Tibetan and Himalayan Library - THL

THL Extended Wylie Transliteration Scheme

Overview

With the burgeoning of digital technology in the humanities and the recent surge of scholarly interest in Tibetan studies, the need for a standard transliteration system is even more compelling at present. However, Wylie’s own scheme is not comprehensive, and incommensurable extensions of it have proliferated in the digital world. While the international standards community (“ISO”) has established standards for the transliteration of other languages using non-roman alphabets, no such standard has been established for Tibetan, either de facto or ISO-approved. We thus feel the time has come to establish such an initiative in order to promote a standard format for information exchange dealing with Tibetan texts and language.

Some within the PRC have modified Wylie’s system by using v and x respectively to transcribe the a-chung (23rd letter) and the a-chen (30th letter). We can see no compelling reason for such an alteration. Our system is geared towards a disambiguated transliteration required for digital processing and aims to make as little change as possible to already extant scholarly practices in most countries, especially those where transliteration is most commonly used in respect to Tibetan. We have not been persuaded by arguments that the a-chung and a-chen should be represented by ‘v’ and ‘x’ since they are treated as consonants in most Tibetan grammars. Firstly, the apostrophe used to represent a-chung in Wylie is not a vowel anyways; secondly, the status of a-chung and a-chen in Tibetan grammar are controversial; and thirdly, while Wylie is not a phonetic system, it does have the advantage of using reasonable phonetic approximations of Tibetan letters, and ‘v’ and ‘x’ would completely contradict that principle.

Though we have adopted Wylie’s basic scheme, there are several fundamental gaps in the Wylie transliteration scheme that need to be addressed, if one is to develop a comprehensive standard. These are:

1. The ability to represent Tibetan transliterations of Sanskrit characters not normally found in Tibetan language without the use of diacritic marks,
2. The ability to unambiguously represent unusual stacks of Tibetan characters in the transliteration of mantras and the like, and
3. The ability to represent various Tibetan punctuation marks not covered by Wylie.

Various solutions have been proposed, though there has been no consensus. The following presents an unambiguous solution to these problems, with an eye toward digitally processing Tibetan documents as well as orthographic considerations. This is a provisional proposal, and we plan to systematically revise it as necessary in coordination with critical feedback from Tibetan scholars and Tibetan computing experts from around the world. Our goal is establishing an internationally accepted standard that is both used by scholars and computing experts, and approved by the relevant international standards organization. Wylie’s basic scheme, adopted for transliterating the consonant and vowels, is outlined in the tables below. What follows is an explanation for the proposed additions to Wylie’s system.

It should be noted that a proposed transliteration scheme must serve the needs of print publication and electronic publications. Print publications most typically use transliteration for references to terms or names, as well as for citations of short passages; less frequently, an entire text may be given in transliteration rather than Tibetan script. Electronic publications differ from print publications in having the added flexibility of being able to store material in transliteration, but then deliver it for display various modes, such as in a different transliteration system (such as one with diacritics), in Tibetan script, in a phonetic rendering and so on. For the most part, the needs of print and digital publication are identical when it comes to a transliteration system, with the latter simply adding more stringent requirements. However, there is one potential problem with regards to Tibetan, namely the use of capital letters and “plus” signs as detailed below, which are vital to articulate a comprehensive transliteration system beyond the basic scheme now commonly used. While not formally part of the Wylie system, many authors have taken to using a capital letter to indicate a place or personal name; in addition, the capital letters and plus signs as outlined above can look odd visually to people accustomed to the basic Wylie scheme. In this regards, we should note that the capital letters and plus signs are used to cover special words, such as Sanskrit transliterations, and thus will not typically appear in standard Tibetan passages. Secondly, in print publications authors could continue to use capital letters to mark place and person names as an informal practice – which is its current status within Wylie – but this could not be done in data intended to be used in computer contexts.

