What it is
The first of the five great fields is the science of sound: how a language is built, how it is written, and how it is read aloud. In India, where the list of fields was made, it meant Sanskrit grammar. In Tibet it came to mean the Tibetan language itself: the thirty consonants and four vowel signs, the syllable that is assembled from them with its prefixes, superscripts, subscripts and suffixes, the particles that join syllables into sentences, and the rules of reading and spelling that every schoolchild once chanted aloud.
Where it comes from
Tradition holds that Thonmi Sambhota, a minister of King Songtsen Gampo in the seventh century, devised the Tibetan script after study in India and wrote eight treatises on the language. Two survive. The Thirty, the Sum cu pa, sets out the particles: the words that mark case, connect clauses and close a sentence. The Application of Signs, the Rtags kyi ‘jug pa, assigns a gender to each letter, masculine, feminine or neuter, and from that derives which prefixes and suffixes may stand with which root. Every Tibetan grammar since has been a commentary on these two short texts, and the greatest of them, Situ Panchen’s of 1744, is still the one a serious student reads.
Beside grammar stands the work of the translators, the lotsawas, who over three centuries rendered the whole of the Buddhist canon from Sanskrit into Tibetan. To do it consistently they compiled the Mahāvyutpatti in the early ninth century, a lexicon of some nine thousand terms that fixed, word by word, how Tibetan would say what Sanskrit said. Much of the literary language descends from those decisions.
The script has two families. Uchen, “with a head”, is the upright form with the heavy horizontal stroke along the top of each letter: the script of printed books and of this site. Ume, “headless”, is the family of cursive hands used for letters, notes and everyday writing, from the formal drutsa to the fast khyug that a clerk could write at the speed of speech.
What is at stake
The script is not in danger. The readers are. A language lives as long as children learn to read it, write it and speak it well enough to think in it, and on both sides of the Himalaya that is no longer assured. Inside Tibet, schooling in Tibetan has been narrowed. In exile, the second and third generations often read Tibetan slowly if at all, speak it at home and nowhere else, and have never typed a word of it. A phone that cannot easily write Tibetan is a phone on which Tibetan is not written.
On Genla
Language holds the alphabet and the script, the grammar of the two treatises, reading and spelling aloud, typing with Wylie and with a native keyboard, spoken Tibetan and its dialects, and the craft of translation. The children’s games that teach the letters belong here too. The typing tutor is the field’s first tool, and it is open.