Серия «Тибетский язык», курс 1: Тибетский алфавит, занятие 19

[Speaker 1]
Hi, this is Geshe Michael, and we're continuing our Tibetan translator training classes. So far we've covered all the possible pronunciations of Tibetan, and having been through the video courses up to date, the small video segments, you should be able to pronounce any Tibetan. Good news for you is that Tibetan scriptures, talking about sutras that were written two and a half thousand years ago, or a newspaper written yesterday, the pronunciation is the same.

Okay? You can pronounce, if you can pronounce the Heart Sutra, you can pronounce a newspaper written yesterday. Pronunciation is the same.

That's really good news. When that Aprilia with the shortest sota, the drogta of March, at Perse, Tererota, and Bada, the Berebein, and Swishlakor, of which we are two, and Gendovitz of Lur, like, that's Chaucer. Okay?

And it don't sound like modern English, but you can read, you can pronounce. If you can pronounce a newspaper, you can pronounce the Heart Sutra from two and a half thousand years ago. That's the good news.

So you've covered it, you can pronounce anything. I expect you pronounce everything correctly from now on. The only exception is that there is a Sanskrit words written with Tibetan letters, and they will trip you up.

So I wanted to... I thought I would do two short video segments about Sanskrit written with Tibetan letters. And you know, it's just to give you a taste for what might happen.

I want you... The only goal of these two small segments is that by the time you finish them, you can recognize when you're in Tibetanized Sanskrit, and you don't freak out, and you know what to do. Okay?

So it's not to teach you all of the pronunciation of Sanskrit, which is a vast subject, and which is not pronounced correctly by anybody I know, except me. And sorry. So anyway, I'm going to give you some basic presentations about Sanskrit in Tibetan letters.

And then at least you will know when you've hit a mantra, or you've hit a Sanskrit title in Tibetan, and you know pretty much what to do. Because it breaks all the rules that you've learned so far about how to pronounce Tibetan and how to show Tibetan. So to get you some examples, what I did was, I turned on our database, our Tibetan library that has, I don't know, half a million pages in it.

I went to the Kangyur, and I typed in gyagar kedo, which means... in the language of India, okay? Which is how every sutra and every shastra starts, you know, in the language of India, and they give you the Sanskrit title.

So if I wanted to give you a pile of important Sanskrit, I could just go take titles from the Kangyur. So I went to the Kangyur, I typed in, you know, in the language of India, and I got like six or seven examples for you. So let's go through those.

You'll get a feel for when you hit Sanskrit in Tibetan letters, and you'll start to get a feeling of why it's not pronounced the way other Tibetan is, okay? So the first thing I hit, I ended up in the stotra, or the stava section, which is topa in Tibetan, which means the collection of praises. These are songs of praise, eulogies written to high lamas or great gurus of the past or saints, and this is a whole section in the Kangyur and Tengyur called topa, mainly in the Tengyur called topa, okay?

So I'm going to just give you a few examples, and I wrote them down for you, okay? And you'll start to be aware of some of the pitfalls of this subject. Okay, so pronounce it—I mean, you can't pronounce it.

According to what we've studied so far, it cannot be pronounced. It would be something like bi, shi—we have never had this before—and then ta, ba. It would be something like bi, shi—bi, shi is something—ta, ba, okay?

Now, because it's Sanskrit written in Tibetan letters, what this is, is... Say, bi, shi—bi, shi—ta—ta. You turn your tongue back, this is retroflex.

These two dots represent a retroflex. Retro means back, flex means bent, like flexed foot, right? So this is a non-retroflex sha.

This is sha, and this is sha. And we don't have it in Tibetan, okay? Say, bi, shi—bi, shi—ta—ta—ta.

Stava, okay? Bi, shi—ta—bi, shi—ta—ta. Stava, okay?

Stava means appraise. It comes from a root stu, to appraise somebody. Bi, shi, sta means khyab-du-phak-pa, which means special, super special, okay?

So, what do we notice from the... How are we going to pronounce the, you know, the Tibetan here—Tibetan letters? One thing we notice is that B changes to V, okay?

So, this was B, okay? B. Unfortunately, B is also— to show a B in Sanskrit, you also use this letter, okay?

So you have to know Sanskrit to know how to pronounce it, okay? Because why didn't they just use a Tibetan V? There is no Tibetan V, okay?

Get used to it, alright? So, when the Tibetans hit a V in Sanskrit, which is VA, right? They didn't—they just used a B, okay?

Because they didn't have any other letter. So, you have to know what it says before you can pronounce it, which is bad news, okay? This could have been BZHUSHTA, but you don't know, okay?

