re-posting from May 23, 2008
originally posted on the "Have You Ever Wondered?" page of our old website
Q: How do you pronounce that mantra?
A: Well, that depends. Do you want to pronounce it the way the Tibetans do? Or the way that someone from India would? And what part of Tibet or what part of India?
Q: I don't know. I just want to pronounce it the right way.
A: As English speakers, we're probably never going to pronounce the mantras quite like the Indians or Tibetans do, even if we get an accurate explanation.
But here are some tips.
First, Buddhist mantras are preserved in the Sanskrit language, the classical language of India. But these days, we are mainly receiving them from Tibetan lamas, after they have been put through the mill of the Tibetan alphabet and the Tibetan way of pronouncing things.
There are several variations on the way that mantras are spelled in Roman letters:
(1) Sometimes you will receive a written form of a mantra that has been transcribed by someone who is just trying to write down the sounds that they are hearing from their lama's speech.
(2) Or you might be looking at a mantra very carefully transliterated from the Tibetan alphabet into the Roman alphabet (the alphabet that is used for English).
(3) Or you might be looking at a mantra spelled out for you the way they do in travel books, in an attempt to help you pronounce it: PAR-LAY VOO FRAHN-SAY?
(4) If the text you are looking at was prepared by a scholar, then the mantra is most assuredly written in the international standard of romanization for Devanagari (the alphabet used for Sanskrit), complete with diacritical marks.
Note: Sanskrit has been written in a number of different alphabets over the centuries. Please understand that Sanskrit is a language and Devanagari is an alphabet.
The advantage of the accurate standard spelling is that a person could, if they wanted to, look up that word in a Sanskrit dictionary. If it's not spelled correctly, that becomes very difficult.
If you prefer the travel book type of spelling, please consider that not all Dharma students are English-speakers; other languages use the Roman alphabet and they have different ideas about how those letters are pronounced.
At this point, please look over the separate document Sanskrit Tibetan Equivalencies.
Below is the Deva-nagari alphabet, which is most commonly used for Sanskrit, as well as some other Indian languages. (India has many languages which are written in different alphabets.)
In both Sanskrit and Tibetan there are aspirated and un-aspirated consonants that we don't have in English. English-speakers have a very hard time discerning these sounds. In formal writing, the letter H always represents an out-breath, a puff of air. So, you have a T with no puff (unaspirated), and a TH with a puff (aspirated). Don't make the mistake of turning this into an English 'Th' as in Thursday.
In the 'travel-book' type of spelling, they often help you out by putting an H in, for example after the letter C, so that you make the English 'Ch' sound. However, the letter C is always pronounced like the English 'Ch' in both Sanskrit and Tibetan; never like 'City' or 'Cat'. Sanskrit consonants with the H-sound: KH, GH, CH, JH, T-dot-H, D-dot-H (retroflex), TH, DH, PH, BH.
Retroflex
Sanskrit has some sounds which are called 'retroflex'. That means that you bend your tongue back. Put the tip of your tongue on the high point of the roof of your mouth and then talk.
The Tibetan alphabet represents these sounds by flipping regular letters so that they are facing backwards. The official romanization of Sanskrit puts dots under letters to indicate retroflex. In the Devanagari alphabet, these are distinct letters. Letters that can be retroflexed are: T, TH, D, DH, N, S, KS.
Don't worry too much about actually making this retroflex sound; I just want you to understand what those dots are about.
V
That's the letter V. Or is it really?
There is a Sanskrit letter that is officially romanized as V, but many Indians don't pronounce it that way. And Tibetan-speakers can't pronounce the sound V (that is, the sound that English-speakers call V). They make it B or W. Try it. Give a word with V in it to a Tibetan person and listen.
However, Sanskrit scholars will stand by their claim that it is a V. Devanagari has a B and a V. Tibetan has a B and a W. The Sanskrit V can end up as either a B or a W in Tibetan spelling. In Indian pronunciation, when the V comes after another consonant, it becomes W, as in Svaahaa, pronounced Swaahaa.
In Sanskrit, V is considered to be one of the consonants derived from a vowel, namely the vowel U. That makes it very tempting to call it a W.
