Sunuwar letter Gil

Gil is the Sunuwar letter for the hard g sound. It appears inside Sunuwar words written in the Jenticha script.

Krishna Bahadur Jentich developed the script in 1942 to write Sunuwar in eastern Nepal and Sikkim; Gil was one of its original 22 letters. A community account describes Koĩts-BreɁse inscriptions on animal skins, recopied onto fresh skins and discussed in the 1940s. Sunuwar writing also appears in poetry, grammars, calendars, newspapers, community histories, and translated legislative proceedings.

Why did Sunuwar spell “ng” with Gil?

An older Sunuwar spelling paired Gil with another letter. Jentich’s system used Gil for the hard g sound; the pair represented the nasal sound at the end of English “sing.” Sunuwar writers later added Ngar as a separate letter for that sound.

Sunuwar is not descended from another script, though Jentich modeled its structure on Latin; a later letter, Aal, was borrowed from Limbu. “Jenticha” comes from the creator’s surname; “Sunuwar” is the community-preferred name used outside the community, and “Koinch” is an endonym—the community’s own name for itself.

How do I type Sunuwar letter Gil?

Use a Sunuwar keyboard and a font that supports Unicode text. Translation Commons offers a desktop Sunuwar keyboard. Legacy publishing fonts such as Kirat1, Kaatich, and Mukdum mapped Sunuwar characters onto Latin keys, so text typed with them may not be Unicode text. Changing the font alone may not make that text readable elsewhere.

If the glyph appears as an empty box, the font or text environment may lack Sunuwar support. In 2024, Unicode described Sunuwar’s digital use as still depending on specialized fonts and keyboards.