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དགེ་ལ་ Genla

Subject · in Calligraphy

History of the script

From the seventh century to the present: the Indian models, the standardisations, the printed book, and the scripts of the modern screen.

This page is a placeholder. It exists so that the structure does; the text will follow, and will be checked by a teacher of the field before it is called finished.

Tradition dates the script to the seventh century and to Thonmi Sambhota’s study in India, and the earliest surviving inscriptions, on the pillars of Lhasa, are from the following century. The script was standardised in the ninth century along with the language of translation, adapted to the woodblock from the fourteenth, and cast in metal type only in the twentieth. Its move onto the screen, with Unicode in the 1990s and usable fonts a decade later, is the latest chapter.

This page will tell that history with examples from each period.