Hello everyone! So I just realized that I have been extremely greedy by not sharing any of the wonderful knowledge that I am accumulating here, so I would like to take this opportunity to teach you all some Tibetan. It’s super straightforward, particularly for English speakers, so just follow along and I’m sure it will make perfect sense right away. Buckle up, here we go!

Let’s learn how to say hello first, because basic greetings are always a good way to start. Here’s the Tibetan for hello:

བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས

Doesn’t look too bad, right? Ok, so let’s get started by spelling it out. Each set of characters, separated by a dot, makes one sound. That sound is determined by which letter is the main letter and whether there are any prefixes, suffixes, second suffixes, vowels, head letters, or subscribed letters present in the syllable as well. Lucky for you, this phrase doesn’t have any head letters, so you can ignore that for now.

The first thing you should know is that all the consonants have an inherent “a” vowel sound attached to them, except when that is overridden by the presence of another vowel written above or below the character, or sometimes by a suffix or second suffix to the main letter which can change it to an umlaut or do other stuff, depending. So the first letter of the first syllable is a “ba.” The second letter is a “ka,” not to be confused with “kha,” “ca,” or “cha,” of course. But it also has a subscribed “ra,” which for our purposes doesn’t alter the sound enough to explain here. Now because the “ka” has the subscribed letter we know that’s the main letter, so the “ba” doesn’t matter and the first syllable would be transliterated (using Wylie) as “bkra.” We are on our way!

Now to save some time, I’m just going to spell out the rest—I’m sure you could figure this out on your own without too much trouble. The second syllable would begin “sha,” but there’s a vowel “gi gu” over the top which changes it into a “shi” sound and also tells us that is the main letter, and then the suffix is a “sa.” So the second syllable is “shis.” Make sense? The third syllable is “ba,” just like before, followed by “da” but with a “’greng bo” which makes it a “de,” and the third syllable is therefore a “bde.” Finally, The last syllable is “la,” “’greng bo” which makes it “le,” “ga,” “sa” to become “legs.” You drop the inherent “a” vowel sound because there is a vowel above the main letter.

See how easy it is! Now you have learned some Tibetan! Transliterating from the Tibetan script to Wylie, we get “bkra shis bde legs.” Now of course, that’s just the transliteration—there isn’t any phonetic spelling systems because there are too many sounds that are so similar to Western ears that they are indistinguishable. Plus, there are tons of words that sound exactly the same way, but are spelled differently, which means that most of the letters are actually silent anyway. You just have to know which ones they are, and then memorize the pronunciation. Since you all are just getting started, I will go ahead and tell you how to pronounce this phrase. It should sound something like “tashi delek,” with maybe a little bit of a “g” or “h” sound in place of the “k” at the end than you would expect.

See how easy that was? བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས becomes bkra shis bde legs which is pronounced tashi delek. It’s like learning a bike really, you might fall down a couple times but if you’re willing to memorize letters and rules until you are blue in the face just to get the pronunciation right and then what the words actually mean on top of that you won’t have any trouble at all. Best of luck! That’s all for now, I will be back later for a less sarcastic post.