Tibetan language and its historical background

Tibetan language belongs to Tibeto-Burman language group. Thanks to the Tibetan language, particularly the Classical Tibetan language, Tibetan Buddhism originated from India is well preserved for more than a thousand years. Because of this language Buddhism spread all over the world for the benefit of all beings. The Modern Tibetan language and the Classical Tibetan language share more common values than differences and help each other to understand written documents, old and modern, deeper and better.

Tibetans traditionally categorize the Tibetan language into two groups. They are known by the name, written language (yig skad) and spoken language (ngag skad). It is one of the oldest languages with a script and writing system in the world. According to modern Tibetologists Tibetan language belongs to Tibetic language group, utilized and spoken in Tibet proper and around the Himalayan regions. Based on the research findings of the Tibetan language, we can categorize it into three groups; Old Tibetan, Classical Tibetan, and Modern Tibetan. The Tibetan script we have now was invented more than a thousand years ago, in the middle of the 7th century. According to Tibetan history, a minister of the Tibetan imperial court, Thon mi Sambhota, was sent to India to learn the Indian language. Spending more than a decade in India he returned to Tibet and invented two kinds of scripts, Dcu
chen and Dcu med. The script Dcu chen is mainly for printing documents and Dcu med script is for everyday usage, writing notes and letters.

There are different theories about the invention of the two Tibetan scripts. Most of the traditional Tibetan historians assert that the two Tibetan scripts are invented based on Lantsa [Ranjana] and Wartula Indian script. And some historians stated that it derived from the Indian Devanagari script. The modern Tibetan scholar Dge ’dun chos ’phel (1903-1951) believe that Dbu chen script is invented based on the Gupta script of India and Dbu med script is just a faster writing version of Dbu chen script, similar to many old archaic writings as well as Dzongkha writing of Bhutan nowadays. In some archaic documents we could find the combination of both scripts in a single syllable. Those archaic documents are called yig rnying (old writing). Except for minor stylistic differences between Tibetan archaic script and modern script, the basic structure of the script remained unchanged without evolution.