Limbu Small Letter Ta

It marks Limbu’s final t at a syllable’s end. This small ta is an independent letter, not a half-form attached to the syllable base; no vowel follows it. Full ᤋ starts a syllable.

Why is the Limbu ta small?

Its size marks syllable position, not emphasis. Limbu writes final consonants as independent small letters, rather than as half-letters attached to a base.

The script’s origins are unknown, though local folklore credits a king from the 9th century, Sirijanga Hang, with creating a way to write Limbu oral tradition. Its revival in the early 18th century is associated with a later Sirijanga, Sirijanga Singthebe (also known as Rupihang), regarded as the earlier king’s incarnation. A British Library catalog describes a Limbu alphabet book from the early 18th century, perhaps c.1730 or earlier; Unicode says the oldest known writings were collected in the 1850s. These dates differ: one estimates a manuscript’s age, the other dates a collection.

Modern Limbu writing was developed in Kalimpong beginning in 1925 and revised by Subba in the 1970s. Unicode distinguishes manuscript forms of the 19th century, early modern publications from 1928 to the 1970s, and forms used in Nepal and India since the 1970s. Limbu writing serves mundhum (the Limbu oral religious tradition), books, songs, poetry and history. Since the 1990s, its literary use in Nepal has grown and the script has become a marker of Limbu identity. The script is thought to draw inspiration from the Lepcha writing system, used for the Lepcha language, and shares some visual features with Tibetan script.

How do I type ᤳ?

Use a Limbu keyboard and a font with proper shaping support.

As of October 2026, SIL lists two Keyman layouts: Limbu Phonetic, which places Limbu letters on corresponding Latin keys, and Limbu Typewriter, which roughly follows a manual Devanagari typewriter. Use the sequence for the layout you learned.

A font’s OpenType shaping feature arranges ᤳ and nearby vowel signs correctly; the app also needs to support it. The old Namdhinggo 8-bit font uses a custom encoding, so convert its text to Unicode before modern software searches or renders it.