I have this dream of doing a spelling bee on steroids. The contestants line up facing
a wheel labeled with a bunch of the world's languages. Step right up, spin that wheel
and, wherever it happens to land, you have to read a word and write a word in that language's
native writing system.
Whohooh! As a language nerd, there's a lot that intimidates me about this spelling bee.
But I must confess there's one maniacally tough written language that I really hope
this wheel never lands on.
Wooh, I am excited! Let's go through and list why each one of these scripts has some tricky
letters. And then at the end I will reveal to you the language with the world's scariest
spelling!
Number 10... wait, what was that? Come again? This just in, but apparently someone else
already answered my question. Uh, he swears that the worst script ever is... Thai?
Hmm. Really? I mean, I messed with Lao and Thai a few years ago and, yeah, they weren't
super easy. But Thai?!?
Ok, here's his complaint. See, when a written language grows up and gets old, the way people
speak it changes over time, but the way people write the language stays fossilized. The result
is historical spelling. And Thai has some blatant historical spelling. Not only is written
Thai pretty old, but even when it was new it modeled its letters on Sanskrit, so it
inherited fossils from the get-go.
Thai has an alphasyllabary with 44 consonant letters for writing just 21 consonant sounds.
Plus vowels and tone marks. Plus a complicated way of figuring out how all of those letters
work together to tell you which tone to pronounce on which vowel. Yeah...
But I think this missed the point: what is it about historical spelling that makes a
script tough?
Consider two people. First, the reader. (Won't you consider the reader?) A script is hard
when I don't know which sound to say for the letters I'm about to read. And for the writer,
this script is hard if I don't know which letters to use for the sounds I want to write.
Now glance back at Thai. There's something regular and predictable about it. Especially
for the reader. We can sum it up in a not-too-long page on Wikipedia, we can dust our hands off
and set you loose on the language and you should do fairly well.
In fact, I think of Thai spelling as not too different from Greek in a way. A bunch of
letters come together to represent a smaller set of sounds. It's that same many-to-one
correspondence. Uh, also, like Thai, some sounds influenced others in predictable ways.
And, yeah, there aren't those Thai tones to deal with, but you're stuck with the Greek
tónos system with its movable accents and double accents based on how pitch and vowel
length used to work way back in Ancient Athens!
No. No. No! Don't fear Thai, my friend. Look elsewhere.
It's got mountains. It's got Lamas. It's got Buddhists talking dhamma! Welcome to Tibet.
History tells us that Tibetans have this guy to thank for writing: Songtsen Gampo. Pardon
the spelling there, heheh. Sneak preview. He brought kingdoms together to form the vast
Tibetan Empire. He said, "Hey guys, we're Buddhist now!" And around the year 630 he
sent a young minister to India to learn how to write.
What he brought back from India was a new alphasyllabary. Just like Thai. They both
emphasize consonants and surround them with vowels. They both came with Buddhism, so both
have special conventions for transcribing sacred Sanskrit terms. And, nowadays, they
both have to deal with tones in convoluted ways they weren't designed to handle.
But written Tibetan is much, much older. Here's the basics. You start with the base consonants
with their built-in dummy vowels. Then you learn to write vowels and w's and r's and
y's as little flags on the consonants. But it gets even more exotic. Tibetan can stack
consonants. It can flip consonants. It can clunk together masses of consonants to build
syllables that look like this.
This is how Tibetans spell these words... and this is how they say them. Did that sink
in for you? This is what people are reading. This is what people are saying.
This tangled mess of consonants is why Yeti "yache" is spelled gya'-dred, why the Tibetan
language is "y˧˥˧ʔ" even though it's really dbus, and this, the name for this Klingon-looking
beauty that is the Tibetan script, how do you think it's pronounced? Any clue? Time's
up! It's "utɕɛ̃".
If you think reading with these letters is hard, you should try writing with them. In
Lhasa, the sounds "tup" might mean any of these words: it might mean "overflows", "accomplishes",
"sews" or even other forms of the verb "accomplish" like "accomplished" and "will accomplish".
But guess what? Those are all spelled differently.
The puzzles don't stop. Take two words with very similar spelling. The one spelled "grags"
gets pronounced "tha". And "grogs"? Why, that's "rɔ".
Give up yet? Well, there is some logic here. Here's the deal. Tibetan has core letters,
it has vowels around those core letters and then outside letters.
Once you grasp that basic fact, you can start figuring out which letters to ignore. Like
in this verb that looks like "bsags", b- is a prefix and the -s is a suffix, so you can
just concentrate on getting these middle letters right. "Sak"... maybe.
Ok, and now you're thinking, I get it! It's the vowel and some other letters in the middle
of the syllable I care about. I can just ignore everything else. BAM! I'm Tibetan!
Dangerous strategy there. For two reasons. Number one: you need to know which letters
not to ignore.
And reason number two? Well you can't just drop letters and walk away like that. Tibetan
has a complicated relationship where letters influence the pronunciation of other letters.
Meaning a silent letter can still change the way other letters get pronounced!
So the name of one of the major schools of Tibetan Buddhism is written like this. We
might innocently cross out all of these sounds and say something like "ka-kyu". But that
"u" actually sounds like the German "üüü" there. It acts that way because of the final
d that's after it: "kacyː˥˥". Lucky you though, "u" to "ü" isn't the only vowel change
that works this way and "d" isn't the only consonant that triggers it.
So you're dropping letters here. You're influencing letters with ghost letters. And sometimes
you're not even just dropping and influencing, you're finding out that clusters of letters
interact together to create totally different sounds. Complex patterns! It's all
complex patterns!
Now things ratchet up another notch when you put syllables together. Sometimes you'll find
a letter that's silent, like say silent r before another consonant in the word "tɕeː˩˧".
So you might cross it out and then forget about it, just to have it suddenly pop out
when you smash it against another syllable. Like in this name.
Keep every little bit of this in mind when you run crying to your Tibetan dictionary
for help, because the Tibetan idea of alphabetical order is not organizing words by the first
letter. No, no, no. They use that root letter, wherever it happens to be.
Why do you do this, Tibet?
Science...
says that, being a high-altitude mountain people, Tibetans have physiological
advantages like increased bloodflow to the brain. Maybe they're spending that power on
this bizarre writing system. But, honestly, they did try to get rid of this bad spelling
karma. Really, Old Tibetan got a spelling reform in the year 800! And then, well, that...
that was it.
1200 years ago. Think of what's happened in 1200 years. The Viking Age. The Norman conquest
of England. Everything ever written in Thai. The last Mayan codices. Chaucer. Shakespeare.
The Tokugawa Shogunate. These are current events compared to the last time Tibet changed
its spelling.
That is some serious historical spelling. And it's why, when I'm standing there watching
the wheel clack, clack, clack around deciding my fate in that multilingual spelling bee,
I really, really hope that wheel doesn't land on Tibetan.
Assuming we're thinking spelling means segmental scripts, ones where we're matching letters
to sounds. But I'm going step out of the bounds of this gameshow here, because, if we color
outside the mandala lines, Tibetan isn't even the worst offender when it comes to historical,
ahem, "spelling". There's a written language that plays much faster and looser with its
symbols and expects way more of readers and writers than Tibetan ever could.
Thanks for joining me in my spelling bee. I really liked having you here! Stick around
and subscribe for language.
I'm Tibetan on you!