Joanna Bialek, “Side, stench, remnant, plot, oath, and craftiness — the semantic ‘capacity’ of the OT dku”, Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, no. 35, April 2016, pp. 115-167. Side, stench, remnant, plot, oath, and craftiness — the semantic ‘capacity’ of the OT dku * Joanna Bialek (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München) he present paper has emerged as a result of a relentless struggle of the author with diverse occurrences of the syl- lable dku in Old Tibetan documents. It attempts to under- stand and to bring together conflicting information that has arisen from the analysis of frequently confusing, sometimes even com- pletely obscure, passages. As efforts made by other scholars, who previously endeavoured to resolve the puzzle of the OT dku, have revealed 1 , reducing its semantics to a common denominator — a single keyword — cannot be deemed an adequate approach. More- over, when one additionally includes glosses from lexicographical works on Classical Tibetan in the corpus the situation around dku complicates intolerably. As a matter of fact, I was able to discern between thirteen (!) different and, to all appearances, mutually * Passages quoted from Old Tibetan texts have been checked against their scanned versions available online via IDP. For the manuscripts that have not been scan- ned yet, I have used the transliterations published by OTDO. Otherwise, the so- urce for the transliteration is given in brackets. Canonical texts have been trans- literated after ACIP. The Tibetan script is transliterated according to the princi- ples put forward in Hahn 1996: 1. No special signs have been used for translitera- tion of Old Tibetan texts; this concerns letters as well as punctuation marks. Ac- cordingly, the so called ‘reversed gi gu’ is transliterated as a regular gi gu. The Old Tibetan orthography is strictly followed. No distinction is made between a single and a double tsheg. Punctuation marks other than tsheg and śad (translit- erated as a space and a slash respectively) are not accounted for. For the sake of readability I have used hyphens between syllables of Tibetan proper nouns in translations as well as in the discussion. All passages were rendered by the au- thor as literally as possible in the hope, however, that their comprehension has not been hampered by the chosen method of translation. 1 Cf. the second part of the paper, where the results of earlier analyses are presen- ted. T