THL Extended Wylie Transliteration Scheme

Version: 2.0

Status: Working Draft

Date: 2004-01-07

Contributors: David Chandler, David Chapman, Robert Chilton, Tony Duff, Chris Fynn, Nathaniel Grove (co-director), David Germano (co-director), Steve Hartwell, Peter Hauer, Andrew West, Steven Weinberger.

Description: The Tibetan and Himalayan Library (THL)’s Extended Wylie Transliteration Scheme (EWTS) is a collaborative effort to extend the basic transliteration scheme, originally proposed in the 1950s by Turrell Wylie (“A Standard System of Tibetan Transcription,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 22 [December 1959], 261-67), in order to provide a completely comprehensive method for transliterating all forms of Tibetan literature using the Latin alphabet and the symbols available on a standard keyboard. The scheme provides not only transliteration equivalents but also methods for handling special situations, such as Tibetan transliteration of Sanskrit, how to insert other languages within Tibetan transliteration, and the like.

Instructions: Please use the right-hand menu to explore the actual transliteration system. When viewing the charts of characters, more information about a specific character can be viewed either 1) by putting the mouse over the image of that character to reveal its Unicode code and name or 2) by clicking on the image itself to display the full information about that character.

Additional Resources:

• Online Converter between Tibetan Script and THL Extended Wylie by Roger Espel Llima

With the burgeoning of digital technology in the humanities and the recent surge of scholarly interest in Tibetan studies, the need for a standard transliteration system is even more compelling at present. However, Wylie’s own scheme is not comprehensive, and incommensurable extensions of it have proliferated in the digital world. While the international standards community (“ISO”) has established standards for the transliteration of other languages using non-roman alphabets, no such standard has been established for Tibetan, either de facto or ISO-approved. We thus feel the time has come to establish such an initiative in order to promote a standard format for information exchange dealing with Tibetan texts and language.

Some within the PRC have modified Wylie’s system by using v and x respectively to transcribe the a-chung (23rd letter, འ) and the a-chen (30th letter, ཨ). We can see no compelling reason for such an alteration. Our system is geared towards a disambiguated transliteration required for digital processing and aims to make as little change as possible to already extant scholarly practices in most countries, especially those where transliteration is most commonly used in respect to Tibetan. We have not been persuaded by arguments that the a-chung and a-chen should be represented by ‘v’ and ‘x’ since they are treated as consonants in most Tibetan grammars. Firstly, the apostrophe used to represent a-chung in Wylie is not a vowel anyways; secondly, the status of a-chung and a-chen in Tibetan grammar are controversial; and thirdly, while Wylie is not a phonetic system, it does have the advantage of using reasonable phonetic approximations of Tibetan letters, and ‘v’ and ‘x’ would completely contradict that principle.

Though we have adopted Wylie’s basic scheme, there are several fundamental gaps in the Wylie transliteration scheme that need to be addressed, if one is to develop a comprehensive standard. These are:

1.   The ability to represent Tibetan transliterations of Sanskrit characters not normally found in Tibetan language without the use of diacritic marks,

2.   The ability to unambiguously represent unusual stacks of Tibetan characters in the transliteration of mantras and the like, and

3.   The ability to represent various Tibetan punctuation marks not covered by Wylie.

Various solutions have been proposed, though there has been no consensus. The following presents an unambiguous solution to these problems, with an eye toward digitally processing Tibetan documents as well as orthographic considerations. This is a provisional proposal, and we plan to systematically revise it as necessary in coordination with critical feedback from Tibetan scholars and Tibetan computing experts from around the world. Our goal is establishing an internationally accepted standard that is both used by scholars and computing experts, and approved by the relevant international standards organization. Wylie’s basic scheme, adopted for transliterating the consonant and vowels, is outlined in the tables below. What follows is an explanation for the proposed additions to Wylie’s system.

