script

• an introduction to tibetan orthography archived from kuro5hin.org (2004)
• http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tibetan.htm

tibetan script				englaski pronounced
ཀ	ཁ	ག	ང	ka	kha	ga	nga
ཅ	ཆ	ཇ	ཉ	ca	cha	ja	nya
ཏ	ཐ	ད	ན	ta	tha	da	na
པ	ཕ	བ	མ	pa	pha	ba	ma
ཙ	ཚ	ཛ	ཝ	tsa	tsha	dza	wa
ཞ	ཟ	འ	ཡ	zha	za	'a	ya
ར	ལ	ཤ	ས	ra	la	sha	sa
ཧ	ཨ	.	.	ha	a	.	.

(via rtmyers on kuro5hin.org)

Here's a brief introduction to one of the world's most dysfunctional scripts (what do you mean by dysfunctional? As anyone who's done any studies in the Indic languages can easily see, Tibetan script is based on devanagari. And just like in devanagari, all the syllabels are very well arranged on the basis of which part of the mouth is used to speak them. Also, there's only one way to write any spoken word using these scripts, and any written word has only one pronunciation. You call that dysfuctional?)

I'm no script virgin. I'm an armchair linguist who knows the Japanese and Korean scripts well, and has a nodding acquaintance with many others. I'm no longer shocked by letters and pieces thereof magically disappearing or changing shape or engaging in shameful public acts with each other. I've come to expect baroque and archaic rules and long lists of exceptions. But Tibetan's pure, shameless, in-your-face weirdness still managed to shock me.

Probably after studying Tibetan for ten years this would all seem obvious and natural to me. Actually, at this point I've studied it for all of one weekend, albeit an intensive 20-hour weekend with a whole semester's worth of Tibetan crammed into it. I thought I would be learning basic Tibetan but what I soon found is that it takes 20 hours just to learn Tibetan orthography. It's not until Tibetan II that you even get to basic grammar and vocabulary.

What's so strange about Tibetan? After all, they start off with an alphabet like just about every script. There are thirty characters, arranged in a neat 8×4 matrix, the two cells on the bottom right being empty. And there's a great deal of logic in the way the matrix is structured.

For instance, the first row contains “k”-like sounds, made in the throat. The second “ch”-like sounds, made on the roof of the mouth, the third dental “t” sounds, the fourth labial “p” sounds, and so on.

And the first column contains the basic unvoiced sound (for the first row, “ka”), the second a breathy, aspirated sound (“kha”), the third the voiced version (“ga”) and the fourth the nasal variant (“nga”). This layout mimics the Sanskrit used as a model for the Tibetan script.

Here's how the matrix looks:

Tibetan is a tonal language, but (thankfully) not in the Chinese fashion. Instead, each syllable, to oversimplify somewhat, has either a high or low intonation. And another elegant aspect of the arrangement of Tibetan characters into the matrix above is that in general the first two columns take the high, the last two columns the low intonation. Whether high or low, Tibetan tones do not go up or down, but stay “flat”.

The lower rows depart from the regularity of the first five, but remember, the inventor of the alphabet was not inventing the sounds, just inventing ways to organize and represent them.

Can't see the characters in the table, or see empty squares instead? Then something is wrong in your universe of browsers/encodings/fonts/renderings. Your browser needs to handle Unicode, since that's how I've specified the Tibetan characters. And it needs to have access to Tibetan fonts, most likely as part of a Unicode font such as MS Arial Unicode. Sorry, we're not going to spend any more time here debugging your Tibetan display problems. You should visit the Omniglot Tibetan page, which shows the matrix, the vowel marks discussed below, and examples of Tibetan writing.

Back to Tibetan spelling. The thirty characters above can be used as is, as long as you put the a little dot after them indicating that that's the entire syllable (or “morpheme” in linguist-speak). So ག་ is kha, the Tibetan word for “mouth”. We're cooking!

Each character has a built-in “a” sound (pronounced “ah”). So how would we get something like ri, for “mountain”?

