HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

The Lepcha script, or Róng script, is 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 ...
used by the Lepcha people to write the Lepcha language. Unusually for an abugida, syllable-final consonants are written as diacritics.


History

Lepcha is derived from the
Tibetan script 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 ...
, and may have some Burmese influence. According to tradition, it was devised at the beginning of the 18th century by prince Chakdor Namgyal of the Namgyal dynasty of
Sikkim Sikkim ( ; ) is a States and union territories of India, state in northeastern India. It borders the Tibet Autonomous Region of China in the north and northeast, Bhutan in the east, Koshi Province of Nepal in the west, and West Bengal in the ...
, or by scholar Thikúng Men Salóng in the 17th century. Early Lepcha manuscripts were written vertically. When they were later written horizontally, the letters remained in their new orientations, rotated 90° from their Tibetan prototypes. This resulted in an unusual method of writing final consonants.


Typology

Lepcha is now written horizontally, but the changes in the direction of writing have resulted in a metamorphosis of the eight syllable-final consonants from conjuncts ( ligatures) as in Tibetan to superposed
diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...
s. As in most other
Brahmic scripts The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout South Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India and are used b ...
, the short vowel /-a/ is not written; other vowels are written with diacritics before (/-i, -o/), after (/-ā, -u/), or under (/-e/) the initial consonant. The length mark, however, is written over the initial, as well as any final consonant diacritic, and fuses with /-o/ and /-u/. (When fused as /-ō/, however, it lies below any final consonant.) Initial vowels do not have separate letters, but are written with the vowel diacritics on an &-shaped zero-consonant letter. There are postposed diacritics for medial /-y-/ and /-r-/, which may be combined ''(krya).'' For medial /-l-/, however, there are seven dedicated conjunct letters. That is, there is a special letter for /kla/ which does not resemble the letter for /ka/. (Only /gla/ is written with a straightforward diacritic.) One of the final letters, /-ŋ/, is an exception to these patterns. First, unlike the other finals, final /-ŋ/ is written to the left of the initial consonant rather than on top, occurring even before preposed vowels. That is, /kiŋ/ is written "ngki". Second, there is no inherent vowel before /-ŋ/; even short /-a-/ must be written, with a diacritic unique to this situation. (It appears to be the diacritic for long /-ā/ rotated 180° around the consonant letter.) That is, /kaŋ/ is written "ngka", rather than "" as would be expected from the general pattern.


Letters

As 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 ...
, a basic letter represents both a consonant followed by an inherent vowel. In Lepcha, the inherent vowel is . To start a syllable with a vowel, the appropriate vowel diacritic is added to the vowel-carrier . A vowel-carrier with no diacritic represents the sound .


Consonants

A consonant cluster can be formed by adding one of the subjoiners to a base letter.


Vowels


Numerals


Unicode

Lepcha script was added to the
Unicode 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 Char ...
Standard in April, 2008 with the release of version 5.1. The Unicode block for Lepcha is U+1C00–U+1C4F:


References

*Leonard van der Kuijp, ''The Tibetan Script and Derivatives,'' in Daniels and Bright, ''The World's Writing Systems,'' 1996.


External links


Lepcha script at Omniglot.com


- A free Lepcha Unicode Kit including fonts and keyboard files (Win/Mac/Linux), published by the Sikkim Bhutia Lepcha Apex Committee (SIBLAC)
Noto Sans Lepcha
- A free Lepcha Unicode font that harmonizes with other fonts of the Noto font family
Mingzat
- A Lepcha Unicode font by SIL, based on Jason Glavy’s JG Lepcha

- A free and well designed but non-Unicode compliant font by Jason Glavy. {{list of writing systems Brahmic scripts