Серия «Тибетский язык», курс 1: Тибетский алфавит, занятие 11

[Speaker 1]
Hi, welcome back to Tibetan language class. Today we'll be studying the last of the sub-join letters. We finished the three primary sub-join letters, which in alphabetical order are ya, ra, and la.

And now we'll have two sort of minor ones, but they're sort of important if you don't know them, you're going to have trouble. One of them is called wasur, say wasur. Wasur.

So let's get to know the word sur first. Oops, sorry. Let's draw that again.

Say sur. Low tone s sound, sur. Sur can have a lot of meanings.

Sur can mean an angle. Sur can mean a corner. And sur has also come to mean x or former, like a former abbot is called a khen sur rinpoche, khen sur.

So sur means former. Or gyi sur means what? A form of gyi ku, which means a debate master or the vice president of a monastery.

So sur means former. But somehow it means a corner. Probably means they put them in the corner, I don't know.

So sur means corner. So this sub-join letter, the name for it in Tibetan is wasur. So wa is a very unusual, uncommon Tibetan letter.

You only see it very rarely. That's wa. And it's only used in a handful of words.

And so you see it very rarely. But if you chop off this corner here, and then you have a, let's just say you have a, let's say you have a letter like da. This is, say da.

Then you add that little triangle, sur, to the bottom of the letter. And that becomes a new word, because you added this corner of the wa. There's a debate whether you should call it wasur or asur.

Because you know this letter is a. Say a. Low tone a, a.

We have a mid-tone a, which is like omahum, right? So this is a. But you see there's another sur here.

If you cut it here, this angle or this corner could be this. So some Tibetans say it's wasur, which means an angle or corner cut off the letter wa. And some Tibetans will say it's asur, which means that an angle cut off the letter a.

Either way, it's a wasur or an asur. Now, why do we put an asur on words? Let me give you two examples.

We're going to build a word from this one we just made. Sorry for that. And then I'm going to do an example of the same letters without the wasur.

So now we have two different, we have two versions of the same syllable. One has a wasur, and one doesn't have a wasur. When you are trying to decide what's the main syllable here, so this could be da, ga, sa, dak.

Or it could be dao, ga, sa, ge. This could be the main syllable. The main letter with a prefix letter and a suffix letter, which we haven't got to yet.

Or this could have been the main letter. It could have been, this is ambiguous in Tibetan how to pronounce this. Normally, Tibetan is 100% unambiguous.

If you see it written down, you can pronounce it. Not like other languages, not like English especially. If you see a Tibetan syllable written down, you always know how to pronounce it.

There's never any ambiguity. This is close to being an ambiguity. Because it could have been, it could have been dak, taking this as the main letter.

Or it could have been ge, taking this as the main letter. So in very elegant Tibetan writing, in classical writing, they will mark the main letter with an wasur. And that, no letter with any head join or sub join on it is anything except the main letter.

When something is hanging on it, like a vowel, or a sub join letter, or a super join letter, that's always the main sound. That's always the main letter. So there's a custom to put this wasur on the main letter to prevent the ambiguity that you find in this.

By the way, this is the instrumental ga of the word ga, as in gawa, as in kunga. What's gawa mean? Kunga.

Ananda. Yeah, gawa means happy. Not to be confused with gewa, which is the good karma which causes gawa.

Gawa. And then there's an s for through happiness, or because of happiness, or by happiness. And then the main letter, if you have a choice, you take the middle one.

So here we have a choice, we'll take the middle one. Ge. This is ge.

This is? Dag. So you can form a word like this.

What's that mean? Yidak. So this is the word for those hungry ghosts.

Yidak is spelled like this. Correct? Carving will have a wasa on the dot.

Otherwise you would say yi ge, and you would be confused. Now, when I say correct carving, what does that imply? There's other carvings, okay?

Sometimes they leave the wasa out. And then it becomes ambiguous, and then there's a problem. You don't know if it's he was happy because he was happy, or if it's a hungry ghost.

So then you have to take it from the context, alright? So you have to learn to deal with mistakes in carvings, which are much more common in Tibetan than in English, okay? In English, a page of well-edited English, it's rare to find more than one or two typos in a well-edited book.

That's the standard currently in English books. But in Tibetan books, you might find a miscarving on every single page. So a person who's learning Tibetan has to learn how to read corrupt woodblocks.

And some letters won't be clear, because the ink didn't cover the woodblock when they printed it. So really, anyone who really learns Tibetan has to become a textual scholar also, and has to be able to tell if the carving was mistaken, or the woodblock broke. You're going to have to be able to figure that out.

So it's much more contextual. Figuring out Tibetan is much more contextual. So this is yidak.

Say yidak. Da, ga, sa, ge. Sorry, tau.

Ga, sa, ge. This is spelled, jor long, this is spelled out loud. Say da.

Wasur. Da. Ga, sa.

Tak. This is spelled tau, ga, sa, ge. OK, so you have to know that difference.

I'm going to give you another example. I'll give you two more examples, OK? This is ra.

Not ra, OK? Not English. Spanish, ra.

Ra, ra, and ra. This is spelled ra, wasur, ra. Ra, wasur, ra.