C and J
The Sanskrit sounds that we spell with a C and J, are spelled with Tibetan letters that come out as TS and DZ. Tibetan has other letters that equal C and J. This is not a mistake. The Tibetans listened to the Indian speakers and when they heard them say these sounds, as in the words CITTA (mind) or JAMBHALA (a wealth deity), they heard a sound more up towards the front teeth, rather than back in the mouth. Contrast 'ts' with 'ch'. And 'dz' with 'j'.
Vowels
To make it simple, you can basically use Latin pronunciation for vowels in Sanskrit. Most European languages besides English use Latin vowels, so if you know a bit of Spanish, just think like that. However, Sanskrit actually has long and short vowels. That's probably an advanced lesson.
Even the letters R and L have vowel forms in addition to their consonant forms, so don't be surprised to see an R sitting all by itself between two consonants. That's not a mistake. Think about it. Even in English, R is often functioning as a vowel, isn't it?
M with the dot
The M with a dot—either under or over it—is actually listed as a vowel. It is called an anusvara and generally represents a nasal sound. Exactly which nasal sound depends on the context. In Roman letters, you can't just have a dot hanging there with nothing else, so the scholars decided to use an M. That raises a controversy about some words. Everyone is happy with the syllable OM ending with an M sound.
But what about HUM-dot? Is it HUM or HUNG? This dot is used even in Tibetan writing, so there is still no M or NG; it's just a dot. But Tibetans universally say HUNG. And if you asked most Indians—at least Northern Indians—they would say HUNG. So don't get thrown off by the Romanization. It's still fine to say HUNG.
Sanskrit Alphabet as a Mantra
In Vajrayana Buddhism, the Sanskrit alphabet is recited as a mantra in order to bless the speech. (You might argue that I should say Devanagari alphabet, but since it's just an oral recitation, saying Sanskrit is accurate.) So this introduction to the Sanskrit alphabet will at least help you with that.
Tibetan Pronunciation
If the scribe or woodblock-carver hasn't slipped, then the Tibetan spellings of mantras are very consistent, letter-for-letter transliterations of the Sanskrit. They might have quite different ways of pronouncing them, but the spelling is very orthodox.
Some of the common Tibetan pronunciations are different from the scholarly pronunciations, but they are not wrong. They are in accord with how many Indian speakers pronounce things.
• Some variations are due to the limits of Tibetan pronunciation (like the way that we just can't hear an unaspirated T).
• Others are due to Tibetan spelling rules mistakenly being applied to Sanskrit (like the way we might pronounce TH with a soft 'Th' sound).
• There is a special compound consonant in Sanskrit that comes out as JÑ in official spelling, but is usually pronounced GY by both Indians and Tibetans.
• I've already mentioned the V/B/W controversy which accounts for a lot of the variations.
• Tibetan doesn't have long vowels, so they just ignore the long vowel markers. Or bizarrely, they sometimes turn it into a nasal sound.
• Tibetans abhor compound consonants, so those are always reduced to what they would consider the root letter. SMARA becomes MARA, etc.
• Tricky spelling rules in Tibetan make BY into J, PR into T, and in Kham, KY becomes CH, so that accounts for many of the variants.
• A final consonant often modifies the vowel, in Tibetan, so they sometimes apply that to Sanskrit words even though it doesn't apply. PADMA becomes PEMA. And PHAT-dot becomes PAY.
• For some unfathomable reason, the Tibetans pronounce the retroflex SH as KH, even though they clearly write it with just a backwards SH. And they make KSH-dot (a special compound in Devanagari) into KHY.
So that's all for now. I might add more later. Pleases excuse the colloquialisms in this paper; it is meant as a casual explanation for non-scholars. I have avoided using a lot of diacritical marks and non-roman fonts (here), because they won't display correctly online.
Online Resources:
Tibetan Transliteration Schemes: http://www.thlib.org/tools/scripts/wiki/tibetan%20transliteration%20and%20transcription.html
Sanskrit Pronunciation and Diacritic Guide: http://www.sanskrit.org/www/Sanskrit/SanskritPronunc.htm
Printed Resources:
Modern Tibetan Language, Volume 1, by Losang Thonden, Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1984.
Tibetan-English Dictionary, by Sarat Chandra Das, Gaurav Publishing House, 1985, (originally published by The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1902).
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