Tibetan punctuation: usage of the "shad"

The shad is the vertical strokes that falls at the end of a sentence or phrase. Its usage in Tibetan is a bit tricky, just like with commas in English. Here are the rules as I learned them when typesetting Tibetan publications in Varanasi.

The shad marks pauses at the ends of a sentence, clause or phrase, or separates items in a list. In tshig lhug (prose), there is a single shad except after a rdzog tshig, in which case there are two--one at the end of one phrase, and one at the beginning of the new phrase. For example: thabs yin no/ /legs so/ /sogs

After the letter ga when it does not have either a vowel, sgo can or mdogs can, the shad is moved after the space. For example: dgra rnams zlog /'phrin las sgrub/ sogs

This is because the shad and the vertical stroke together can be visually confusing, but you can't entirely eliminate the shad without confusing things.

In tshig bcad, shad begin and end every tshig (verse), with the exception that after a ga with no vowel, sgo can or mdogs can, the shad is omitted at the end of the line. Here it is not necessary to repeat the shad at the beginning of the next line because there already is a shad there. If a shad would fall at the beginning of a line, it is moved up to the end of the previous line because otherwise it would not be easily seen.

There are some scholars who suggest that when a shad falls before the letter kha, it should be omitted, but that seems to be relatively uncommon in practice. DKC