Tibetan handles vowel orthography in a highly regular way. There are just five vowel sounds including the built-in “a”, the others being “i”, “u”, “e”, and “o”, and each has its own symbol, placed above or below the character in question:

• ི gigu, a hook above giving “i”
• ུ shabkyu, a hook below giving “u”
• ེ dreng-bu, a kind of accent grave, giving “e”
• ོ naro, a mark above giving “o”

So ri or “mountain” would be RA with the gigu hook above it. Unfortunately, I can't show that to you easily on this web page. The problem is that Unicode has defined only components of Tibetan script elements, as opposed to composed glyphs. (Tibetan occupies a single 256-byte “page” in the Unicode code space.) And no web browser has the logic required to compose these components on the fly into the so-called stacks or “grapheme clusters” (the “graphemes” here being the RA and the I) that are required. There's a Unicode character called COMBINING GRAPHEME JOINER which in some better world might do something useful, but it doesn't seem to. ZERO WIDTH JOINERS possibly could be interpreted in a friendly way but they aren't. To see a whole bunch of decomposed and thus completely weird-looking Tibetan text encoded using Unicode see the Tibetan Unicode Test Pages. I will studiously avoid getting involved in the religious wars as to whether or not Unicode 29.0 should define all grapheme clusters as individual code points, of which there would be several thousand.

In any case, at the moment only dedicated environments are capable of correctly rendering Tibetan. There is a hack involving MS Word. There is a Java app. Emacs supports entering and displaying Tibetan. For the Macintosh, there is the Tibetan Language Kit. All these alternatives involve a home-grown encoding together with a more-or-less custom fonts. In some cases, it may be possible to embed the glyph information into a web page, marking the Tibetan portion for rendering with the Tibetan font, allowing Tibetan to be displayed on “normal” web pages, assuming platform and browser compatibility.

The elegant architecture of Graphite should permit a Tibetan implementation but no-one has gotten around to doing it yet.

So on a web page like this I can't show you a “ri”, except as a graphic.

This all seems boringly regular. But actually, this is precisely the point at which Tibetan spelling begins to get extremely hairy. Since this article cannot give a complete description of Tibetan orthography, let's just jump right in with a real-world example.

We'll use the word pronounced drup (or droop in pseudo-phonetic notation, low tone), which is the past tense of the word meaning “accomplish”. Here we go: using English transliterations for each Tibetan character, it's written BA SA/GA/RA/U BA SA. And there you have it: drup. I've used spaces to separate the four “pieces” which are used to write this syllable. Bring up the image of how drup is written in a separate window and you should be able to follow the discussion more easily. You can see the four pieces, arranged left-to-right. Notice the second “piece” is stretched out vertically. That's because it's a “stack” which contains the SA/GA/RA/U arranged vertically. Some people might prefer to call this a “grapheme cluster”.

OK, let's take this one step at a time. The first character is the one for BA. That's one of those thirty basic characters used in Tibetan. Why BA? Well, actually, no one knows. It's silent, and has nothing to do with the pronunciation of the word. This character is a prefix, one of several that can so function, all of which are silent when they do so. It is a prefix to the “root” character which follows.

The next piece is the tall, stacked “root” letter. Placed to the right of the BA we just wrote, it begins at the top with the the character SA. But technically, this character is a superscript, and is also silent, completely unrelated to the pronunciation of the word.

Finally we get to the character for GA. This is the heart of the stack and the entire syllable drup, and is written underneath the SA. Now to form Tibetan syllables, you mostly string the basic characters together left-to-right. But the “main” piece in each group can be a “stack”, where a bunch of basic characters are arranged top-to-bottom; that stack then fits into the left-to-right sequence of the other pieces. In other words, the individual basic characters in Tibetan spread out both to the left and right and up and down from the central root character. The GA character we just added is that central root character. As we'll soon see, the GA does have a relationship to the word we are trying to spell (drup), although it's tenuous in the extreme.

Underneath the GA we write a variant of the character for RA. This is a subscript. The alert reader may guess, correctly, that the “r” sound in RA accounts for the “r” sound in the word drup. What he or she could not deduce is that it also changes the “g” sound of the GA above into a “d” sound, yielding “dra”. There's no reason for this–it's just the rule. But at least we seem to be making some progress towards drup.

Still working on the same stack, we now add to the bottom the final element, the curly shabkyu, the vowel character mentioned above which changes the intrinsic “a” sound to a “u” sound, giving us “dru”.

We're finished with the stack. Next we move on to the third element of the syllable, which is the character BA again; this time it's not silent, but rather puts the final “p” on the word drup. And then we're done, right?

Not so fast. We still have the final SA, another silent character, the fourth left-to-right piece of the syllable (the so-called second suffix, present in some but by no means all syllables). Then, finally, we really are done. We just write the little dot called the tsek, which terminates the entire four-piece syllable. Voila.

A scholar named Wylie came up with a way to uniquely transliterate Tibetan into Roman characters, completely round-trippable. (The word drup in “Wylie” is BSGRUBS.) This provides a handy and widely-used mechanism for inputting Tibetan into word-processing programs. Western Tibetan scholars are said to be able to read Tibetan directly from such transliterations. There is no reported research on what the effect on their brains of learning to do so was.

