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romanizarion issue

Posted by LGCM on 11 Apr 2013 at 19:10 GMT

Unfortunately the copy editing process missed the fact that the name of the practice in question is represented rather confusingly in the article. Reasonable English approximations are "tummo" "tumo", or even "dumo" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/w...). The "g" is used in the Wylie transcription to preserve the Tibetan spelling, especially useful in the days when Tibetan fonts were not widely available to typesetters. It's as though one represented the English word "knight" in Russian with six Cyrillic letters. If one wants to use the Wylie system, it would be better to write "gTum Mo". Like the "g" in "knight", the "g" in "gTum" is part of the spelling of the syllable, but not part of the pronunciation. Since this is an electronic publication, it would be easy to correct this minor howler.

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RE: romanization issue

LGCM replied to LGCM on 11 Apr 2013 at 19:13 GMT

I see that I have fallen victim to the fate of all pedants: in writing to correct a spelling error, I have a typo myself in the subject line.

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RE: RE: romanization issue

mkozhevn replied to LGCM on 12 Apr 2013 at 10:21 GMT

Although this might be true that the most reasonable translation in english will be 'tummo", neverthelss we used the term "g-tummo" in this paper to be consistent with most books on tibetan tantra translated into english and most importantly with neuroscience literature and work of Benson published in Nature in 1982 to make explicit to the readers that this is the same type of meditative practice described there.

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RE: RE: RE: romanization issue

LGCM replied to mkozhevn on 14 Apr 2013 at 06:06 GMT

The scholarly (Wylie) transliteration generally used in books on Tibetan tantra is "gTum Mo" (or some variation). Rendering this as "g-tummo" is like writing "knight" as "k-night". The only places where "g-tummo" seems to appear, if my web search is representative, is in responses to this article, and to Benson's. It may be that this misunderstanding has become naturalized and even uncorrectable in neuroscience publications, but it looks very eccentric to anyone used to reading Wylie transliteration. If a hyphen is to be used, it should indicate the space between syllables, not randomly break up the spelling of a single syllable (and "gTum" is a single syllable, just as "knight" is a single syllable). It's almost as eccentric as it would be to insist on rendering "Tchaikovsky" as "T-chaikovsky" in a cookbook because some classic cookbook had once done so, and therefore all cookbooks must do so, even though nowhere else is it done that way. Please excuse my pedantry; I have belabored the point enough!

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RE: RE: RE: romanization issue

Meditator replied to mkozhevn on 23 Jul 2014 at 13:54 GMT

I strongly disagree with this answer because your current paper did not male improvement over the plain mistake made by the earlier researchers in not getting the romanization done correctly. What the first responder said is sound. 'G-tummo' needs correction since there is no 'G' sound. The word needs to be respelled.

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