Lepcha Letter Ba

It marks the ba consonant that forms a syllable’s base.

Lepcha vowel signs change the vowel, medial letters add a consonant within the syllable, and final signs mark consonants at its end. These marks combine with ᰓ, so the full spelling carries more than the letter alone.

How is Lepcha writing connected to Tibetan?

Its letterforms came from Tibetan and were turned for left-to-right writing.

The Róng script, also called Lepcha writing, was based directly on Tibetan. Accounts differ about who devised it: Lepcha tradition credits the scholar Thikúng Men Salóng, while another account places its development around 1720 under Sikkim’s king Chakdor Namgyal. Written-language codification was probably connected with Buddhist missionary activity.

The Tibetan forms it drew on were written in vertical columns, perhaps under Chinese influence. Lepcha rearranged them into lines running left to right. Its literary tradition reaches back to the eighteenth century. Nineteenth-century manuscripts include alphabet lessons, letters, accounts, moral instruction and funeral prayers. After Sikkim’s official-language policy, Lepcha textbooks appeared in schools and colleges in 1977.