The rules for reading/pronouncing Tibetan script

Factual Questions
1

The Tibetan script looks nice, does it not? So exotic, so beautiful. Well, it seems that deciphering it is even more of a mystery.

According to this site, “Good morning” is, “tah-shi de-leh.” Straightforward, right? Wrong. That’s what’s pronounced. What’s written is, “bkra.shis.bde.legs.” Let us break this down syllable by syllable (each character within brackets, the unindicated “a” in parenthesis, vowel diacritics connected to consonant they’re on with a dash).

  1. **kr, pronounced “tah.” How “t” is derived from ** or [kr] escapes me. All I can gather that comes from this is the vowel.

  2. [sh-ee][s], pronounced “shi.” This is easy: drop the last consonant.

  3. **[d-e], pronounced “de.” This is also easy: drop the first consonant.

  4. [l-e][g][s], pronounced, “le.” This is also easy: drop the last two consonants.

But what are the rules? How does one know which consonant to drop? How does one get “t” from “b,” “kr,” or “bkr”? Why is this writing system so convoluted with all these seemingly extra consonants? I mean, “ta.shi.de.le” from “bkra.shis.bde.legs”? This makes French look easy!

Omniglot for the entire Tibetan alphabet. (I love Omniglot! One of the best websites out there!)

WRS - thu-chee che!

2

I believe a lot of the confusion comes from using extra letters to denote vowel tones, though I’m no expert in Tibetan.

3

I think I’ll move this from IMHO to General Questions.

4

How does one determine which letters denote the tone?

WRS

5

When I was studying Tibetan stuff, this used to mystify me no end. Yes, it’s frightfully complicated, but after you’ve looked at enough examples, you start to see some method in the madness.

I don’t know if there are rules to cover the reduction of every single consonant cluster, but if you had a good dictionary it should give the pronunciation for each word.

The discrepancy between spelling and pronunciation came about in Tibetan the same way it did in English: after the spelling had become set in a certain way, the pronunciation changed. Tibetan literature has been written since the early Buddhist period, right? That’s going back at least 1200 years. Think how much English pronunciation has changed in that time. Imagine trying to read Old English spelling with Modern English pronunciation. The pronunciations we are given are based on the speech of Lhasa. In outlying areas of Tibet, I have heard, many of the old consonants are still pronounced in the local dialects.

6

P.S. Tibetan letters do not show the tone. This is done in Hmong and Thai spelling, but not in Tibetan. The silent letters are simply the remnants of consonants that were once pronounced, but have been lost in changing pronunciations over time. There are tones in spoken Tibetan, but the writing does not show them. IIRC (the reference book I have on this is in my office at work, not at home), the tones vary between the different dialects anyway, so writing them would not cover all the pronunciations.

7

OK, I was wrong. I went to work this morning and looked up the information. I came home just to post a correction of my mistake. Kind of sucks when you have to have your books in two different places, plus no internet access at work.

Yes, emekthian was correct. The Tibetan letters do show tones. Here’s how:

"There are four tonal phonemes: mid (neutral), high, low, falling. These are not marked in the script, but can be deduced from the initial consonant or consonant cluster+vowel. High and low tones inhere in consonants: in a four-term series (velar, palatal, dental, etc.) the first two have high, the second two low tone: e.g. ká - khá - ga - nga; cá - chá - ja - nya.

The inherent tone of an initial can be changed by a prefixed, superscript, or subscript consonant: e.g. d prefixed to a low-tone initial raises it to high; thus ma is a low-tone consonant, but dMar /maa/, ‘red’, is high tone.

Final consonants introduce a further complication by affecting the tone, quality and length of the base vowel; e.g. na is low tone, but addition of -d, e.g. in nad /nEÈ/ produces falling tone."

—from Concise Compendium of the World’s Languages by George L. Campbell, p. 537.

There’s also a brief explanation of the spelling weirdness:

"The basic point is that prefixed letters may precede the word-initial consonant: e.g. in bsTan.’gyur, T is the initial of the first component, which is pronounced /ten/. In the classical literary language, the verb sTon /tœœn/ has a past root which is spelled bsTan, the form found in this compound, which is pronounced as a whole /ten.kuu/.

This retention of the traditional and etymological orthography means that the correspondence between sound and symbol is very weak. For example, kra, khra, gra, phra, bra, sGra, bsGra are all ways of writing the phoneme /ta/.

In Tibetan dictionaries, words are entered under word-initial consonant, i.e. ignoring the prefixed letters. Taking C=consonant, V=vowel sequence i, u, e, o, P=prefixed letter, the dictionary entry sequence is CV, CyV, CrV, PCV, PCy/rV, PPCV. Final consonants are ordered in sequence." (Ibid.)

8

I used to wonder why my University offered a course in written Tibetan, as opposed to just having a course in the Tibetan language. I guess they think it’s too difficult to teach both at one, since they’re so different.

From the course catalogue: