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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 Example. ... The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas (writing systems) used in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria. ... Transliteration is the practice of transcribing a word or text written in one writing system into another writing system. ... This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... 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. ... Year 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 spoken primarily by the Tibetan people who live across a wide area of eastern Central Asia bordering South Asia, as well as by large number of Tibetan refugees all over the world. ... 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 specifies the correct way of writing in that language. ... Language change is the manner in which the phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features of a language are modified over time. ...

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 Tibetan 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: བཀའ་བརྒྱུད་; 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)
• Test Tibetan display (enter wylie)

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. ... The Peoples Republic of Chinas Official Tibetan Transcription (or OTT) (Chinese: 藏文拼音; Pinyin: Zàngwén Pīnyīn; Tibetan: བོད་ཡིག་གི་སྒྲ་སྦྱོར་) is the official transcription system for Tibetan in China. ... The THDL Simplified Phonetic Transcription of Standard Tibetan (or THDL Phonetic Transcription for short) is a system for the phonetic rendering of the Tibetan language. ...

References

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