Tibetan script

The Tibetan script was created in the mid-7th century, by Thonmi Sambhota, a Tibetan official, with the assistance of some Indian Buddhist monks. The letters, which are a form of the Sanskrit characters of that period, rammar, follow the same arrangement as their Sanskritic prototype. The printed form of the script used in religious texts is called u-can or u-chen while the hand-written cursive form used in everyday writing is called u-mey.

A note on the transliteration or transcription of Tibetan. When attempting to write Tibetan using a Latin script one is faced with an immediate problem: should the transcription reflect how a word is pronounced or how it is spelled? Like English, Tibetan suffers from a wide divergence between the two so a choice must be made. The term "transliteration" implies that the source must be represented as it is written and the system must be reversible. Tibetan scholars have settled on the Wylie transliteration scheme which is useful for reconstructing the original Tibetan sequence of letters, but near useless in indicating pronunciation (unless you take it upon yourself to study the irregularities of Tibetan spelling). This accounts for the stunningly unpronounceable transliterations often encountered in the course of Tibetan studies. The remainder of this article uses the Wylie system, which nonetheless serves adequately when describing Tibetan letters in isolation.

The 30 consonants, which are deemed to possess an inherent sound a, are the following (with alternative transliterations in parentheses):

1. ཀ ka, ཁ kha (k’a), ག ga, ང nga (n̄a),
2. ཅ ca, ཆ cha, ཇ ja, ཉ nya (ña),
3. ཏ ta, ཐ tha (t’a), ད da, ན na,
4. པ pa, ཕ pha (p’a), བ ba, མ ma,
5. ཙ tsa, ཚ tsha (ts’a), ཛ dza,
6. ཝ wa, ཞ zha (ža), ཟ za,
7. འ 'a , ཡ ya, ར ra, ལ la,
8. ཤ sha (s’a), ས sa,
9. ཧ ha, ཨ a.

The h or apostrophe (’) usually signifies aspiration.

Consonantal letter variations include:

• The Sanskrit "cerebral" (retroflex) consonants are represented by the letters ta, tha, da, na, and sha turned the other way to give ཊ ṭa (Ta), ཋ ṭha (Tha), ཌ ḍa (Da), ཎ ṇa (Na), and ཥ ṣa.
• As in other Indic scripts, clustered consonants are often stacked vertically. Unfortunately, some fonts and applications do not support this behavior for Tibetan, so these examples may not display properly; you might have to download a font such as Tibetan Machine Uni.
  • W, r, and y change form when they are beneath another consonant; thus ཀྭ kwa, ཏྭ twa, པྭ pwa; ཀྲ kra, པྲ pra; ཀྱ kya. R also changes form when it is above most other consonants; thus རྐ rka, however རྙ rnya.

The vowels are a, i, u, e, o. As in other Indic scripts, each consonant letter includes an inherent a, and the other vowels are indicated by marks; thus ཀ ka, ཀི ki, ཀུ ku, ཀེke, ཀོ ko (again, these marks may not display properly). There is no distinction between long and short vowels in written Tibetan, except in loanwords, especially transcribed from the Sanskrit. However, certain silent consonant letters (notably འ 'a) are sometimes used to indicate long vowels in pronunciation, even in native Tibetan words.

Syllables are separated by a tseg ་; since many Tibetan words are monosyllabic, this mark often functions almost as a space. Though Tibetan is tonal, there are no tone marks as such; rather, tones are indicated by the use of otherwise silent consonant letters.

Tibetan in Unicode

The Unicode Tibetan block is U+0F00 — U+0FFF. It includes letters, digits and various punctuation marks and special symbols used in religious texts (you will have to install Unicode fonts covering this block to view the table properly in your web browser):

Besides Tibetan, the Dzongkha language is written in the Tibetan script.

External links

• 2 fonts – not Unicode compatible.
• 2 fonts: 1 Macintosh, not Unicode compatible.
• Omniglot's Guide to the Tibetan writing system
• Tibetan & Himalayan Digital Library – articles on Unicode font issues; free cross-platform OpenType font – Unicode compatible.
• free Tibetan fonts project.
• Tibetan Calligraphy – how to write the Tibetan script.
• Tibetan writing course.
• Elements of The Tibetan writing system.