It should be noted that a proposed transliteration scheme must serve the needs of print publication and electronic publications. Print publications most typically use transliteration for references to terms or names, as well as for citations of short passages; less frequently, an entire text may be given in transliteration rather than Tibetan script. Electronic publications differ from print publications in having the added flexibility of being able to store material in transliteration, but then deliver it for display various modes, such as in a different transliteration system (such as one with diacritics), in Tibetan script, in a phonetic rendering and so on. For the most part, the needs of print and digital publication are identical when it comes to a transliteration system, with the latter simply adding more stringent requirements. However, there is one potential problem with regards to Tibetan, namely the use of capital letters and “plus” signs as detailed below, which are vital to articulate a comprehensive transliteration system beyond the basic scheme now commonly used. While not formally part of the Wylie system, many authors have taken to using a capital letter to indicate a place or personal name; in addition, the capital letters and plus signs as outlined above can look odd visually to people accustomed to the basic Wylie scheme. In this regards, we should note that the capital letters and plus signs are used to cover special words, such as Sanskrit transliterations, and thus will not typically appear in standard Tibetan passages. Secondly, in print publications authors could continue to use capital letters to mark place and person names as an informal practice – which is its current status within Wylie – but this could not be done in data intended to be used in computer contexts.

Because of the great importance of translation of Indian Buddhist scripture in Tibetan religious culture from the eighth century onward, Tibetans developed a method for accurately transliterating Sanskrit using Tibetan orthography. However, to do so they had to make modifications to their glyphs and writing conventions. There were two basic problems. First, Sanskrit contains a whole series of characters not found in Tibetan, mainly the retroflex characters but also the anusvara and visarga, to name a few. The last two were dealt with by adopting the Sanskrit ligature—a circle above the character and a colon-like glyph at the end of a word. For the retroflex characters, they took their closest relative, generally the dentals with one exception, and reversed them. The second problem was that Sanskrit contains consonant combinations that do not conventionally occur in Tibetan. This was easily solved by stacking the consonants with the first on top and the last on the bottom, though such combinations often transgressed the traditional grammatical rules for creating stacks in Tibetan. While Wylie’s system can account for the abnormal stacks by just stringing the consonants together, it presents no way to transliterate the Tibetanized Sanskrit characters without resorting to diacritics, thereby transgressing Wylie’s own goals. In the proposed system, these retroflex characters are handled in a way similar to the Tibetan method, namely by capitalization of the corresponding dental. There are six main retroflex characters, represented below with their diacritic transliteration:

Even with the computer, diacritic marks are hard to type, requiring several keystrokes for one character. Yet, if a simple, unambiguous transliteration is adopted the computer can easily be programmed to represent those characters with diacritic marks if so desired, as well as correspondingly represent them with the correct Tibetan glyph. Thus, it is proposed that for these characters, the capital forms of their corresponding letters be used, rendering them:

This would of course preclude using capitals to distinguish proper names or root letters. We believe there is little practical benefit in distinguishing root letters that way, as anyone who can read Tibetan can easily pick out the root letters. Capitalization of proper names could be allowed when imbedded in English for conformity to English practice, but should not be used for strict transliteration. For the sake of consistency it is proposed that the anusvara and visarga be handled in a similar way through capitalization:

While the objection could be raised that interspersed capital letters are difficult to read, the purpose here is to develop an unambiguous and simple transliteration system as Wylie proposed. In print publications, diacritics could still be used, as they are today. However, with digital technology, it is desirable to have the transliterated text easily transferable between machines and platforms. The use of diacritics, which are font specific, hinders this, whereas the use of capitals does not. Conversely, conversion from our extended Wylie system to a diacritic font would be relatively straightforward, as long as the transliteration system is, like this one, disambiguated.

Non-standard Tibetan stacks found in Tibetan transliteration of Sanskrit also present a problem for transliteration. These stacks can be represented in Wylie’s system by merely stringing consonants together. However, some of these Sanskrit stacks can be confused for letter combinations found in standard Tibetan. For instance, there is a Sanskrit stack consisting of an n over a y. Unless provision is made for distinguishing this combination, it would naturally be confused with the eighth Tibetan letter, nya. For this situation, we suggest the use of the plus sign (+) between all non-standard stack letters found in Tibetan transliteration of Sanskrit. For instance, there are aspirated letters in Sanskrit not found in Tibetan, such as dha, gha, and bha. These would be transliterated as d+ha, g+ha, and b+ha respectively. If a Tibetan transliteration of a multi-syllable Sanskrit word falls within one syllable, or tsheg bar, an implicit “a” is inserted after each syllable that does not have an explicit vowel. Thus, the Tibetan transliteration of the word “tantra” is “tan+t+ra,” “citta” is “tsit+ta,” and maṇḍala is “maN+Dala.” (To view a list of standard Tibetan stacks, click here. “Non-standard Tibetan stacks” would be all other combinations not found in this list.)

