Talk:Tibetan pinyin

message: The comparison table in this article seems to conflate the "Tournadre system" of transcription with "THDL system", particularly in this edit by Babelfisch. These systems are similar, but not the same, even though Nicolas Tournadre helped design the THDL system and even though the THDL itself sometimes uses the Tournadre system. They are referred to as distinct things right on THDL's page laying out the THDL system: "... THDL employs a relatively precise phonological scheme for transcribing Tibetan for linguistic purposes. This scheme, created by Nicolas Tournadre, is referred to as 'Tournadre Phonetic Transcription' ('Tournadre' for short). However, this scheme is still too technical to be of use for representing Tibetan words in easy-to-pronounce forms within non-Tibetan publications oriented towards a wide readership ... To address the lack of a pronounceable and regular system for rendering Tibetan phonetically, THDL has established a phonological transcription system for use throughout THDL with the aim of making its collections accessible to and user-friendly for the broadest possible audience. We refer to this as the 'THDL Simplified Phonetic Transcription System'". The most notable differences are that THDL uses "e" to represent both the [e] and [ε] sounds, and THDL represents initial stop sounds based on their original spelling, with no clear indication of how they are actual pronounced; thus, Tournadre gives a fuller and more accurate description of the word's pronunciation.—Nat Krause(Talk!) 23:37, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  THDL system vs. Tournadre system 

message: I am not really an expert in this field and I did not want to make any changes to the article directly, as tibetan transliteration seems to be a hot topic in WP. But I find the comparison of this scheme with wylie a bit misguided. 
The scheme that is presented here, seems to aim at presenting the pronunciation only. Looking at how many tibetan letter combinations are merged into one single lattin letter, it seems that it is not possible to reconstruct the original Tibetan writing from this scheme. 
Now, I don't say that a transcription scheme for Tibetan must be a bad thing (except that there is no consensus whatsoever about which of the many conflicting schemes to use). But a transcription scheme is not the same as exact transliteration. "Tibetan Pinyin" or however one would call it seems to have a warrented but completely different purpose than wylie. 
Therefore I cannot imagine that "It is used inside of China as an alternative to the Wylie transliteration for writing Tibetan in the Latin alphabet." is correct information. How can a phonetic transcription system replace a transliteration system? Transcription and transliteration have completely different purposes, don't they?
I would suggest that the sentence "It is used inside of China as an alternative to the Wylie transliteration for writing Tibetan in the Latin alphabet." be corrected and the actual use of Tibetan Pinyin be adequately characterized by somebody who knows how this scheme is actually used in China. 
ok, these are my 2cents. I hope nobody takes offense.
Faximile 14:35, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Faximile, thanks for your comments. I certainly don't take any offense at them, although I don't completely agree with them, either. You are correct that Tibetan Pinyin (or Zangwen Pinyin or whatever you wish to call it) presents the pronunciation of Tibetan words (to be precise, it shows the pronunciation in a fairly posh version of the Lhasa dialect). One cannot reconstruct the Tibetan spelling of a word based on its Tibetan Pinyin romanization. Thus, Tibetan Pinyin is precisely a transcription, while Wylie is a transliteration, just as you note. Still, I think it is not quite correct to say that transcription has a completely different purpose from transliteration. In fact, there is a lot of overlap. For example, consider the monastery འབྲས་སྤུངས་ (which is conventionally written "Drepung" in English). If I want to tell you how it is pronounced in Lhasa, I could write "Zhaibung" (Tibetan Pinyin) or [ɖεpuŋ] (IPA), depending on which system you're familiar with. If I want to tell you how it is written in Tibetan, I could write ‘bras-spungs. However, what if I just want to refer to it by name, in a way that can be written using the world's most widely-used alphabet? In that case, either "Zhaibung" or ‘bras-spungs—either transcription or transliteration—will accomplish the goal. I think that it is for this type of situation that the author of this article meant Tibetan Pinyin was "an alternative to the Wylie transliteration for writing Tibetan in the Latin alphabet."—Nat Krause(Talk!·What have I done?) 20:19, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Nat, there is a flaw in your argument about pronunciation.  You write "For example, consider the monastery འབྲས་སྤུངས་ (which is conventionally written "Drepung" in English). If I want to tell you how it is pronounced in Lhasa, I could write "Zhaibung" (Tibetan Pinyin) or [ɖεpuŋ] (IPA), depending on which system you're familiar with."  The problem with this argument is that it is *not* pronounced "Zhaibung" in Lhasa, but rather a close approximation of "Dre-pung".  The only individuals in Lhasa who pronounce it "Zhaibung" are ethnic *Chinese*.  Hence, my correction of the main entry paragraph to the effect that "Tibetan Pinyin" often deviates substantially from normative Tibetan.  I have taken your other suggestion (thread below), and made changes accordingly. Scy77 (talk) 14:32, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: "Zhaibung" is not a pronunciation; it is a spelling. In the Tibetan Pinyin, this spelling is used to represent a particular Tibetan pronunciation. The spelling "Drepung" is a different (non-systematic) representation of the same pronunciation. That being the case, I don't know what you mean when you write "The problem with this argument is that it is *not* pronounced 'Zhaibung' in Lhasa, but rather a close approximation of 'Dre-pung'". Can you indicate using IPA or X-SAMPA what the distinction in pronuciation you are referring to is?—Nat Krause(Talk!·What have I done?) 03:20, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  comparison with wylie? 

