PRONUNCIATION.

The general reader should remember as a rough rule that in Eastern names the vowels are pronounced as in German, and the consonants as in English, except for c which is pronounced as "ch," ṅ as "ng," and ñ as "ny." In particular, words like Buddha are pronounced as if spelled in English "Bood-dha," Shakya Muni as "Shah-kya Moo-nee," and Karma as "Kur-ma."

The spelling of Tibetan names is particularly strange and startling to the English reader. Indeed, many of the names as transcribed from the local language seem unpronounceable. This difficulty is not lessened by the fact that the spoken form often differs widely from the written, owing chiefly to consonants having changed their sound or dropped out of speech altogether—the so-called "silent consonants."¹ Thus, the Tibetan word for the border-country which we, following the Nepalese, call Sikkim is spelled 'bras-ljongs and pronounced "Den-jong," and bkra-shis is pronounced "Tashi." When, however, I have found it necessary to give the full form of these names—especially the more important words translated from Sanskrit—in order to recover their original Indian form and meaning, I have referred them as far as possible to footnotes.

The transcription of the Tibetan letters follows the system adopted by Jäschke Heinrich August Jäschke (1817–1883) was a German Tibetologist and missionary who compiled an influential Tibetan-English dictionary. in his dictionary, with the exceptions noted below,² and corresponds closely with the similar system for Sanskrit words given on the following page. The Tibetan pronunciation is spelled phonetically in the dialect of Lhasa.

¹ Somewhat similar to the French ils parlent original: "ils parlent." French for "they speak," where the final "-ent" is a "silent" ending not pronounced in speech..

² The exceptions are mainly those requiring very specialized diacritical marks Diacritical marks are symbols added to letters, like accents or dots, to indicate a specific pronunciation.. The letters which are there (Jäschke's Dictionary, p. viii) pronounced ga as a prefix, cha, nya, and the ha in several forms as the basis for vowels; I have rendered these as g, ch’, ñ, and ' respectively. In several cases, I have spelled words according to Csoma’s system Alexander Csoma de Körös (1784–1842) was a Hungarian philologist who wrote the first Tibetan-English dictionary and grammar book., by which the silent consonants are italicized.