Tibetan

Letters

Combining marks

Numbers

Punctuation

Symbols

Other

Vowel sounds

Consonant sounds

	labial	dental	alveolar	post- alveolar	retroflex	palatal	velar	glottal
stops	p b	t d			ʈ	c ɟ	k ɡ	ʔ
	pʰ	tʰ			ʈʰ	cʰ	kʰ
affricates		t͡s d͡z		t͡ɕ d͡ʑ	ʈ͡ʂ d͡ʐ
		t͡sʰ		t͡ɕʰ	ʈ͡ʂʰ
fricatives			s		ʂ	ɕ		h
nasals	m		n			ɲ	ŋ
other	w		l ɹ	ɹ̥ l̥		j ʎ

The sounds ʈ~ʈ͡ʂ and ʈʰ~ʈ͡ʂʰ appear to be alternative versions of the same phoneme. Wiktionary IPA transcriptions for Lhasa Tibetan use the affricate sound only.

Voiced phones occur when the syllable has a low tone. However, the dialect of the upper social strata in Lhasa does not use voiced stops and affricates.wl

Tone

Lhasa Tibetan is commonly said to have 2 tones, but in fact there are 4; the 'high' tone can have 2 distinct contours, as can the 'low' tone.

Vowel summary table

The following table summarises the main vowel to character assigments.

ⓘ represents the inherent vowel. Ⓢ represents one of 4 root suffix letters. The right-hand column shows standalone vowels.

Inherent vowel

ཀ ka U+0F40 TIBETAN LETTER KA

a following a consonant is not written, but is seen as an inherent part of the consonant letter, so ka is written by simply using the consonant letter.

པ་ན་མ

Vowels after consonants

Post-consonant vowels are written using 4 vowel signs, all combining marks. Some vowel sounds are written using a combination of vowel sign plus a root suffix.

There are no pre-base, circumgraph, or multipart vowels in the Tibetan used to write the Llasa dialect (though there are when writing in Sanskrit).

Standalone vowels

0F68 (called ཨ་ཆེན ạ␣ʧʰen␣ a chen) and 0F60 (called འ་ཆུང à␣ʧʰuŋ␣ 'a chung) represent the phoneme a. In the Lhasa dialect, they have a high and a low tone, respectively.

Other standalone vowels are written by attaching vowel signs to one or other of these, depending on the tone needed.

Other uses of A-chung

Tones

Some Tibetan tone distinctions are reflected in the orthography by the choice of consonant letter. For example, consonant letters such as the following carry a particular default tone. This applies to stops, affricates, and some fricatives.

However, the tone of these letters can be modified by additional letters in the tsheg-bar. For example, a prefix or superscript will typically change the default low tone of a nasal to a high tone. (See prefix and suffix.)

Otherwise, there are no diacritics or other ways of marking tone in the orthography (nor is tone marked in the Wylie transcriptions).

Consonants with no following vowel

The inherent vowel is not normally pronounced at the end of a syllable which ends with a coda. These syllable-final sounds are written using one of 7 suffixes (see suffix).

Vowel signs

Circumgraphs & multipart vowels

Sanskrit extensions add vowels that involve more than one glyph per base. In 2 cases these glyphs are positioned both above and below the base or stack.

show composition

ཤྲཱི་

The Unicode Tibetan block provides precomposed characters for each of these vowels, but discourages their use.

ཱི␣ཱྀ␣ཱུ

Instead, the Standard recommends the use of decomposed sequences as follows. The decomposed sequence is produced after normalisation by both NFC and NFD methods

ཱི␣ཱྀ␣ཱུ

Whichever approach is used, the vowel signs must be typed and stored after the consonant characters they surround. In the case of decomposed vowel signs, the order is also important and must be as shown above.

Consonant summary table

The following table summarises the only the nominal consonant to character assignments. Note that the dialect of the upper social strata of Lhasa doesn't include voiced sounds, and simply de-aspirates the other sound where two are shown. For additional details and sounds see consonant_mappings.

