Tibetan Newspaper Yul Phyogs So So ’i Gsar’ Gyur Me Lons As New Impetus In Tibetan Literary Writing And Modernization Of Tibetan Language

Yul phyogs so so’i gsar ’gyur me long (literally "The Mirror of News from Various Countries" or, as it was called by its editor, "The Tibet Mirror") is one of the first periodicals in the Tibetan language. The Tibet Mirror was published in Kalimpong, West Bengal, India, during 38 years by the remarkable Tibetan religious and public leader Dorje Tharchin, who has played an important role in the political and cultural history of Tibet and has significantly contributed to the development and modernization of his native land and people. Apart from being an interesting prolific resource for studying political, economic and cultural history of Tibet, China and India in the period dating from 1925 to 1963, Yul phyogs so so’i gsar ’gyur me long also presents the first example of the Tibetan mass media established by a Tibetan editor. This periodical contains first pieces of modern Tibetan writing which determined a future development of the new Tibetan literary genres and contributed to the introduction of modern political and economic terminology and new grammatical and lexical features in the Tibetan language.The objective of present paper is defining the role of Yul phyogs so so’i gsar ’gyur me long in the process of modernization of the Tibetan language and exploring the newspaper’s input on the Tibetan literary activity through an analysis of the specific features brought to the Tibetan literary language by the newly introduced publicistic functional style.The main body of thesis paper consists of three chapters, each of which includes several sections. The chapters are arranged according to the following research plan tasks:1. distinguishing the main stages in the history of the Tibetan language; providing a brief description of the classical Tibetan literature genres; examining the newspapers published in the Tibetan language prior to the establishment of Yul phyogs so so’i gsar ’gyur me long and simultaneously with it;2. presenting the history of publication of Yul phyogs so so’i gsar ’gyur me long and characterizing the corpus of extant issues available for access;3. analyzing the inner structure of newspaper genres pertaining to the publicistic literary style and completing a correlation of functional features of the publicistic style at different levels of the language system in the first six issues of Yul phyogs so so’i gsar’gyur me long (dated from 1925 to 1926).The paper has four appendixes that contain information regarding the location and current conditions of the remaining issues of Yul phyogs so so’i gsar’gyur me long, an annotated table of contents of the first six issues of the periodical published during the first year of the newspaper publication, photocopies of these issues, the Tibetan text and the English translation of the selected samples from these issues.The actual value of the thesis paper is explained by the fact that the materials for a research on Yul phyogs so so’i gsar’gyur me long have become accessible for scholars just recently-after about 65.5% of the newspaper issues were published in a digital form on the Columbia University library website1 in May,2009 and, in fact, remain still largely unexplored by tibetologists throughout the world. This thesis paper may be applied later for a more detailed and comprehensive research on The Tibet Mirror publications and further exploration of the spelling, vocabulary and grammar peculiarities of the Tibetan language (which at that time was going through a transition from a Classical stage to his Modern standard), as well as the study of the process of development of new functional styles and genres of the Tibetan literary writing.