Tibet is a region of southerwestern China on a high plateau north of the Himalayas.https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Tibet variants or Xizang or Hsi-tsang, region of southwestern China on a high plateau (average altitude 16,000 feet, or 4877 meters) north of the Himalayas and bordering on India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Myanmar (Burma); capital Lhasa area 471,660 square miles (1,226,316 square kilometers), population 3,002,165 The first known written use of the English word Tibet dates back to 1827 CE and may have been derived from older terms in other languages similar to Mongol term Tibyet, or Töbed. The first known Chinese words Xizang and the simplified form Zang date back to time between 1591 CE (萬曆十八年) and 1592 CE (萬曆十九年) during the Ming Dynasty. The first known official use of Xizhang in Qing records dates back to 1663 CE (康熙二年).https://www.oed.com/dictionary/tibet_n The earliest known use of the noun Tibet is in the 1820s. OED's earliest evidence for Tibet is from 1827, in the writing of Walter Scott, poet and novelist. Their definitions and usage have been controversial in terms of the extent of territory being claimed.
The endonymic term is Bod (; Bö) or Ü-Tsang (དབུས་གཙང་; Wü-Tsang) for Central Tibet. The Chinese term Tǔbō or Tǔfān () was used during the Tang and Song dynasties to refer to the historical Tibetan Empire. In 1720 the Kangxi Emperor of Qing dynasty wrote an edict for the Imperial Stele Inscriptions of the Pacification of Tibet in Han, Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan languages. At that point, Xizang officially appeared, replacing other terms like Kokham (朵甘) and Ali Sankor (阿里三廓, "Nari Sugulusun" in the Yuan and Ming dynasties). The Manchu term is Wargi Dzang, and the Mongol term is Töbed. Xizang was subsequently used in all documents such as 13-Article Ordinance for the More Effective Governing of Tibet in 1751, or 29-Article Ordinance for the More Effective Governing of Tibet of 1793. Xizang has become synonymous in China with the Tibet Autonomous Region.
Names
In English The first known written use of the English adjective Tibetian is from in 1747; the first known use of the modern form, Tibetan, was in 1822. The first known written use of the proper noun was in 1827 as Thibet.Oxford English Dictionary (2nd. ed., 1989), Walter Scott The Surgeon's Daughter. The western name, is, however, much older: it was recorded in the 13th century by Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and William Rubruck, as Tebet. William Rubruck (1253) records Tebet as the name of a people, situated beyond the Tangut, and were distinctive for their customs and traditions."Post istos sunt Tebet, homines solentes comedere parentes suos defunctos, ut causa pietatis non facerent aliud sepulchrum eis nisi viscera sua." ed. Richard Hakluyt (1809), p. 101. The name Tebet appears to be a loan from an Iranian or Turkic language, perhaps Sogdian.Stein, R. A. Tibetan Civilization (1922). English edition with minor revisions in 1972 Stanford University Press, pp. 30–31. (cloth); . In 17th-century Modern Latin, Tibet is known as Tibetum (also Thibetum, Tibet, Thobbat, Tubet).Joh. Jacobi Hofmann, Lexicon Universale(1698), vol. 4, p. 431: "THIBETUM, vulgo TIBET & THOBBAT, regnum Tartariae"; s.v. muscus: "Uti Tupata est Tubet, urbs et regio notissima (ultra Chorasan) ex qua moschum optimum advehi, magnô consensu scribunt Arabes: unde in ipsam Indiam et Sinas advehitur, quorum muscus cur sit Tibethiensi deterior, docet Masudius Scriptor Arabs, apud Bochartum, his verbis: Muscus Tubetiensis Sinensi praestat duabus de causis: quarum una est, quod capreae Tubetienses pascuntur spicâ odoratâ (nardô) et aliis aromatibus, cum Sinenses capreae herbis pascantur, quae sunt inferiores herbis illis aromaticis, quibus pasci diximus Tubetienses." The ultimate origin of the name, however, remains unclear. Suggestions include derivation from Tibetan, Turkic or Chinese.
