Серия «Тибетский язык», курс 1: Тибетский алфавит, занятие 18

[Speaker 1]
Hi, this is Geshe Michael with our next installment of Learning Tibetan, Learning to be a Translator of Ancient Tibetan. And we've been talking about the different letters of the Tibetan alphabet. We've covered all the vowels, we've covered the mostly silent prefix letters, we've covered head letters, we've covered the sub-join letters, we've covered the suffix letters that come after the sound, that close the sound.

So, having covered ngun-juk, which means the prefix letters, ngun means before, juk means applied. We've covered the jen-juk, which means applied after, so j means after. We're going to cover tonight yang-juk.

So, yang-juk means secondary suffix letter. Let's give an example. And there are only two of them, so it's not a big subject.

All right, if we take this word here, so can you pronounce that for me? Rik, okay, with a ra, right, rik. It's spelled out loud, C-A-T-K-A-T, it would be ra-gi-ku-ri, say ra.

Ra-gi-ku-ri-ka-rik. So, here, because this primary suffix letter, the first suffix letter, in order to get a change in meaning, another suffix letter can be added. And one of the two, which is allowed, is a sa.

So, pronounce this for me. Rik, same pronunciation, okay, these two are homonyms, they're pronounced the same. If you're spelling out loud, if you're jor-log, you say ra-gi-ku-ri-ka-sa-rik.

So, you don't say ra-gi-ku-ri-rik-sa-rik, you don't say it that way. You say ra-gi-ku-ri-ka-sa-rik, okay? And that changes the meaning.

Any idea about the meaning of either one of these? Rikpa? Rikpa meaning mind, the mind, okay?

Selsing rikpa shepa tseni, part of the definition of the mind. And rik with an s means type or class or family, like Rignar, the buddhas of the five families, okay? So, this becomes a totally different word meaning class, okay?

With the secondary suffix letter. The secondary suffix letters are silent, okay? You don't hear them, all right?

Something you should know about this combination of ka and sa is that in a woodblock carving, if they run out of space at the end of the piece of wood, they're allowed to shorten that combination of ka-sa to this, which is a backwards ta, okay? So, ra-gi-ku-ri-ka-sa-rik, it can be carved this way, and it's a rik. It's the same thing, okay?

And you just have to know that. When you come to a backwards d, at the end of a block, a woodblock, then it might be ka-sa. Also, there are some woodblocks like the monastic textbooks of Tashi Lhumbo Monastery, which are purposely carved strange to thwart other monasteries who might want to steal their books.

So, they will have many of these abbreviations you'll find in books like that. So, you should know that this is a proper way of showing this. We have ka-nga-da-na-ba-ma-a-ra-la-sa.

Ka-nga-da-na-ba-ma-a-ra-la-sa. Ten suffix letters. And, a good number can take a secondary sa.

For example, if we take this verb... and by the way, the dot is required after only this letter, nga, so you don't mistake it for a ka. Pronounce this.

sung, okay? Jar log. kau, kau means prefix ka, sa, shab gyu, su, nga, sung, okay?

And that means, to say, okay? He is talking to me in the Koran sung-gu-dur. He's telling me that, okay?

Koran sung-gu-dur. Now, if we add a secondary suffix, sa, yang juk, Let's pronounce it first. sung, these are homonyms.

Secondary suffix letters don't change the pronunciation at all. They're only for orthographic purposes. Change the meaning by spelling, changing the spelling.

And then this would be spelled out loud. kau, sa, shab gyu, su, nga, sa, sung, nga, sa, sung. So you don't say, kau, sa, shab gyu, su, nga, sa, sung.

You say, kau, shab gyu, su, nga, sa, sung, okay? You don't say, kau, shab gyu, su, nga, sung, sa, sung, okay? You don't say that.

Now, if you say, I don't know. Let's take the verb create, okay? In English, what do you use for the third person singular present tense?

He creates su, and you add an s. How do you indicate the past tense? Yeah, ed is often used in English for the past tense.

When you add this suffix letter, d, in English, the verb often changes to past tense. When you add a secondary suffix letter to a Tibetan verb, it almost always indicates a past tense, okay? So, tenses are not very well defined in Tibetan, okay?

And after a certain century, they're pretty ignored anyway. You have to guess the tense from the context. But, if you see a secondary suffix letter on a verb, you can pretty much count that it's a past tense, okay?

So, that covers the first of the two yang jugs, the first of the two secondary suffix letters. No change in pronunciation, sometimes a radical change in meaning, and oftentimes, changing of a present tense verb to a past tense verb. And those are the uses of su, okay?

And just be aware of this special character used for kasa when we're running out of space. Now we're going to cover the second secondary suffix letter, which is ta, and... I'll give you an example...

I wrote some examples for you. Okay. So, let's jor-lop this, let's spell it out loud.

A-o, nga, okay? You already indicate the prenasal. This is one of the two prefix letters that can make a prenasal out of a third column.

A-o, nga, yatak, nga, shabgyu, ngyu, ra, ngyur, okay? Present tense of the verb, to become. Very, very important verb in Tibetan, to become, okay?

A different spelling means to translate, or to exchange money, ngyur. Pao... pao-sa-ga-ta-ga-ya-ta-gya-shabgyu-gyu-ra-gyur, which means to exchange.

But obviously the same root, okay? To change or to become. And then we have the kang-gyur, which is the translated word of the Buddha.

Kang-gyur, okay? Let's go to the past tense of this verb, which simply drops the... simply drops the prefix letter, okay?

And that's pretty common. And someday we'll get into tenses, okay? And we're not going to do it tonight.

But this changes from a prenasal to a... just a normal third column. So it goes from ngyur to gyur.

Di chepar ngyur means he will be doing it. Di chepar gyur means he did it, okay? Gyur.

