Acknowledgements
The book offered herewith to the reader is a fruit that has ripened over many years with support from numerous individuals and institutions. The undertaking would not have been possible without the financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. A considerable part of the research has been completed within the granted project “Old Tibetan Annals: A Comprehensive Text Grammar” (BI 1953/1–1; BI 1953/1–2) hosted by the Central Asian Seminar at the Department of Asian and African Studies (Humboldt-Universität, Berlin) in the years 2017–2020 and 2020–2022.
Old Tibetan Documents Online (OTDO), International Dunhuang Project (IDP), Gallica, the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC), and Resources for Kanjur and Tanjur Studies (rKTs) have provided substantial technical aid for most of my research. I want to take this opportunity to thank all the institutions and people involved in developing and making these devices openly accessible. Without them, in-depth investigations in many areas of Tibetan Studies would remain beyond the bounds of possibility.
I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Prof. Dr. Jürgen Hanneder (Philipps Universität, Marburg), who offered his guidance through the habilitation process at the Foreign Languages and Cultures Department (Philipps Universität, Marburg) for which an earlier version of the book was submitted in 2022. Critical comments and remarks expressed in the official reviews by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Hanneder (Philipps Universität, Marburg), Prof. Dr. Nathan W. Hill (Trinity College Dublin), and Prof. Dr. Guillaume Jacques (CNRS-CRLAO, EPHE, Inalco) helped improve many of the topics that were not yet satisfactorily elucidated in my habilitation. I wish to thank them for their commitment and patience with the reviewing process and the following fruitful exchange that has led to correcting or refining my arguments.
The book includes digital images and photos protected by copyrights, which enrich the language documentation at the graphical level. For consent to use the images, I wish to thank Harry Falk and Oliver Hellwig, the developers of IndoSkript, Bibliothèque nationale de France, the British Library, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Preußischer Kulturbesitz Orientabteilung, and Oxford University Press, specifically for the permission to use images of the Siddhamātṛkā (S) letters reproduced in Salomon (1998).
This first attempt at a comprehensive description of Old Literary Tibetan, the language of documents composed in the Tibetan Empire, benefitted from exchanges with scholars and colleagues, to whom I would like to express my deepest gratitude in this place (ordered alphabetically): Bianca Horlemann, Toni Huber, Gwendolyn Hyslop, Kazushi Iwao, Petra Maurer, Johannes Schneider, Hiroyuki Suzuki, Nicolas Tournadre, Alice Travers, and Bettina Zeisler. I thank them for engaging discussions, their invaluable advice, generosity in sharing data, and readiness to help with the interpretation. I have tried to implement their advice and apologise for instances where the book has suffered from my reluctance to follow it. My further thanks go to my student assistants, Tom Heumann and Amrei Vogel, who helped me bring order into the chaos of primary linguistic data. Lastly, I would like to thank Mareike Wulff for kindly providing the cover photo.
I gratefully acknowledge the cooperation with the editors of the Brill series Languages of Asia who consented to publish my book in their series upon the invitation of the late Prof. Alexander Vovin.