The Verb "Red"

I remember telling a close (Tibetan) friend that I think the verb red is really amazing, upon which he burst into laughter and told me, “Of course, without red we couldn’t express even the simplest sentences.” It is true that without an existential verb it would be hard, or at least, awkward to voice what we want. But what I meant is that I was impressed at the modern/colloquial flavor that could be introduce to a sentence or entire piece of writing by using red instead of yin. The verb yin has this sense of the text being static, ancient, impersonal. On the other hand, for me at least, red gives me a sense of the writing being more “alive” and the authors more present. This is because the we are able to distinguish first person from second and third persons by using red and yin instead of just yin across the board. At any rate, I think it fair to say that this is just one of the features by which we can distinguish classical and modern writing. It would be fascinating to find the first instances of the usage of red! I wonder how recent it emerged. I did a quick TBRC word search for red and, needless to say, it turned up thousands of texts. There’s no way to arrange according to date (and of course, with the amount of modern republishing, the publishing date is not indicative of the composition date) so I thought I’d look under the genre and subjects subheadings. There was no “canon” genre listed so it would seem that there isn’t a single instance the verb red in the bka’ ’gyur or bstan ’gyur. Perhaps this is not such a revelation but certainly something interesting to consider.   

In a similar vein of explicitly distinguishing persons, I would suggest that an increased usage of pronouns is a defining feature of modern Tibetan. I say this because in some of the fiction I have read (Pema Tseden’s grong khyer gyi ’tsho ba in particular comes to mind) each sentence has the pronoun explicitly written in the same way that an English sentence requires a subject. This stands in stark contrast to classical texts (sutra literature is the first thing that comes to mind) in which the only thing that tells us who is speaking is not a pronoun or verb but simply the context. We always say, “Tibetan sentences don’t require a subject” but I would say they do require one—it’s just that in classical (perhaps to save paper and other materials) there is a tendency to make the subject implicit. There is indeed a significant difference between a implicit subject and a lack of one. I would then wonder if the explicit use of pronouns in modern literary Tibetan is not a result of the modern world (i.e., revolution in printing and publishing) in general and the influence of Chinese (and perhaps, to a lesser extent, English).

Of course, the main critique of this suggestion is that we have to be wary of genre. A modern novel is necessarily going to feature a plethora pronouns compared to a meditation manual. To pit two such divergent types of literature against each other does not make for a fair comparison. It would be more appropriate to compare some legends like the tales of gling ge sar with modern fiction. At any rate, the presence/absence of pronouns relative to the date of the text is something I am going to keep in the back of my mind as I read and encourage others to do the same.