Тибетское произношение (Геше Майкл Роуч), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
Hi, this is Geshe Michael Roach with another installment of Learning Tibetan to be a translator of the ancient scriptures. We've been working this week in Arizona with our group about a translation of a beautiful text called Djordje. Djordje means the preparation, the song that is sung in preparation for meditation.

And then I asked a team of my students, my friends, to write out the pronunciation. So we'd like to give all of the people who come to the Djordje class, we're expecting about 100 people, we'd like to give them the Tibetan language, and we'd like to give them the pronunciation, and we'd like to give them the translation. So I had these friends of mine to do the pronunciation.

And then today I'd like to critique their work on the pronunciation so they can get better and better at it. And then, you know, later it will be perfect. But what these corrections reflect is pieces where a foreigner, a westerner, would have trouble getting the correct pronunciation.

It's very important to get the pronunciation correct. And I just want to give you an example. The first example I have, these are words that came up in the first 30 verses of the Djordje, which people were writing out the pronunciation for me, and they made a mistake, and I'd like to explain the mistakes, okay?

Because we learn more from our mistakes than... The rest is all good, okay? So I'd like to take this example of this word.

So please repeat the word, hungse. Okay, good. Anybody know what a hungse is?

It's kind of a strange word. It means that a sage's bowl that a monk or a nun will carry to ask for their food is called hungse. Okay, so what I'd first like to talk about is the difference between transcription and pronunciation.

So they're not the same thing. And a lot of people get confused. When I see almost any book written about Tibetan or anything, prayers written in Tibetan, they're almost always wrong.

So I want to really see if you can grasp today at least the difference between transcription and pronunciation. Transcription is the spelling of the foreign word in English letters, and it has to be precise. It has to reflect every orthographical element.

Every letter here has to have a separate character in Roman letters, in English letters. The pronunciation is totally different. The pronunciation is the closest sound that a foreigner can make when they hear this Tibetan word.

And it won't be perfect, because we don't have in English these sounds. But the goal of pronunciation, like in this text we want to recite this prayer with a group of a hundred people who don't know it, it should just be simple, clear, and as close in normal English as you can get to the pronunciation without the use of diacritical marks. Diacritical marks means extra little sashes and dots and things that you put on letters that most people don't understand.

In my opinion, to use diacritical marks in a text which is meant to be recited by a hundred just people off the street is crazy, because they don't know what those diacritical marks are supposed to mean. You can put checks or dots or things on letters, but they don't know how to pronounce it anyway. It's the same as Tibetan to them.

So the idea of pronunciation is simplified pronunciation. What's the closest you can get in English to this Tibetan sound? In normal letters, okay?

Here we go. So I'm going to do the transcription first, which is, So this is the transcription meaning each orthographical element here, each letter, or piece of a letter, has its equivalent here. This is the L, this is the H, this is the U, this is the NG.

So that's transcription. If you pronounced this according to transcription, you would be making a lot of mistakes. It's not the same.

So if you tried to say it would be completely wrong, okay? So let's do the simplified pronunciation. What's the pronunciation in Tibetan of this first part?

Yeah, it's H-L-U-N-G. Lung, okay? So check this out.

You actually reverse them. For the pronunciation of this particular stack in Tibetan, you say the H first. What capital city of what great country was totally misspelled by someone who confused transcription with pronunciation?

Lhasa, okay? It should be H-L-A-S-A. Lhasa is the correct pronunciation.

So some British bureaucrat saw the spelling as L-H-A and they copied it. That's the transcription. It's not the pronunciation.

The pronunciation should have been reversed, okay? Lhasa, Lhasa. Say Lhung.

Lhung. Okay, and then as you know D is a silent suffix letter. We drop it, it gets shorter.

Z is a low tone S. S is a high tone S. They're both S's.

In pronunciation, they're both S's. So do we put Z-E or do we put S-E? S-E.

There's no Z in Tibetan language, okay? There's no such thing. Then people say Lama Zopa or something and they just...

they're butchering the poor great lama's name, okay? It's Sopa. It's an S, okay?

Why did they get... where did they get the Z? That was the transcription.

It's to make the difference between the low S and the high S. So please, I beg you, on my knees, don't confuse transcription with pronunciation. And people...

I think almost everybody I've seen does it, okay? And it takes a lot of self-control not to do it, okay? So we're going to put it together.

ZE LUNG ZE Okay, so... what I'd like to do is have Nick start writing some rules for pronunciation and then we'll write up a whole document. We have a shortened version in the Release 4 ACIP manual but I would like to make a...

I'd like to start on a document. So let's do rules today. I think we've got to have three or four more videos, ten-minute videos.

Let's start collecting rules and then we'll put them in some kind of logical order at the end, okay? But I... according to real cases that came up in a real text by real people doing pronunciation, we're going to do this first, okay?

We're just going to go through them in a random order. So what can we see here? Remember that the order of the stack is not necessarily the order of the pronunciation, okay?

Especially L-H, okay? L-H in transcription is what in pronunciation? H-L, okay?

H-L, okay? That's all. So someone made a mistake, they just put LUNG ZE, okay?

Now, in transcription you must put a space where there's a dot in the Tibetan, divide the syllables. But these are one word. They are two parts of one word.

So in pronunciation you... mush them together, okay? LUNG ZE.

So that's rule number two. Where there's a dot, you put a space in the transcription, but in pronunciation you join them. If they are two parts of one word.

Sometimes they're not and we'll talk about that, okay? And then Z in transcription unexpectedly becomes S in pronunciation, okay? So that's...

I think we got three rules there. Can you say the rules again? Like, roughly.

[Speaker 2]
The order of the stack is not necessarily the order of the pronunciation.

[Speaker 1]
Good.

[Speaker 2]
In transcription we divide the syllables, and in pronunciation we put the whole word together. And the Z becomes an S.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, okay? Are we good? Okay.

Notice one thing for the future. This ZHENG BU, this vowel, A, it's always pronounced A. If you see...

and we use E for that. And everyone knows that that's not a long E. It's not E.

It's A. Okay? So we don't have to put a Y after it or anything like that.

Okay? We know it's A. And it's not going to be E.

Alright? Okay, here we go. Let's do another one.

I'm going to use the same paper. First let's do the... This is the transcription, okay?

This is the spelling in English letters. M-D-O-K... Sorry, G.

C-A-N. Now let's do the pronunciation. What?

First one? D, spell it for me. K, good.

C-H... Good. Okay, say DOG CHEN.

Okay, the person who did the pronunciation... We're going to go to twelve minutes. The person who did the pronunciation split them, okay, into two separate syllables.

And that's a hard call, okay, you have to learn. But CHEN is R-S-H in English, like pinkish, or reddish, or... foolish, okay?

So it gets added directly to the word. We wouldn't split it into two different words, okay? So some endings get split off, because they're not part...

they're not one half of a two-syllable word. But some endings are half of a two-syllable word, so you have to know to transcribe it correct, to make the pronunciation correctly, okay? So we have DOG CHEN.

Why did the A change to E? Because of this NA, and we'll talk about that in the next video. So the next video we'll be talking about how vowel sounds change according to the suffix letter.

And we'll do that in the next video. So here we have... this is the transcription, C-A-N, but the pronunciation is C-H-E-N.

And this is DOG CHEN. DOG means color, and CHEN means having that color, like reddish, or purplish, okay? So we add it straight on.

But there's a space in the transcription, okay? Alright, we'll see you in the next video, we'll continue on difficult points of proper pronunciation in Tibetan. Thank you!