Tibetan is written in a script derived from that of Indian Gupta about 600 ce. It has a syllabary of 30 consonants and five vowels; six additional symbols are used in writing Sanskrit words.
The script is an alphabetic script. Words consist of one or more letters. They are written from left to right. Not all letters are pronounced. They can also change the pronunciation. A good example of this is the spoken Tibetan greeting »Tashi Delek«. It is written as »བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས«. If every letter were pronounced, it would sound like »bkra shis bde legs«.
An additional difficulty is that a word may consist of more than just letters written in sequence. In some words, the main letter may be preceded by one letter, followed by two, and have one letter above and one below it. Here, too, not all letters are pronounced. In the past, significantly more of the written consonants were actually pronounced than in modern Standard Tibetan. The current discrepancy between the written form and pronunciation developed gradually over many years.
This is an example of the word “bsgrubs” [= »completed« or »carried out«] with nearly all possible variations of one Tibetan syllable.
| བསྒྲུབས [bsgrubs] | བ + ས + ག + ྲ + ུ + བ + ས |
| Pre-positioned letter: | བ | Präfix |
| Letter above main letter: | ས | Superskript |
| Main letter: | ག | |
| Subscript: | ྲ | not visually detectable |
| Vowel sign: | ུ | |
| First post-positioned letter: | བ | First Suffix |
| Second post-positioned letter | ས | Second Suffix |
All consonants always end in »A«, wie z.B. »Ta« »Ka« »Ba« »La« etc. Additional vowel marks added to the main letter [see table above] for »E« »I« »O« and »U« change the pronunciation to »Te« »Ki« »Bo« or »Lu«
A word can consist of one or more syllables. Syllables are separated from one another by a period. There is no symbol to indicate the end of one word and the beginning of the next. Here, too, the text contains only a single period.