Colloquial Tibetan

The Complete Course for Beginners

Jonathan Samuels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317305798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachen

Colloquial Tibetan provides a step-by-step course in Central Tibetan as it is spoken by native speakers. Combining a thorough treatment of the language as it is used in everyday situations with an accurate written representation of this spoken form, it equips learners with the essential skills needed to communicate confidently and effectively in Tibetan in a broad range of situations. No prior knowledge of the language is required.

Key features include:

• 
  
  

• progressive coverage of speaking, listening, reading and writing skills
• phonetic transliteration of the Tibetan script throughout the course to aid pronunciation and understanding of the writing system
• structured, jargon-free explanations of grammar
• an extensive range of focused and stimulating exercises
• realistic and entertaining dialogues covering a broad variety of scenarios
• useful vocabulary lists throughout the text
• additional resources available at the back of the book, including a full answer key, a grammar section, bilingual glossaries and English translations of dialogues.

Balanced, comprehensive and rewarding, Colloquial Tibetan will be an indispensable resource both for independent learners and for students taking courses in Tibetan.

Audio material to accompany the course is available to download free in MP3 format from www.routledge.com/cw/colloquials. Recorded by native speakers, the audio material features the dialogues and texts from the book and will help develop your listening and pronunciation skills.

By the end of this course, you will be at Level B2 of the Common European Framework for Languages and at the Intermediate-High on the ACTFL proficiency scales.

Unit One

Syllables, letter combinations and words

In this unit you will learn how to:

• combine letters (single syllables)

• recognise exceptions

• say words of more than one syllable

The opening section dealt with the sound system, as well as the basic script. It also showed that a written Tibetan syllable, or a Tibetan word can be as simple as just one element (a consonant symbol), or two elements (a consonant symbol plus a vowel marker).

Many more Tibetan syllables, however, involve more than just one or two elements, and many words have more than one syllable. This unit focuses upon what sounds are produced when such combinations of elements and syllables occur.

‡ What to expect

Written Tibetan is at the opposite end of the scale from a language like German, where one basically pronounces every letter on the page. Instead, it is closer to French or English.

(a) The fact that a written syllable has multiple elements does not necessarily mean that it is more difficult to pronounce! Just as in English, what looks like a complex combination of letters on the page can still produce a relatively simple sound (e.g. ‘tongue’, ‘borough’, ‘psycho’).

(b) Some consonants are occasionally written, but produce no sound (as in English ‘knight’, ‘subtle’).

(c) Many written syllables look quite different from each other, but actually have the same sound (as in English ‘bow’, ‘bough’).

Just like in English, discrepancies between the way things are written and spoken are due to historical changes. These discrepancies will initially seem to be more extreme than those in English. But there is perhaps greater consistency; so once one has learnt the rules, it is easier to predict the sound of a word from its spelling.

The transliteration system is obviously there to show how things are pronounced (rather than spelt), so there are no silent letters. Each vowel represents the presence of a distinct syllable. So if there are two vowels within a word/letter combination, such as yike, meaning ‘letter’ (

), it is to be read as yi-ke (i.e. two syllables), and never as a single syllable (as in ‘yikes!’).

‡ Exercise 1

Here are some words written in a simplified transliteration form; count how many syllables each has:

1 ming	4 shikatse	7 yaya
2 khyi	5 lame	8 ṭhaṭik
3 eni	6 phökä

‡ In English, two or more separate consonants can come together to form a sound in which both can still be heard; at the beginning of a word, e.g. br in ‘bring’, pl in ‘plate’, sk in ‘skill’, or at the end, such as ks in ‘takes’, bls in ‘syllables’. This never happens with Tibetan consonants. A syllable can start with one consonant-sound, and may end with one, but that is the limit. Neither ng nor ts stand for combinations of two different consonant-sounds; they are both individual consonants. So when pronouncing either ng and ts, try not to make them sound like t-s or n-g.

‡ Exercise 2

In the two versions of the following words (written in simplified transliteration) the first has all the syllables written together, whilst the second breaks them into their separate syllables. But are all the broken-down versions correct? The section above and the earlier one, on the Sounds of Tibetan Speech, explain what sounds are possible in Tibetan, so provide all the information one needs to answ...