The proposed Tibetan etymology derives the term from Stod-bod (pronounced Tö-bhöt) "High/Upper Tibet" from the autonym Bod.Rockhill, William Woodville . 1900. The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253–55, Hakluyt Society, p. 151Hastings, James. (1922). Encyclopædia of religion and ethics, p. 331.G. W. S. Friedrichsen, R. W. Burchfield, and C. T. Onions. (1966). The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford University Press, p. 922.Mair, Victor H. (1990). "Tufan and Tulufan: The Origins of the Old Chinese Names for Tibet and Turfan." Central and Inner Asian Studies 4, pp. 14–70. Andreas Gruschke's study of the Tibetan Amdo Province says, At the beginning of the Tang dynasty's rule of China, Tibetans were called Tubo, a term that seems to be derived from tu phod or stod pod (upper Tibet). The archaic Tibetan dialects of Amdo have retained the articulation of the medieval Tibetan language; as such the pronunciation is Töwöd, as in Mongolian tongue. Thus, the term was handed down as Tübüt in Turkish diction, Tibbat in Arabic and passed on as Tibet in Western languages.Gruschke, Andreas. (2001), The Cultural Monuments of Tibet's Outer Provinces: Amdo, volume 1. The Qinghai Part of Amdo. White Lotus Press. p. 21
The proposed Turkic etymology adduces töbäd 'the heights' (plural of töbän). Behr (1994) cites Bazin and Hamilton (1991)Bazin, Louis and James Hamilton. (1991) "L'origine du nom Tibet", in Ernst Steinkellner ed., Tibetan history and language, Studies dedicated to Uray Géza on his seventieth birthday, Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien, pp. 9–28. to the effect that the four variant 土/吐-番/蕃 characters used to write Tu-fan/bo (Middle Chinese *Tʰɔʰ-buan < Old Chinese *Thaˤ-pjan) "Tibet" suggest "a purely phonetic transcription" of an underlying *Töpün "The Heights, Peaks" "Tibet" etymology from Old Turkic töpä/töpü "peak; height".Behr, Wolfgang, "Stephan V. Beyer. (1994). The Classical Tibetan Language" (book review), Oriens 34, pp. 558–559 He further hypothesizes that the final -t in Tibet names derives from "an Altaic collective plural which results in *Töpät, thus perfectly matching Turkic Töpüt 'Tibet'", which is attested in the Old Turkic Orkhon inscriptions.
Proposed Chinese etymology compares Tǔfān / Tǔbō.China Tibet Information Center "The Origin of the Name of Tibet" The premise of the Chinese name being the primary origin of the name hinges its having had -t final in Middle Chinese, e.g., Eric Partridge's hypothetical Tu-pat.Partridge, Eric, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, New York, 1966, p. 719 cites Chinese "Tu-pat, Tu-fan". Stein (1922) assumes that Tufan has the same origin as Tibet, but not that the latter is adopted from Chinese: Instead, the Chinese name would have arisen "by assimilation with the name of the T'u-fa, a Turco-Mongol race, who must originally have been called something like Tuppat", also reflected in Sogdian and Turkic texts as Tüpüt.
Origins: A short etymological dictionary of modern English states that "Tibet seems to have passed to us through the Ar name (Tibat, Tobbat), drawn from the anicent Ch name (Tu-pat, Tu-fan)".
Before the 1990s, Tibet in scholarly English literature almost always referred to only central Tibet (roughly Ü-Tsang geographically). The currently promoted definition of Tibet with its broader inclusion of cultural or ethnographic Tibetan areas, also known as "Greater Tibet", often leads to historical misunderstanding and confusion, because Amdo and Kham were often not treated as part of the same polity as central Tibet even by the government in Lhasa. The relatively recent push by Tibetan exiles for a "Greater Tibet" has made negotiations with China more difficult for the 14th Dalai Lama because their demands cover areas with non-Tibetan populations and histories.Goldstein, Melvyn C. "Change, conflict and continuity among a community of nomadic pastoralists: a case study from western Tibet, 1950–1990." Resistance and Reform in Tibet (1994): 76-111.
