Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Tibetan)

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Contents 1 Comments 1.1 Six point agenda 2 Comments on Tibetan phonology and transcription 3 Wylie 4 Notes

[edit] Comments

Nice work getting started on this, babelfisch. I think we should emphasise that our basic principle for naming articles should always be to use the most common form. Naming conventions are still very useful, though, to make recommendations in cases where no one spelling can be clearly distinguished as most common. My feeling, generally, is that we should deprecate Wylie in favour of something that will give the reader some idea how the word is actually pronounced by somebody. In practice, this will probably often mean privileging the Lhasa dialect, but the world seems to be moving in that direction anyway. When it's feasible, we can make effort to favour local dialects when writing about a place or something else that is specific to a certain place.

Should we try to use an actual organized system for writing Tibetan? That seems like a good idea, especially in the case of common words and terminology (rather than names of people and places). I don't know if either the names used by the Chinese government or the ones used by the Government-in-Exile are based on an actual system. User:Nathan_hill mentioned something about a Tournadre system of transcribing Tibetan a while back on a talk page, but I don't know much about that.

I'm afraid I don't agree with the suggestion to use official government spellings of places inside the PRC. We should always prefer whatever is the most common spelling in English. In some cases, this might be the official spelling, but, at least for the more famous places, the spelling used by the Tibetan Government-in-Exile seems to be predominant. For instance, using official spellings would require us to move Shigatse to Xigazê and Tashilhunpo to Zhaxilhünbo. In cases where there is no spelling which is clearly more common, I suggest we favour Government-in-Exile spelling or some phonetic system for the sake of consistency.

While we should deprecate Wylie in article titles (which is overwhelmingly the preponderent practice at present), it should, as babelfisch suggests, still be provided parenthetically. Maybe. Now that we are able to include actual Tibetan script in articles (I recently installed a Tibetan font, and it was extremely easy), I'm not sure if Wylie serves any useful purpose at all anymore. I think we can profitably observe a principle mentioned in the Manual of Style for Chinese, which is that, in the case of that language, one should make sure that every reference to a Chinese name or term is linked to the equivalent Chinese characters—either add them in parentheses or else link to another article that does. In the case of Tibetan, this goal can be accomplished either by including Tibetan script or by using Wylie transliteration (because someone who knows Tibetan and knows Wylie can always figure out the former from the latter. I think so, anyway; I don't fall into that category). Therefore, if we can provide a blue link to an article about X, we don't need to write out X (Tibetan language|Tibetan]]: ཁངསསས; Wylie: zXrg-S) every time it is mentioned in another article. In the article about X itself, my initial recommendation would be that we begin with "X (Tibetan language|Tibetan]]: ཁངསསས; other romanisations if necessary) and include Wylie only if it has some level of currency as a romanisation. - Nat Krause^(Talk!) 05:17, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

There needs to be a system. "Most common spellings" do not exist for Tibetan, because there is a very limited set of Tibetan words, personal names and place names that have established English spellings. In this regard, the situation is similar to Chinese.

I'm aware of only two systems - one is Wylie, the other is the Chinese official system. The exile community did not produce any explicit guidelines, and transcriptions in their publications are chaotic. Tournadre is the author of an important textbook for Tibetan, but his transcription is not widely used or accepted. —Babelfisch 09:30, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Babelfisch: sorry that I drifted away from this conversation. I had been reading this article from THDL, which says a little bit about Tibetan romanisation, but I got distracted by some other things. So, I don't begrudge you for changing the spellings on Dalai Lama, which should help get more of a conversation started, although, ultimately I don't think they should stand. We should probably should try to publicise this proposed policy a bit more before considering it in force. I'll leave some notes on relevant talk pages and the Village Pump.

I have in my possession exactly one volume of Tibetan history, Tsering Shakya's The Dragon in the Land of Snows. In the introduction, the author writes, "I have rendered Tibetan terms and names in more familiar Roman forms and a list of correct Tibetan spellings is provided as an appendix. For this I have used standard written Tibetan spelling and followed the transliteration established by Wylie (1959)." I find it interesting he seems to consider Wylie to be the only romanisation system worth mentioning, but he still doesn't use that in the body of the text. Rather, he refers to some "more familiar" Roman spelling. Looking through his list in the appendix, none of these seem similar to the official PRC romanisation: e.g., Chamdo, not Qamdo; Shigatse, not Xigaze; Sakya, not Sa'gya. On the other hand, some of his spellings don't really seem all that familiar to me: e.g. Kargyu instead of Kagyu.

As far as I can tell, official PRC romanisation is rarely used outside of government spellings are rarely used outside of government signs in the PRC. PRC romanisation looks, to me, distinctly different from other systems and harder to read. It contains similarities with Chinese Hanyu pinyin, including the Q and X that are frequently seen as confusing. These reasons, I think, militate against adopting PRC romanisation for general purposes. If we're going to choose a system, we should try to pick something that will tend to produce spellings resembling those which are familiar to readers. Using the PRC system indiscriminately will imply a political bias, because they are so closely associated with the Chinese government.

I think we should carefully consider to what extent we really need a system. Babelfisch writes: "'Most common spellings' do not exist for Tibetan, because there is a very limited set of Tibetan words, personal names and place names that have established English spellings." However, should we not use established spellings for names when they exist? If we do use them, then we are creating an exception to our system right at the start for the most-commonly-used instances. I think what we need is a system that we can use as a fall-back in cases where we are unable to determine what the most common system is. We can also refer to lists such as Tsering Shakya's and this one for suggested common spellings.

In any event, PRC spellings are particularly inappropriate for use on the Dalai Lama article, given that this system was not in place until after the current Dalai Lama left Tibet. There certainly must be examples of these historical names written in English by the current Dalai Lama or his people, and I suggest their spellings should take precedence. - Nat Krause^(Talk!) 21:15, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Nat. As far as I know there is no system which is commonly used and accessible to the layman, which leaves us with common use as the best guide. I think we should be able to agree on common terms for most of the things that we're likely to have articles on, such as people, places and Buddhist terminology. These names don't have to be known to the general population of Idaho, just the most common among whatever people talk about these things in English. Henry^Flower 00:52, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm not convinced (yet). Spellings can't be determined by a survey. How do we get the "more familiar" or "most familiar" spellings? From a specific corpus of literature? Through a Google search? Through a discussion on Wikipedia about each word until a consensus is reached?

The motivation for some of the "more familiar" spellings (such as "Tashilhunpo" for Zhaxilhünbo / bkra shis lhun po) is not clear at all and they are misleading, because they reflect neither pronunciation nor Tibetan spelling.

The list Nat Krause refers to is very unsystematic, particularely in the left column. Many of those spellings are not official.

Tournadre's system is a mixture. It tries to preserve the three-way distinction of the plosives in the written language (e.g. k-kh-g), which is not reflected in the pronunciation; on the other hand it drops most "silent" letters. The result is quite systematic, but some of the spellings won't be very popular, such as "Zhikatsé" for Xigazê/Shigatse (gzhis ka rtse) or "Trashilhünpo" for Zhaxilhünbo/Tashilhunpo (bkra shis lhun po).

One of the problems here is that for place names (cities, districts, counties), the official spellings are becoming more and more accepted, because they were adopted by the UN and other international organisations. However, this is not the case with names of historical figures, monasteries etc., which is a source of inconsistency.

I'm aware that there is no easy solution for this problem. —Babelfisch 03:39, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Generally, yes, the only conclusive way to decide what the "common name" of something is by discussion. We can certainly use lists, like the ones I mentioned above, to give us suggestions about what is more common, but none of those are final. For instance, Tsering Shakya has Kargyu as the common spelling of Bka'-brgyud, but I would argue that it should be Kagyu. Google is a popular choice on Wikipedia to decide what the mostly used form of a word is, and, although it has weaknesses, that's often a good start. I also think we should weight things towards the spelling that is used by the party in question, provided that she/he/it still lives/exists and spells her/his/its name with some kind of consistency.

Does this seem unworkable to you? I think that it's pretty normal for Wikipedia for things like this to be hashed out on the talk page of the article in question.

As far as inconsistency is concerned, I think the important thing is to make sure that the name of a given person, place, or thing is spelled consistently throughout Wikipedia, and, especially, throughout a given article. Beyond that, what's the problem? I suspect that our friends who know a lot about Tibetan will wind up looking at the Tibetan characters or the Wylie transliteration instead of whatever transcription we use, while other readers will remain blissfully unaware of the inconsistencies that might exist between different transcriptions.

I agree that mixed transcription-transliteration qualities of Tournadre make it less desireable for our purposes.

In reference to the list I mentioned, did you actually mean that the left column is unsystematic, or did you mean the right? Either way, I don't really follow you. The only thing unsystematic that I can see about the left column is that some of the entries have only Chinese, while some of them have both Chinese and Tibetan. Are you saying that the Tibetan spellings contain errors? As for the right column, it's not supposed to be systematic. - Nat Krause^(Talk!) 19 April 2006

PS - One of the additional demerits of the PRC system is that it doesn't seem to be used very systematically even in Chinese publications. Since I've been looking into the matter, I've noticed several names with variant spellings. - Nat Krause^(Talk!) 04:07, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Six point agenda

This is technopilgrim. Thanks babelfisch for creating this discussion topic, it is much needed. My comments:

1) if there was a clean fix for this we wouldn't be here struggling to figure this out. We are talking about the best way to blend multiple systems together in a way that works for both casual users and serious students, without causing too much offense or violating NPOV more than we have to. Because casual users are more intellectually delicate (think grade school students trying to use wikipedia), I suggest we establish a principle of keeping them foremost in mind. This means pedantry and escoteric scholarship, while welcome, needs to sit in the back of the bus & we keep the opening paragraph especially clean.

2) The inline "incantation style", which works OK in less demanding contexts, tends to break down horribly in the Tibet and Mongolia-related articles. By incantation style I mean opening sentences like:

Qinghai Lake or Lake Koko Nor (Tibetan: mtsho khri shor rgyal mo and མཚོ་སྔོན་ mtsho sngon po; Chinese: 青海湖;, pinyin: Qīnghǎi Hú, "Blue Sea"; Mongolian: Хөхнуур [Höhnuur], Classical Mongolian: [Köke Naɣur]; Manchu: Huhu Noor, "Blue Lake") is the largest lake in China...

This is broken from a readability standpoint, completely broken, although valid arguments can be made for including all the cross-reference alternatives. I think we need to go to the use of an side-bar infobox of some kind, instead of our present inline gizmo. Something like this (but off to the side and smaller)::

Alternative Name	System
མཚོ་སྔོན་	Tibetan
mtsho khri shor rgyal mo	Wylie transliteration
青海湖 lit. "Blue Sea"	Simplified Chinese
Qīnghǎi Hú	Pinyin
Хөхнуур [Höhnuur]	Mongolian
[Köke Naɣur]	Classical Mongolian
Huhu Noor lit. "Blue Lake"	Manchu

and the article itself would simply begin:

Qinghai Lake or Lake Koko Nor is the largest lake in China...

3) In theory, Tibetan unicode does away with the need for Wylie transliteration. Wylie was designed to accurately transliterate the actual Tibetan script, and now that we have unicode and computers, we don't need a transliteration system. However, since Wylie transliteration has been the foundation of Tibet scholarship in the West for several decades, I can't argue with purists who consider it a necessary part of each article. I would suggest we keep the Wylie to the main article, and not included in link references from other articles. Thus we would link to the Kagyupa like this:

The monastery was established by the Kagyu (བཀའབརྒྱུད) school in 1132...

and not

The monastery was established by the Kagyu (Tibetan: བཀའབརྒྱུད་; Wylie: Bka'-brgyud) school in 1132...

4) I agree with the Chinese gazetteer names are worth considering, despite their irregularities, but they should have lower precedence than any traditional pronunciation-based (read: non-Wylie) English name we find history has left us. Thus article names for placenames should follow any established English version first, but the article itself should include the gazetter name.

