Wylie Transliteration - Consonants

Consonants

The Wylie scheme transliterates the Tibetan characters as follows:

The final letter of the alphabet, the null consonant ཨ, is not transliterated—its presence is unambiguously indicated by a vowel-initial syllable.

In Tibetan script, consonant clusters within a syllable may be represented through the use of prefixed or suffixed letters or by letters superfixed or subfixed to the root letter (forming a "stack"). The Wylie system does not normally distinguish these as in practice no ambiguity is possible under the rules of Tibetan spelling. The exception is the sequence gy-, which may be written either with a prefix g or a subfix y. In the Wylie system, these are distinguished by inserting a period between a prefix g and initial y. E.g. གྱང "wall" is gyang, while གཡང་ "chasm" is g.yang.