In a series of papers I have explored the development of the personal pronoun system in different periods of Tibetan linguistics history (Hill). In this paper, I focus on first person singular pronouns, surveying my own previous findings and filling in the picture with further gleanings from version A and (where the passage in question is missing in A) version E of the Old Tibetan Rāmāyaṇa (de Jong 1989). When the evidence of the Rāmāyaṇa is insufficient, I further consult other Dunhuang texts, the Mdzaṅs-blun, and the Vinayakṣudrakavastu (Ḥdul ba phran tshegs kyi gźi, D.6). Apart from a few Dunhuang texts, these sources are all translations or adaptations of foreign literature into Tibetan.
The use of computational methods in comparative linguistics is growing in popularity. The increasing deployment of such methods draws into focus those areas in which they remain inadequate as well as those areas where classical approaches to language comparison are untransparent and inconsistent. In this paper we illustrate specific challenges which both computational and classical approaches encounter when studying South-East Asian languages. With the help of data from the Burmish language family we point to the challenges resulting from missing annotation standards and insufficient methods for analysis and we illustrate how to tackle these problems within a computer-assisted framework in which computational approaches are used to pre-analyse the data while linguists attend to the detailed analyses.
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