| In order to depict the lexical features of Tibet-related English, a300,000word corpus is built. The texts of this self-built Tibet-related English corpus are drawn from major Tibet-related English websites in China. A corpus-based lexical study is conducted to analyze the Tibet-related English in terms of lexical density, lexical growth rates, word length, word frequency distribution, key words (Tibet-related proper nouns). Followed are the results of this analysis:Firstly, the STTR and lexical growth rates of Tibet-related English corpus are significantly lower than that of Brown sample corpus which implies that Tibet-related English has a lower lexical density than that of Brown corpus. It is also discovered that the average word length of Tibet-related English is longer than that of Brown sample corpus.Secondly, though the similarities do exist between the two word lists, word list of Tibet-related English differs from that of sampled Brown greatly both in high frequency words and hapaxes. The high frequency words of Tibet-related English show great Tibet-related characteristics and most of the hapaxes are transliterations and transcriptions of Tibetan words.Thirdly, those key words, display strong Tibet-related features and also show that they themselves are different transliterations and transcriptions of the original Tibetan words. It is concluded that the existence of different transliteration and transcription schemes of Tibetan language, home or abroad, past or present, unavoidably give born to so many Tibet-related English words. Tibet-related English words of phonetic transcriptions have more occurrences than transcriptions rending the Tibetan scripts. And most of the geographic names are of Tibetan pinyin transcriptions. Words of Wylie transliteration are popular in Tibet-related academic studies. Some words of internationally accepted transcriptions can also be seen. |
