Three ka's · thirty letters and four signs · one head line · the six scripts · where twenty-six letters came from · which way writing runs · Phags-pa
1
sound, three ways to write it
30
consonants, Tibetan
26
Latin letters, from twenty-two
3
unrelated roads
The short version
The letter a script puts first is not a detail — it is a statement about what the script thinks writing is for. Tibetan puts ka first because the alphabet is named after its first two letters; Chinese coined a character for the sound when it came in with Buddhism; Latin inherited K from a hand. Read this if you have ever wondered why the same syllable looks like three different objects.
What is inside
- 01One sound, three ways to write it
- 02Three scripts, one stone
- 03Thirty letters, four signs
- 04Every letter hangs from a line
- 05Characters are built, not drawn
- 06One skeleton change in three thousand years
- 07Twenty-six letters, from twenty-two
- 08Which way writing runs is half the hand
- 09Three ka's, one table
01 · Introduction
One sound, three ways to write it
Tibetan writes ka. English writes k. Chinese had no character for it and made one. One same sound, three sets of signs, and three completely different reasons behind each. This page is the way into the booklet.
Latin · a fork
K
K was a hand. The Phoenicians called the letter kaph, “palm”, and drew the outline of a hand; the Greeks turned it a quarter turn and it became Κ. Latin barely used it — C did the same work — so K sat idle for centuries.
Chinese · a coined character
迦
Chinese had no character for ka. When Buddhist texts came to be translated, one was coined for it: built from the walking radical, with 加 for the sound. It is not in the Shuowen. It reads jiā today — transcription characters drift with the language, and a thousand years carries them far.
Tibetan · a first place
ka
Thirty letters, and the first is ka. Not by accident — the alphabet is ordered by where in the mouth the sound is made, throat first, so ka leads. That is why Tibetan calls the whole alphabet “ka kha”.
Three solutions, one sentence each. Latin drew a letter out of a hand. Chinese coined a character for the sound. Tibetan did nothing special at all — ka simply happens to come first. One problem, three roads, and none of them wrong.
The coinage worked. Buddhist transcriptions use it again and again — Kāśyapa, Garuḍa, Kapilavastu, Kalandaka. A character used that often grows a new job.
The coinage worked. Buddhist transcriptions use it again and again — Kāśyapa, Garuḍa, Kapilavastu, Kalandaka. A character used that often grows a new job.
Why ka leads
Because the Tibetan alphabet is ordered by where the sound is made. The throat comes first, and the first of the throat group is ka — then kha, ga, nga; after that the order moves outward: palate, retroflex, teeth, lips. So “first” here does not mean important, it means deepest — whatever comes from furthest in is written furthest forward.
Even the word “alphabet” is its first two letters
Alphabet is the names of the first two Greek letters: alpha + beta. Tibetan calls its own alphabet “ka kha”, again the first two letters — and the phrase grew a family of words: a beginner is ka kha pa, a primer is ka kha'i dpe, alphabetical order is ka kha'i rim pa. What a language calls the act of learning to read is what it thinks of first about its own script. Chinese has no alphabet and so no such name — it has radicals instead, two hundred and fourteen of them, ordered by stroke.
There are two kinds of first, and this booklet takes the first kind. Tibetan's first is first in order — by where the sound is made, throat outward. The other kind of first is first in meaning: a stands thirtieth, yet it is the sound every consonant already carries, and tantric tradition names it “the letter a, unborn”. The first in order is the one every learner must pass; the first in meaning is heard only from further in.
02 · Three scripts
Three scripts, one stone
Tibetan on the lintel, Chinese on the stele, Latin letters on the signboard. Three kinds of writing crowd onto one stone and look like three generations of one family. None is anyone's ancestor — each simply solved “hold a sound in place” once.
What you see at the gate
Tibetan. Written across, left to right. One even line runs along the tops of the letters, and a dot separates syllable from syllable. Prayer books, lintels, mani stones.
Chinese. Square characters, one to a box, built from horizontals, verticals, falls and sweeps. Steles, plaques, old gazetteers.
Latin letters. Twenty-six, with spaces between words. Road signs, maps, passports.
Three ways of packing
Chinese is a seal. One character pressed into one box; the box has not changed size in three thousand years, only what sits inside it. So Chinese lines up like tiles, square against square.
Latin is brick. Bricks laid end to end, as long as you please, with a gap left between them — and that gap is where one word ends.