We have retained the use of the period between a g prefixed to a y to distinguish such a combination from the stack gy, because this is an already well-established practice. Thus, the Tibetan words for “left” (གཡོན) and “right” (གཡས) are transliterated g.yon and g.yas, respectively, whereas the word for “wear” (གྱོན) is gyon. The function of the period can be extended to other situations where one desires to prevent stacking.

The other major omission of the Wylie scheme lies in its limited coverage of punctuation. This system adopts the basic policy, as does Wylie, of using a space for a tsheg (་), the intersyllable dot, with the special exception of using an asterisk (*) for a non-breaking tsheg, which will not allow a line break to occur after it. In other Wylie-based transliteration systems that use a space for a tsheg, there is no way to represent the white space that can actually occur in Tibetan texts. To disambiguate this situation, the underscore (_) is proposed as an equivalent to Tibetan white space. Besides the tsheg, Wylie presents no policy concerning punctuation in his article. Yet, Tibetan has as much punctuation as English, if not more. It is therefore necessary to develop a standard for transcribing these unpronounced marks. The common convention of using the slash (/) for a shad (།), the vertical line ending a phrase, has been adopted. The remaining punctuation marks are less frequent, though the attempt has been made to represent them with standard Latin-I character set glyphs that are if possible somewhat similar in form to the corresponding Tibetan glyph. Thus, the tsheg shad (༏), a line with a dot above it, is represented by the semicolon (;). The rin chen spungs shad (༑), a shad with three dots above it, is represented by the vertical bar (|). The sbrul shad (༈) is represented by an exclamation mark (!), and the gter shad (༔) is represented by the colon (:). Though it could be argued that the colon is more appropriate for the visarga (ཿ, \u0F7F), as they are almost identical in shape, the counter argument is that the gter shad not only is similar in form to a colon but they are both punctuation marks (albeit with different functions), whereas the visarga represents an aspiration at the end of the word and given the method of dealing with transliterated Sanskrit above, is best represented by a capital H. The final punctuation mark to mention is the yig mgo mark, which has two forms mdun ma (front ༄) and sgab ma (back ༅), respectively. The first is represented by a similar looking glyph, the at-sign (@), while the second is represented by the next symbol over on the keyboard, the pound sign (#) for ease of typing. This covers the major punctuation mark; others are listed in the punctuation chart below.

Not all the punctuation marks in the chart below have transliteration equivalents. This is because there are not enough characters on the standard keyboard to correspond to every character that is found in the Unicode 4.0 Tibetan character set. Besides, there should be a secondary way of transcribing a character as some keyboards may lack certain keys such as the dollar-sign and so forth. To this end, it is proposed that the use of an “escape” character is standardized. The “escape” character would be inserted before the desired character’s Unicode value, just as one can now use the alt key (Windows) or option key (Mac) to type in a decimal code for a character. This can be done with any character in the Tibetan character set. The proposed escape sequence is that used for the universal character names, the backslash-“u” combination (\u) followed by the character’s hexadecimal Unicode value. Thus, the rgya gram shad (༒), which does not have a single character transliteration equivalent, can be entered by typing: \u0F12. The astrological sign sgra gcan char rtags (༗), lacking a transliteration equivalent, will have to be entered: \u0F17. As these universal character names are unambiguous and always have the format \uXXXX or \uXXXXXXXX, there is no need for a closing marker. Because the consonants, vowels, Sanskrit-derived characters, and punctuation characters make use of every available key on the standard keyboard, such escape codes will have to be used for the other Tibetan characters in Unicode 4.0 (Chart VI) and later releases. These escape codes could be used for other character sets as well, such as Devanagari or Chinese, which may be interspersed with Tibetan. This accounts for all the Unicode 4.0 character set; however, some provision needs to be made to deal with punctuation not included in that set. In the last chart below (Chart VII), we have included some marks found in various Tibetan fonts that do not appear to be included in the Unicode standard for Tibetan. The THL Extended Wylie Transliteration Scheme thus proposed covers all the various possible letter combinations found in Tibetan literature in an unambiguous way. For most situations, Wylie’s basic system will suffice. So, it has been left intact here. However, if the more unusual letter combinations are found, they can be easily and clearly transliterated using the above system. The following charts give the complete proposed Extended Wylie system of transliteration as described above. There are seven such tables:

                     I. Consonants

                   II. Vowels

                  III. Numerals

                 IV. Sanskrit letters

                   V. Punctuation

                 VI. Other Tibetan characters found in Unicode 4.0

                VII. Characters not found in Unicode 4.0.

Rule 1:

Transliterate Tibetan characters in a syllable from left to right and in stacks from top to bottom with the vowel being transliterated after the final consonant of the root letter or stack. Equivalents for characters are in the charts below.

Example:  བསྒྲིབས་ becomes bsgribs.

Rule 2:

If there is no explicit vowel mark, the implicit vowel is transliterated as “a” and placed after the final consonant of the root letter or stack.

Example: མཁན་ becomes mkhan.

Rule 3:

Use the period to horizontally display two consonants that would normally be stacked.

Example: གྱོན་ becomes gyon but གཡོན་ becomes g.yon.

Rule 4:

The use of the plus-sign (“+”) is required between consonants in a non-standard Tibetan stack. (View list of Standard Tibetan Stacks.)

Example: སཏྟྭ་ becomes sat+t+wa.

Rule 5:

Use the plus-sign (“+”) between transliteration equivalents for multiple vowel signs above and/or below the same Tibetan stack. In such cases, the vowels should be transliterated from bottom to top even though this may contradict the logical order of the expanded phrase.

Example: བྲེུ་ becomes bru+e, and རྡོེ་, which is short for rdo rje, becomes rdo+e.

Rule 6:

The transliteration of a standard Tibetan stack that uses the plus-sign (“+”) is equivalent to the transliteration that does not.

Example: For རྟ་, the transliterations rta and r+ta are equivalent, though the former is preferable.

Rule 7:

For Tibetan transliterations of multi-syllable Sanskrit words that fall within a single tsheg bar (Tibetan “syllable”), the implicit vowel, “a,” should be inserted after each cluster consonant without an explicit vowel mark except when the virama (Tib. srog med) is subscribed to that cluster. If the word ends in an anusvara (“M”) or a visarga (“H”) the final “a” is inserted before their transliteration.

Example: སརྦ་མངྒལཾ་ becomes sarba mang+galaM.

Rule 8:

All characters can be represented by the escape sequence “\u” plus their 4-digit hexadecimal code for standard Unicode characters. For surrogate pairs, the escape sequence “\U” plus the 8-digit hexadecimal code should be used. In either case, the full 4 or 8 hexadecimal code must be used without dropping leading zeros. The characters in the list of those not found in Unicode 4.0 have been assigned values in the Private Use Area, so that the standard escape sequence, “\uXXXX,” can be used.

Example: ཀ་ can be represented by either “ka” or “\u0F40.”

Rule 9:

To insert a run of non-Tibetan characters within Tibetan transliteration: the whole string, encoded in UTF-8, must be enclosed in brackets. Pairs of opening and closing brackets may be nested with the final closing bracket indicating the resumption of Tibetan transliteration. The escape sequences “\uXXXX” and “\UXXXXXXXX” can be used within brackets to refer to Tibetan or non-Tibetan characters.

Example:  ཁོང་New York་ལ་ཕེབས་སོང། becomes khong [New York] la phebs song /

Rule 10:

To insert a single non-Tibetan character, numeral, or punctuation mark within a run of transliterated Tibetan, prefix it with a backslash. (Note: The upper or lowercase “u” cannot be inserted through this method, since “\u” and “\U” trigger the insertion of Unicode characters by their hexadecimal value. Brackets must be used to insert a single letter “u” or “U,” e.g. [u] or [U].)

