THDL Simplified Phonetic Transcription of Standard Tibetan

"While multiple systems are currently used for transliterating Tibetan words with the Roman alphabet in ways that precisely render the Tibetan spelling, one system has emerged as a de facto international standard: the Wylie system. However, no such standard has emerged for the phonetic rendering of Tibetan, and in fact there is no single phonetic system in widespread use. Because Tibetan spelling practices are extremely conservative – they have remained essentially unchanged for ten centuries – there is an unusually broad discrepancy between spelling and pronunciation. Tibetan punctuation chiefly divides Tibetan words into syllables, each of which may have up to four horizontal positions (prefix, root letter, suffix, and post-suffix). Additionally, the root letter can have as many as four vertical positions (the root letter consonant, superscript consonant, subscript consonant, and vowel). In contemporary spoken Tibetan, however, many of these components are silent (although some silent elements do influence the pronunciation of the root letter and vowel). Because of this, transliterations of Tibetan words that render the standard spellings into the Roman alphabet – for example, bsgrubs – are virtually impossible for the general reader to pronounce (bsgrubs is pronounced "drup"). Compounding this difficulty is the fact that, while Tibetan spelling is standardized across the entire Tibetan cultural region, the pronunciation of a given word can differ markedly from one spoken dialect to the next. Because general readers cannot decipher Tibetan words in transliteration (e.g., bsgrubs) it is impossible for them to know how to pronounce the words, and as a result they have an extraordinarily hard time remembering Tibetan personal names, place names, terms, and so forth. Thus, the use of such transliteration systems significantly restricts the utility of the resulting materials for anyone who does not know the Tibetan language."

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