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):