Wylie transliteration

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Wylie transliteration of Tibetan script

This article contains Tibetan script. Without proper rendering support, you may see very
.small fonts, misplaced vowels or missing conjuncts instead of Tibetan characters

Wylie transliteration is a method for transliterating Tibetan script using only the letters
available on a typical English-language typewriter. The system is named for the American
scholar Turrell V. Wylie, who created the system and published it in a 1959 Harvard Journal
of Asiatic Studies article.[1] It has subsequently become a standard transliteration scheme in
.Tibetan studies, especially in the United States

Professor Turrell Wylie in 1979 at the University of Washington, Department of Asian

Languages and Literature

Any Tibetan language romanization scheme faces the dilemma of whether it should 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, comparable to the English orthography and French orthography, which
.reflect Late Medieval pronunciation

Previous transcription schemes sought to split the difference with the result that they
achieved neither goal perfectly. Wylie transliteration was designed to precisely transcribe
Tibetan script as written, which led to its acceptance in academic and historical studies. It is
.not intended to represent the pronunciation of Tibetan words

Contents

Consonants 1
 Vowels 2

Capitalization 3

Extensions 4

See also 5

References 6

External links 7

Consonants

This section contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / /
.and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters

:The Wylie scheme transliterates the Tibetan characters as follows

IPA W T IPA W T IPA W T IPA W T

nga ང [ɡà/↗︎kʰà] ga ག [↘︎kʰá] kha ཁ [ká] ka ཀ

[ŋà]

nya ཉ [dʑà/↗︎tɕʰà] ja ཇ [↘︎tɕʰá] cha ཆ [tɕá] ca ཅ

[ɲà]

na ན [dà/↗︎tʰà] da ད [↘︎tʰá] tha ཐ [tá] ta ཏ

[nà]

ma མ [bà/↗︎pʰà] ba བ [↘︎pʰá] pha ཕ [pá] pa པ

[mà]

wa ཝ [dzà/↗︎tsʰà] dza ཛ [↘︎tsʰá] tsha ཚ [tsá] tsa ཙ

[wà]

[ɦà/↗︎ʔà] 'a འ [zà/↗︎sà] za ཟ [ʑà/↗︎ɕà] zha ཞ

[jà] ya ཡ

[↘︎s sa ས [↘︎ɕá] sha ཤ [là] la ལ [rà] ra ར

á]

[↘︎ʔá] a ཨ [há] ha ཧ

In Tibetan script, consonant clusters within a syllable may be represented through the use of
prefixed or suffixed letters or by letters superscripted or subscripted 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 base letter ཨ) are transliterated

ཨོ o ཨེ e ཨུ u ཨི i

When a syllable has no explicit vowel marking, the letter a is used to represent the default
.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 superfluous to a reader able to use a Tibetan
dictionary, Wylie specified that if a word was to be capitalised, the first letter should be
capital, in conformity with Western capitalisation practices. Thus a particular Tibetan
.Buddhist sect (Kagyu) is capitalised Bka' brgyud and not bKa' brgyud

Extensions

Wylie's original scheme is not capable of transliterating all Tibetan-script texts. In particular,
it has no correspondences for most Tibetan punctuation symbols, and lacks the ability to
represent non-Tibetan words written in Tibetan script (Sanskrit and phonetic Chinese are the
most common cases). Accordingly, various scholars have adopted ad hoc and incomplete
.conventions as needed

The Tibetan and Himalayan Library at the University of Virginia developed a standard, EWTS
—the Extended Wylie Transliteration Scheme—that addresses these deficiencies
systematically. It uses capital letters and Latin punctuation to represent the missing
characters. Several software systems, including Tise, now use this standard to allow one to
type unrestricted Tibetan script (including the full Unicode Tibetan character set) on a Latin
.keyboard

Since the Wylie system is not intuitive for use by linguists unfamiliar with Tibetan, a new
transliteration system based on the International Phonetic Alphabet has been proposed to
replace Wylie in articles on Tibetan historical phonology.[2]

See also

China portal flag

Asia portal icon

Languages portal icon

Tibetan pinyin

THL Simplified Phonetic Transcription

Tise - extended Wylie input method for Tibetan script

Tibetan script

Standard Tibetan

Uchen script

References

Wylie, Turrell V. (December 1959). "A Standard System of Tibetan Transcription". Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies. Harvard-Yenching Institute. 22: 261–267. doi:10.2307/2718544.
.JSTOR 2718544

Jacques, Guillaume (2012). "A new transcription system for Old and Classical Tibetan".
.Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area. 35 (2): 89–96

External links

)Some of the following links require installation of Tibetan fonts to display properly (

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

Hill, Nathan W. A note on the history and future of the 'Wylie' system in Revue d'Études
.Tibétaines, Number 23, Avril 2012. pp. 103–105

The Wylie Translation Table, at Nitartha International

 Staatsbibliothek Berlin – A standard system of Tibetan transcription

THDL Extended Wylie Transliteration Scheme (A project of the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital
Library to adapt and expand the Wylie system for computer use.)

Tibetan transliteration: convert between Wylie or EWTS and Unicode

Test Tibetan display (enter wylie)

vte

Tibetan language

Language

Tibetic languagesOld Tibetan Classical TibetanU-tsangKhamsAmdo

Scripts

Tibetan alphabet Umê (Drutsa, Bêtsug)UchenRegional (Joyig, Monyig and

Lhoyig)NumeralsBraille

Others

Transcription: Wylie, Tibetan pinyin, THL TranscriptionGrammar (Modern Standard Tibetan

grammar)

Tibetic languages outside Tibetan plateau

DzongkhaSikkimeseLadakhiBalti

Categories: Romanization of TibetanLanguages of TibetTibetan Buddhist literature

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.This page was last edited on 9 August 2022, at 08:46 (UTC)

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