Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Tibetan)/proposal 2

Seems OK in general. --Klimov 13:52, 8 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well done Nat, this clearly represents a lot of hard work. I'm afraid I find it hard to take in all the implications. One thing I certainly support is to Determine what the common, widely-used name of the subject is, and use that. This certainly helps the non-expert reader look up things they have heard about from other sources. As for 3., I know that Akong Rinpoche and Lama Yeshe Losal are from Kham, and I understand their accent is different from Lhasa. I wonder if this results in different romanisation of some Tibetan words at Samye Ling (eg names, prayers)? As it is a very large and influential Buddhist centre in the UK, perhaps that is where examples may be found? Billlion 08:25, 30 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Billlion. I think you have the right idea. In fact, the complete romanisation system was something I worked out mostly for my own amusement. With regard to most things that anybody has heard of (and just about anything that very many people have heard of), there will be a conventional spelling, so the system will never be used (not counting cases where the result of the system is exactly the same as the conventional spelling). This could be especially true depending on the answer to my unanswered question. Still, the system might prove useful in some more obscure cases.

As far as the Kham, etc. accents of some notable persons, this is a fact. Still, I have the impression that persons from across the Tibetan-speaking world tend to write an approximation of Lhasa pronunciation when writing phonetically; at least, one almost never sees noticeably non-Lhasa elements in conventional spellings of names (with one exception, which I'll mention below). For instance, "Yeshe Losal" is basically the Lhasa pronunciation of that man's name (with the same exception that I mentioned below). Similarly, I saw a website with the Heart Sutra in Tibetan, which had a note pointing out that the phonetic transcription was in the Lhasa dialect, sounding considerably different from the audio recording, which was in Ladakhi. I thought to myself, geez, it's not much of a phonetic transcription if it doesn't even try to represent the audio. However, this reflects the assumption that phonetic spelling should be standardised to Lhasa.

Actually, Tournadre and Sangda Dorje's book states that conversation between Tibetans (both in the diaspora and in Tibet) tends to be carried out in some form of the Lhasa dialect (what they refer to as "Standard Tibetan"), which is necessary because Kham, Amdo, Ladakhi, etc. are basically different languages which are not mutually intelligible. So, I imagine that, in a lot of contexts what you're actually getting is a locally-accent attempt at speaking Lhasa, rather than the local tongue itself. This is much the same phenomenon that you get with local accents of Mandarin Chinese, or even with Scottish English as compared to thick Lallans (viz Doric).

The exception I mentioned above is the sequence "al", which can never appear in the Lhasa dialect (it always becomes "êl"), but which often appears in conventional spellings, for instance "Gyaltsen", "Palden", "Losal". Tournadre and Sangda Dorje mention that the sequence "al" does appear in the Shigatse dialect, which is otherwise quite similar to Lhasa, so it appears that the transformation of "al" to "êl" might be a particularly narrow Lhasan characteristic which is ignored by people from other regions even when they are speaking in "Standard".

I'd be very hesitant to adopt a systematic standard for a form of Tibetan such as Kham or Amdo until we have some reliable scholarly information on how those languages are pronounced. (There exists a textbook on Amdo Tibetan which is available on Amazon, but it costs over a hundred dollars! I'll try to get it some day when I am inclined to spend the money for it). However, without a system, we would still, of course, take the local pronunciations into account in cases where they have influenced the conventional spellings (as is probably the case, for instance, with Chote Chaba).—Nat Krause^{(Talk!·What have I done?)} 05:34, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much, Nat. I agree with it. Regarding to Determine what the common, widely-used name of the subject is, and use that this may be in one way not precise but it seems the only way to deal with it. We have to apply common sense here and being sensitive to the reader. This is fulfilled by the proposal. Thank you very much, --Kt66 19:35, 5 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your comments Kt. By the way, in the interest of full disclosure, I thought of another habit of conventional spelling which may reflect non-Lhasa dialects. This is the representation of the stop consonants, which I discuss here. Conventional spellings tend to reflect a three-way stop system (d-t-th, as seen in spellings such as Dorje, Tendzin, Thubten), which no longer exists in Lhasa Tibetan. I had been thinking of this tendency as primarily an anachronism and an issue of confusion and disagreement over how to represent the Lhasa sounds. However, in some cases, this probably does also reflect the influence of non-Lhasa dialects, many of which do retain the three-way distinction for stops.—Nat Krause^{(Talk!·What have I done?)} 23:34, 5 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This proposal is well-worked out and sensible. However, I would suggest adopting the THDL Simplified system instead. That system is a pre-existing standard that has already gone through a long scholarly review process with input from many experts. It also has the advantage of avoiding confusing diacriticals and letter combinations that appear unpronounceable to English speakers (such as lh). It usually accords more-or-less with the most common traditional Tibetan-to-English phonetic transcriptions. Its goal is to provide a roughly accurate impression of word sounds to non-Tibetan-speakers. It is a non-goal to provide a detailed and accurate phonetic representation. There is no way of doing that for non-speakers, and for those who read Tibetan it is not needed. There is software available for turning Wylie into THDL Simplified (in the WylieWord package), and this would be useful for those writing about Tibetan topics (e.g. Buddhism) whose knowledge of Tibetan is limited. Arthur chos (talk) 12:09, 20 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your comments, Arthur. I have replied to them, along with your other remarks, on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Tibetan).—Nat Krause^{(Talk!·What have I done?)} 22:33, 15 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]