🔤Spelling notes

Reading and Pronouncing Syllables

Reading Tibetan is about recognizing and pronouncing syllables that combine to form words and phrases. 

It is written with markers called "tsek" at the ends of syllables instead of at the ends of words, and a "shey" phrase-end marker, which can function as a comma, period, or other type of punctuation.

Note that many punctuation markers are actually syllables in Tibetan and are spoken as part of a phrase. 

Many words are made of only one syllable, and many words are compounds of existing one-syllable words. 

There are also multi-syllable words that don't break down easily into the meaning of separate syllables.

There is a preference for two-syllable words in rhythm, and four-syllable words will often be condensed into two syllables. For example, A me ri ca is often contracted as A ri.

A syllable can contain up to eight parts to spell out loud, and usually has only one vowel sound when pronounced. 

For example, བསྒྲུབས་ has a prefix, a superfix, a root letter, a subfix, a vowel marker, a suffix and a second suffix. See the "Spelling out" section below for a full analysis.

There can sometimes be two subfixes (a wa-sur might be added to a ra-ta, for example). 

This is a regular structure going generally from left to right and top to bottom (though vowel markers sometimes appear above the syllable, which makes the order a bit irregular). 

The "o" and "ta" signal whether a syllable marker is placed as a prefix or is stacked underneath another letter. 

There are some cases where a word will contain two syllables with only one tsek or syllable-end marker "་", such as པའོ་

Tibetan Spelling Aloud (སྦྱོར་ཀློག་) “jor lok”

Spelling aloud in Tibetan has its own system, and learning to spell aloud will help you increase your reading speed exponentially. 

You will quickly be able to identify the root of any syllable and know how to modify its pronunciation to produce the sound of the syllable itself as it is spoken normally.

Nick Prior’s page has a quite useful and detailed overview:

Spelling out བསྒྲུབས་ "accomplished"

Here are some different ways that you might encounter the same syllable བསྒྲུབས་, which means "accomplished":

Warning

Transcription is not pronunciation!

It is important to note that transcribing Tibetan using a system like Wylie can be misleading if you try to use it as a guide to pronunciation without understanding the spelling rules of Tibetan. 

With the varied way that phonetics are often printed out, it can be even more confusing, not to mention when the printouts contain errors. 

As you noticed in the example above, it is not obvious how to pronounce "sgrubs" as "ḍup" unless you know how to recognize the Tibetan and its rules.

It is better to learn the spelling and pronunciation rules independent of the Latin-character transcription, and remember that the transcription represents the written character only, and not necessarily the pronunciation of the syllable. 

For example, ག་ is transcribed in Wylie as "ga" but is pronounced as a low-tone "kha" using the central dialect convention. 

However,  ག་ will sound like "ga" when it has a prefix or superfix, because it is in the third column of the first five rows. 

The videos and dialogues will help you to become familiar with these rules as they are regular and predictable.

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