User:Yzhang4/Final project

Our group's final project is a orthographic conversion tool from IPA to Tibetan Script of Japhug based on lexd and twol of apertium.

Description

Currently, compared to IPA, Tibetan Script-based orthography is more accepted among Japhug speakers. Therefore, we developed the orthographic conversion tool to make our transducer/translator more accessible for the Japhug community.

Transcription Strategy

Our orthographic conversion is based on the orthography proposed by Guillaume Jacques, from A Grammar of Japhug(2021) p.105 to p.106

This transcription aims to minimize ambiguity, maximizing one-to-one map from sounds to orthography. Because the phonology of Japhug is richer than Standard Tibetan, in order to reduce ambiguity, this transcription uses some archaic Tibetan letters and some Tibetan letters for Sanskrit. For example, the archaic Tibetan diacritic ྀ represents vowel /ɯ/, and the letter ཊ that used to represent Sanskrit sound /ʈ/ represents /tʂ/ in this transcription.

Moreover, since vowel /ɤ/ is more common than /a/ in Japhug, we use /ɤ/ as the base vowel of each syllabus(a.k.a akshara) instead of /a/ in Standard Tibetan. On the other hand, we use the long vowel diacritic ཱ to represent /a/.

External Resources

Please see here