This table only shows the unmodified syllable onset values, using sounds from the Lhasa dialect. It doesn't include letters used for writing Sanskrit other than those in the right column, which are typically used to write foreign proper nouns. There's a need for more research to determine what others should be listed, and the exact IPA equivalents for each.

For additional details see consonant_mappings.

Basic consonants

Native Lhasa Tibetan words use 28 full-sized consonant letters and 20 subjoined consonant letters. Tibetan has distinct stop and affricate letters for consonants that are high tone and unaspirated, high tone and aspirated, and low tone and aspirated. The sound values of these are modified, however, by the other characters within a written syllable. The sound matrix provides a useful framework for understanding these effects, and the various modifications are described in the sections that follow.

The lists below show a basic and a subjoined version of each consonant, however not all subjoined forms are used for writing the Tibetan language. Subjoined letters that are not used are marked as such. A few subjoined letters used as subscripts have IPA fields left blank because they show too much variation. Whereas the table just above takes you from sounds to letters, the following simply lists the basic consonant letters.

Here, and for the other lists in this section, click on the characters to reveal detailed information about pronunciation and use.

The following diagram shows characters in all of the syllabic positions, and lists the consonant characters that can appear in each of the non-root locations.

Consonant stacking

A stack has a consonant character at the top (although it may actually be slightly squeezed or adapted slightly in shape), and one or more special subjoined consonant characters beneath it.

The topmost consonant in a stack always uses the standard character from the Unicode Tibetan block regardless of whether it is a root consonant or not, and consonants below it always use a character from the subjoined range.

fig_stack shows an example from the Unicode Standard of a word which shows a stack with three consonants. Click on the image or 'show composition' to see the components and the order in which they are stored.

Unlike other Brahmi-derived scripts, no virama is used for native Tibetan text. Instead, just a full and subjoined form of each consonant. The subjoined forms are combining characters. Avoiding the virama makes sense because the virama is not used by Tibetans, and the approach taken makes it easier to create the large number of stacks contained in Tibetan text.

Tibetan uses the word 'head' to refer to either the top-most consonant (ie. spacially) or the root consonant of a syllable, which may be a subjoined consonant. We therefore avoid this term here, and say 'root' or 'topmost'.

The following list shows the order in which characters should be typed, and stored in memory, for a set of stacked characters.

1. Standard consonant shape
2. First subjoined consonant
3. Any other subjoined consonants, in order of descent
4. Subjoined vowel 'a-chung
5. Standard or compound vowel sign, or virama (for transliterations)

In transliterated text consonants are sometimes stacked in ways that are not allowed in native Tibetan text.

The root consonant

The pronunciation of Tibetan syllables is typically much simpler than the orthography, which involves patterns of consonants that reduce ambiguity and can affect pronunciation and tone.

The primary consonant in a tseg-bar is called the root consonant or radical (མིང་བཞི), and the other consonants in the syllable (normally up to a maximum of 6) annotate or modify it. The following rules help identify the root:

• a consonant with a vowel is always the root, unless it is the phrase connector འི, and letters with superscripts or subscripts are root consonants.

  གཡུ་མདོག júm.tôː turquoise

  དཔྱ་ཁྲལ t͡ɕá.ʈ͡ʂʰɛː tribute

• in a 2-consonant syllable with no vowel, the first consonant is always the root

  ནང naŋ inside, room

• in a 3-consonant syllable where the last consonant is not ས, the second consonant is likely to be the root.

  དམག maː˥˩ war

• in a 4-consonant syllable, the second consonant is always the root.

  གཟིགས si᷈ to see, look (hon.)

Prefixes

The 5 characters that appear in the prefix location are not pronounced, but may de-aspirate or give a higher tone value to certain root characters. Each superscript character can only be used with a specified set of root characters.

