Tibetan is one of the oldest Sino-Tibetan language to be recorded.
The earliest Tibetan inscriptions date from 7th to 8th century CE in
what is called the dbu can (which translates into "with a head")
script, which also appeared on manuscripts from around 11th CE and
remained until the modern day in the form of printed Tibetan text.
Another script tradition, the dbu med ("without a head",
"acephalous"), appearing first around the 12th century CE. The main
difference between the two script traditions is that the dbu can
script has the top line (hence the name "with a head") and less cursive
than the dbu med script.
The origin of the Tibetan script is rather obscure. Tibetan
Buddhist tradition states that it was created by Minister Thon mi
Sambhota in northeastern India by order of the Tibetan king
Srong btsan sgam po. On the other hand, the Bon po religious
tradition maintains that the script came from Iranian or Central Asian
origins. However, no matter how it came into Tibetan, the script's
structure clearly suggests that its ultimate ancestor is the
Brahmi script of India: (a) each sign
is actually a syllable consisting of a consonant plus the vowel /a/;
(b) the ordering of the characters are same as in Brahmi; and (c) the
way the vowels /i/, /u/, /e/, and /o/ are represented by marks above
and below the signs.
The following is a list of all the signs in the dbu can
script. The first line is the Tibetan sign, and the second line is
the traditional transliteration of the sign that reflected how the
sign was pronounced in the 7th century CE (see below). Also, notice
the dot to the upper right of every sign. When it is present, the
sign is meant to be syllabic, i.e. Ca, but without it,
it becomes only the consonant.
Retroflex (apico-palatal) consonants (/t/ and /d/)
occur only in loanwords from Sanskrit. In these cases, the regular
signs for /t/ and /d/, respectively, are flipped horizontally to
represent these sounds.
Syllables with vowels other than /a/ is denoted by a set of
vowel marks above or below the consonant sign. Hence the default
vowel of /a/ is replaced with the vowel of the mark. Initial
vowels are denoted by writing the /a/ signs with the desired vowel
mark.
The writing system of Tibetan is incredibly conservative,
to the point that a written word would sound nothing like the
spoken word. Phonological changes since the 7th century CE
include simplification of consonant clusters and development
of tones, but the writing system has remained formalized and
unchanged since the 7th century CE. For example, the word
written as brgyad (which means "eight") is now
pronounced as /gye/. However, there is really no way to
ameliorate this situation since there are thousands of mutually
unintelligible Tibetan dialects, all of which use the same
writing system.
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