Tibetan is a stack. A syllable is a pile hung from the head line, with rules about who sits on whom; a pile is often two or three deep.
Three origins. Chinese from itself, a line running down from the oracle bones without ever changing systems. Tibetan devised in the seventh century, its letters modelled on Indian scripts. Latin from the eastern Mediterranean, passed through Phoenician, Greek and Roman hands. Standing on one board is a modern fact, not a blood relation.
1
Separate writing from speech. Writing is a set of signs for recording speech. One language can use different scripts; one script can record different languages — Japanese, older Korean and older Vietnamese all used Chinese characters.
2
Separate shared origin from resemblance. Tibetan and Phags-pa are related; Chinese characters and Japanese kana are not. Looking alike proves nothing.
3
Separate how it is written from how it is read. This booklet covers the first only. Pronunciation is another discipline, and the dialects differ widely.
Why this booklet does not teach pronunciation
Tibetan has three main dialect groups — Ü-Tsang, Kham and Amdo — and the same letter is not pronounced alike in all of them. Romanisation schemes differ too: the one scholars use is not the one on the road signs. Any pronunciation printed here would be wrong somewhere. Learning to say it takes someone saying it to you.
Three scripts on one board is a modern arrangement. Before that, each grew where it grew.
“Tibetan is a phonetic script” is only half true. It does record sound, but a syllable is often built from two or three stacked letters, and added letters change the reading. Chinese is not a “picture script” either — over eighty per cent of characters in common use are semantic-phonetic compounds, and the shape alone will not tell you what they say.
03 · I · Tibetan
Thirty letters, four signs
The Tibetan alphabet looks forbidding and is structurally very simple: thirty consonants and four vowel signs. No upper and lower case, no second parallel alphabet. And the order has a logic — it follows where in the mouth the sound is made.
Consonants
30
Grouped by place: throat, palate, retroflex, teeth, lips, then the affricates, fricatives and semivowels. A row of workshops ordered by process, not by names — so it is learned in strings, not as thirty isolated shapes.
Vowel signs
4
i, u, e, o, written as marks added above or below a letter, never holding a place of their own. Hats and shoes: i, e and o go on the head; u goes on the foot.
Default vowel
a
With no mark at all, the letter reads a. It is the factory setting — leave it alone and you get a; change it and you have to do something. So in Tibetan, “no sign” is itself a sign.
| Group | Letters | Where it is made |
|---|---|---|
| Throat | ཀka ཁkha གga ངnga | the throat |
| Palate | ཅca ཆcha ཇja ཉnya | the palate |
| Retroflex | ཊṭa ཋṭha ཌḍa ཎṇa | tongue curled back (dot below) |
| Teeth | ཏta ཐtha དda ནna | the teeth |
| Lips | པpa ཕpha བba མma | the lips |
| The rest | ཙtsa ཚtsha ཛdza ཝwa ཞzha ཟza འ'a ཡya རra ལla ཤsha སsa ཧha ཨa | affricates, fricatives, semivowels |
The first letter is the “furthest in”
The thirty letters run from the throat to the lips, and the first is ka. This does not mean “most important”; it means “furthest in” — count outward from the deepest part of the mouth, and whatever comes first is written first. And in Buddhism the one actually called the mother of all letters is the a that stands last: the tantras call it “the letter a, unborn from the start” (Sanskrit ākāra-anutpāda) — all things are unborn, and a is the sign for that. It is the seed syllable of the dharmakāya, and Om begins with it. Order gives the first place to ka; meaning gives it to a — two firsts, two reasons.“Unborn from the start” renders ākāra-anutpāda, a tantric formulation. Tibetan also has a “small a” (romanised 'a), mostly used as a prefix letter, distinguished from this “great a” of the alphabet.
Do not look for “the tenth letter” the way you would with ABC. The order walks from the throat to the lips by place of articulation, so the answer has no standing in the language. The romanisation in the table (a Wylie-type scheme) exists only so a reader can follow — it records letters, not sounds: the same letter sounds different in Lhasa and in Amdo, and the romanisation is identical.
04 · I · Tibetan
Every letter hangs from a line
Latin letters stand on the ground, feet level, like a row of people on parade. Tibetan letters hang from a line, shoulders level, like washing on a rope. One grows upward, one hangs downward — and that single difference shapes both scripts.
With a head, without a head
dbu དབུ means “head”. dbu can དབུ་ཅན — with a head — has letters level along the top and upright strokes; it is what is carved and printed. dbu med དབུ་མེད — without a head — has uneven tops and joined strokes; it is the running hand.
