ABSTRACT

Tibetan belongs to the Bodish branch of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. The ethnonym is bod.pa (whence Bodish), pronounced as /poe.pa/. The literary language dates from the seventh century AD, when Buddhism began to penetrate into Tibet. As a necessary first step towards the translation of the Buddhist scriptures into Tibetan, King Srong.brTSan.sGam.po commissioned a group of scholars to study Indian writing systems with a view to finding a script for Tibetan. Brahml was chosen as a suitable model. In the Tibetan version, the phonological series are ordered as in Devanāgarī (q.v.) but the voiced aspirate member of each series is missing: e.g. the velar series is ka – kha – ga – nga (minus gha). As in Devanāgarī, the short vowel /a/ is inherent in the base consonant. The basic vowels are /i, e, o/, marked by superscript sign, and /u/, marked by subscript.