NAME App::Lingua::BO::Wylie::Transliteration VERSION version 0.1.0 SYNOPSIS Wylie transliterate can be used to transliterate words from Wylie Transliteration to (Classical) Tibetan (dbu med) BACKGROUND When you have one (foreign) alphabet and would like to display it in a different alphabet (example: Russian to Latin alphabet), you will want to use a certain transliteration scheme. Just compare all the different names you can find "Dostojevski" transliterated to, to see what enourmous differences there will be. Now for the Classical Tibetan "dbu med" alphabet there exist two main transliteration schemes: * Library of Congress Transliteration * Wylie Transliteration Classical Tibetan alphabet itself works in a really interesting way. First, let's have a look at the table of the individual "characters" with their Wylie transliterations: A few key observations: * (Almost) all letters represent a consonant, carrying an inherent vocal: "a" * These letters/syllables are sorted according to tonality and aspiration (in pronunciation) * Other vocals will be achieved by adding certain vocal-symbols in the proper places: * i.e. you can build the following syllables by adding a vowel sign: * ka -> ko * ka -> ku * ka -> ki * ka -> ke The latter is a process of merging symbols to form new symbols (with the merging taking place in the proper places -- 'e' is on top, 'u' will be inserted at the bottom) This merging process can be seen as building "ligatures", of which even more exist. As we have seen, the vocal symbols (for all vocals except 'a', which is inherent) need to be added in the proper places. For the rest of the symbols that can be added, the scheme looks the following: b s g r u b s | | | | | | | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 With the places being the following: 1) Prescript 2) Superscript 3) The Center piece (carriyng the inherent vocal, mandatory) 4) Subscript 5) The vocal sign 6) Postscript1 7) Postscript2 Note: Except from the Center piece (3), all other signs are optional. Note: Optional character can form ligatures with the character they are combined with. TECHNICAL BACKGROUND (UNICODE) The Unicode consortium had to decide what they want their code points to look like: a) either each altered base syllable is represented (i.e. ka, ko, ke, ki, ku) as a separate character (code point) b) the base syllables are represented and the altered syllables will be merged Since it was chosen for the latter, this has a few consequences: * The graphical representation will depend on building ligatures and thus on the font you are using. * That means you have to make sure you have appropriate fonts to display the signs correctly. Even if you find the ligatures not mixed together well (e.g. on your shell), you can still copy-paste the results somewhere else where you have a proper font available. Since only the code points are represented and it is up to the font to build the ligatures you will find the copy-pasted result come out very well with a proper font having the ligatures available. Copy-pasting your results here(http://www.thlib.org/reference/transliteration/wyconverter.php) might help should the tibetan signs not be rendered correctly on your shell USAGE echo bsgrubs | wylie-transliterate or wylie-transliterate MOTIVATION "Nobody needs such a module!" -- you might say. I agree. But the one person who might need it will be more than happy to have. (Given he/she finds it in the webz). Still though, let me just say: * I do it because I can * in my studies I visited a course "Classical Tibetan I" Really, I didn't learn too much about this interesting language, but a few things just stuck with me, such as the composition of characters to build words. RESPONSIBILITIES / FEEDBACK I am in no way any expert in Classical Tibetan. I can't even read one sentence. But I can decipher one word! This module was written in the spirit of my fascination with the interesting system of this language and I would love to learn it for real some day. Please, if you are an expert and you find any errors, fixes, whatever -- I call it your reponsibility to let me know! Please shoot me an email at: dbr @at@ cpan . org, thank you! AUTHOR DBR COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE This software is copyright (c) 2013 by DBR. This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.