Tibetan Transliteration of Sanskrit

Because of the great importance of translation of Indian Buddhist scripture in Tibetan religious culture from the eighth century onwards, Tibetans developed a method for accurately transliterating Sanskrit using Tibetan orthography. However, to do so they had to make modifications to their glyphs and writing conventions. There were two basic problems. First, Sanskrit contains a whole series of characters not found in Tibetan, mainly the retroflex characters but also the anusvara and visarga, to name a few. The last two were dealt with by adopting the Sanskrit ligature—a circle above the character and a colon-like glyph at the end of a word. For the retroflex characters, they took their closest relative, generally the dentals with one exception, and reversed them. The second problem was that Sanskrit contains consonant combinations that do not conventionally occur in Tibetan. This was easily solved by stacking the consonants with the first on top and the last on the bottom, though such combinations often transgressed the traditional grammatical rules for creating stacks in Tibetan. While Wylie’s system can account for the abnormal stacks by just stringing the consonants together, it presents no way to transliterate the Tibetanized Sanskrit characters without resorting to diacritics, thereby transgressing Wylie’s own goals. In the proposed system, these retroflex characters are handled in a way similar to the Tibetan method, namely by capitalization of the corresponding dental. There are six main retroflex characters, represented below with their diacritic transliteration:

Even with the computer, diacritic marks are hard to type, requiring several keystrokes for one character. Yet, if a simple, unambiguous transliteration is adopted the computer can easily be programmed to represent those characters with diacritic marks if so desired, as well as correspondingly represent them with the correct Tibetan glyph. Thus, it is proposed that for these characters, the capital forms of their corresponding letters be used, rendering them:

Ta

Tha

Da

Dha

Na

Sha

This would of course preclude using capitals to distinguish proper names or root letters. We believe there is little practical benefit in distinguishing root letters that way, as anyone who can read Tibetan can easily pick out the root letters. Capitalization of proper names could be allowed when imbedded in English for conformity to English practice, but should not be used for strict transliteration. For the sake of consistency it is proposed that the anusvara and visarga be handled in a similar way through capitalization:

M

H

While the objection could be raised that interspersed capital letters are difficult to read, the purpose here is to develop an unambiguous and simple transliteration system as Wylie proposed. In print publications, diacritics could still be used, as they are today. However, with digital technology, it is desirable to have the transliterated text easily transferable between machines and platforms. The use of diacritics, which are font specific, hinders this, whereas the use of capitals does not. Conversely, conversion from our extended Wylie system to a diacritic font would be relatively straightforward, as long as the transliteration system is, like this one, disambiguated.

Non-standard Tibetan stacks found in Tibetan transliteration of Sanskrit also present a problem for transliteration. These stacks can be represented in Wylie’s system by merely stringing consonants together. However, some of these Sanskrit stacks can be confused for letter combinations found in standard Tibetan. For instance, there is a Sanskrit stack consisting of an n over a y. Unless provision is made for distinguishing this combination, it would naturally be confused with the eighth Tibetan letter, nya. For this situation, we suggest the use of the plus sign (+) between all non-standard stack letters found in Tibetan transliteration of Sanskrit. For instance there are aspirated letters in Sanskrit not found in Tibetan, such as dha, gha, and bha. These would be transliterated as d+ha, g+ha, and b+ha respectively. If a Tibetan transliteration of a multi-syllable Sanskrit word falls within one syllable, or tsheg bar, an implicit “a” is inserted after each syllable that does not have an explicit vowel. Thus, the Tibetan transliteration of the word “tantra” is “tan+t+ra,” “citta” is “tsit+ta,” and maṇḍala is “maN+Dala.” (To view a list of standard Tibetan stacks, click here. “Non-standard Tibetan stacks” would be all other combinations not found in this list.)

We have retained the use of the period between a g prefixed to a y to distinguish such a combination from the stack gy, because this is an already well-established practice. Thus, the Tibetan words for left and right are transliterated g.yon and g.yas, respectively, whereas the word for ornament would be rgyan. The function of the period can be extended to other situations where one desires to prevent stacking.

