Тибетское произношение (Геше Майкл Роуч), занятие 3

[Speaker 1]
Okay, welcome back to pronouncing Tibetan correctly and writing it in prayers and so on for foreigners to pronounce correctly. The next example that we're going to take, and these are real examples from a real text that we're working on, is this word. The transcription, not the pronunciation, is so-ba, ga-so-ba, okay?

[Speaker 2]
That's the transcription. If you give me these Roman letters, I will know what Tibetan letters to write, okay? If you give me the pronunciation, I don't know how to write it in Tibetan.

But I know how to pronounce it correctly. That's the difference, okay? So give me some help on the first one.

How do you want to spell it? In pronunciation.

[Speaker 1]
S-U-L. S-U-L, okay? But, this person was writing SO-L, why?

They're confusing transcription with pronunciation, okay? Before four suffix letters, LA, one of them, O changes to U. And U is closer to U than O is, okay?

You say SUL-WA. And if you went up to a person on the street, which is the ultimate test of pronunciation, and you went up to them and said, I'm going to tell you a foreign word, you write it in English as best you can, and you said SUL-WA, nobody would put an O there, nobody. You see?

That's the way to test your pronunciation, okay? Just go to a normal person and say, SUL-WA, write it, okay?

[Speaker 2]
Okay, now, so we have one rule that we repeated from the last class. This is one of the four suffix letters that changes the vowel before it to an umlauted version, U, SUL-WA, okay? Now, what do you notice about this BA?

BA as a second syllable, or a third syllable, or a fourth syllable, of a single word, changes to WA, okay? Changes to WA. So we have SUL-WA.

And we wouldn't want to write SUL-BA, okay? Unfortunately, if there's any other vowel on here, like a SHEP-KYU, like TA-BU, it becomes hard again, B.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, so you gotta remember that, okay? Only when it's a second or third syllable. Like a person from Hwasa is called Hwasa-WA, and it's spelled B-A, okay?

[Speaker 2]
A person from Hwasa. And there's examples like that, okay? There's even four or five syllables examples, but...

As a second syllable, BA changes to WA, okay?

[Speaker 1]
So this is the correct pronunciation, SUL-WA. And this is the correct transcription.

[Speaker 2]
Got it? So these are the... We're covering the troublemakers.

The others are easy. The other ones are easy, okay? These are the difficult ones.

All right, next video, we'll be going on to another example. Thank you.