message: I reverted some edits by User:Scy77 which introduce the claim that Tibetan Pinyin "reflects the Chinese pronunciation of Tibetan which often diverges substantially from normative Tibetan." This is not accurate as far as I'm aware—the phonemes which are encoded in Tibetan Pinyin match Tournadre and Sangda Dorje's description pretty closely. The same edits also state that Tibetan Pinyin produces the spelling "Lasa" for ལྷ་ས་, which is definitely incorrect; "Lhasa" is the about the only thing that all systems of Tibetan transcription, including Tibetan Pinyin, agree on. Lhasa does become "Lasa" in Hanyu Pinyin, because that is a system for transcribing Chinese.—Nat Krause(Talk!·What have I done?) 00:42, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Scy77's edits 

message: Why are all the retroflex sounds affricates in the IPA, including inaspirate ones? This looks like an error. Surely the inaspirate ones should be simple retroflex stops. This is almost certainly true of aspirate ones too, which means all the retroflex affricates should be simple stops. What I mean is, wherever the IPA has a "t" or "d" with a curly tail, there should be a little "h" in place of the following "s" with a curly tail or the following "s" with a curly tail should just be omitted. Or is this genuine evidence of a Chinese dialect of Tibetan?
Moonsell (talk) 03:38, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Funny, I was thinking about that recently. As far as I'm aware, the more common and standard realisation of these sounds is as retroflex stops. Nevertheless, there evidently is a Tibetan accent which makes them affricates: R. A. Miller writes "Perhaps the most striking phonological isogloss separating the Central Tibetan koiné from genuine Lhasa Tibetan is the correspondence of retroflex stops [ṭ, ṭ', ḍ] in the former with retroflex affricates in the altter. Reported fro Lhasa in Chinese trasnscriptions from early on ... then in modern times canonically described in Y. R. Chao's well-known monograph Love Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama ... and later verified by numerous in situ investigators, including Chin P'eng, Schubert, and Ricther, Hu Tan, and Huang Pufan, these characteristic affricate phonemes [tʂ, tʂ'] were well documented for speakers of a specific sociolinguistic level, notably lay officials, in the city of Lhasa itself." I assume that Miller's [ṭ, ṭ', ḍ] means [ ʈ ], [ ʈʰ ], and [ ɖ ] in IPA. So, we might do better to show these sounds as stops in this article's table, but I don't think that the affricate version can be chalked up to Chinese influence. Also, neither this short excerpt of Miller nor Tournardre and Sangda Dorje mention that the unaspirated retroflex is less affricated than the aspirated one ... that doesn't mean it isn't so, of course.—Nat Krause(Talk!·What have I done?) 04:59, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: IPA for retroflex

message: It just occurred to me that the table in this article prominently shows the "floating nasal" (the added [m], [n], etc. sound that can sometimes appear between two syllables) in the IPA pronunciation, but this is not reflected at all in the Tibetan Pinyin romanisation listed. Is this an error? The implication here is that, for instance, the correct Tibetan Pinyin for Ganden would be "Gadain". But, I don't think this is accurate. I think that perhaps the issue of the floating nasal is too complicated to be handled this way—for instance, the tables would have us believe that a-mdo is "Ando", but actually it is Amdo; also, the table doesn't tell us that rgyal-rdze would have a nasal sound at all. It might be simpler just to leave that out of the description, or put it in a footnote. Someday, hopefully, Wikipedia will have a detailed article on the floating nasal, but that day is a ways off.—Nat Krause(Talk!·What have I done?) 19:31, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Floating nasal