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Wylie transliteration is a method fortransliteratingTibetan script using only the letters available on a typicalEnglish-languagetypewriter. The system is named for the American scholarTurrell V. Wylie, who created the system and published it in a 1959Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies article.[1] It has subsequently become a standard transliteration scheme in Tibetan studies, especially in the United States.
AnyTibetan languageromanization scheme faces the dilemma of whether it should seek to accurately reproduce the sounds of spoken Tibetan or the spelling of written Tibetan. These differ widely, as Tibetanorthography became fixed in the 11th century, while pronunciation continued toevolve, comparable to theEnglish orthography andFrench orthography, which reflectlate medieval pronunciation.
Previous transcription schemes sought to split the difference with the result that they achieved neither goal perfectly. Wylie transliteration was designed to precisely transcribe Tibetan scriptas written, which led to its acceptance in academic and historical studies. It is not intended to represent the pronunciation of Tibetan words.
The Wylie scheme transliterates the Tibetan characters as follows:
| T | W | IPA | T | W | IPA | T | W | IPA | T | W | IPA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ཀ | ka | [ká] | ཁ | kha | [↘︎kʰá] | ག | ga | [ɡà/↗︎kʰà] | ང | nga | [ŋà] |
| ཅ | ca | [tɕá] | ཆ | cha | [↘︎tɕʰá] | ཇ | ja | [dʑà/↗︎tɕʰà] | ཉ | nya | [ɲà] |
| ཏ | ta | [tá] | ཐ | tha | [↘︎tʰá] | ད | da | [dà/↗︎tʰà] | ན | na | [nà] |
| པ | pa | [pá] | ཕ | pha | [↘︎pʰá] | བ | ba | [bà/↗︎pʰà] | མ | ma | [mà] |
| ཙ | tsa | [tsá] | ཚ | tsha | [↘︎tsʰá] | ཛ | dza | [dzà/↗︎tsʰà] | ཝ | wa | [wà] |
| ཞ | zha | [ʑà/↗︎ɕà] | ཟ | za | [zà/↗︎sà] | འ | 'a | [ɦà/↗︎ʔà] | ཡ | ya | [jà] |
| ར | ra | [rà] | ལ | la | [là] | ཤ | sha | [↘︎ɕá] | ས | sa | [↘︎sá] |
| ཧ | ha | [há] | ཨ | a | [↘︎ʔá] |
In Tibetan script, consonant clusters within a syllable may be represented through the use of prefixed or suffixed letters or by letters superscripted or subscripted 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 sequencegy-, which may be written either with a prefixg or a suffixy. In the Wylie system, these are distinguished by inserting aperiod between a prefixg and initialy. E.g.གྱང "wall" isgyang, whileགཡང་ "chasm" isg.yang.
The four vowel marks (here applied to the base letterཨ) are transliterated:
| ཨི i | ཨུ u | ཨེ e | ཨོ o |
When a syllable has no explicit vowel marking, the lettera is used to represent the default vowel "a" (e.g.ཨ་ = a).
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 superfluous to a reader able to use a Tibetan dictionary, Wylie specified that if a word was to be capitalised, the first letter should be capital, in conformity with Western capitalisation practices. Thus a particular Tibetan Buddhist sect (Kagyu) is capitalisedBka' brgyud and notbKa' brgyud.
Wylie's original scheme is not capable of transliterating all Tibetan-script texts. In particular, it has no correspondences for most Tibetan punctuation symbols, and lacks the ability to represent non-Tibetan words written in Tibetan script (Sanskrit and phonetic Chinese are the most common cases). Accordingly, various scholars have adoptedad hoc and incomplete conventions as needed.
TheTibetan and Himalayan Library at theUniversity of Virginia developed a standard,EWTS—the Extended Wylie Transliteration Scheme—that addresses these deficiencies systematically. It uses capital letters and Latin punctuation to represent the missing characters. Several software systems, includingTise, now use this standard to allow one to type unrestricted Tibetan script (including the fullUnicode Tibetan character set) on a Latin keyboard.
Since the Wylie system is not intuitive for use by linguists unfamiliar with Tibetan, a new transliteration system based on theInternational Phonetic Alphabet has been proposed to replace Wylie in articles on Tibetan historical phonology.[2]
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