Unless you know Sanskrit, you don't know how to pronounce it, okay? So you're going to get in trouble when you hit Sanskrit, okay? V, ZHUSHTA.

Now, there's—how many rows in Tibetan? KACCHATTABATSA, right? KACCHATTABATSA, and then two more.

So you got seven and a half rows, thirty letters. Seven and a half rows of four, four per row. So you have thirty letters—thirty consonants in Tibetan.

We don't have this retroflex row in Tibetan. In Sanskrit, it comes between CHA and TA. KACCHATTABATSA, in Sanskrit would be KACCHATTABATSA, okay?

There would be a retroflex dental row. TA, say it right, TA. TA, TA, DA.

That's also in Sanskrit, and NA, like bandita. Or mandala, okay? So those would be retroflex, okay?

Not mandala and pandita, okay? Pandita. Not hatha yoga, but hatha.

Hatha yoga, okay? Not hatha yoga, okay? So, this—to achieve a retroflex in Tibetan, you reverse the letter, okay?

You just turn it around, which is kind of cool. It's a cool idea. So this is CHA, and this is...

CHA, CHA. CHA, CHA, okay? That's all.

When you want to retroflex a Tibetan letter and make it retroflex, you just flip it, okay? It's kind of cute. It's kind of cool.

All right, VISHISTA. So VISHISTA means very special or extraordinary. And then, now, in normal Tibetan, this would be jor lokad for me.

SA, DAG DAG, DAG, okay? Please say SA, DAG DAG, DAG. If I take a SA and I join a DA below it, I get DA, okay?

Now, this is not Tibetan, this is Sanskrit. So it's SA, DAG, DAG. Okay, now it's VISHISTA, STAVA, and you pronounce the head letter, okay?

So you've got to know Sanskrit to be able to pronounce Tibetan correctly. By the way, Tibetans don't. They have no idea what to say.

They will say VISHISTA, they have no idea. STAVA, STAVA probably, okay? Now you already know why this is a V, because they didn't have a V and they used a B, okay?

VISHISTA, STAVA. Say VISHISTA. No, sorry, VISHISTA.

Don't turn your tongue back till the second SHA, right? VISHISTA, STAVA, okay? Got it?

So, you're not going to know how to pronounce that until you know how to pronounce it. By the way, that's the way English is, you know, sorry for that. I'm going to give you two more examples, and then we'll stop for the night, okay?

So, have hope. I'm sorry we're going late. That's okay.

No yawning. I'm older than all of you guys. Okay.

So, it's all illegal in normal Tibetan. You can't pronounce it. This should be STA, this should be BA, there should be a dot.

You never get this combination in Tibetan. This should be a silent spelling changer for differences like ZA and SA, meaning root and grass, respectively. And then this should be a DO, and this should be something like DRA, DRA.

Say DRA, right? I mean, it's all, now the pronunciation changes in Sanskrit, okay? So, this B, I'll give you a clue, is a V, and we did one today in yoga class.

Yeah, sarva, okay? So, this part is sarva, meaning all, right? Sarvangasana means you use all your limbs, supposedly.

So, sarva. Now, this is a very interesting thing. And it justifies the way I pronounce Sanskrit for you guys.

The Tibetans, when they hit the second row in Sanskrit, which is what? CHA CHA CHA NYA, okay? CHA CHA CHA NYA.

Say CHA. CHA. CHA.

NYA. When they hit the second row in Sanskrit, they didn't use the second row of their own alphabet. They dropped down to CHA CHA CHA.

The fifth row, okay? They chose the fifth row to represent the second row in Sanskrit, okay? So, instead of saying bodhicitta, they wrote bodhicitta.

Instead of saying king as raja, they said raza, okay? It means, a thousand years ago, when Buddhism entered Tibet from probably West Bengal, they pronounced the things differently, and they didn't say... for example, wisdom wasn't janyana, okay?

Or as it's mispronounced in India nowadays, gnana, or something like that. Like banana, I don't know. It was pronounced properly, which was znyana.

Say znyana, okay? What's the Russian for I know? Znyayo.

Russian comes more directly from Sanskrit, okay? The correct pronunciation is znya. And the Tibetans understood that.

When I showed this to my Sanskrit teacher, he was very excited. He said, I always thought it was pronounced that way, you know? He always pronounced it that way.

But he didn't have like big proof for it, except for poetry where they had to make similar sounds. So, he was very excited to see the word I know, okay? Znyay, or znyana, okay?

