Rhesusman 20:04, 12 February 2006 (UTC) Reply You can find a nice summary of Sino-Bhutanese border tensions here. Chris Fynn ( talk) 09:21, 9 December 2008 (UTC) Reply please add this ĭoes China really have a territorial claim on Bhutan? That's news to me. Modern Dzongkha differs from Classical Tibetan as much as modern French does from Classical Latin. Formerlly Clasical Tibetan (known in Bhutan as Choke) was used as the written and liturgical language. Dzongkha is unique amongst all these in having a formal written form - although this was fairly recently developed. There are also several other seperate Bodic languages spoken in Bhutan including Bumthap, Kheng, Kurtop, Nyenkha, Chali and Dzala. All of these spoken Bodic languages are prety much mutually incomprehensible in their pure form. 81.155.100.190 14:36, 6 October 2007 (UTC) Reply Dzongkha is a Bodic language as are the several varieties of modern spoken 'Tibetan' including Central Tibetan, Khams, and Amdo speech. Most Portuguese can understand Spanish, although not the other way round.

Spanish and Italian are almost mutually intelligible, especially in the written language. Nat Krause ( Talk!) 21:21, (UTC) Reply Nevertheless, this is the way they are usually described, so I've attempted to clarify that here and there. In the case of Tibetan, it seems that some varieties are arbitrarily defined as 'dialects of modern spoken Tibetan' (Khams, Amdo, Ü-Tsang, and sometimes the smallish Tibetanoid enclaves of Nepal) while others are arbitrarily defined as separate languages, although none of them are really mutually intelligible. Tibetan is a classical literary language that has become several distinct local varieties, including Dzongkha. BovineBeast 15:10, 28 October 2007 (UTC) Reply I generally agree.(although)I think that the concept of a 'Tibetan language' as a modern spoken language is inherently misleading or confused. A similar problem exists within Chinese, wherein the dialects are even more different from each other than they are in Tibetan, more akin to the difference between English and German than Spanish and Italian, but they're still generally referred to as dialects rather than languages. The problem with Tibetan is whether to refer to its sub-varieties as dialects or languages. Although the spoken language is obviously quite different from the varieties of Tibetan as spoken in Tibet, the written language can be pretty much identical in a literary register, or quite different in a more informal one. technopilgrim 19:44, 29 August 2005 (UTC) Reply I don't think it's as clear cut as that. I've changed the article to make the actual relationship of Tibetan and Dzongkha clearer. What is true is that both languages trace back to a common root, Classical Tibetan, which has died out as a spoken language but is still used in religious contexts (much as Latin is no longer anyone's mother tongue but is a common root of the various Romance languages and is preserved as the international scholarly language of Roman Catholicism).

That would suggest that native speakers of these languages could understand each other which is not true.

I believe we mislead our readers when we describe Dzongkha as a dialect of Tibetan.

Dzongkha english dictionary pdf