The effect varies according to the position of the character in the matrix described earlier:
ཀཅཏཔཙ   column 1 characters are unaffected, pronunciation-wise, and prefixes serve to distinguish similar sounding words;
ཁཆཐཕཚ   column 2 characters only infrequently have prefixes, and pronunciation is also unaffected;
གཇདབཛ   column 3 letters are de-aspirated / voiced (but still low tone);
ངཉནམཡ   column 4 letters and ཡ are given a high tone.

Prefixes can also appear before other letters that are not included in the matrix.

The consonant 0F42 may occur before 11 root characters, 0F51 before 6, 0F56 before 10, 0F58 before 11, and 0F60 before 10, eg.

འཁོར་ལོ

བསམ་བློ

The prefix letters མ and འ also introduce prenasalisation of column 3 letters in Old Tibetan pronunciation. The nasal sound is homorganic with the following consonant.

Superscripts

The three characters that appear in the superscript location raise the tone pitch of the syllable, but are not pronounced themselves. Each superscript character can only be used with a specified set of root characters. The effect varies according to the position of the character in the matrix described earlier:
ཀཅཏཔཙ   column 1 characters are unaffected;
ཁཆཐཕཚ   column 2 characters don't have superscripts;
གཇདབཛ   column 3 letters are de-aspirated / voiced (but still low tone);
ངཉནམ   column 4 letters receive a high tone.

The following table shows the combinations that are generally used in this orthography, and the pronunciations. The left-most column shows the default pronunciations for the letters supporting the superscripts. Note that the superscript glyph is a normal character, and the bigger character below it is actually a subjoined code point.

Grey characters indicate combinations that exist, but that don't change their pronunciation. Gaps and empty cells indicate that the combination doesn't occur in the Tibetan orthography we are describing.

ལྷ produces the heavily aspirated sound ʰlá.

ར has a shape slightly different from its nominal shape in all combinations except རྙ and རླ.

You should always use the normal RA character for the superscript. The font will adjust the shape where needed.

Subscripts

The four characters that can appear in the subscript location are also each combined with a particular subset of root characters and have different effects. The table below shows the resulting sounds.

Note that three of the subscripts have shapes that are significantly different from the nominal shape of the character they represent.

Grey characters indicate combinations that exist, but that don't change their pronunciation. Gaps and empty cells indicate that the combination doesn't occur in the Tibetan orthography we are describing.

0FB1 functions as a medial -j- after k(ʰ). When combined with bilabial consonants, however, the pronunciation is mapped to the set of palatal consonants.

ྲ mostly produces retroflex ʈ(ʰ).

ླ, with one exception, produces l. ཟླ produces ta or ⁿda.

ྭ doesn't affect the pronunciation, but may be used to indicate which is the root consonant when there is a prefix and second suffix but no vowel sign.

Uniquely, ྭ can also appear as a sub-subscript, as in the following word which is transcribed grwa pa.

གྲྭ་པ

Suffixes

Characters in the suffix position can have the following effects:

Consonant sound

བ ག མ ང   usually add a sound.

ན   usually nasalises the vowel.

ར ལ   may produce a sound but are often silent.

ད ས འ   are usually silent.

Vowel modification

ད ས ན ལ   modify the vowel quality as follows: a→ɛ, u→y, o→ø. The vowel quality doesn't change for i and e.

When a final consonant is not pronounced as a consonant or nasalisation, the modified vowels are generally long.

Observation: Roach draws a comparison between ད ས wherein the former produces very short, abrupt vowels and the latter long, but this is not generally reflected in the Wiktionary IPA transcriptions.

ར ལ, when not pronounced, generally produce long vowels, whether modified or not.

The following are illustrative examples.

1. ག མ ར   adding a sound.

   གླག

   གསུམ

   པིར

2. ན   nasalising the vowel.

   བདུན

   བསྟན་འཛིན

3. ད ས   changing the vowel quality.

