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Writing system
Tibetan is a syllabic alphabet of the abugida kind (with an inherent vowel that is only changed when indicated by diacritical marks). Tibetan has 30 consonants and 5 vowels: a, i, u, e, o. The inherent vowel is »a«, but it\'s only audible when the consonant is syllabic, which is marked by a tsheg ་. It separates all syllables, and since many Tibetan words are monosyllabic it works almost like a wordspace. Consonants can build clusters, and clustered consonants get stacked vertically within the word (also called ligatures or conjuncts). That happens most frequently with Sanskrit texts and foreign words. The characters U+0F4A,U+0F4B, U+0F4C, U+0F4E and U+0F65 are only needed for Sanskrit loan words. The form of the script used for printing which is encoded here is called »u-can« (Dbu-can, with a head) where as the cursive (connected) handwrittenform is called »u-mey« (Dbu-med). |
  
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History
The Tibetan script is a member of the Indic family of scripts descended from Brahmi, but it is not clear which specific Indian script was used as a model. The original Brahmi letter shapes can still be clearly discerned in Tibetan, although some letters were removed and others added. The script was created aound 650 AD, probably for administrative purposes, and apart from that mainly used to write religious texts and Tibetan translations of Buddhist literature. Tibetan Buddhist tradition states that the script was created by Minister Thon mi Sambhota in northeastern India by order of the Tibetan King Srong btsan sgam po, but sinceno minister of that name appears in any of the old Tibetan texts this is deemed a myth. The writing system has remained unchanged since its creation and today, written words often differ very much from the spoken word. Alas, the existence of a high number of dialects makes it impossible to change that. |
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Languages
The Tibetan script is used to write several languages including Tibetan (in Tibet, India and the worldwide Tibetan community) a Sino Tibetan language spoken by about 6 million people, Ladakhi (in Northern India) and Dzongkha (in the Kingdom of Bhutan), spoken by about 500,000 people. |
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Spread
The Tibetan script is used in the Chinese provinces Tibet und Qinghai, in India, Bhutan, Sikkim, Ladakh and Nepal, also, until recently, in Mongolia for the teaching of religious texts. |
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Fonts
The Opentype font »Tibetan Machine Uni font« (THDL Open Community License, Version 1.0.) from the Tibetan & Himalayan Digital Library is available for free at http://iris.lib.virginia.edu/tibet |
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