Transcription of Tibetan Characters

All hypertexting is done using texts that have been transcribed into Roman characters. You do not need to learn anything about the Tibetan alphabet to work on hypertexting. If, however, you are a little curious about the alphabet and pronunciation, read on.

Since Tibetan letters are sometimes silent, the transcription may not look much like the phonetic spelling. (See below for examples of transcription and phonetic spelling.)

The following Roman characters are used for transcribing Tibetan to Roman characters. In two cases the ACI encoding differs from classical Wylie encoding, indicated in the table as the rightmost value in a pair (classical/ACI).

Examples of Transcription

Tibetan	Transcription	Phonetic	English	Comments
	SA LAM	sa lam	stages and paths	This word has no silent letters
	LAS	le	karma	The SA character modifies the "A" vowel into an "E" sound
	CHOS	chu	dharma	The SA character modifies the "O" vowel into an "U" sound

Rudiments of Tibetan grammar

If you are relatively unfamiliar with Tibetan, there are a few rudimentary rules about the structure of Tibetan grammar that you should keep in mind. The most basic difference between Tibetan and English is that the Tibetan verb typically comes at the end of the sentence. The sentence is often translated from back to front. If a Tibetan verse was translated in the order of the words that appeared, it would come out something like this:

BSTAN PA RGYAS PHYIR BSKAL BRGYAR BZHUGS SU GSOL,

"Teaching to spread eons one hundred for stay I ask."

In actuality this sentence is translated as:

"I ask You to stay for a million years to spread the teaching."

For more background on Tibetan grammar, see the following PDFs (Adobe Acrobat format):

• "From" particle (204 KB)
• Genitive particle (92 KB)

(Mac OS X users: Open PDFs in Adobe Acrobat Reader instead of Preview, since Preview cannot handle Tibetan fonts)