The difference is not in the letters but in how fast they are written. It is the same person in a suit and in ordinary clothes — one carved on a printing block, one jotted in a notebook. Only the two Tibetan forms diverge much further, and newcomers often take them for two scripts.
A syllable, not a letter
A syllable is a root letter plus added letters: prefix, superscript, subscript, suffix, second suffix. Some are silent; others change the root's sound. Everything stacks into one cluster, three or four tiers deep — counting the letters in one syllable often means counting to three or four.
A dot (tsheg) separates syllables, a vertical stroke (shad) closes a sentence. Words are divided by dots, not spaces.
Root letter
The core of the syllable, and roughly what it will sound like. Every syllable has one.
Super- / subscript
Above or below the root. They change its sound; the common subscripts are ya, ra and la, and their effect is the strongest.
Prefix
Before the root. Usually not pronounced on its own, but it turns a voiceless root voiced.
Suffix / second suffix
After the root, closing the sound. Second suffixes appear in only a few combinations.
tsheg · shad
A dot divides syllables; one stroke closes a sentence, a double stroke ends a paragraph or verse.
Why you cannot read it letter by letter
Two layers sit between spelling and sound: the rules for added letters, and the dialect. Take b-sgrub: five letters, one syllable when spoken. Reading it letter by letter is like reading pinyin as if it were English. And the rope is not decoration — it sets the upper boundary of every line, and room has to be left below for what hangs down. That is why Tibetan needs more leading than Chinese, and why a block-printed book looks so evenly ruled.
05 · II · Chinese characters
Characters are built, not drawn
The “six scripts” are not six kinds of stroke but six ways of making and using characters — like a carpenter's six tools, not six kinds of sawdust. Xu Shen listed them in order in the second century, and the first is not the pictograph but the indicative sign.
Indicative
A mark put on the picture, like a pin pushed into a map to say “here”. 上 and 下 are a line with a mark above or below it; 本 adds a stroke at the base of 木, pointing at the root.
Pictograph
A photograph. The thing drawn until it is recognisable: 日, 月, 山, 水. Few in number, but the whole system started here.
Semantic-phonetic
Half a shelf label, half a pronunciation key. The water radical is the sign over the “anything wet” aisle; the “blue” on the right tells you how to say it. Over eighty per cent of characters in common use are of this kind.
Compound ideograph
Two things set side by side to make a third. A person 人 beside a tree 木 gives 休 — to rest.
Mutual gloss
One family of characters sharing a definition. Characters of the same radical and related meaning explain one another.
Loan
Borrowing a neighbour's name. No character existed, so a homophone was taken. 来 first meant wheat; it was borrowed for “to come” and the original sense fell away. The character on page one took a different road — it was not borrowed, it was coined to hold a new sound.
Why eighty per cent are semantic-phonetic
Because it is the least effort. Pure pictography cannot draw an abstraction, and pure compounding is slow to build. It is like putting two labels on anything new: one says what kind of thing it is, one says how to say it — which lets you coin a character and still let a reader guess. It is the “good enough” road, and it has been walked for two thousand years.
How many characters. The Shuowen Jiezi lists 9,353; the Kangxi Dictionary 47,035. The Table of General Standard Chinese Characters (2013) lists 8,105, of which the first tier of 3,500 covers the great majority of everyday reading.Sources: the postface to the Shuowen Jiezi and the front matter of each dictionary; the notes to the 2013 table.
The six scripts are a Han-dynasty classification, not a timetable of excavated objects. Nobody held a meeting, fixed six rules, and then began inventing characters; the classification is a later look back, sorting what already existed. The characters came first, the book about them afterwards.
“Chinese characters are pictographs” needs a discount. Pictography is only the start, and there are few of them. In any sentence written today the overwhelming majority of characters are semantic-phonetic — the shape hints at a direction, but not at the sound, and often not at the exact meaning.
06 · II · Chinese characters
One skeleton change in three thousand years
Chinese script has changed dress many times, but its skeleton moved once: the clerical reform. Like swapping a tape measure that bends for a folding rule — rounded lines pressed into square breaks. Every horizontal and vertical written today comes from that turn.
Oracle bone
Cut into turtle plastrons and ox bones with a knife: thin straight strokes, many right angles. One character often appears in several forms.
Bronze
Cast into bronze vessels. Casting is freer than cutting, so strokes are thick and rounded and the forms more regular.
