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The Wylie transliteration scheme is a method for transliterating the Tibetan script using the keys on a typical English language typewriter. It bears the name of Turrell Wylie, who refined the scheme in 1959. It has subsequently become a standard transliteration scheme in Tibetan studies, especially in the United States. Image File history File links Created by me. ... The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas used in South Asia, Tibet and Southeast Asia. ... Transliteration is a mapping from one system of writing into another. ... Om Mani Padme Hum, the primary mantra of Tibetan Buddhism written in the Tibetan script, on a rock outside the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Mechanical desktop typewriters, such as this Underwood Five, were long time standards of government agencies, newsrooms, and sales offices. ... 1959 (MCMLIX) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Any Tibetan language romanization scheme is faced with a dilemma: should it seek to accurately reproduce the sounds of spoken Tibetan, or the spelling of written Tibetan? These differ widely as Tibetan orthography became fixed in the 11th century, while pronunciation continued to evolve (cf. language change). Previous transcription schemes sought to split the difference with the result that they achieved neither goal perfectly. Wylie transliteration was designed to precisely transcribe written Tibetan script, hence its acceptance in academic and historical studies. It is not intended to help in the correct pronouncing of a Tibetan word. The Tibetan language is typically classified as member of the Tibeto-Burman which in turn is thought by some to be a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. ... In linguistics, romanization (or Latinization, also spelled romanisation or Latinisation) is the representation of a word or language with the Roman (Latin) alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system. ... The orthography of a language is the set of symbols (glyphs and diacritics) used to write a language, as well as the set of rules describing how to write these glyphs correctly, including spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. ... Language change is the manner in which the phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features of a language are modified over time, it is the topic addressed by historical linguistics which looks at the past states of a language and seek to explain how the present state came about. ...

Consonants

The Wylie scheme transliterates the Tibetan characters as follows:

The final letter of the alphabet, the null consonant ཨ, is not transliterated - its presence is unambiguously indicated by a vowel-initial syllable.

In Tibetan script, consonant clusters within a syllable may be represented either through the use of prefixed or suffixed letters, or by letters superfixed or subfixed to the root letter (forming a "stack"). The Wylie system does not normally distinguish these as in practice no ambiguity is possible under the rules of Tibetan spelling. The exception is the sequence gy-, which may be written either with a prefix g or a subfix y. In the Wylie system these are distinguished by inserting a period, . between a prefix g and initial y. E.g. གྱང "wall" is gyang, while གཡང་ "chasm" is g.yang.

Vowels

The four vowel marks (here applied to the silent letter ཨ ) are transliterated:

When a syllable has no explicit vowel marking, the letter a is inserted to represent the inherent vowel "a" (e.g. ཨ་ = a).

Capitalization

Many previous systems of Tibeten transliteration included internal capitalisation schemes - essentially, capitalising the root letter rather than the first letter of a word, when the first letter is a prefix consonant. Tibetan dictionaries are organized by root letter, and prefixes are often silent, so knowing the root letter gives a better idea of pronunciation. However, these schemes were often applied inconsistently, and usually only when the word would normally be capitalised according to the norms of latin text (i.e. at the beginning of a sentence). On the grounds that internal capitalisation was overly cumbersome, of limited usefulness in determining pronunciation and probably superflous to a reader able to use a Tibetan dictionary, Wylie specified that if a word was to be capitalised the first letter that should be capital, in conformity with Western capitalisation practices. Thus a particular Tibetan Buddhist sect (Kagyu) is capitalised Bka' rgyud and not bKa' rgyud. The Kagyu (Tibetan: བཀའབརྒྱུད་; Wylie: Bka-brgyud) school, also known as the Oral Lineage and the Spotless Practice Lineage school, is one of four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism, the other three being Nyingma (Rnying-ma), Sakya (Sa-skya), and Gelug (Dge-lugs). ...

External links

(The following require installation of Tibetan fonts to work properly)

• The Wylie Translation Table, at Nitartha International
• THDL Extended Wylie Transliteration Scheme(A project of the *Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library to adapt and expand the Wylie system for computer use.)
• Online Transliterator (converts Wylie or ACIP transliteration to graphics)

See also

• Tibetan alphabet
• U-chen script
• Tibetan transliteration (PRC)
• Tibetan transcription (THDL)

The Tibetan script was created in the mid-7th century, by Thonmi Sambhota, a Tibetan official, with the assistance of some Indian Buddhist monks. ... Ucan script (variant spellings: u-can,u-chan,uchan, u-cen,ucen, u-chen/uchen) is the printed script of the Tibetan alphabet. ...

References

• Wylie, Turrell (1959). A Standard System of Tibetan Transcription. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, p. 261-267