In Tibetan The Standard or Central Tibetan endonym for Tibet, Bod (), is pronounced , transliterated Bhö or Phö.
One local explanation for the origin of Bod is that it is derived from the bod pa, a warning call used by herdsmen in pre-agricultural Tibet. According to Tibetan historian Chapel Tseten Phuntsog, the herdsmen formed close bonds with each other because they lived sparsely in a remote area that was prone to natural disasters and attacks by bandits and wild animals. When a herdsman became aware of incoming danger, he would yell "geye" or "waye"the bod pafrom atop a hill to warn others. Bod consequently became the name of the region over time.
In regard to external uses of the endonym Bod, the French Sinologist and Tibetologist Rolf Stein explains in his 1922 work Tibetan Civilization: The name Tibetans give their country, Bod (now pronounced Pö in the Central dialect, as we have seen), was closely rendered and preserved by their Indian neighbours to the south, as Bhoṭa, Bhauṭa or Bauṭa. It has even been suggested that this name is to be found in Ptolemy and the Periplus Maris Erythraei, a first-century Greek narrative, where the river Bautisos and a people called the Bautai are mentioned in connexion with a region of Central Asia. But we have no knowledge of the existence of Tibetans at that time.
American philologist Christopher Beckwith agrees that Ptolemy's geographic reference to the "Bautai – i.e., the "Bauts"" was "the first mention in either Western or Eastern historical sources of the native ethnonym of Tibet". He compares the 4th-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus describing the Bautai living "on the slopes of high mountains to the south" of Serica with contemporaneous Chinese sources recording a Qiang people called the Fa 發, anciently "pronounced something like Puat" and "undoubtedly intended to represent Baut, the name that became pronounced by seventh-century Tibetans as Bod (and now, in the modern Lhasa dialect, rather like the French peu)."Christopher I. Beckwith, (1987), The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia, Princeton University Press, , p. 7. Beckwith states in his 1987 work The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia: This first mention of the name Bod, the usual name for Tibet in the later Tibetan historical sources, is significant in that it is used to refer to a conquered region. In other words, the ancient name Bod originally referred only to a part of the Tibetan Plateau, a part which, together with Rtsaṅ (Tsang, in Tibetan now spelled Gtsaṅ), has come to be called Dbus-gtsaṅ (Central Tibet).Beckwith (1987), p. 16.
In Chinese
The oldest Chinese language name for Tibetan Empire is (Middle Chinese transliteration ), with modern Standard Chinese transliteration as either or . Chinese ("Tsang") is a loan from Tibetan གཙང (gtsang), the name of the southwestern part of the Tibetan Plateau.
Modern Xizang () 'Western Tsang' now specifies the "Tibet Autonomous Region".
The name is recorded in the Old Book of Tang (dated 945 CE), relating that the Tibetan King Namri Songtsen (Gnam-ri-slon-rtsan) sent two emissaries to Emperor Yang of Sui in 608 and 609. The two characters had the following medieval readings:Pulleyblank, E. G. (1991). Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation in Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese, and Early Mandarin. UBC Press. , pp. 312, 89, 90. could be read as > 'spit' or > 'vomit'. could be read as > 'hedge, fence' or > 'luxuriant growth'.
According to Paul Pelliot, the pronunciation was suggested by Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat in the early 19th century, based on pronunciations of similar characters and the Tibetan name Bod, and adopted uncritically by other European scholars. p. 18. Herbert Giles included this pronunciation in the 1912 revision of his dictionary. It also appears in Mathews' Chinese–English Dictionary. W. South Coblin conjectures that it was adopted by mainland Chinese scholars after 1949.Coblin, W. South. (1994), "A Note on the Modern Readings of 吐蕃", Sino-Platonic Papers 46, pp. 149–151.