And that explains the K in English, or the G in Gnostic, comes from this znya, okay? So, this means to know, znyay, okay? Sarva.

If you're gonna do it in normal, you know, diacritics, Sanskrit diacritics, sarva znyay, okay? But pronounced properly, it's znyay, okay? Sarva znyay.

Then this is okay, mara is mara. Maha means big. But when it meets Ishvara, it becomes A.

A means I becomes I. Maheshvara. Say Maheshvara.

Okay, so this is a combination of two words, maha and Ishvara, okay? What do we learn from this? This orthographic va in Sanskrit.

We said Tibetan didn't have a va, but it has a piece of a letter called a vasur or a asur. There's a debate, right? They used to represent a V when it's connected to a Sanskrit letter, shva.

Maheshvara, okay? Maheshvara, alright? So this means Wangchuk Chenpo in Tibetan, the great lord, okay?

Maheshvara. Then the S you know is pronounced sto. And then the ratak on a dental no longer is a tra.

It's no longer a retroflex dental. You pronounce the whole thing. Stotram, okay?

Say stotram. You don't say stotram, okay? Stotram, stotram.

And then sometimes this is the, on this one I think it's called, this is a ma, right? Stotram, which is a case ending. It shouldn't even be on there maybe, okay?

Stotram. So stotram means a praise of the great lord who knows all things, the all-knowing great lord. Why this is an E is a long story, I'm not going to go into it, okay?

But it's a common variant in Buddhist hybrid Sanskrit, okay? Now let's do one more example and we're done for the night. And then I'll give you a part two of Sanskrit in Tibetan.

Again, the goal is not to what? Teach you, I'm not going to teach you every possible combination. I just want you to feel when you hit some Sanskrit and you know it's not going to obey the rules, okay?

Here we go, one last example and then we'll stop for tonight. Oops, sorry. Hee hee.

Alright. Guess what this is? The first two syllables.

Deva. Okay, deva. Alright.

Means what? Yeah, angel or god, okay. But we just said if you wanted a V you would use a Tibetan.

B, ba. You can use either one. Okay, so now you have real problems.

Okay, V could be a B or V could be a W. B could be a V, W could be a V or W could be a W. You have to know the word before you can pronounce it correctly, okay?

Sorry. Okay, got that? The V can be written either with a B or with a W.

Okay, bad news. Or with an asura. Okay, three choices for a V, alright?

So get used to it, okay? So deva you know, deva you know. I think you know this word.

[Speaker 2]
Atisha.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, atisha, okay. Which is in Tibetan is... two translations.

Puntsok or Pultujungwa and they mean the same thing. Puntsok, which is a name of a friend of ours. There's a monk name.

Puntsumtsokpa, it's a short form of Puntsumtsokpa or Pultujungwa, which can be shortened to Pultjung. And they both mean excellent or amazing or wonderful or like that, okay? This is just an adjectival ending, aya.

So atishaya means wondrous, okay? Atishaya. And atisha, Lord Atisha, atisha means amazing or wonderful or excellent, okay?

Atishaya is just another form of that word. Atishaya, okay? So this...

Here it means actually more wonderful than. Atishaya, exceedingly... more exceedingly wonderful than, okay?

This you already had, and so you're going to give it to me. Stotra. Stotra.

Okay, not tra, okay? If it's Tibetan, it's tra. If it's Sanskrit in Tibetan letter, it's tra.

Stotra, okay? If you want a real mess up, think about what it is in English. It's a second, second row.

Kaccha. Cha. T-R in English before U is truck.

Truck. It's not truck. It's not even truck.

It's truck. It totally breaks all the rules. Why is it C-H?

God knows, okay? You never thought about it because you grew up speaking English, okay? But try it when you're a foreigner and you sit T-R-U-C-K and your teacher says, that's cha, truck.

You're like, what do you mean cha? It's T. It should be truck.

Okay, all those Russians are right. Don't try to trick me. All right.

This one you actually know if you think about it. Yeah, and then we'll finish for the night. You tell me where trika is.

Trika. Now this is a real Sanskrit retroflex. You turned around the ta, right?

So ta became tra, tra, tra. What's a trika? Do you know?

It means a commentary. Like pramana vartrika. Pramana vartrika, okay?

It's a commentary on valid perception. Pramana vartrika. Okay, so trika means a commentary, okay?

And it's a loan word in Tibetan. They'll say trik, trik. Okay, and it means a ...

And if you care, which you don't, but I don't care that you don't care. These kind of words that start with a retroflex represent the old Dravidian culture of India before the Aryans moved in. So the languages spoken down in South India will have a lot of ...