Example: དེ་ལ་3་ཡོད། becomes de la \3 yod/

Rule 11:

When the a-chen (ཨ) is found at the beginning of a word and lacks a vowel sign, it is transliterated as “a.” Otherwise, it is transliterated according to the vowel sign attached to it. If it is found in the middle of a stack, transliterate it as “+a”; if it is found in the middle of a syllable (tsheg bar), transliterate it as “.a”.

Example: ཨ་ཁུ་ becomes a khu, but ཨུག་པ་ becomes ug pa. Also, ཨཾ་ becomes aM.

Rule 12:

Capitals are used to denote the following Sanskrit-based Tibetan characters: the long vowels – A, I, U, -I; the anusvara – M; the visarga – H; the retroflex letters – T, Th, D, D+h, N, and Sh.

Example: མཱ་ becomes mA (diacritic transliteration is mā). དུཿ་ becomes duH (duḥ).  ཕཊ་ becomes phaT (phaṭ).

Rule 13:

Capital R is used to indicate the full-form of ra when it is the top letter of a non-standard Tibetan stack (equivalent to U+0F6A). (View list of Standard Tibetan Stacks.)

Example: ཪྣ་ becomes R+na. ཪྻ་ becomes R+Ya, while ཪྱ་ becomes R+ya.

Rule 14:

The full-formed ra in the standard Tibetan stacks is transliterated as the lower-case “r”.

Example: རྙ་ becomes rnya, རླ་ becomes rla, and རྭ་ becomes rwa.

Rule 15:

Capital W, Y, and R are used to transliterate the full form of wa, ya, and ra respectively, when they are in any position except the top-most.

Rule 16:

In non-standard Tibetan stacks, the lower-case r, y, and w are used to represent the superscribed ra (ra mgo), the subscribed ra (ra btags), the subscribed ya (ya btags), and the subscribed wa (wa zur) respectively. (View list of Standard Tibetan Stacks.)

The transliteration equivalents for the 30 Tibetan consonants remains the same as Turrell Wylie’s original scheme. Each consonant in the Tibetan syllabary has a equivalent string in the Latin alphabet. In standard Wylie transliteration, when no vowel mark is used in the Tibetan, the implicit vowel “a” is appended to the root consonant. However, in the chart displayed here, the implicit vowel is left out for clarity’s sake. Thus, by way of example, ཀ is transliterated as “k” and ཚ is transliterated as “tsh.”

Tibetan root letters have an implicit “a” vowel-sound associated with them unless the root letter is modified by a vowel sign above or below it. In cases where a syllable has no explicit vowel mark, the letter “a” is inserted into the transliteration after the root letter, as in the Wylie system. The transliterations for the other standard Tibetan vowels are also the same as Wylie’s orginal scheme. However, long vowels, which in Tibetan are formed by affixing an a-chung to the bottom of the consonant stack, are transliterated by the capital letters of the corresponding short-form.

Tibetan numbers are transliterated with the corresponding Arabic numeral (1, 2, 3 ...). The Unicode Standard has also included half-number characters, equivalent to 0.5, 1.5, 2.5, etc., though these are very rarely used by Tibetans themselves. These are transliterated using the EWTS Unicode escape sequence (\u) plus the Unicode hexadecimal equivalent, e.g., \u0F2A for 0.5 (༪).

As Tibetan writing was in large part developed for the translation of Indian Sanskrit texts, Tibetan orthography contains a number of characters, ligatures, and marks for the representation of Sanskrit transliteration. These can be divided into four groups: aspirated letters, retroflex letters, compound consonants, and other marks. Some aspirated letters found in Sanskrit are included within the Tibetan syllabary; others are not. This latter group is formed in Tibetan by stacking the root letter above a “ha.” These are transliterated in the same way as compound letters using the “+” sign. Retroflex letters, which are found in Sanskrit, are not naturally part of the Tibetan language. These are represented in the Tibetan script by using a mirrored version of the corresponding dental letter. In transliteration, these are represented by capitalizing the dental equivalent. Compound consonants, or consonant clusters, are common in Sanskrit. In Tibetan transliteration, these are represented by stacking the Tibetan equivalents. In Wylie transliteration, such unusual stacks are represented by placing plus signs (+) between the consonant equivalents. The four subsections describe other marks found in the Tibetan transliteration of Sanskrit and their corresponding Wylie transliteration.

