的传播渠道、西藏地区报纸编辑与翻译实践，以及20世纪50至60年代中华人民共和国早期少数民族语言政策的雏形与发展状况。 本次发布的三个文件包含三类列表，将藏语及外来人名、外国地名与其原语、英语及汉语形式进行对应整合： 《分歧藏语人名数据集v1》（Diverge Tibetan Anthroponyms v1）收录96个藏语人名，及其对应的汉语（含部分变体）与英语形式。与其余两个列表不同，此类名称均不指代历史人物。 《分歧外来人名数据集v1》（Diverge Foreign Anthroponyms v1）收录414个以藏语译写的外国人名，及其原语与汉语形式。 《分歧外来地名数据集v1》（Diverge Foreign Toponyms v1）收录760个以藏语译写的外国地名，及其原语与汉语形式。 部分条目附带了指向统一权威文件（Integrated Authority File）中对应条目的链接。