Тибетское произношение (Геше Майкл Роуч), занятие 4

[Speaker 1]
Okay, here we are, continuing in our pronunciation class, especially for writing out pronunciation for people to say prayers and things like that, properly, correctly, okay? So, here we go. These are real examples from some work that we've been doing this week.

ku le, which means from the body, from the holy body, okay? ku le, from the holy body. So, give me the transcription.

S-K-U, good. S-K-U, stock, L-A-S. Wonderful.

That's the transcription which is spelling it in Roman letters, okay? Now let's do the pronunciation. K-U...

Yeah, okay, here we have a problem, okay? E in pronunciation of Tibetan is always A. It's never E.

There's no E in Tibetan. That would be an I. Okay, so this is always spelled, this is always pronounced A.

So, is it necessary to put a Y after it? Never, ever, okay? But, you will see Y in our pronunciations.

Y... We're reserving Y, get this, and remember it and burn it into your brain. We're reserving Y for the genitive, for the possessive, apostrophe I, okay?

So, this combination... is very, very common in Tibetan, okay? Apostrophe I, it's...the transcription is what? Apostrophe I. The pronunciation is...just add a Y on...because we don't say R-I. We say, if it's...like, if I was gonna say, of the body...

what's this transcription?

[Speaker 2]
K-U apostrophe I.

[Speaker 1]
Wait, S-K-U... Apostrophe I. That's the transcription, and we do it in capital letters just to make it easier.

Now, give me the pronunciation. K-U-Y. Yeah, K-U-Y, perfect, okay?

Get it straight. Learn it. Okay, we're reserving the Y at the end of a word for the possessive.

It will never ever be used at the end of the word except for possessive, because you never need it for anything else. Because E is always A. Sera-me should be M-E.

There's no possessive there. If it were of Sera-me, it would be Sera-me-yi. And then you'd need a Y, okay?

So, try to...these are difficult points, I don't know why. Okay, people stumble over this, but now you got it straight, right? It's very cool.

And you can be...the big thing about pronunciation system and a transcription system is that it should be consistent. It should never change, it should always be the same. It should handle all cases logically and in the same way.

And I've never seen any book that does it correctly. At all, okay? So, here we go.

So, K-U-L-E. Why? Now, do I write K-U-L-E?

Why not? It's two separate words. It's not a single word with two syllables.

Okay, there is a word called, I don't know, ku-le in Chinese. But there are words like, I don't know, so-le means a saw. So-le, and that's one word.

And then you would join it, okay? But here you'd say ku-le. Okay?

Good? Alright, I will have another comment on that next time, about the E. Why?

Because if we did come to a Tibetan word where the second syllable ended in E, and you did have to join them together because there were two parts of one word, this E in English has an effect on this vowel. What is it? Yeah.

Okay, this E makes this long. Mike. Or nuke.

Okay? Or spoke. Okay, this final E changes the value of the first syllable.

It makes it long. Short I is what? Nick.

Long I is? Mike. Short U is?

Suck, or buck, or tuck. Long U is nuke. U.

Short O is? Yeah, Dr. Spock. And then long O is?

Spoke. All English speakers are trained, when they see E in a two-syllable word, after a consonant, with a vowel in front of that, they know they're supposed to make this vowel long. So, it would be a bad idea to put them together, even if they were one word, in Tibetan.

So, you should put a hyphen between them. Otherwise the person's gonna say, I don't know, let me think of an example. Mmm...

Mmm... Great, that's a great example. So, the transcription is...

Y-I-G-E. Y-I, space. Space.

G-E. Okay. What's the pronunciation?

[Speaker 2]
Y-I-A. Y-I, space.

[Speaker 1]
No, it's still G, because it's a... It should be this. It should be this with no space.

Okay, it should be yige. Okay. But a normal English speaker's gonna say what?

Yikes! So, we split it. And that's just something you have to learn.

When you see this in a prayer, coming from our organization, it's gonna say, Y-I-K. Because otherwise a normal English speaker's gonna say, Yikes! Okay, got it?

These are cool. You should learn them. There's a logic behind correct pronunciation, and a group of foreigners can recite a Tibetan prayer almost perfectly if the person doing the pronunciation for them has done it correctly.

And if they haven't, it's gonna sound terrible, and you know that. Okay. Thank you, see you at our next pronunciation class.