This is a sign that this is an ancient word from the original people of India before the Persians or whoever they were moved in in the north and were called Aryans, which means superior people. I don't know how many years ago, 5,000 years ago, longer. They pushed the darker people down to the South India, and they spoke a different language which wasn't related to ...

It wasn't the same as Sanskrit, and it had a lot of initial retroflexes in it. So this is probably a Dravidian word. Okay, trika.

And those, you know, someday you can get into that. Nagarjuna was from there, for example. So trika.

There's only one more thing I want to show you about this. It's that how do Tibetans indicate a long I in Sanskrit, you see? This would be a short I in Sanskrit, okay?

This would be trika. Trika. And this is tika.

Tika. Tika. Tika.

Okay, I and I. We call a short E and a long E, right? Or, sorry, short I and a long E in English.

Okay, tika, which is not a word, and tika. Tika. So when you draw the I vowel in Sanskrit behind the first letter, it means short I.

And when you draw it on the right side, it means a long I. Okay, that's the difference between a short I and a long I in Sanskrit. What are you going to do in Tibetan to indicate a long I when you don't have an extra vowel for I?

You put an ah chung at the bottom. Okay, any long letter. So, pronounce this for me.

You thought you were going home. Pronounce this for me. Ah.

Ah. Ah. Ah.

Okay? Arya. Acharya.

Okay? Like that. What's a nice pronunciation people do?

There's one word that really irritates me. Anyway, if it's a long A, you've got to say a long A. If you say ah, like asana, okay?

But that's another story. I forget the example, that drives me nuts. Anyway, I can't remember.

Anyway, this is an ah sound. Without the long mark. By the way, in a Sanskrit word, starting with ka, it would be ka.

That's a long A. What's a short A? It's nothing.

Every letter has its own short A. Ka. Ka.

Say ka. Ka. This is equivalent really to a short U in English.

I cut my finger. And this is equivalent to a, I don't know what. Ah.

A-H in English, okay? Maybe it's namaste. I don't remember.

No, there's something else. Avidya. Avidya would mean supreme knowing.

Avidya would mean ignorance. Something like that. There's some word that yoga teaches you.

Drives me crazy. That's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ananda means the person who's unhappy. Ananda means the person who's supremely happy. An initial long A means very much.

An initial short A means not at all. So when they say ananda, it drives me crazy. Nanda means to be happy.

Ananda means to be very happy. Ananda means I'm very unhappy. Okay, just like that, you gotta be careful with Sanskrit, okay?

And people mispronounce it all the time. Amitabha means... Anyway.

Amitabha means immeasurable light. Am, a, not, measurable, mitabha, light, as in photon, from the Greek. But that's another story.

Okay, so anyway, I've given you three examples of titles. Actually, I think they're from the thing here. Just to show you what it feels like when you hit suddenly Sanskrit.

And it'll be noticeable. There'll be weird stacks of letters and things you haven't seen before. And then you gotta think that there's a possibility that you just hit a patch of Sanskrit.

And you may not be able to pronounce it correctly unless you learn Sanskrit. Sanskrita. Sanskrita.

Okay, Sanskrita. Say Sanskrita. Amrita.

Okay, it's a vocabulary R, not amrita. Amrita? That doesn't have any meaning at all in Sanskrit.

There's no such word. So anyway, now you know when you hit Sanskrit that you're in Sanskrit, and then maybe later, if we have nothing to do, we can learn the correct pronunciation of all the titles in the Kanya or something. Because that's a pretty representative case of Sanskrita.

By the way, this combination here is illegal in modern Sanskrit. Okay? When an A meets an A, what's supposed to happen?

Yeah, a long A. Deva ends in A. Atisha starts in A.

It should have been written devatisha. Devatisha. Okay?

And then you got to get into what's called Buddhist hybrid Sanskrit. And there are slightly different rules for Buddhist Sanskrit than there are for classical Panini Sanskrit. Okay?

And that's a whole other subject, which we'll cover in another class about a hundred years from now. Good night, and thank you for coming. See you in our next class.

Next class we'll do maybe three more titles in Sanskrit, just to get a feeling for it, and then we'll move on. We'll move on to the basic particles of Tibetan that are covered in the short Tibetan memorizable grammar texts, like dung, shing, shing, and ching, and dung. All words for and, for example.

And they're used in different places. And we have to—our next job is to start to learn particles. And then after that we'll learn vocabulary, and after that we'll learn syntax, and after that we'll be able to read simple sentences.

Okay. Good night.