Limbu alphabet

History

According to traditional histories, the Limbu script was first invented in the late 9th century by King Sirijunga Hang, then fell out of use, to be reintroduced in the 18th century by Te-ongsi Sirijunga Xin Thebe during the time, teaching of the limbu script was outlawed by the monarcy in Sikkim, as it posed a threat to the Monarchy.

Accounts with Sirijunga

Limbu, Lepcha and Nepal Bhasa are the only Sino-Tibetan languages of the Central Himalayas to possess their own scripts. (Sprigg 1959: 590), (Sprigg 1959: 591-592 & MS: 1-4) tells us that the Limbu or Kirat Sirijunga script was devised during the period of Buddhist expansion in Sikkim in the early 18th century when Limbuwan still constituted part of Sikkimese territory. The Limbu script was probably composed at roughly the same time as the Lepcha script which was by the third King of Sikkim, Phyag-rdor Nam-gyal (ca. 1700-1717). The Kirat Sirijunga script is ascribed to the Limbu hero, Te-ongsi Sirijunga (translation: Reincarnated Sirijunga; refer to Sirijunga Hang) who was killed by the Tasong monks in conspiracy with the king of Sikkim at the time when Simah Pratap Shah was King of Nepal (i.e. 11 January 1775 to 17 November 1777; Stiller 141,153).

Structure

As an abugida, a basic letter represents both a consonant and an inherent, or default, vowel. In Limbu, the inherent vowel is /ɔ/.

To change the inherent vowel, a diacritic is added. Shown here on /k/ (ᤁ):

ᤁᤨ represents the same thing as ᤁ. Some writers avoid the diacritic, considering it redundant.

Initial consonant clusters are written with small marks following the main consonant:

Final consonants after short vowels are written with another set of marks, except for some final consonants occurring only in loanwords. They follow the marks for consonant clusters, if any.

Long vowels without a following final consonant are written with a diacritic called kemphreng:

There are two systems for writing long vowels with syllable-final consonants. One system is simply a combination of the kemphreng and final consonant marks:

The other is to write the final consonant with the basic letter, and a diacritic that marks both that the consonant is final, and that the preceding vowel is lengthened:

This same diacritic may be used to mark final consonants in loanwords that do not have final forms in Limbu, regardless of the length of the vowel.

Glottalization is marked by a sign called mukphreng.

Unicode

Limbu script was added to the Unicode Standard in April, 2003 with the release of version 4.0.

Block

The Unicode block for Limbu is U+1900–U+194F:

Font support

Noto Sans Limbu, Namdhinggo SIL, Code2000, Sun-ExtA and MPH 2B Damase fonts support Limbu script. TW-Sung partially supports Limbu script (without OpenType).