Say gyur. Ngyur. Gyur.

Ngyur. Ngyur. Okay.

Now we had termination particles. Kong-ngo don-no-bo-mo-o-ro-lo-so-to, okay? Kong-ngo don-no-bo-mo-o-ro-lo-so-to.

There are only ten suffix letters, so there should be only ten terminative particles. I'll give you an example. If you want to say he will become, and then you want to stop the sentence in a big way, not all sentences have this, but this terminative particle is a strong stop, okay?

Like a section stop or something like that. So Tibetan doesn't have periods. They have no way to indicate the end of a sentence.

You just have to translate it according to your feeling of the meaning. But, if you see a ro, that means a definite stop, and that's normally the end of a sentence or even a whole section. So the terminative particle for ngyur is ro, and there are, let's say so far we have ten choices.

Kong-ngo don-no-bo-mo-o-ro-lo-so. Okay, ten choices. How do you determine which one of the ten you use after any selected word?

Yeah, you look at the suffix, the last letter here will match the letter of the terminative particle. If this had been the past tense of to say, which is sung-su, it would have been sung-so. Good.

Who said that? Good. Sung-so, okay?

And that's very common, okay? Sung-so, gyur-ro. Now, there's a problem, alright?

We will often see in scripture this combination. Sorry. Gyur-to, say gyur-to.

Gyur-to, he became, period. Okay, he became past tense, period. Gyur-to.

Why isn't it gyur-ro? There, okay, there's a, there's a, what do you call it? Vestigial?

Thing that dropped out of the language, okay? There was a secondary suffix here. What was it?

Is the secondary suffix there. So if you see some very old manuscripts, like the ones that come from Dunhuang in Tibetan, you might see the ancient spelling, which is gyur-do, okay? Ending with a secondary suffix, do, okay?

They are, the only way we know they are there, the only way we know they were there in modern literature is because of the do, okay? And why it wasn't do, I don't know. Maybe this got harder, and maybe it used to be do, I don't know.

But you will see impossible termination particles after the wrong letter. This should have been gyur-ro, this should match this letter, but it's gyur-do. And the explanation is that there used to be a secondary suffix letter, do, okay?

And it's easy to remember because it's very similar to ed, and it means past past tense. Perfect participle, past tense, very past tense, okay? So gyur-do means he became, period, okay?

How do we know there used to be a d there? Because of the terminative particle that's used after it, okay? Now, later writers get sloppy, and you might see something like...

This is the present tense of a verb, dzin, what's it mean, dzin? To hold, all right? dzinpa, right?

To hold, dzin. The past tense changes, but it's obviously related. It's sin, okay?

And in fact, the word sin can be a past participle indicator. ko che sin sha means he already finished it. So it's a strong ed.

Sin means it's done, it's finished, it's held, okay? So sin can be the past perfect indicator. If they want to make it strong, like he already went to do sin sha, ko do sin sha means he finished, he went already, it's gone, it's already done, okay?

Sin. Now, this being the past tense, there is a secondary da, which is not visible, right? In the written language you'll never see it.

It's invisible. This is always in the scriptures like sin, okay? Unless it's very, very old, okay?

The carving. You will only see sin, okay? So then what should be the terminative particle after sin?

Yeah, it should always be do, because sin is already what? It's already past tense, okay? This is the present tense.

When the da changes to sa, it's past tense, okay? That's always past tense. Now you tell me whether this is legal to end a sentence with sino.

This is the correct spelling. It should be always sinto. But, in the last, I don't know, 500 years, Tibetans forgot, many Tibetans didn't know about this secondary suffix, and they would say sino.

So if you do a search of the database, the ACIP library, you will see a lot of sinos, and they will mostly be later writers, okay? The early writers knew there was an invisible da there, and occasionally you'll see lists of verb tenses, and they'll add the secondary da in the past tenses just to show you, okay? So we've completed the two.

yang juk, yang juk, which means secondary suffix letter. Yang means again, right? Juk means applied again, meaning a secondary suffix letter.

One is visible, which is?

[Speaker 2]
Sa.

[Speaker 1]
And it's pretty common after ka, nga, pa, ma. Like, you know lam rim, right? That rim means what?

A step or a stage, marga, right? Add a sa to it, and it becomes the plague. A plague.

The plague, okay? So you have to know your suffix letters, okay? And then this one is a sa, is a ...

da is a secondary suffix letter in the ancient language, and only deduced by the presence of to in modern manuscripts, okay? And that way you'll know that it's there, that it was there, okay? Any questions?

Okay, that completes the secondary suffix letters. I believe we have covered everything you need to know to pronounce a Tibetan syllable correctly. What's cool about Tibetan syllables is that in almost all cases, with very rare exceptions, when you see it on the paper, you can pronounce it correctly.

It's not like English, where there could be different pronunciations of the word that you have to have heard it before. With all the classes up to this one, and having finished this one, you can pronounce anything in the Tibetan language correctly, okay? Except for weird exceptions, like dorje, like that R shouldn't be pronounced, okay?

There's one exception to saying that now you can read anything in the Tibetan language correctly, which is Sanskrit written with Tibetan letters, okay? Sanskrit written in Tibetan letters misbehaves completely, and impossible things are possible. So in our next class, we'll just go and taste Sanskrit written in Tibetan letters.

To give a whole course about that would take a whole course. But I'll give you a couple of examples of Sanskrit written in Tibetan letters. Sanskrit transcribed with Tibetan.

I think Coptic is like that. It's Egyptian written in Greek letters, or something like that. And also we're going to have some weird things, weird impossible things can happen, and all the rules of pronunciation that you've learned so far collapse when you talk about Sanskrit.

So in our next class, we'll do a little bit of Sanskrit for fun. Thank you!