Small seal
The standard regularised after the Qin unification. Even rounded lines, symmetrical structure, the first standard of shape.
Clerical
A fast hand grown from small seal. Rounded turns became square breaks, strokes grew a “silkworm head and swallow tail”. This is the clerical reform, the single largest turn in the script's shape.
Regular
Clerical tidied once more: level horizontals, upright verticals. Faster than clerical, clearer than cursive. In use two thousand years.
Simplified
Forms standardised in the twentieth century. Most were not invented: old forms, popular forms and cursive shapes were given official standing.
Traditional and simplified are not two scripts
Most simplified forms are old: some are original characters found on oracle bones, some are popular forms used by Song and Yuan woodblock cutters, some are squared-off cursive shapes.
A first table was published in 1935 and suspended the next year; the 1956 scheme was followed by the 1964 general list of 2,236 characters. Most pairs are one to one, a few one to several, and a few look alike without being related — so conversion cannot be left to a machine.
How the sound is written down
Homophone glossing. Find a character that sounds the same and use it to gloss the sound. Simple — and useless when no homophone exists.
Fanqie. Two characters spell one sound: the first supplies the initial, the second the final and tone. Used for more than a thousand years.
Zhuyin. Published 1918: a dedicated set of symbols for initials and finals.
Pinyin. Published 1958: Latin letters with tone marks. Now the international standard.
Pinyin is not a script
It is a notation for sound. Like a pronunciation key printed beside a character — Chinese written in pinyin can be read aloud, but to be understood it must be turned back into characters in the reader's head; with so many homophones, pure pinyin does not make a text. Zhuyin is the same: a tool, not a script.
“Simplified characters only appeared after 1949” is not accurate. The great majority of simplified forms can be found in Song and Yuan printed books. What the 1950s did was select forms already in use and make them standard.
07 · III · The Latin alphabet
Twenty-six letters, from twenty-two
The Latin alphabet was not invented by the Romans, nor designed in one go — it was divided up, household by household. Phoenician twenty-two; Greek and Etruscan each took a hand; Rome received twenty-one, and four more split off over two thousand years.
Phoenician
Twenty-two letters, all consonants. The names still remember shapes — aleph is an ox, beth a house. The name is the photograph.
Greek
The crucial step: several consonants Greek did not need were turned into vowels. Vowel letters begin here.
Etruscan
The middleman of the Italian peninsula. The Romans learned their letters from the Etruscans, by which time the shapes had already altered.
Latin
Twenty-one at first. G split off from C in the third century BC; Y and Z were borrowed in the first century BC; by the imperial period, twenty-three.
Splitting
From the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, I gave rise to J, and V to U and W (a double V). Only then did the count reach twenty-six.
Lower case
Lower case is not “small capitals” but another set of clothes: it grew from medieval cursive and the Carolingian minuscule, took shape in the eighth and ninth centuries, and was fixed by printing.
| Letter | When it stood alone | Where it came from |
|---|---|---|
| G | 3rd century BC | Split from C, to keep two sounds apart |
| Y / Z | 1st century BC | Borrowed straight from Greek, for loanwords |
| J | 16th century | I had done both jobs; written apart, J stood alone |
| U / W | Medieval to Renaissance | V did both jobs; U split off, W is two Vs |
Why English spelling and speech have parted
Because printing fixed the spelling in the fifteenth century, and then the pronunciation moved — the Great Vowel Shift, fifteenth to seventeenth century. Spelling is a photograph taken in that century; the sounds later changed shape — same photograph, different person. That gap is still there.
“Twenty-six letters is the international alphabet” does not hold. Many languages use Latin letters, with different counts: Italian has twenty-one, Turkish twenty-nine, and plenty add diacritics. Twenty-six is simply the English number. What an alphabet looks like depends on how many sounds a language must keep apart.
08 · IV · Direction, and one more script
Which way writing runs is half the hand
Latin runs left to right, Arabic right to left, Chinese columns right to left, Mongolian columns left to right. Like driving on the left or on the right — no right answer, it depends which road you grew up on. Some directions were forced by materials; others are only old habit kept.
Left
to right
to right
Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Tibetan. The hand pushes rightwards, blank paper lies ahead of the pen, and the letters already written stay behind the hand.
Right
to left
to left
Arabic, Hebrew, Persian. The direction comes from the earlier Semitic scripts and was never changed. The Greeks borrowed the letters and turned them to left-to-right; Latin followed the Greeks.