   དྲོད་ཚད

   ཆོས

   འཁྲུད

འ   is always silent, and serves to disambiguate the spelling (see achung_inherent), unless it has a vowel sign attached (for example, see achung_diphthong), eg. compare the following with the example in point 1 above:

གཟའ

འཇའ

Secondary suffixes

Only two characters can appear in the secondary suffix location, according to Tibetan grammar, 0F66 and 0F51, and the latter is no longer officially found in modern Tibetan. A character in this position adds no sound and nor does it affect the sounds in the rest of the syllable, eg. བསྒྲུབས གྱུརད

Irregular pronunciations

Most consonants translate to the same basic sound unless they are modified by surrounding letters as mentioned above. In some cases, however, the pronunciation of a consonant is irregular. In particular, b is sometimes pronounced w, eg.

རེ་བ

དབང་ཆ

When it has an u vowel and this transformation applies, the sound becomes simply u, eg.

དབུ་མེད

And some words have an additional nasalisation which is not shown, eg.

ད་ལྟ

Extensions for non-native sounds

The section sanskritC describes extensions to the basic set of consonants for use with Sanskrit and Chinese transliterations. Here we list some of those that are also used in modern Tibetan for writing proper nouns and other loan words from non-Tibetan sources. (The pronunciations shown are approximate.)

མོ་ཊ

ཋེག་ཟ་སི

ཁ་ཎ་ཌ

ཧུང་གྷ་རི

དྷེའི་ལ་ཝར

བྷར་མ

Finals

Nominally, 6 of the suffixes produce syllable codas, and another produces vowel nasalisation.

དེབ

གཏམ

ཀླུང

In practise, in modern Tibetan, syllable-final k is typically pronounced ˀ or k̚ in very formal speech.wl

གཟིག

Syllable-final r and l are often realised as a lengthening of the previous vowel, rather than as consonants.wl

ཏིལ

ཤར་བ

རྒྱལ་ཁབ

ཉལ

A syllable-final n is realised as vowel nasalisation.wl

ཉན

གྱོན

Consonant length

Tibetan doesn't allow geminated or lengthened consonant sounds. If a syllable ends with the same sound as the next syllable begins with, the coda of the first syllable is dropped.wl For example, compare the initial syllables in the following:

ཞབས

ཞབས་པད

Consonant sounds to characters

Retroflex consonants

The retroflex consonants, which are reversed versions of Tibetan consonant shapes, may be used in modern Tibetan to distinguish loan words from sequences of Tibetan syllables. For example,

ཁ་ཎ་ཌ

མོ་ཊ

Aspirated consonants

Consonant stacks are normally used to represent aspirated sounds and the Sanskrit diphone kʃ.

A set of precomposed characters exists for representing these sounds, but they are decomposed under both Unicode normalisation forms, so using the decomposed stacks is likely to make the text more consistent.

The bottom line here is that aspirated consonants are normally written by simply adding a subjoined HA below a consonant, and the diphone kʃ is produced in a similar way.

Fixed form letters

0F62 at the top of a stack usually has a reduced form, eg. རྐ rka. For transliterations it is sometimes desirable to retain the full form of RA where in Tibetan words it would be reduced. To do this use 0F6A instead of the normal RA, but only where the normal RA would not produce the full form anyway, ie. do not use eg. རྙ rnya, which has the full form already.

There are also fixed form variants of subjoined YA and WA.

Other Sanskrit characters

0F7F ( nam chay ) is the visarga, and 0F7E ( ngaro ) is the anusvara.

Tsa-'phru mark

0F39 is an integral part of the three consonants 0F59, 0F5A, and 0F5B. Although those consonants are not decomposable, this mark has been abstracted and may be used in combinations such as ཕ༹ or with other consonants to make new letters for use in transliteration and transcription of other languages. For example, in modern literary Tibetan, it is one of the ways used to transcribe the Chinese “fa” and “va” sounds not represented by the normal Tibetan consonants.

