Sunuwar letter Thari

It marks an aspirated t.

That means a t followed by a clear puff of air. Devanagari थ represents a similar sound, but it is a different letter in a different script.

Older Sunuwar spellings could mark aspiration by adding Hamso after another consonant; Thari gives the aspirated t its own letter.

Why was Thari added?

Sunuwar writing was developed for the Sunuwar language. A formal account dates the script’s development to 1942. A community account separately describes an older Koĩts-BreɁse inscription on animal skins that was copied and discussed in the 1940s.

Thari was not part of the original 22-letter set. Users added it by the turn of the 21st century, alongside dedicated letters for aspirated and retroflex sounds.

The Unicode proposal published in 2021 describes Sunuwar as not descended from another writing system, though its structure was modeled partly on Latin. It identifies Aal as borrowed from Limbu; Thari was a later user-added letter. Nepal’s alphabetic convention does not add an inherent vowel to consonants. The Sikkim Herald convention can work like an abugida, a system where consonants may carry an unwritten vowel.