Why There Are Two Different Tibetan Spellings

...getting in the habit of noting the transliterations as well as the transcriptions, you can start to recognize words as they appear in different guises...

You have probably noticed that books and articles about Tibetan Buddhism often give two quite different spellings for each Tibetan word. For example, tulku and sPrul sKu are the same word. You may also have noticed that different authors may spell the same word differently; one man’s thinlay is another man’s trinle—although both would give phrin las as their alternate spelling.

Why? And should you care?

As to “why,” there are three underlying reasons: Tibetan words are not spelled as they are pronounced; Tibetan has many sounds that English does not; and there are large dialectical variations in Tibetan pronunciation.

First, Tibetan spelling is a disaster of cosmic proportions—much like English spelling. If you read only English, you may not be aware that English spelling is much more difficult and irregular than that of most languages. In many European languages, each letter is pronounced in only one way, and each sound can be spelled in only one way. This is very much not the case in English, or in Tibetan.

For example, the English word knight is pronounced (using typical European spelling) nait. If you hear the word without knowing the spelling, there is probably no way you could guess it. Knight is spelled that way because it was pronounced as it was spelled a thousand years ago. Spellings change much more slowly than pronunciations, because books last, whereas before the development of sound recording technology, pronunciations were lost as people died.

Pronunciations change for various reasons, but often to make speech easier. The kn- sound in knight is difficult to pronounce, so the k “wore off.” Similarly, the gh sound (which modern English doesn’t have, but was sort of a cross between a k and an h) was tricky, so it dropped out. The i was originally pronounced like ee in feet (which is how it is still pronounced in most languages), but for reasons that aren’t well understood, in the 1400s it changed to its current ai pronunciation.

The spellings here in bold—such as sPrul sKu and phrin las—are transliterations: letter-by-letter correlates in English letters of Tibetan spellings. The spellings in italics are transcriptions: attempts to capture in English letters the pronunciations of Tibetan words.

The following diagram shows these relationships:

The orthography is the Tibetan spelling in Tibetan letters, as it appears in a Tibetan book. A Tibetan reading the book turns the orthography into the pronunciation.

A thousand years ago, Tibetan (like English) was pronounced as it was spelled, so sPrul sKu sounded just as it is written: sprul sku. But whereas spellings were “frozen” back then by the translation committees, pronunciations have changed drastically. For example, both ss “wore off” with use, and Pr changed to tr. (More about the missing r below. And: the capital letters are a device that helps keep track of which bits of the word have “worn off.” If a Tibetan word has a capital letter in it, you know that any letters before it are silent. Many authors don’t bother with the capital letters, so you may also see sprul sku.)

It is certainly not obvious that sPrul sKu (or sprul sku) would be pronounced tulku; so in an English book about Tibetan Buddhism or culture the phonetic transcription is useful unless you have studied the Tibetan language enough to know how to turn transliterations into pronunciations.

The transliteration, on the other hand, is useful for two reasons:

1- It lets you look up the word in a Tibetan dictionary. I’ll say more about this later.

2- It lets you know what words are the same. You might very well not guess that thinlay is the same word as trinle, or worse yet that tulku can equally well be transcribed drugu, and you might learn different things about each from different sources before you made the connections.

How can it be that tulku and drugu are transcriptions of the same Tibetan word? This is for the two reasons I left hanging above: Tibetan has many sounds that English does not, and there are large dialectical variations in Tibetan pronunciation.

Modern Tibetan has three different letters each of which may be heard, more-or-less at random, as either d or t by an English-speaking listener. Similarly, there are three letters that sounds like g or k, and three that sound like p or b. The distinctions between these have to do with the pitch at which they are pronounced, and the degree of aspiration, or “breathiness.” English doesn’t distinguish between sounds on the basis of pitch or aspiration, so it is difficult for English speakers to tell these letters apart without training. Similarly, the r in sPrul is pronounced as a sound English doesn’t have, but it is somewhat similar to the English r, and is subtle enough that one can miss it altogether. Accordingly, there is no “right” way to render sPrul sKu: to one English speaker, it may sound more like tulku, to another trulgu, and another drulku.

Furthermore, Tibetan is pronounced very differently in different places, and by different social classes in the same place. For example, a member of the Lhasa aristocracy might omit the l in sPrul, and would change the quality of its vowel, pronouncing sPrul sKu approximately as dügu. On the other hand, the Purigpas in Kashmir would pronounce it as (of all things!) sprul sku. Having been isolated from mainstream Tibetan social trends for hundreds of years, Purigpa pronunciation has not changed much.

Obviously, these people could not easily understand each other in spoken language, although they would agree on spellings, and both their tongues are classified by linguists as dialects of Tibetan, not separate languages. Similarly, Ngawang Zangpo, the Western-born translator for Kalu Rinpoche, recounts that in India, he had to translate everything Rinpoche said twice: once into English for Western students, and then again out of Rinpoche’s incomprehensible outback Khampa accent into the Lhasa pronunciation for non-Khampa Tibetan students!

So, to go back to one of my original questions: Should you care about this?

It’s your call, obviously. Me, I think it’s worth getting in the habit of noting the transliterations as well as the transcriptions, so you can start to recognize words when they appear in different guises in different books. And you may be curious enough about some words to look them up in a dictionary.

Fortunately, you don’t have to actually buy a Tibetan dictionary; here in the modern world, there is a free one on the web. You can find it at

http://www.nitartha.org/dictionary_search04.html

Remember, to use the dictionary, you need to know the spelling (transliteration), just as you need to know the spellings of English words to look them up in an English dictionary.

The value of looking up words is learning their range of meanings. Often one discovers something surprising about Dharma this way. For example, for a long time I read about tulkus, and about the Nirmanakaya, two apparently unrelated concepts; and it wasn’t until many years after I thought I had gained a basic understanding of each that I discovered that tulku simply is the Tibetan word for Nirmanakaya. That radically reorganized my conception of both.

You might eventually be inspired to learn a little Tibetan. I got started on that when I became thoroughly annoyed upon discovering that the ritual of tsog (rhymes with “hog”) practiced by one of my sanghas was the same thing as the ritual of tsok (rhymes with “soak”) practiced by the other. Maybe this should have been obvious, but I’d learned something about each without realizing they were the same word.