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Standard Tibetan and most other Tibetic languages are written in the Tibetan script with a historically conservative orthography (see below) that helps unify the Tibetan-language area. Some other Tibetan languages (in India and Nepal) are written in the related Devanagari script, which is also used to write Hindi, Nepali and
In the Tibetan script, the syllables are written from left to right. Syllables are separated by a tsek (་); since many Tibetan words are monosyllabic, this mark often functions almost as a space. Spaces are not used to divide words. [13] The Tibetan alphabet has thirty letters, sometimes known as "radicals", for consonants. [14]
Tibetan and Bhutan written scripts that use the Tibetan language, have been grouped into two categories. The first category being the Uchen script. The word Uchen translates to 'with a head', this refers to the elongated letters of the alphabet, that are tall and block like with linear strokes. [ 5 ]
Sino-Tibetan (also referred to as Trans-Himalayan) [1] [2] is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. [3] Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan language. [4] The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Sinitic languages.
The Standard or Central Tibetan endonym for Tibet, Bod (Tibetan: བོད་), is pronounced , transliterated Bhö or Phö. Rolf Stein (1922) explains, . The name Tibetans give their country, Bod (now pronounced Pö in the Central dialect, as we have seen), was closely rendered and preserved by their Indian neighbours to the south, as Bhoṭa, Bhauṭa or Bauṭa.
Though the division of Sino-Tibetan into Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman branches (e.g. Benedict, Matisoff) is widely used, some historical linguists criticize this classification, as the non-Sinitic Sino-Tibetan languages lack any shared innovations in phonology or morphology [2] to show that they comprise a clade of the phylogenetic tree. [3] [4] [5]
The Sinitic languages [a] (simplified Chinese: 汉语族; traditional Chinese: 漢語族; pinyin: Hànyǔ zú), often synonymous with the Chinese languages, are a group of East Asian analytic languages that constitute a major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.
Contrary to other hypotheses suggesting a Proto-Sino-Tibetan homeland in the Yellow River valley of northern China, [6] Matisoff (1991, [7] 2015) suggests that the Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST) homeland was located "somewhere on the Himalayan plateau," and gives Proto-Tibeto-Burman a date of approximately 4000 B.C., which is roughly on a par with the age of Proto-Indo-European.