Jainarayan wrote:I looked through this forum and through the Wiki and Wylie transliterations and found a few things, like ö being close to German ö. But I have not found these. The
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_Tibetan isn't much help.
lhündrubpé - what do I do with that!?
In be'u is the apostrophe a glottal stop like in uh-oh?
How different are tsa and cha?
I think dz is like j in jeep?
In drakpé does the accent mark indicate stress on the syllable? drak-
pe
sangye chö dang gendün pakpé tsok is a humdinger. Is sangye like "sung-yeh", and the ge- of gendün like get or yet?
These are examples from the Verses of the Eight Noble Auspicious Ones
http://www.lotsawahouse.org/tibetan-mas ... cious-ones I'd like to recite the Tibetan.
So to pronounce these attempts at phonetic transliteration of Tibetan words you need to first follow the rules of phonetic renderings that you find in most of the romanizations of Asian language. So "a" is like the vowel in 'spot', 'e' is like the vowel in 'pay', 'i' is like that in 'see', 'o' like in 'bow' and 'u' like in 'boo'. In Tibetan, as in Sanskrit, the addition of an 'h' after a consonant means that consonant is aspirated, i.e you should feel the breath if you put your hand over your mouth. So having said that, the three syllables in lhundrupe would be pronounced with the "lhun" like look (replace the 'k' with an 'n' and add aspiration to the 'l'), drup with the 'u' pronounced like the vowel in 'look', and pe as you would the word 'pay'.
In be'u, the apastrophe is actually the consonant 'small a' so there's no stop. It would be pronounced like the phrase 'hey you' though Tibetans sometimes gloss over this as these words tend archaic and more common in literature, i.e. some Tibetans don't know how they should be pronounced either.
Tsa and cha are not pronounced the same and neither is dza and ja, unless they are transliterating Sanskrit and then tsa, tsha, ja or used to transliterate ca cha and ja, hence Jambhala is written Dzambhala in Tibetan.
The 'accent' in drakpe is a phonetic mark just indicating that the pe is pronounced with a long "a" like 'pay'. It has nothing to with emphasis or stress, as you say.
As for the sentence, you should be able to pronounce it properly based on what I already mentioned in terms of vowel pronunciation, though there are exceptions (like an "a" followed by a "l" or "n" like in 'pal' or 'ban" would be pronounce like the words 'bell' or 'den').
Well, that's today's lesson. Hope it helps.