5) In articles on Bhutan I defer to the spelling adopted by the English edition of Kuensel and that pretty much ends the arguments about the highly irregular romanization that bedevils Dzongkha->English romanization. We should take comfort in the fact that Kuensel does not always follow its own rules. Is there a corresponding online newspaper that covers Tibet news and is not too beholden to either Beijing or the Free Tibet folks?

6) While I'm making Tibetan naming suggestions, can I make a pitch against conflating the name and titles of the historic Dalai Lamas in their article titles? Kelzang Gyatso, 7th Dalai Lama seems to be a very irregular name for an article, just as John Adams, 2nd US President would be. What's wrong with Kelzang Gyatso and a disambiguation link should another Kelzang Gyatso pop up?

See ya in church, technopilgrim 01:52, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Ironically Kelzang Gyatso is one of the few Dalai Lamas who does share his name with another notable person, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso. If we want to disambiguate just by an arbitrary spelling difference, that's okay with me. Generally, I support the idea of having Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama instead of just Tenzin Gyatso, because this person is so extremely well known as simply, "the Dalai Lama". As far as previous incarnations go, I would support a move to move them all to just XYZ Gyatso. On the other hand, maybe they should all be at 1st Dalai Lama, 2nd Dalai Lama ... 14th Dalai Lama, since that seems to be the more common way to refer to them. - Nat Krause^(Talk!) 03:57, 11 May 2006 (UTC) PS, Technopilgrim, you are so very right about the Koko Nor incantation, although we may or may not see eye to eye on a less dramatic case. I'll probably have more comments later.

re 2: The box is a great idea. Maybe something similar to Template:Koreanname Chinesename, because it has to be multilingual.

re 3: Articles should get rid of redundant information. If a Tibetan term or a name has a link to a separate article (like Kagyü in your example), there is no need to give any alternative spellings or transcriptions, because they can be found in the linked article. If there is no link, Wylie would probably be better than Tibetan script for most users.

re 4: I disagree. With a few exceptions, there are no established English spellings—Tibet is a rather obscure topic in the West. The Gazetteer is in accord with the United Nations, etc. —Babelfisch 03:20, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Sorry to get here late; that depends on what you mean by few: Shigatse, for example, is probably established by Francis Younghusband and Harrer. The box seems useful. Septentrionalis 16:38, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Also, some articles elsewhere have a paragraph on naming; see Ptolemy, and several geographic articles. Septentrionalis 19:15, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

I implemented Technopilgrim's suggestion on Qinghai Lake. Only took six months!—Nat Krause^(Talk!) 07:25, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it seems to me too, the box is a great idea.--Klimov 18:13, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Comments on Tibetan phonology and transcription

After months of anticipation, I've finally had the opportunity to peruse Nicolas Tournadre and Sangda Dorje's Manual of Standard Tibetan, which is, as far as I can tell, the last word (in English) on modern spoken "Standard" Tibetan. I'd like to make a few comments about what it says, which may affect our opinions on Tibetan naming conventions.

Before that, though, I'd like to quibble with something the "project page" currently says. I think it's not, strictly speaking, true that the spelling “Tashilhunpo” fails to match pronunciation^[1]. Rather, it matches what a lot of people might hear as the pronunciation; this is shown by the frequency with which [ʈʂ] or [ʈʂʰ] is written this way (e.g. tulku, Thinley, tashi delek, Lhamo Thondup, etc.). The actual problem is that it doesn’t fit comfortably into any system of transcription because it conflicts with the [t] and [tʰ] phonemes.