Punctuation

The other major omission of the Wylie scheme lies in its limited coverage of punctuation. This system adopts the basic policy, as does Wylie, of using a space for a tsheg, the intersyllable dot, with the special exception of using an asterisk (*) for a non-breaking tsheg, which will not allow a line break to occur after it. In other Wylie-based transliteration systems that use a space for a tsheg, there is no way to represent the white space that can actually occur in Tibetan texts. To disambiguate this situation, the underscore (_) is proposed as an equivalent to Tibetan white space. Besides the tsheg, Wylie presents no policy concerning punctuation in his article. Yet, Tibetan has as much punctuation as English, if not more. It is therefore necessary to develop a standard for transcribing these unpronounced marks. The common convention of using the slash (/) for a shad, the vertical line ending a phrase, has been adopted. The remaining punctuation marks are less frequent, though the attempt has been made to represent them with standard Latin-I character set glyphs that are if possible somewhat similar in form to the corresponding Tibetan glyph. Thus, the tsheg shad, a line with a dot above it, is represented by the semicolon (;). The rin chen spungs shad, a shad with three dots above it, is represented by the vertical bar (|). The sbrul shad is represented by an exclamation mark (!), and the gter shad represented by the colon (:). Though it could be argued, that the colon is more appropriate for the visarga (\u0F7F), as they are almost identical in shape, the counter argument is that the gter shad not only is similar in form to a colon but they are both punctuation marks (albeit with different functions), whereas the visarga represents an aspiration at the end of the word and given the method of dealing with transliterated Sanskrit above, is best represented by a capital H. The final punctuation mark to mention is the yig mgo mark, which has two forms mdun ma (front) and sgab ma (back) respectively. The first is represented by a similar looking glyph, the at-sign (@), while the second is represented by the next symbol over on the keyboard, the pound sign (#) for ease of typing. This covers the major punctuation mark; others are listed in the punctuation chart below.

Not all the punctuation marks in the chart below have transliteration equivalents. This is because there are not enough characters on the standard keyboard to correspond to every character that is found in the Unicode 4.0 Tibetan character set. Besides, there should be a secondary way of transcribing a character as some keyboards may lack certain keys such as the dollar-sign and so forth. To this end, it is proposed that the use of an “escape” character is standardized. The “escape” character would be inserted before the desired character’s Unicode value, just as one can now use the alt key to type in a decimal code for a character. This can be done with any character in the Tibetan character set. The proposed escape sequence is that used for the universal character names, the backslash-“u” combination (\u) followed by the characters hexadecimal Unicode value. Thus, the rgya gram shad, which does not have a single character transliteration equivalent, can be entered by typing: \u0F12. The astrological sign sgra gcan char rtags, lacking a transliteration equivalent, will have to be entered: \u0F17. As these universal character names are unambiguous and always have the format \uXXXX or \uXXXXXXXX, there is no need for a closing marker. Because the consonants, vowels, Sanskrit-derived characters, and punctuation make use of every available key on the standard keyboard, such escape codes will have to be used for the other Tibetan characters in Unicode 4.0 (Chart VI) and later releases. These escape codes could be used for other character sets as well, such as Devanagari or Chinese, which may be interspersed with Tibetan. This accounts for all the Unicode 4.0 character set; however, some provision needs to be made to deal with punctuation not included in that set. In the last chart below (Chart VII), we have included some marks found in various Tibetan fonts that do not appear to be included in the Unicode standard for Tibetan. The THL Extended Wylie Transliteration Scheme thus proposed covers all the various possible letter combinations found in Tibetan literature in an unambiguous way. For most situations, Wylie’s basic system will suffice. So, it has been left in tact here. However, if the more unusual letter combinations are found, they can be easily and clearly transliterated using the above system. The following charts give the complete proposed Extended Wylie system of transliteration as described above. There are seven such tables:

1. Consonants,
2. Vowels,
3. Numerals,
4. Sanskrit letters,
5. Punctuation,
6. Other Tibetan characters found in Unicode 4.0,
7. Characters not found in Unicode 4.0.

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