Limbu Letter Ssa

ᤚ is an old Limbu letter for a curled-back hiss. The sound is made with the tongue slightly drawn back. The letter is called ssa; a bare Limbu consonant carries a built-in vowel, roughly like the open “aw” in “saw,” so ᤚ forms a syllable by itself.

This old Limbu letter ssa is marked obsolete in modern orthography references, but it remains useful when preserving or reproducing older Limbu-script texts.

How did the Limbu script develop?

The Limbu script has a traditional origin story and later written records. The origin of the Limbu script, also known as Sirijanga, is traditionally credited to King Sirijanga in the ninth century. A catalogued alphabet book probably dates from the early 18th century, and manuscripts from the nineteenth century provide later written evidence. The tradition and surviving records answer different historical questions.

The script was developed and spread through Kalimpong, Darjeeling, and Sikkim in the 1920s. A printed 1961 Mundhum, a Limbu ritual text, used Devanagari for technical reasons; Limbu-script publications appeared especially after 1990.

The Limbu script descends from Brahmic writing systems, a family of South Asian scripts, and follows a Tibetan-style writing model. A possible link with Lepcha, another regional script, has been noted, though how that link arose is unknown. The sound of ᤚ is also compared with Devanagari ष, but they are characters from different scripts.

Why does ᤚ look different in another font?

Fonts can draw it differently, and typing depends on the keyboard layout. Limbu forms have differing glyphs across historical and modern writing. A font or app without Limbu-aware shaping—the software that positions vowel marks around letters—may display the text incorrectly or leave a blank box.

To type ᤚ on a Limbu keyboard, choose a Unicode layout; phonetic and typewriter layouts assign different keys.