Tibetan/Keyboard

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On this page, I document the steps I took to develop a Tibetan transcription keyboard. There git repository for this project. More information about the Tibetan language, translations and texts and the tools I have developed in the class can be found on the LING073 Tibetan Language page.

Transcription Characters

Over the course of this project, I learned about the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which is a system of phonetic characters based on the Latin alphabet.[1] I laid out some of these symbols on the keyboard so that users can type in Tibetan text based on how it sounds. The file for this transcription keyboard is in the Github repository I created for this project. I found the data for this keyboard on the Tibetan language Wikipedia page. The following tables reflect the consonants and vowels needed to transcribe Standard Tibetan.[2]

Standard Tibetan Consonants IPA.png Standard Tibetan Vowels IPA.png

My Process

You will notice that some of the characters in the above tables already exist on standard Latin alphabet keyboards. Therefore I did not change the position of these keys. Furthermore, there are keys that look similar to Latin script letters; I tried to place each of these keys as close to Latin script letters that they are most similar to on a standard English language keyboard. To do so, I used the AltGr key to assign nonstandard letters to keys in the Latin script that they most resemble. The non-standard letters from the IPA used for this keyboard are shown below [3]:

Symbol Decimal Hex Value
ɲ 626 0272 vd palatal nasal
ŋ 331 014B vd velar nasal
ʈ 648 0288 vl retroflex plosive
ʂ 642 0282 vl retroflex fricative
ʔ 660 0294 glottal plosive
ɕ 597 0255 vl alveolopalatal fricative
ɹ 633 0279 vd (post)alveolar approximant
n̥ d̥ 805 0325 voiceless
ø 248 00F8 front close-mid rounded
ɛ 603 025B open-mid front unrounded

Other Keyboards

The Tibetan Wylie transliteration keyboard is the most common keyboard layout for rendering written Standard Tibetan in Latin characters. The Tibetan pinyin keyboard layout is also popular, and is the official keyboard layout used by the People's Republic of China.[2] The Wylie keyboardCite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag

[2]

[3]

[4]

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  1. Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named IPA_wikipedia
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 Standard Tibetan. "Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia". Retrieved February 2, 2018>
  3. 3.0 3.1 The International Phonetic Alphabet in Unicode. University College London (UCL). Retrieved February 2, 2018>
  4. Tibetan Input Method for Mac OS-X. Digital Tibetan. Retrieved February 3, 2018>