Also used to represent tsa, tsha, and dza in abbreviations.

This code point should be used immediately after the consonant it modifies, even if that consonant is followed by a subjoined consonant.

Sanskrit vocalics

Other letters

The Unicode Tibetan block contains the following additional characters with the general property of letter.

Half-numbers

By some interpretations, the following shapes each have the value of 0.5 less than the number within which it appears. Used only in some traditional contexts, they appear as the last digit of a multidigit number, eg. ༤༬ represents 42.5. These are very rarely used, however, and other uses have been postulated. For more information see Numbers that Don't Add Up : Tibetan Half Digits, by Andrew West.

Context-based shaping & positioning

Tibetan requires many rules to position glyphs correctly, and also to shape characters according to context.

Glyphs in Tibetan script need to be adapted sometimes to suit the context in which the character is used. A particularly prevalent example is that of the letter ར [U+0F62 TIBETAN LETTER RA]. When used at the top of a stack it has an abbreviated form, as shown by the highlight in fig_ra_position on the left.

The example on the right in fig_ra_position shows what a normal RA looks like. This is the same underlying character. The shape is determined by rules in the font.

Combining characters need to be placed in different positions, according to the context. fig_tibetan_position shows the same vowel sign displayed at different heights, according to what stacks above it.

Letterform slopes, weights, & italics

Tibetan writing never had bold or italic effects until the Chinese introduced bold style for books after the invasion of Tibet.dt,34

Duff describes some Western publications that slant Tibetan text in books, but points out that a more natural slant direction for Tibetan would be the opposite to that of Western italics.dt,34

Word & syllable boundaries

Word boundaries are not indicated by the Tibetan orthography. However, phonetic syllables, represented by a sequence of letters known as a tsheg-bar tsheg bar, are separated by 0F0B.

See also tsheg.

Graphemes

tbd

Phrase & section boundaries

Tibetan uses native punctuation marks.

Emphasis

0F35 can be used to indicate emphasis.

If entered as a combining character it can be added after the vowel sign in a stack. But the use of this mark is not straightforward, since it attaches to a syllable rather than a character and therefore to place it correctly the application needs to take syllable boundary positions into account. If the syllable has an even number of stacks/consonants, the diacritic will be displayed between the 2 in the middle, not underneath a particular consonant/stack.

Application software has to ignore this character for text processing, such as search and collation.

Alternative methods of emphasis include use of a different colour, or the use of the prefix 0F38.

Modern texts appear to use bolding on text.

Abbreviation, ellipsis & repetition

Inline notes & annotations

tbd

0F37 can be used in interspersed commentaries to tag the root text that is being commented on. An alternative is to set the tsheg-bar being commented on in large type and the commentary in small type.

Application software has to ignore this character for text processing, such as search and collation.

Line breaking & hyphenation

Tibetan never breaks inside a syllable, and has no hyphenation.

Normally, lines break after ་, and don't break after spaces. If a word is composed of multiple syllables, it is also preferable to avoid breaking a line in the middle of the word.

However, line breaks should not occur after a tsheg when it is between ང (with or without a vowel sign) and །. Applications should be able to handle this if they encounter a normal tsheg, but content authors are advised to use ༌ instead, to be on the safe side.

Line breaks are also possible after:

• ། - as long as the next line starts with a consonant (ie. not a second shad).
• ༔
• ཿ (visarga) (there is never a tsheg after this character, eg. ཨོཾ་ཨཱཿཧཱུྃ་)
• ༴ or ྾dt,37

A line must never start with a shad, space, or other punctuation sign.dt,37

A line that ends with a shad plus space followed by a consonant can wrap after the shad and discard the space. But a line that ends with one of the following must not lose the space and must not be broken either side of the space:

• ཀ or ག followed by a space (in which case a shad is not used).
• a shad followed by a space then another shad.

This should be straighforward if content authors use 00A0 for the latter cases.

