pronunciation guide

pronunciation guide In the course of its long history Buddhism has spread to every part of Asia. One result of this is that Buddhist concepts have come to be expressed in languages as diverse as Sanskrit, Pāli, Tibetan, Chinese, Mongolian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Sinhala, Vietnamese and many more. Since this dictionary is intended to reflect the cultural diversity of Buddhism it contains terms drawn from all the major Buddhist languages. Following the scholarly convention, however, the primary language used is Sanskrit. Sanskrit served as the lingua franca of ancient India, just as Latin did in medieval Europe, and most of the translations made into other Asian languages were based on Sanskrit originals. The most important scriptures of Mahāyāna Buddhism were composed in a variant of Sanskrit known as Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, while the earliest Buddhist scriptures are preserved in Pāli, a literary language derived from Sanskrit.

One feature of Asian languages like Sanskrit is that their alphabets are larger than those of Western languages. In order to represent the additional characters diacritical marks have to be added to the Roman letters. These typically take the form of symbols such as dots and dashes placed above or below certain characters. These symbols do not affect the alphabetical order of entries in the present work, but do affect pronunciation in various ways. As far as Sanskrit is concerned, the most important of these is that a macron above a vowel serves to lengthen it, roughly doubling the length of the sound. Thus the character ‘ā’ is pronounced as in ‘far’ rather than ‘fat’. With respect to consonants, an underdot (ṭ ḍ etc) indicates that the tongue touches the roof of the mouth when pronouncing these letters, giving the characteristic sound of English when spoken with an Indian accent. For the most part the other marks do not affect pronunciation enough to be of any special concern. A summary of the most important points in connection with the pronunciation of Sanskrit and Pāli terms is shown below:

ā	pronounced as in far
ī	pronounced as in seek
ū	pronounced as in brute
ṛ	pronounced as in risk
ñ	pronounced as in Spanish mañana
ś or ṣ pronounced sh, as in shoe
ṅ/ṃ	pronounced with a nasal sound as in ring
c	pronounced ch, as in church

More detailed guidance on the pronunciation of Sankrit can be found in chapter 1 of Michael Coulson Sanskrit: An Introduction to the Classical Language (Teach Yourself Books, 1992).

Chinese

The transcription and pronunciation of Chinese poses special problems due to the fact that there are two systems in use for transcribing it, namely Wade-Giles and Pinyin. The latter was introduced in 1979 by the People's Republic of China as its official system, but the earlier Wade-Giles method of transcription is still in widespread use, and is the form used in the present work. Pinyin has gained acceptance among specialists, but students are more likely to encounter Wade-Giles in introductory and popular literature. A helpful guide on converting from Wade-Giles to Pinyin can be found in A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1989) 441–4. Neither Pinyin or Wade-Giles, however, provides a way of representing the sounds of spoken Chinese with any accuracy since the same characters in Chinese may be pronounced in one of four different tones.

Japanese

The transcription of Japanese is relatively unproblematic, and this book uses the widely adopted Hepburn system. The characters used correspond closely to their Roman equivalents, with the exception of the long vowels ō and ū. As in the transliteration of Sanskrit, the macron over the letter indicates that the sound of the vowel is lengthened, thus kōan is pronounced ‘koh-an’, with the emphasis on the first syllable.

Tibetan

In contrast to Japanese, Tibetan orthography and pronunciation poses many complex problems. This is despite the fact that a standard system of transliteration exists that does not rely on diacritics, namely the system devised by Turrell Wylie and explained in his article ‘A Standard System of Tibetan Transcription’ (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 22 (1959), 261–7). The present work adopts this method of transliteration, but difficulties still remain. Not least among these is the fact that Tibetan words frequently contain letters that are not pronounced (this is also a feature of English, as in words such as ‘through’, ‘ought’, and so forth). Even more problematic from the point of view of alphabetization is that in Tibetan these redundant letters are often found at the start of a word: thus the term for a senior monk—lama—is in fact spelt ‘blama’. A problem therefore arises as to whether the entry for ‘lama’ belongs under B or L. Since this dictionary is intended primarily for a general readership, the policy of using a simplified phonetic form for the spelling of Tibetan headwords has been adopted. The headword is accordingly shown in a simplified phonetic form with the correct transliteration from Tibetan given in brackets, thus: lama (Tib., blama).

Korean

The Korean system of writing is known as Hangŭl, and the present work uses the standard conventions for transcription into English. This method uses the standard Roman alphabet pronounced for the most part as in English, with the exception of the two vowels ŏ (pronounced as in cot) and ŭ (pronounced as in burn).