Tibetan script

writing system

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development

  • In Indic writing systems

    … scripts, from which derived the Tibetan and Khotanese systems. (Khotanese was also influenced by the Kharosthi script.) From the Tibetan script were derived the writing system of the Lepcha (Rong)—the aboriginal inhabitants of Sikkim, India—and the Passepa writing system of the Chinese Imperial chancery under the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368); the…

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modern practice

  • Potala Palace
    In Tibet: Population composition

    Tibetan is written in a script derived from that of Indian Gupta about 600 ce. It has a syllabary of 30 consonants and five vowels; six additional symbols are used in writing Sanskrit words. The script itself has four variations—dbu-can (primarily for Buddhist textbooks), dbu-med

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Tibetan literature

  • Mongol shaman
    In Central Asian arts: Tibetan literature

    …the spoken dialects since the script was fixed, the Tibetans have never changed their system of writing. Thus, once the literary language and the various types of script have been mastered, the reader has immediate access to all literature of the 7th to the 20th centuries, though changes in style…

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Brahmi, writing system ancestral to all Indian scripts except Kharoshthi. Commonly believed by scholars to be of Aramaic derivation or inspiration, Brahmi first appears as a fully developed system in the 3rd century bce, and its most notable instance is on the rock edicts of Ashoka (reigned c. 265–238 bce). Brahmi is semialphabetic, each consonant having either an inherent a sound pronounced after it or a diacritic mark to show another vowel; initial vowels have separate characters. In most cases Brahmi and its derivatives are written from left to right, but an early coin discovered in the state of Madhya Pradesh is inscribed with Brahmi characters running from right to left, and there are instances of Brahmi written from right to left in Sri Lanka, although these are rare exceptions.

Among the many descendant scripts of Brahmi are those of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, such as Devanagari (used for Sanskrit, Hindi, and other regional languages) and the Bengali and Gujarati scripts; those of the Deccan region, including the scripts for Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada; the script for Sinhala in Sri Lanka; that of Tibetan in the Tibetan Highlands; and several alphabets in Southeast Asia, including those for Thai and Khmer.

After the positional decimal system was perfected by Indian mathematicians, forms of the Brahmi numerals for 1 through 9 diffused throughout the world, ultimately evolving into the numerals used in modern Devanagari in the Indian subcontinent, the Hindu-Arabic numerals used in Europe and the Americas, and the East Arabic numerals used in the Middle East.

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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Charles Preston.