Book Title: Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind
Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications
View full book text
________________
BRANCH
INDIAN
355
usually employed in the current hand. Mention may be made of the various peculiar ornamental and ritual scripts employed for inscriptions and decorative purposes, titles of books, sacred formulæ, etc.
There is also a kind of cypher, a secret script used for official correspondence, called rin-spuns, from the name of its inventor Rinc'(hhen-) spuns (-pa), who lived in the fourteenth century A.D.
In comparison with the Deva-nagari character, the Tibetan script is very much simplified, although they agree in their main features. The dbu-chan, which is the more important, has the vowel a inherent in every consonant and not separately indicated, while other vowels when they follow a consonant are marked by small signs placed either above the consonant (in the instances of e, i, and o) or at its foot (in the case of u). The y when it is subjoined, as in kya, pya, and so forth, and the r and I when they are parts of consonantal compounds are also similarly indicated. The end of each syllable is marked by a dot placed at the right hand side of the upper end of the closing letter. As to the consonants, the most important feature of the dbu-chan is that the cerebrals in borrowed words are written by reversed dentals, while in spoken Tibetan cerebrals are found only as contractions of certain compound consonants.
See J. Bacot, Grammaire du Tibetain littéraire, Paris, 1946.
For modern Tibetan see now the series of three books (to be continued with further books on the Alphabet, Verbs and Grammar Notes) published by B. Gould and H. R. Richardson: (1) The Tibetan Word Book, with an informative introduction by Sir Aurel Stein; (2) Tibetan Sentences: (3) Tibetan Syllables; Oxford University Press, 1943
There were two main offshoots of the Tibetan character:
Passepa Character
A famous Grand Lama of Sa-skya (Bashbah or 'p'ags-pa["honourable"] bLo-gros-rgyal-mthsan-in Chinese, P'a-k'o-si-pa, known as P'a-sse-p'a or 'Phags-pa-1234-1279, invited to China by Qubilay Khan) played a great part in the conversion to Buddhism of the Mongolian imperial court, and adapted the Tibetan square script to the Chinese and Mongolian languages, replacing the Uighur alphabet (see preceding Chapter). Under Chinese influence, this script, commonly called Passepa (Fig. 153, col. 11), was written in vertical columns, downwards, although unlike Chinese, the columns read from left to right. This character, officially adopted in 1272, was only sparsely used owing to the convenience of the Uighur script, and did not last long, but it lingered on at the imperial Chancery under the Yuan dynasty, particularly in the official seals.