Of course, the Tibetans themselves need a way to spell to each other. They've come up with an elegant approach, where each component is given, followed by its position in the stack if applicable and then cumulative phonetic result. So our drup example would be spelled in Tibetan as:

BA O (meaning silent) SA GA ta (meaning below) ga (pronunciation so far) RA ta (meaning below) dra (pronunciation so far) shabkyu (“u” vowel) dru (pronunciation so far) BA drup (pronunciation so far) SA drup (final pronunciation)

Drup is hardly a unique example in terms of the exceptions and special rules involved. Write DA/RA? That's cha (bird). How about ZA/LA? That's da. A final NA puts the “n” sound on the end of the word, but also changes the preceding vowel. Or, you could do the same thing by just putting a little circle on the top of the main stack in the syllable. And so on, ad inifinitum. Don't even get me started on the variant characters used for Sanskrit borrowings.

Speaking of Sanskrit, which I know virtually nothing about, Tibetan inherits major portions of its orthography from that language, and to that extent shares with modern-day descendants such as Devanagari. It's possible writers of those languages would not find Tibetan to be quite as “dysfunctional” as this newbie did. Having said that, Sanskrit does not have the huge clusters, or the frequent silent characters of Tibetan (although it does have its own set of major difficulties, including many more characters and its rich grammar).

So what is the deal with these silent characters anyway? They clearly play a major role in resolving homonymal ambiguity in Tibetan. For instance, the word for “I, me” is pronounced “nga” and written NGA as expected, while the word for five“ is also pronounced “nga” but is written LA/NGA with a silent LA. Fine and possibly useful, but other languages manage to deal with the same kind of ambiguity without resorting to such tricks. Those tricks make the learning curve markedly steeper, not only for adult foreign students but for native-speaking children as well. If the silent letters had some other meaning, perhaps semantic, it would be more understandable, but they appear not to.

It appears that in general these silent letters reflect archaic pronunciations. This theory is supported by the observation that the word “lama” (guru) is written with a silent leading BA, and in some dialects is actually pronounced “blama”./p>

How did Tibetan orthography get to be such a mess? Probably because it basically hasn't been reformed in the millennium-and-a-half since it was invented by the legendary Thon-mi Sambhota, although it seems to me that it must have been pretty baroque even back then. Just imagine trying to write English in an ur-Germanic script from 1400 years ago, with the added restriction that words today must be spelled exactly as the words they were derived from were.

(2.84 / 19) (#26) by just8 on Thu Feb 05, 2004 at 04:15:33 PM EST

For Indo-European language speakers, there are stranger things out there than Tibetan script (which is modeled on the Sanskrit syllabary). Quite strange texts, for those who have learned only Indo-European languages, would probably include: Egyptian heiroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform, Incan khipu (knotted strings), the Mayan hieroglyphic syllabary, Chinese characters, and the Japanese mixture of Chinese characters and several syllabaries.

Strangeness depends on familiarity. All of these examples seem to me more strange than Tibetan - but I had studied Sanskrit before Tibetan.

I wrote this before it went to voting. I'll leave it as it is (and resubmit as topical), in case you revise it for another forum.

Tibetan might be arcane and complex. If you have studied a South Asian language and script, it is not so strange.

I visited your website. I appreciate that you are interested in various languages, in the game of Go and computer applications for that, and are into Incan metaphysics. So am I. Small world. I appreciate your shoot from the hip humor. The humorous writing style works on some topics. I don't think it really fits with this article.

This article is probably very difficult to follow for most people not familiar with Tibetan or South Asian languages.

Your focus on the Tibetan script for a general audience, while arcane, overly detailed and hard to follow, is not too deep.

You seem basically to be saying: “The Tibetan script is difficult, even strange. Here are some of the rules of the language. Here are a few examples of strange scripts to represent words. There are some problems representing the Tibetan script in character rendering programs. Tibetan is a mess because it hasn't been reformed in 1400 years.”

I don't think that almost 1900 words are needed to say that.

To learn about Tibetan, starting out with the scripts seems, well, like a very frustrating thing to do. However, after your essay based on study of only 20 hours, well, I find some of your general points to be premature.

My main suggestion if you want to revise this and to stick with the topics would be to cut the article in half and simplify the examples. If you want to keep the complexity, then some subsections with subtitles would help. It would be a good idea to add to that a bit more historical research on the development of Tibetan in linguistic and historical context. For instance, Tibetan is a Sino-Chinese language but uses an Indo-European derived script due to the importation of Buddhism and the creation of the script in Tibet around the same time to translate religious texts. As it is, the detail of the article doesn't match the points.