About Manual of Standard Tibetan: it’s worth noting that, when we talk about a “Tournadre” romanisation system, there are actually two systems described in ‘’Manual of Standard Tibetan’’: one is used in the body of the textbook to show corret pronunciation, and the other is described in an appendix as a suggested system for writing Tibetan words in the middle of English text. We can call these Tournadre Full and Tournadre Simplified, respectively; I believe that most of the references on Wikipedia so far that referred to a “Tournadre system” meant Tournadre Simplified. The THDL Simplified system is similar to Tournadre Simplified, but it is even simpler (e.g., it uses e instead of ä); one might even call it "Tournadre Extra-Simplified". Tournadre Simplified conveys approximately all the same information that Tibetan Pinyin (the official romanisation in the PRC) does. It’s not exactly accurate to say that Tournadre Simplified preserves the classical Tibetan three-way system of stops (g, k, kh); it doesn’t just preserve it, it also adds a “gh” option. In fact, Tournadre Simplified’s “g” is pronounced exactly the same as “k”, and “gh” is pronounced exactly the same as “kh”; the only difference is in tone. However, the tonal distinction is inconsistent, because there is no similar way to show tone in words that don’t begin with stops. The other obvious advantage, although it doesn't strike me as terribly important, of the k-kh-g-gh system is that it clearly shows the Tibetan spelling of the word. Another possible advantage is that it could accurately reflect a four-way stop system in some other dialects related to Standard Tibetan—however, we can hardly go by that, lacking information on it.

Another flaw in Tournadre Simplified, which seems rather inexplicable, is that it has us substitute “ch” for “c”, which is strange because these are two different sounds (presumably, Mr. Tournadre thinks that “c” alone will be too confusing for readers, because they will pronounce it like a “k”. However, he doesn’t seem to have a problem with “th” or “ph” or "tsh", which are also confusing)—it would have made more sense to substitute “j” for “c”.

Tournadre Full seems to be Tournadre and Sangda Dorje’s definitive record of the Central Tibetan pronunciation of words. The good news from ‘’Manual of Standard Tibetan’’ is that its phonology typically agrees quite closely with the phonology described by Tibetan Pinyin. Coming from two independent sources, this seems like a good indication that we do have accurate information on how Central Tibetan is actually pronounced. There are a few nuances of pronunciation which are included in Tournadre Full but are not mentioned in Tibetan Pinyin, or, for that matter, any other system of Tibetan romanisation that I know of. Tone is one thing: Central Tibetan has two tones which are phonetic, and each tone has two possible contours, which are not phonetic except in rare cases (Babelfisch’s Tibetan Pinyin article indicates that there is a version of Tibetan Pinyin which does indicate tones). Tournadre also states that there is a glottal stop at the end of words which originally ended in –s or –d, but this is not indicated in any transcription system other than Tournadre Full. For example, take the syllables ‘’rje’’ (རྗེ་) and ‘’rjed’’ (རྗེད་); Tournadre Simplified, THDL Simplified, and Tibetan Pinyin each make both of these “je”^[2], implying that they are homophones, pronounced exactly the same. However, Tournadre Full indicates that there is an audible stop after ‘’rjed’’, meaning that the listener can distinguish one from the other without regard to context. Similarly, Tournadre Full indicates that there is a lengthening effect which can appear with some vowels, essentially meaning that Tibetan has developed a phonetic vowel length; so, in the case of ‘’rje’i’’ (རྗེའི་) Tournadre Simplified, THDL Simplified, and Tibetan Pinyin each make that “je”, which again is exactly the same as ‘’rje’’, but Tournadre Full indicates that a listener will be able to hear the difference.

As I said above, I think that it would be nice for us to have a system for transcribing Tibetan that we can use as a fall-back in cases where a conventional spelling can't be found. This would give Tibetan roughly the same naming conventions as Russian. We should find something that works, as Technopilgrim says, "for both casual users and serious students". Taking Tournadre and Sangda Dorje's description as authoritative, only the Tournadre Full system is complete, but this was not designed for use in normal text.—Nat Krause^(Talk!) 07:25, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wylie

When I started to look for Tibetan terms on the web, it was not really easy to find them. Then it occured to me to google
for something like "rdzogs chen". Such kind of google searches usually give definite results.

It seems a good reason why any article on a Tibetan issue should contain Wylie transliteration.--Klimov 18:13, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Notes

1. ^ This is referring to the letter T, as does the original passage. What is questionable here is u and possibly the p.
2. ^ Note: to be fully correct, it should be “jé” in the THDL system and “jê” in Tibetan Pinyin.