Zanabazar's square script is a horizontal Mongolian square script ( or ), an

abugida An abugida (; from Geʽez: , )sometimes also called alphasyllabary, neosyllabary, or pseudo-alphabetis a segmental Writing systems#Segmental writing system, writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as units; each unit ...

developed by the monk and scholar

Zanabazar Öndör Gegeen Zanabazar (born Eshidorji) was the first '' Jebtsundamba Khutuktu'' and the first ''Bogd Gegeen'' or supreme spiritual authority, of the Gelugpa (Yellow Hat) lineage of Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism in Mongolia. The son of a Mongol ...

based on the

Tibetan alphabet The Tibetan script is a segmental writing system, or ''abugida'', forming a part of the Brahmic scripts, and used to write certain Tibetic languages, including Tibetan, Dzongkha, Sikkimese, Ladakhi, Jirel and Balti. Its exact origins a ...

to write Mongolian. It can also be used to write

Tibetan language Tibetan language may refer to: * Lhasa Tibetan or Standard Tibetan, the most widely used spoken dialect * Classical Tibetan, the classical language used also as a contemporary written standard * Any of the other Tibetic languages See also * Ol ...

and

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; stem form ; nominal singular , ,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwest South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural ...

as a geometric typeface. It was re-discovered in 1801 and the script's applications during its using period are not known. It read left to right, and employed vowel diacritics above and below the consonant letters.

Letters

Vowels

The Zanabazar Square script is an abugida. Each consonant represents a syllable with an inherent vowel /a/. The vowel can be changed by adding a diacritic to the consonant. Only the vowel /a/ is written as an independent letter; other independent vowels, for example those at the start of a word which can't be attached to a consonant, are written by adding the appropriate diacritic to the letter . A length mark indicates that the vowel sound is long and a

chandrabindu Chandrabindu (IAST: , in Sanskrit) is a diacritic sign with the form of a dot inside the lower half of a circle. It is used in the Devanagari (ँ), Bengali-Assamese (), Gujarati (ઁ), Odia (ଁ), Tamil (◌𑌁 Extension used from Grant ...

indicates that it is nasalised. The final consonant mark functions as a

virama Virama ( ्, ) is a Sanskrit phonological concept to suppress the inherent vowel that otherwise occurs with every consonant letter, commonly used as a generic term for a codepoint in Unicode, representing either # halanta, hasanta or explicit vir ...

, or "killer stroke" that removes the inherent vowel, leaving an isolated consonant. When transcribing Sanskrit or Tibetan, a different virama, is used. Two additional diacritics are used for Sanskrit transcription, the

anusvara Anusvara ( ; , , ), also known as Bindu ( ; ), is a symbol used in many Indic scripts to mark a type of nasal sound, typically transliterated or in standards like ISO 15919 and IAST. Depending on its location in a word and the language for ...

, which adds nasalisation and the

visarga In Sanskrit phonology, Visarga () is the name of the voiceless glottal fricative, written in Devanagari as '' . It was also called, equivalently, ' by earlier grammarians. The word ''visarga'' () literally means "sending forth, discharge". Visa ...

, which adds aspiration.

Consonants

The Zanabazar script includes twenty basic consonants used for writing Mongolian, and twenty additional consonants that are used for transcribing Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, and other languages.

Tibetan consonant clusters

The following diacritics are used for transcribing Tibetan consonant clusters.

Other characters

Head marks are similar to Tibetan

yig mgo A yig mgo is a textual caret mark in Tibetan script which is one of the possible markers for a new text or page. In some cases, such as following an internal title page, a triple yig mgo is used.The many canons of Tibetan Buddhism: PIATS 2000. p. 36 ...

, and may be used to mark the beginning of a text, page, or section. They may be decorated with a candra, or

Unicode

"Zanabazar Square" has been included in the

Unicode Standard Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 cha ...

since the release of Unicode version 10.0 in June 2017. The

Zanabazar Square Zanabazar's square script is a horizontal Mongolian square script ( or ), an abugida developed by the monk and scholar Zanabazar based on the Tibetan alphabet to write Mongolian. It can also be used to write Tibetan language and Sanskrit as a ge ...

block contains 72 characters. The Unicode block for Zanabazar Square is U+11A00–U+11A4F:

References

External links

BabelStone Fonts for Zanabazar
{{List of writing systems Brahmic scripts Mongolian writing systems Obsolete writing systems