From Nominalisation to Passive in Old Tibetan: Reconstructing Grammatical Meaning in an Extinct Language 1

Abstract Based on an analysis of the Old Literary Tibetan corpus—a corpus of the oldest documented Tibetic language—the present study provides evidence that literary Tibetan v3 verb stems (commonly termed ‘future’) initially encoded passive voice. New arguments put forward in this article range from Trans‐Himalayan nominal morphology to early Tibetan practices in translating Sanskrit to the pragmatics of v3 in Old Literary Tibetan and are additionally buttressed by the modern understanding of the passive voice as established by comparative studies and linguistic typology. The reconstructed grammaticalisation path from the Proto‐Tibetic nominaliser *g‐ via resultative participle towards passive marker agrees with a pattern well established cross‐linguistically and ultimately confirms the analysis of v3 stems as passive.