Marchen Subjoined Letter Ja

Type it after a base consonant; shaping puts it below.

That builds a Marchen consonant stack: two or more consonants can share one vertical syllable, while vowel signs attach around the stack. 𑲘 is the subjoined ja component, so on its own it forms only part of a written syllable.

Marchen appears in Bön literature and architectural inscriptions. In 2013, a proposal to encode Marchen reported that no early texts were then known and described the script as likely a more recent innovation than the traditional Zhang-zhung origin story. It identifies a bronze seal at Menri Monastery, inscribed in Zhang-zhung, as one of the earliest known examples.

What is Marchen connected to?

Marchen uses Tibetan-style stacking, but it is a distinct script.

In 2013, an encoding proposal distinguished Marchen from four other scripts named in the Bön tradition: Marchung, Pungchen, Pungchung, and Drusha. It said those scripts had little documented use at the time.

Traditional Bön accounts describe a lineage from the Pung script through the Mar script to Tibetan. A 2011 study notes that no inscriptions or manuscripts confirm that genealogy; it remains a religious-historical account, not an established history of script descent.