Re: Sorting Pali in Tibetan Script

On 07/07/2012, Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham_at_ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Can someone please advise me as to the sorting of Pali as Pali in
> Tibetan script. I need a prompt response rather than a complete
> treatment. It is possible that I have been misunderstood what I have
> been able to pull together.

Richard

I'm rather curious as to why you would want to know this, as I have
never encountered Pali written in Tibetan script. The Buddhist Canon
in Tibetan was almost entirely translated from Sanskrit (with a few
sutras translated from Chinese) - as far as I know, no part was
translated from Pali into Tibetan (there is a 20th century translation
of the Dhammapada from Pali but it is not included in the Tibetan
Canon). The small handful of Tibetans or Bhutanese I know of who have
any knowledge of Pali are familiar with reading that language in
Devanagri script or Roman transliteration.

> What I understand is the following:
>
> (a) The retroflex lateral ('LLA' in most Unicode encodings) is written
> <U+0F63 TIBETAN LETTER LA, U+0F39 TIBETAN MARK TSA -PHRU>, as at
> http://www.tipitaka.org/tibt/ .

In 40 years have never seen that combination of characters (U+0F63
U+0F39) used in Tibetan, or any other language normally written in
the Tibetan script. If you really need to collate Pali written in
Tibetan script in the correct order for Pali then you should probably
create a specific tailoring. The current collation table for Tibetan
in CLDR (and that described in Robert Chilton's slides) has errors
even for Tibetan. It cannot be used to collate Sanskrit written in
Tibetan script in the correct order for Sanskrit - though it should
put Sanskrit loan words in the order they are normally found within a
Tibetan dictionary.

- Chris
Received on Tue Jul 10 2012 - 14:13:55 CDT