Wylie transliteration

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The Wylie transliteration scheme is a method for transliterating the Tibetan script using the keys on a typical English language typewriter. It bears the name of Turrell Wylie, who refined the scheme in 1959. It has subsequently become a standard transliteration scheme in Tibetan studies, especially in the United States.

Any Tibetan language romanization scheme is faced with a dilemma: should it seek to accurately reproduce the sounds of spoken Tibetan, or the spelling of written Tibetan? These differ widely as Tibetan orthography became fixed in the 11th century, while pronunciation continued to evolve. Previous transcription schemes sought to split the difference with the result that they achieved neither goal perfectly. Wylie transliteration was designed to precisely transcribe written Tibetan script, hence its acceptance in academic and historical studies. It is not intended to help in the correct pronouncing of a Tibetan word.

Consonants

The Wylie scheme transliterates the Tibetan characters as follows:

The final letter of the alphabet, the null consonant ཨ, is not transliterated - its presence is unambiguously indicated by a vowel-initial syllable.

In Tibetan script, consonant clusters within a syllable may be represented either through the use of prefixed or suffixed letters, or by letters superfixed or subfixed to the root letter (forming a "stack"). The Wylie system does not normally distinguish these as in practice no ambiguity is possible under the rules of Tibetan spelling. The exception is the sequence gy-, which may be written either with a prefix g or a subfix y. In the Wylie system these are distinguished by inserting a period, . between a prefix g and initial y. E.g. གྱང "wall" is gyang, while གཡང་ "chasm" is g.yang.

Vowels

The four vowel marks (here applied to the silent letter ཨ ) are transliterated:

When a syllable has no explicit vowel marking, the letter a is inserted to represent the inherent vowel "a" (e.g. ཨ་ = a).

Capitalization

Many previous systems of Tibetan transliteration included internal capitalisation schemes — essentially, capitalising the root letter rather than the first letter of a word, when the first letter is a prefix consonant. Tibetan dictionaries are organized by root letter, and prefixes are often silent, so knowing the root letter gives a better idea of pronunciation. However, these schemes were often applied inconsistently, and usually only when the word would normally be capitalised according to the norms of latin text (i.e. at the beginning of a sentence). On the grounds that internal capitalisation was overly cumbersome, of limited usefulness in determining pronunciation and probably superflous to a reader able to use a Tibetan dictionary, Wylie specified that if a word was to be capitalised the first letter that should be capital, in conformity with Western capitalisation practices. Thus a particular Tibetan Buddhist sect (Kagyu) is capitalised Bka' rgyud and not bKa' rgyud.

External links

(The following require installation of Tibetan fonts to work properly)

• Staatsbibliothek Berlin – A standard system of Tibetan transcription
• The Wylie Translation Table, at Nitartha International
• THDL Extended Wylie Transliteration Scheme (A project of the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library to adapt and expand the Wylie system for computer use.)
• Online Transliterator (converts Wylie or ACIP transliteration to graphics)
• Test Tibetan display (enter wylie)

See also

• Tibetan alphabet
• U-chen script
• Tibetan transliteration (PRC)
• Tibetan transcription (THDL)

References

• Wylie, Turrell (1959). A Standard System of Tibetan Transcription. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, p. 261-267

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