Columns
right first
right first
Traditional Chinese and Japanese. A bamboo slip is a narrow strip: you can only write down it, and slips were laid down one after another to the left.
Columns
left first
left first
Uyghur-script Mongolian and Phags-pa. Letters run downward, columns from left to right — the mirror image of Chinese columns.
Half material, half habit
Bamboo slips are narrow, so writing down them wastes nothing. On bone, the left hand holds the chisel and the right the hammer, and cutting right to left keeps the hands clear. Once brush and paper arrived the direction was free — and stayed where habit had put it. Early Greek even tried a line left-to-right and the next right-to-left, like an ox ploughing back and forth, before settling on one direction. Direction is one of the hardest habits to change: the tool changes, the direction stays.
Phags-pa. Commissioned by Kublai Khan and devised by his imperial preceptor Phags-pa, promulgated in 1269 and called the “new Mongolian script”. The shapes are square, the letters taken from Tibetan, written downward with columns running left to right. Its aim was not to write one language but to “transcribe all writings” — to render every language of the empire in a single script.Surviving material: steles, official seals, paiza tablets, paper money such as the Zhiyuan note.
Phags-pa is not the ancestor of modern Mongolian. It fell out of use when the Yuan fell; Mongolian today uses Uyghur-derived letters, written downward, and the two are separate systems. They are often conflated.
A unification that did not take
The reasons are not hard to guess: it was imposed from above and used only for official documents and seals while people went on writing their own scripts; its letters came from Tibetan, so speakers of Chinese and Mongolian alike had to learn it from scratch; and when the Yuan fell, so did the office that promoted it. It is the Esperanto of scripts — however sensible the plan, if nobody has to use it, it does not survive.
09 · To close
Three ka's, one table
| Tibetan | Chinese | Latin | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Origin | Indian scripts, 7th c. | Self-originated, oracle bone | Phoenician–Greek–Roman |
| Where ka is | 1st, head of the throat group | a new character, coined for it | 11th, from an open hand |
| Records | syllables (consonant + vowel sign) | morpheme / syllable | phoneme |
| One unit | a syllable, often 2–4 letters | one character, one square | one letter |
| Direction | across, left to right | across, L→R; columns right first | across, left to right |
| Distinctive | head line; with and without head | six scripts; 80% semantic-phonetic | upper and lower case |
1
Three scripts, three origins. Chinese from itself, Tibetan from India, Latin from the eastern Mediterranean. Standing on one board is a modern accident, not kinship.
2
Read the structure, not the look. Three questions will do: does it record sound or meaning? How much sound does one unit carry? How are words divided? With those answers, each script falls into place.
3
Say nothing you have not checked. What a Tibetan inscription says, what year a lintel was carved — such questions stay unanswered until checked. Shape tells you the style of the lettering, not what it means.
Why no pronunciation and no inscriptions here
Pronunciation differs by dialect, romanisation differs by scheme, and anything printed would be wrong somewhere. An inscription has to be checked against the stone, character by character; reading it off a photograph is the easiest way to be wrong. So this booklet stays with how the letters are arranged, which way they run, and why they look the way they do. The rest of the series keeps the same rule: no ticket prices, no opening hours, no driving times.
A fork, a coined character, a first place. Three scripts, each thousands of years on its own road, all landing on one same sound — not by agreement, but because none of them could avoid it.
October 2026
Samantha
Compiled from published sources: the Zang-Han Da Cidian and works on Tibetan palaeography; the traditional account of Thonmi Sambhota and the scholarly discussion of where Tibetan script came from; tantric commentaries on ākāra-anutpāda, “the letter a, unborn from the start”; the postface to the Shuowen Jiezi and studies of the six scripts; the notes to the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters and the literature on simplification; studies of the Phoenician–Greek–Latin transmission, including the traditional reading of aleph as “ox”; and research on Phags-pa steles and the 1269 promulgation of the “new Mongolian script”. Where scholarship holds two views, the text says “the traditional account” or gives both. No pronunciation and no inscription text has been included.
On the scripts. No Tibetan script is reproduced in this notebook as a glyph: everything is romanised. The three squares on the cover are a diagram, not unfinished typesetting.
On the sources. The Latin and Greek letter histories follow the standard epigraphic account; the Chinese material follows the Shuowen and the usual phonetic-loan literature; the Tibetan alphabet, its head line and the subscript forms follow the standard Tibetan grammars.