Show (default) line-breaking properties for characters in the modern Tibetan orthography.

Line breaks and rin chen spungs shad

In Tibetan, especially in pechas, it is considered a special case if the last syllable of an expression that is terminated by a shad or a double-shad breaks onto a new line. In that case ། may be replaced by 0F11. This change serves as an optical indication that there is a left-over syllable at the beginning of the line that actually belongs to the preceding line.

This behaviour varies in the following cases:

• When a line starts with a tseg-bar containing 2 vowel signs (ie. a diphthong), such as ལེའུ། །, no rin chen spungs shad would be used, since le'u is pronounced as two syllables.
• At the end of a topic the rules say that only one shad should be converted, ie. ༑ །, however it is moderately common to see both converted, ie. ༑ ༑.

Some printed books do not use rin chen spungs shad replacements, however the majority of books seem to apply the same rules as are used with pechas.

In an environment where the width or content of the page can change, such as a web browser, this feature poses a problem. In printed or written texts where the layout is fixed, a content author would typically only insert rin chen spungs shad once the line breaks have been established, and would not expect the text to be changed after that. On the Web, resizing a window or displaying on different devices will reflow the content, and only after that process is it apparent which instances of shad need to be converted. Applications need to be able to automatically switch between the two styles of shad in real time, as a syllable moves on or off a new line because the page is resized or the preceding content is modified.

The Unicode Standard adds: Not only is rin-chen-spungs-shad used as the replacement for the shad but a whole class of “ornamental shads” are used for the same purpose. All are scribal variants on a rin-chen-spungs-shad, which is correctly written with three dots above it.

Text alignment & justification

There are two alternative methods of justification.

Method 2: tsheg padding

While hand writing pechas, but also in some publications, authors add small spaces across the text to get the line end as near as possible to the right margin. Where space remains at the margin, it may be left as is, if it is short. Otherwise, the remaining space will be filled with tshegs to make the line as flush as possible with the right margin (there will usually still be a slight raggedness to the right edge of the text).

There are a couple of detailed rules about the use of tsheg padding. Justifying tshegs are almost always used when the line ends in a tsheg. If, however, the line ends in a shad, there are a number of alternatives.

If the line ends with a single shad the shad is followed by spaces. Tsheg padding is never applied after spaces. (See examples in the figure above.)

If the line ends in a double shad (with space between), it is unusual (though possible) to add tsheg padding. Instead, the space between the shads is stretched or narrowed. (See examples in the figure below.) The same applies if the second shad was removed because it was preceded by a KA or GA.

Baselines, line height, etc.

Tibetan uses a hanging baseline, which tends to fall between the ascender and x-height of Latin text. When text in smaller annotations or larger heading text is mixed with normal text, the letter-heads of all characters should align to the same height.

Tibetan places vowel marks above base characters, and can also add combining characters below the line. In addition, the stacking of consonants, which can have vowel sign below, further extends the text height downwards. The complexity of the glyph clusters means that the vertical resolution needed for clearly readable Tibetan text is higher than for English, or most Latin text.

To give an approximate idea, fig_baselines compares Latin and Tibetan glyphs from the Noto Serif font.

fig_baselines_other shows similar comparisons for the Microsoft Himalaya and Tibetan Machine Uni fonts.

Counters, lists, etc.

You can experiment with counter styles using the Counter styles converter. Patterns for using these styles in CSS can be found in Ready-made Counter Styles, and we use the names of those patterns here to refer to the various styles.

The modern Tibetan orthography uses a numeric style with native digits.

Sub- or superscript counters

Duff describes a form of numbered list where the numbers are placed above or below the main text, which he says is often used.dt,41

General page layout & progression

Notes, footnotes, etc.

See inlinenotes for purely inline annotations, such as ruby or warichu. This section is about annotation systems that separate the reference marks and the content of the notes.

༶ and ྿ are used to indicate where text should be inserted within other text or as references to footnotes and marginal notes.