This is just plain ra. OK, ra means goat. OK, ra means goat.

Ra, wasur means horn. The horn on a yak. Or the horn on a deer or something like that.

That's called a ra. Sometimes ra cho. So you must know the difference.

This is called, what's it called? Orthographical distinction. Meaning a difference in the spelling, because otherwise they would mean the same thing.

You wouldn't know if they're talking about a goat or a horn, OK? That's wasur. So now you know wasur.

I'll give you one more example. Let's do it up here. This is a very common one that you see fairly frequently.

OK, say ra, satak, sa. Ra, satak, sa. Wasur, sa.

OK, it doesn't change. Ra, satak, sa. Wasur, sa.

Again, there's no difference in their pronunciation. The wasur only changes the meaning of the word, OK? This is the sa.

The first one is the sa in Sawai Lama. Sawai Lama. Sawai Lama.

Root Lama. Root Lama. So this is the sa.

That means root, sawa, OK, sawa. Then this is sa as in meaning grass or weeds, OK, grass. So if you forget to put the wasur, it's going to mean root.

If you add the wasur, it changes the meaning to grass from root. OK, got it? All right.

I think we'll stop this video, and let's keep going to the second minor subjoint letter. So now you know wasur, OK? And you know its function.

You won't see it very often. It's not very common. Let's go on to the second minor subjoint letter, which is called achung.

Say achung. So this is the letter a in Tibetan. Say a.

It's like almost a low tone, OK, a. You know the a like an omahum is the middle tone, OK? So this is a.

Then if you shrink it radically, and you add it to a letter like, here we have sha, right? If you shrink it and add it here. Here, OK?

Then that's a subjoint letter, and it changes the meaning of the sha, OK? Off the top of my head, I can't think of many or any native Tibetan words which take an achung. So achung is used in Tibetan to indicate a long Sanskrit vowel, OK?

It's used to indicate a long Sanskrit vowel. So I'm going to give an example, OK? You can say, I'm just going to not use diacritics, OK?

Except here, I'm going to use one here. Say, in Sanskrit, there are long vowels and short vowels. And they are the most important pronunciation feature of the Sanskrit language.

If you don't pronounce the long and short vowels correctly, which no American that I know of does, you can't understand what the person is saying. It changes all the meanings totally. So the first thing a Sanskrit teacher should teach their student is about short vowels and long vowels.

Otherwise, forever, their accent will be screwed up, and no Indian can understand what they're talking about, OK? So this is pronounced as though this were a U in English, OK? Say, shastra, shastra, shastra.

And this long A is pronounced as if this were R in English. Say, shastra, shastra, shastra, shastra, shastra, shastra. If you know that distinction, you can pronounce Sanskrit.

That's the only major thing you need to know about Sanskrit pronunciation. To make Sanskrit correct, you need to know about short vowels and long vowels. This is, by the way, called a strengthening.

This is a strengthening of this vowel. We could talk about it someday. Why was it important?

The word shastra means sword, OK? The word shastra means a classical commentary. Why are we talking about that now?

Now, I haven't taught you how to write Sanskrit in Tibetan letters. But in order to explain an achung, this is called achung, which means what? Chung chung?

Little, a wittle bitty, wittle bitty R. Achung, say achung. Chung means wittle bitty, wittle wittle, chikito.

OK, this is a chikito R, OK? So I haven't shown you all the exceptions that are used to write Sanskrit in Tibetan letters. But in order to illustrate the use of an achung, I'm going to do it now.

But it's a whole other subject that we will get to later, OK? So I will stack things illegally until I get the Sanskrit combination, OK? OK?

Sha. Achung. Sha.

Sa. Tatakta. Ratakta.

This is not pronounced with a retroflex, because this is real Sanskrit, OK? Shastra. It's not shastra, OK?

This tra is not like all the other ratakta we had, OK? It's not pronounced with a retroflex, OK? It's a real T-R-A.

Shastra. It's not even an English T-R-A, which would be? Shra, with a C-H, OK?

It's not that. Say shastra. Sorry, this is shastra.

Now if I want to say, that means what? Yeah, classical commentary. Now if I do the same stacks, OK, then that's going to be shastra.

Say shastra. Shastra. Shastra.

Shastra. That's the function of the second minor subjoin letter in the Tibetan language, is to make long and short Sanskrit vowels. So if you see a little ah hanging off of something, now you know why it's there, OK?

Do Tibetan lamas pronounce the difference? No, they don't know the difference and they don't pronounce it. You'll never hear a Tibetan lama distinguish between these two, OK?

But you're going to pronounce it correctly, OK? Say shastra. Shastra.

So the spelling of these got messed up later. The spelling got messed up. People dropped them because they didn't know what they were doing there.

And then mantras got messed up in Tibetan. So when you come to a Tibetan mantra, you have to study it. You have to use the computer.

You have to go back to the early books from India. And then you can decide how the mantra should be spelled correctly, OK? So that's a whole other subject.

We can get into it later, all right? So now you've learned the three major subjoin letters, which are ya, ra, and la. And you've learned two minor subjoin letters, which are asur and now atum.

And that completes your study of subjoin letters in the Tibetan language. Now you can have a Mexican dinner. Thank you.