Tibetan punctuation is here organized into four types: intersyllabic marks (tsheg), phrase delimiters (shad), head marks (yig mgo), and paired marks that function similar to brackets.

The two tsheg are identical in appearance. The difference between them is that the first, transliterated by the space, is a breaking tsheg, in that it allows for line breaking to occur. The second, transliterated by the asterisk, is a non-breaking tsheg.

The Unicode 4.0 specification for Tibetan contains a number of other marks and signs found in Tibetan orthography. These are variously positioned – inline, above, or below – and perform diverse functions. Here, they are organized into the following groups: additions since Unicode 3.0, name markers, cantillation signs, astrological signs, symbols, miscellaneous marks, and combination characters.

While the encoding of characters already found in the Unicode specification cannot be changed, it is possible to add characters in the future, provided they meet the necessary criteria. There do exist certain characters and symbols in extant Tibetan texts that are not found in the present Unicode specification. Since a comprehensive font and transliteration system should account for all characters in the original, this section provides a list of those characters and symbols that are found in Tibetan texts but have not been added to the Unicode standard. We recommend that these characters be assigned a code point in the Private Use Area of the Unicode specification. For reasons of compatibility, we have chosen the range F021 to F0FF for this use, of which the first 33 places have been assigned to the characters below. This list is open for further submissions. As these are Unicode code points, the transliterations can follow the standard procedure by using the prefix “\u”.

The following table contains the Tibetan ligatures, commonly known as “stacks,” found in Standard Tibetan. These do not include combinations of letters found in loan words or the unusual combinations of letters found in the Tibetan transliteration of Sanskrit. This is primarily a reference for linguistics and Tibetan software programmers. There are both Tibetan and Wylie versions of the chart. Chris Fynn provides a comprehensive chart of these where the root letters are cross-indexed with the superscripts and subscripts in his Table of standard Tibetan letter combinations.

Note: To view the Tibetan chart, you will need to have a unicode Tibetan font (such as Jomolhari, Microsoft Himalaya, etc.) installed on your computer.

Tibetan
རྐ    རྒ    རྔ    རྗ    རྙ    རྟ    རྡ    རྣ    རྦ    རྨ    རྩ    རྫ
ལྐ    ལྒ    ལྔ    ལྕ    ལྗ    ལྟ    ལྡ    ལྤ    ལྦ    ལྷ        
སྐ    སྒ    སྔ    སྙ    སྟ    སྡ    སྣ    སྤ    སྦ    སྨ    སྩ    
ཀྭ    ཁྭ    གྭ    ཅྭ    ཉྭ    ཏྭ    དྭ    ཙྭ    ཚྭ    ཞྭ    ཟྭ    
རྭ    ཤྭ    སྭ    ཧྭ                                
ཀྱ    ཁྱ    གྱ    པྱ    ཕྱ    བྱ    མྱ                
ཀྲ    ཁྲ    གྲ    ཏྲ    ཐྲ    དྲ    པྲ    ཕྲ    བྲ    མྲ    ཤྲ    སྲ    ཧྲ
ཀླ    གླ    བླ    ཟླ    རླ    སླ                        
རྐྱ    རྒྱ    རྨྱ    རྒྭ    རྩྭ                            
སྐྱ    སྒྱ    སྤྱ    སྦྱ    སྨྱ                            
སྐྲ    སྒྲ    སྣྲ    སྤྲ    སྦྲ    སྨྲ                        
གྲྭ    དྲྭ    ཕྱྭ                        

Wylie

rka rga rnga rja rnya rta rda rna rba rma rtsa rdza 

lka lga lnga lca lja lta lda lpa lba lha 

ska sga snga snya sta sda sna spa sba sma stsa 

kwa khwa gwa cwa nywa twa dwa tswa tshwa zhwa zwa 

rwa shwa swa hwa 

kya khya gya pya phya bya mya 

kra khra gra tra thra dra pra phra bra mra shra sra hra 

kla gla bla zla rla sla 

rkya rgya rmya rgwa rtswa 

skya sgya spya sbya smya 

skra sgra snra spra sbra smra 

grwa drwa phywa