Tibetan alphabet

Origin

During the 7th Century AD Sron-btsan sgam-po, a king in southern Tibet, sent Thon-mi Sambhota, one of his ministers, to India to gather information on Buddhism. The minister then reputedly devised a script for Tibetan based on the Devanagari model and also wrote a grammar of Tibetan based on Sanskrit grammars.

The new Tibetan alphabet was used to write Tibetan translations of Buddhists texts. The first Sanskrit-Tibetan dictionary, Mahavyutpatti, appeared in the 9th century. Wood block printing, introduced from China, was used in Tibet from an early date and is still used in a few monasteries.

Tibetan literature is mainly concerned with Buddhist themes and includes works translated from Sanskrit and Chinese and original Tibetan works. There are also literary works about the Bon religion, a pre-Buddhist religion indigenous to Tibet. The most unusual genre of Tibetan literature is that of gter-ma or 'rediscovered' texts - reputedly the work of ancient masters which have been hidden in remote caves for many centuries.

Notable Features

The Tibetan alphabet is syllabic, like many of the alphabets of India and South East Asia. Each letter has an inherent vowel /a/. Other vowels can be indicated using a variety of diacritics which appear above or below the main letter.
Syllables are separated by a dot.
Consonant clusters are written with special conjunct letters.
Tibetan is a tonal language, though the tones are not marked in the writing system.

Used to write:

Tibetan is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken by about 6 million people in China (Tibet, Qinghai, etc), India, Bhutan, Sikkim, Ladakh and Nepal. In Mongolia Tibetan is considered the Classical language of Buddhism and was widely taught until quite recently.

Dzongkha or Bhutanese is the official language of Bhutan and is spoken by about 500,000 people. It is a Sino-Tibetan language which is fairly closely related to Tibetan and distantly related to Chinese.