Here is a listing of resources for the study of Tibetan, from the website of the government of Tibet in exile: Learn Tibetan Language http://www.tibet.com/Language/

I've studed intro Sanskrit and Tibetan. And, I've studied Japanese (year in college) as well as several romance languages. I learned some Russian recently.

A general statement: Scripts at first can get in the way of learning the power, depth, beauty, and living richness of a language. In my opinion, learning the meaning and pronunciation of 200 words of vocabulary of a language is much more helpful for getting a feel for culture than is learning a script.

You can learn simple vocabulary, conjugations, grammar, etc., without knowing scripts.

Good ways to learn the meaning and beauty of Tibetan and Sanskrit (dead, but not dead) would be from: - speaking with native or accomplished scholarly speakers - phonetic transliterations (not Wylie) - word for word translations of texts

While Tibetan orthography may seem to be a mess, it has some important functions with regard to meaning and visualization.

According to Buddhists, written Tibetan was specifically constructed as a liturgical language.

Tibetan Buddhist meditations involve very complicated visualizations. The visualization process of working with Tibetan mantras is ornate and beautiful, involving sometimes taking apart words a syllable at a time. However, knowledge of written Tibetan is not necessary to get a deep understanding of the culture.

Here are two anecdotes about the relative utility of scripts: 1. I once assisted a Tibetan lama to translate some prayers into English. The scriptural Tibetan was multi-layered and quite profound. I didn't need to know the script (though I did and have since forgotten it). He transliterated everything (unevenly). We worked up our own transliteration. That translation work was a luminous experience - a glimpse into quite precise, very colorful meanings. I was able to understand through this study that Tibetan as a philosophical language is quite powerful and precise and elegantly beautiful at times. For instance, lama translates as la = great and ma = mother. Lamas are great mothers or gurus. On a lighter note, dorje (a very important word in Tibetan-perhaps the most important) means vajra (in Sanskrit) means diamond and adamantine and indestructible. Dorje also means penis. You can only get at the multiple layers of something like this through study in context. A focus on text first might well scare someone off from the very colorful, human and at the same time profound context. 2. I attending a teaching once by Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche on the innermost of the nine yogas in Tibetan Buddhism. He chanted a bit in Tibetan in the beginning. Then, there was this clear discourse on the nature of mind and emptiness and nonduality. Then, he explained a meditation. Then, there was a practice session with a bit of chanting with keys given before hand as to what beginners should do. The meditation for people I talked to was very deep and very amazing and clear. Language was not an impediment.

We have a focus on logic and linguistics in the rational west as a way to understand cultural phenomena. However, deep of cultural transmissions can happen more through interpretation (as with the translator in example 1 above) and in practice (as in example 2).

Here is some cultural background on why Tibetan script did not change: The way to understand the history of the Tibetan script is in its development to communicate religious language.

Many significant religious teachings and philosophies were imported very developed from India (and quite complex after 1000 years of development there) to Tibet from about the 8th Century onward. Significant developments also occurred early on in Tibetan history over the next 500 years (with a several hundred year gap due to religious suppression).

A major occupation in Tibetan culture was monasticism. A 1/3 of the population used to live in monasteries.

The religious nature of the scripts development and ongoing transmission was a conservative force on the learning of Tibetan.

I'm not advocating traditionalism. Nor am I claiming that philosophy did not evolve in Tibet. It is just that a lot had developed already early on, 9 C. to 14 C. of common era. Institutional structures were conservative, aiming to conserve their cultural riches.

I am advocating learning languages, for those so interested, in context. When there is a living linguistic tradition, it seems a good thing to start there to understand the context and beauty of a language including its script.

In closing: Well, I ventured beyond the scope of the article but my critique calls for that.

Personally, I believe that the sooner that Tibetan, Sikkhim, Bhutanese, and Japanese lines of vajrayana (which integrate in various ways inquiry into the self through sensual, rational and spiritual means) are established as realization traditions in Western cultures and languages the better. The way to get there has been by learning from the cultural experts – not from the text in abstraction (remembering that the text though not the language was primarily developed and used for religious purposes). Tibetan culture is fused with Tibetan spirituality.

Or, you can get the essence of the spiritual tradition now in English from teachers like the Dalai Lama, Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, or any of thousands of lamas and scholars.

The above doesn't invalidate your points about how complex the script is. But, I hope people will understand that you can enter into Tibetan language in ways that are much more rewarding than contemplating the complex script. I hope you include some more historical and cultural points in a revision of the article. It would be interesting to compare Tibetan with Chinese characters and languages with very strange characteristics to Western eyes and ears. Something to keep in mind is that the many irregular spellings and grammatical forms in English give trouble even to Indo-European language speakers.