Тибетское произношение (Геше Майкл Роуч), занятие 5

[Speaker 1]
Welcome again to our Pronouncing Tibetan Correctly class, and also, you know, especially when you're writing out prayers for foreigners to say together in a group. We're taking an actual text called the Dzogchen, and we're discussing some difficult parts of it, okay? One was, and I'm going to add just something for an easier example.

[Speaker 2]
Okay, now I'm going to do what first? The transcription, the spelling in the English letters, in Roman letters, and that's pronounced, say, ʻ, ki, pungpo.

[Speaker 1]
ʻ, ki, pungpo. There are a couple issues on this one, okay? Maybe I can think of three issues on this one.

We'll cover those three issues, and they'll help you with everything else. The first one is this. Because D is one of the four umlauting suffix letters, this O is changing to ʻ, okay?

And this is a silent prefix letter, it doesn't have any effect on the sound, so it's going to be ʻ. Now I could just write a U, but that would be a little hard for foreigners, you know, sometimes they have that in Burmese or something. I would put a UW, just to make it easier for foreigners.

ʻ, ʻ, okay? ʻ, okay? Now we have ki, and I want to talk about ki.

What does ki mean? Ki, yi, i, hi, av. It's the genitive or the possessive.

What's the English equivalent? Av or apostrophe S, okay? These are the two ways to show possessive in English.

Apostrophe S, or av. And they can be called genitive, and they can be called possessive, it's the same thing, okay? So ʻ means of light, okay?

But this particle is a particle, it's a genitive particle, which is not part of the word. It's not part of the word, so you shouldn't join them, you see what I mean? It's a...

it's like to, or on, or of, or for, or by, preposition. It's by itself. It's not...

get this, and try to burn this into your mind. It's not half of a two-syllable word. These are two single-syllable words that are separate, so we have to put a space in the pronunciation, okay?

So ʻu, ki. So we're clear? Get that in, burn that into your mind.

If it's a single word with two parts, you don't put a space between them. The Tibetan is ambiguous, it's always ambiguous, but if it's two halves of a single word, you jump them together, okay? So, as for example in pungpo, here we go.

So pungpo is one word, the two syllables are one word, so there should be no space between them, okay? When it's one word, you jam them together, in the pronunciation, not in the transcription, and you separate them when they are two separate words, okay? ʻu, ki, pungpo, okay?

We have a few moments I think to talk about a very, very important point, which is aspirated versus unaspirated, okay? Say pung... Say pungpo.

Pung. Pungpo. There's a famous line in the Abhidharmakosha, pung dang ke go re ke dun, pungpo ke je re ke dun, means, pung in that case, means to pile things up on one another, like pung.

You hear that it's unaspirated, I didn't say pung, I said pung. We do not have unaspirated sounds in English, we don't have them. We don't say, would you like a cup of tea, and stir it with your pen, okay?

That's how you can tell an Indian, right? They're unaspirating all the syllables. We don't do that in English.

All English syllables are aspirated, already, okay? So, when you're doing the pronunciation, you don't have to show the aspiration sign that you show in transcription. We cannot distinguish in English spelling, for normal English speakers, the difference between pung and pung, okay?

If you go up to somebody on the street and say, pung, can you spell that for me? They'll write p-u-n-g. If you say, now can you write pung?

They'll also write p-u-n-g. That's the test, okay? Get used to that test, okay?

Then so many people writing Tibetan and English sounds get confused on this point. All of the aspirate row, ka-cha-tha-pa-cha, they are writing with an H. And my llama's name was messed up on his passport, and forever after, as tarchen, because it was aspirated.

But we already aspirate all our consonants. It's already tarchen if you do it without an H, you see? And people don't get it.

It's so weird. So, this doesn't need an H. You don't have to put an H when you do the pronunciation, because it doesn't do anything, it doesn't help anybody, it just confuses.

They're gonna say, pung, pung-po, or something, and that's not what it is. All English consonants of this particular group are already aspirated. When you do the pronunciation, drop the H.

When you do the transcription, you must have the H to distinguish pung from pung, okay? Which is unaspirated, p-u-n-g, s-p-u-n-g, okay? Got it?

All right, so we had three lessons here, if I can recall. One is, ki is a separate word, these are not two parts of one word, but in this case it was two parts of one word. And then we're not going to try to put H's when we're doing pronunciation, because it's just going to confuse people, it's unnecessary, like tsongkhapa, it's not necessary.

There's no English K which is unaspirated, so the H does nothing. It just confuses, thangka, thangka, it's so fun, it's bizarre, you know, it's not thangka, it's thangka, it's a T, you know, so anyway, that's a very important point I think. What was that, and then the U, we were saying, it might be nice to add the W, just because normal English speakers can't handle a single U standing there, they won't know what to say, okay?

Those are the three points of pronunciation today. These are very dear to my heart, they drive me crazy, I see them everywhere, everyone makes these errors, and you have to distinguish between what? Transcription and pronunciation.

Different animals, completely, okay. Thank you, we'll go on to another example in the next video.