[Buddha-l] Ven S Mahinda Thera:

[Christopher Fynn]

Thanks for the links - strange they didn't come up for me (at least in
the first 6 or 7 pages) on google (now all queries here bounce to
google.bt)   .

The Baptist Mission Press were the first to make a moveable metal
typeface for Tibetan letterpress printing - later another was produced
by someone at Varanasi. Before photo offset printing, options for
printing Tibetan script must have been rather limited. I can't imagine
many printers except missionaries kept cases of Tibetan type.

Unfortunately getting books from Amazon sent here to Bhutan is very costly.

"Popery" is certainly a good Baptist or Presbyterian word - and
reminds me that I once met a civil engineer who worked in Darjeeling
during that period. He told me the a Protestant school objected when
the water line they laid to it ran through the grounds of a Catholic
school and they refused to drink "papist water".  Hard to imagine that
outside of Ulster today.

Interestingly even today one can detect a difference between the
English spoken by Bengalis who went to a Catholic boarding school (a
trace of Irish) and those who attended a Protestent school (there is a
trace of Scots and Australian). Generations of Indians still go to the
Anglo-Indian schools their parents went to - and the teachers tend to
be former pupils of the same school - so, though most of the foreign
teachers are long gone, I suppose these differences get preserved and
reinforced.

Funny too how some of the now unuual words used in those days are
still current in some dialects of Indian English.

- C


On 27/05/2013, Dan Lusthaus <vasubandhu at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Chris,
>
>> BTW if anybody has access to a copy of  Kazi Dawa Samdup's
>> Tibetan-English Dictionary (Calcutta, 1919)
>
> The dictionary at archive.org is English-Tibetan, not the other way around.
>
> It was printed by the Baptist Mission Press (obviously as a useful tool for
>
> missionaries!) in Calcutta in 1919. It includes modern terminology (e.g.,
> the Tibetan for "methane") and such standard Tibetological fare as
> "Pharisee," "Pharisaical," "Pharisaism" and "Popery", as well as more than a
>
> few English words I would have to look up in an English-English dictionary
> to discover their meaning (e.g., "Poltroon," "Pomade"). It identifies Lama
> Samdup as "Head Master, Sikkim State Bhutia Boarding School, Gangtok." The
> intro, while focused on the history of the dictionary project, does give
> some indications of whom he consulted, etc. over the years. On the title
> page his name is given as Lama Dawasamdup Kazi; he signs off his Intro as
> Dousamdup.
>
> You may find additional bio information on him in Paul Hackett's _Theos
> Bernard, the White Lama: Tibet, Yoga, and American Religious Life_, which
> chronicles the romantic embrace of Tibet in the West as engineered by people
>
> like Bernard.
> http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-15886-2/white-lama
> or
> (cheaper at amazon)
> http://tinyurl.com/o3ywwt7
>
> Dan
>
>
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