Wylie vs THL Phonetics: Understanding Tibetan Transliteration Systems

Who Was Turrell Wylie?

Turrell Verl “Terry” Wylie (August 20, 1927 — August 25, 1984) was a prominent American scholar, Tibetologist, sinologist, and professor. He is widely recognized as one of the leading Western experts on Tibetan language, culture, and history in the 20th century.

He developed a system of Roman script to write down Tibetan language. This was highly necessary some time ago to enable publishing Tibetan texts, before the invention of Unicode. Now, we don’t need to use Wylie as much as we did in the past; but some academics, especially in Europe, insist on continuous use of Wylie in academic publications instead of Tibetan script.

The Wylie Transliteration Chart

Two-Letter Combinations

Three-Letter Combinations

Aspirates:

Non-aspirates:

Four-Letter Combination

Vowels and A Chung

Pay Special Attention To

Examples:

Wylie vs Phonetics: What’s the Difference?

The Wylie system shows us the spelling of the word—how it is written. But in modern spoken dialects, Tibetan words have pronunciation which differs from how they are written.

When we would like to write down how the word is pronounced, we use phonetic transliteration.

The most common phonetic transliteration was created by David Germano and Nicolas Tournadre and was published on 12 December 2003. You can use a converter here: THL Phonetics Converter

A Practical Comparison

Here is a comparison of the famous Tibetan greeting:

As you can see, Wylie (bkra shis bde legs) preserves all the letters in the Tibetan spelling, while phonetic systems show you how to actually pronounce the word.

Why Consistency Matters

If you have chosen the THL system of transliteration for your essay or abstract, keep using THL without mixing it with Rigpa or other systems.

The same is true for Wylie. Besides the transliteration system of Tibetan language by Turrell Wylie, there are other systems. Whichever you choose, it is advisable to stay consistent throughout your work.