Book Title: Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind
Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications
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354
THE ALPHABET
uncertain whether its prototype was the Eastern Turkestanic Gupta or the Gupta which was the ancestor of the Nagari character.
The former theory seems to be right; A. H. Francke, followed by A. F. Rudolf Hærnle, suggested that the usually held view of the Tibetan tradition on the subject of the introduction of the Tibetan alphabet should be corrected. "The Tibetan script agrees with the Khotanese script in making the vocalic radical a to function as a consonantal radical, and this fact shows quite clearly that the Tibetan script was introduced from Khotan" (Harnle). "The consonantal use of a vocalic radical is quite foreign to the Indo-Aryan language and script" (Hoernle).
In short, according to Dr. Hornle, the Tibetan alphabet can be called Indian only in the sense that its direct source, the Khotanese alphabet, is ultimately an Indian alphabet. "The curious fact that the Tibetan alphabet makes the a-radical to close its series of consonantal radicals (gsal byed) is instructive from the point of view above explained. In the Indian alphabetic system, the vocalic radicals for a, i, u, e occupy a place in advance of, and separate from the consonantal radicals" (Harnle).
Tibetan in its original square form, and also in the derivative current hands of elegant appearance, has served the Tibetan speech down to the present time. There is no doubt that the spelling originally represented the actual pronunciation (in the western and north-eastern dialects, the characteristic combinations of initial consonants are still generally preserved), but the above-mentioned lingua franca of Tibet has undergone extensive changes, including the introduction of some new sounds and the loss of some consonants, so that the writing is nowadays very far from being a true representation of speech. The Tibetan character has been adopted also for other Bhotian dialects.
The Tibetan script can be distinguished into two main varieties: (1) the literary character, called dbu-chan (pron. u-chan, the component dh being dropped in most dialects), that is, "head-possessing," which is the ecclesiastic script par excellence and is used for printing (Fig. 153, col. 8, and 160, 1); it has a few varieties, the most important being the seal-script.
(2) The cursive scripts, used for every-day purposes, called dbu-med pron. u-med), that is, "headless" (Fig. 153, col. 9, and 160, 2), which is the secular script; its main variety is the 'khyug-vig, the "current hand" (Fig. 153, col. 10). The main difference between dbu-chan and dbu-med consists, as the names indicate, in the characteristic top-line of the Deva-nagari character being a part of the dbu-chan signs and absent in those of the dbu-med. 'khyug-yig is an extremely abbreviated script. In compound words, the suffixes of the first syllable and the prefixes of the second are omitted. J. Bacot's L'Écriture cursive tibétaine, "JOURNAL ASIATIQUE," 1912, contains a list of seven hundred contractions of words
