Тибетское произношение (Геше Майкл Роуч), занятие 2

[Speaker 1]
So this is a continuation of learning how to write the pronunciation of Tibetan properly and how to distinguish it from Tibetan transcription. And this will be a series of videos just about difficulties in writing down in English letters the correct pronunciation of Tibetan because so many people make mistakes. I think almost everybody makes mistakes.

So our next example from a real text is called dok chen, which means having that color. Say dok, dok chen, dok chen. Okay, the transcription, not the pronunciation, is...

to get the spelling in English letters, in Roman letters, we would write that. That's the correct spelling in English letters, but it's not the pronunciation. We don't say ma-dog-sen, okay?

We don't say ma-dog-sen, okay? That's transliteration. Let's do the pronunciation.

Dok chen. As one word, say dok chen. Yeah, it's one word.

It's one word with two parts. So in the transcription we have to put a space, in the pronunciation we don't put a space. It'd be like saying, shake spear.

Okay, and you don't do that, okay. All right, there's an important principle here that I wanted to cover, and that's called, I like to call it an umlauting suffix letter. Umlaut means, it changes ah to eh, like this.

There's a German umlaut symbol. This changes ah to eh. Or you can change oo to oo.

Or you can change oh to ah, okay. These are, I call it, or there would have been an oh with an umlaut over it, okay. Let's do it here, okay.

So certain suffix letters, the final letter in a Tibetan syllable, will change the value of the vowel to a different sound, okay. So that's why this is not chan, it's chen, okay. Because of this umlaut rule.

And I'm going to give you those suffix letters which do, and which do not change the sound of the vowel that comes before them. So certain vowels will change their sound in front of certain suffix letters. There are ten suffix letters in Tibetan.

Say, ka-nga-da-na, pa-ma-ah, ra-la-sa. These are the ten suffix letters in Tibetan, okay. Some of them change the vowel before them, some of them don't, okay.

Let's go through in order. I'll say doesn't change is ka and nga. Da and does change is da-na.

I'm going through in alphabetical order. Pa is up here, ma is up here, ah is up here, ra is up here, la is down here, and sa is here. Okay, these are the ten suffix letters in Tibetan.

These six as suffix letters don't change the vowel sound. And these four do change the vowel sound. So that's why chen turns to chen.

The ah changes to eh, okay. So when you're writing the pronunciation you would write a ee. When you're writing the transcription you would write a eh, okay.

And you have to get that difference clear in your mind, okay. If the following suffix letter is one of these four, eh is going to change to eh, oo is going to change to oo, and oh is going to change to oh, oh, okay. And you see a lot of mistakes.

Many, many, many people make a mistake on this point, okay. Many, many Tibetan names get... Like Lama Zopa's name again, it's not...

It's a d. The last letter of his first name, a sopa, is a d. So his name must be pronounced with a u sound.

Uh, a short u. Sopa. It's not sopa.

It's not sopa anywhere in Tibet. And the z is also a mistake because it was supposed to be... That's the transcription.

So somebody confused the transcription, z-o, with the pronunciation which would be what? S-u, okay. Sopa, okay.

So that's a good example, all right. And we'll continue on that idea. So for our rules, we can say that four of the ten suffix letters change the value of the vowel which comes before it to an umlaut, okay.

We'll call them umlauting suffix letters. And that's going to make a difference in how you write the pronunciation, and how you make it the closest that you can get it for a foreigner to the correct Tibetan sound. Okay, let's continue next time with a new word.