Chibetto Moji (ཅིབེཿཏོ་མོཇི)

Chibetto Moji is an adaptation of the Tibetan Uchen script for writing Japanese devised by Punya Pranava Pasumarty. The name literally means 'Tibetan characters' in Japanese. This script is intended to be more straightforward and comprehensive than Japanese Kana (both Hiragana and Katakana) in its phonetic representation of Japanese words. Morphemes are delimited from each other like in Tibetan, thus there is no distinction between orthography of native Japanese words and loan words; they can be told apart from the context.

Although Chibetto Moji doesn't encode any semantic content of Japanese words, one is permitted to use Kanji characters if that makes it easier to understand. Chibetto Moji also permits the use of Tibetan 'letter heads' to distinguish different words with identical pronunciation from each other. Nevertheless, the standard use of Chibetto Moji doesn't feature any Kanji characters or Tibetan letter heads since they generally aren't necessary.

Chibetto Moji Script

There are some differences between Chibetto Moji and the Uchen used for Tibetan. In Chibetto Moji:

fewer letters are used than in Tibetan
each letter sounds the same wherever it is in a word; they are phonetically consistent
there are no silent letters other than the 3 optional ‘letter heads’ (more on that later)
there are no consonant clusters although the [ ྱ] mark can be used on consonants
- this mark is called the ‘palatal mark’ in Chibetto Moji
- when added to a consonant, it follows it with a ‘y’ sound, like in Tibetan
- some regular Tibetan letters are treated as ligatures of Chibetto Moji letters with this mark:
  - [ཅ] + [ྱ] becomes [ཙ]. this is pronounced like [ts]; this is a special case of palatalization
  - [ཇ] + [ྱ] becomes [ཛ]. this is pronounced like [dz]; this is a special case of palatalization
  - [འ] + [ྱ] becomes [ཡ]. this is pronounced like ‘y’ as a consonant.
- No other consonants combine with each other in Chibetto Moji
each letter (including vowel marks and embellishments) represents 1 syllable, and vice versa
the letter [འ] is always used instead of [ཨ], to represent any vowel not followed by a consonant
the letter [ཕ] is used for the ‘f’ sound

As seen above, a total of 18 plain consonants, 1 ‘palatal mark’, 8 vowels and 3 embellishments are used in Chibetto Moji. The palatal mark can be attached to most plain consonants to add a ‘y’ sound to it, occasionally forming ligatures with the consonant and/or modifying its pronunciation.

The 8 vowels occur as marks placed above and below consonants to form syllables. Among these, there are 5 plain vowels [ア, イ, ウ, エ, オ] and 3 palatal vowels [ヤ, ユ, ヨ]. The plain vowels are used on plain consonantsand palatal vowels, on palatalized consonants.

The 3 embellishment marks, shown here below the vowel marks, can be added to any syllable to perform their functions. The ‘anusvara’ mark has been adapted here to act as a final ‘n’ [ン] added at the end of some Japanese syllables. The ‘visarga’ mark has been adapted here to double a following consonant like the [ッ] mark.

The following table shows the various syllables used in Chibetto Moji labelled with equivalents in Katakana. Those syllables shown in grey are not formally used in Japanese but can be used for proper nouns and loan words:

Download a script chart for Chibetto Moji (Excel), or more details of the script (PDF)

Sample text

Sample text in the Chibetto Moji script

Transliteration (Japanese script)

すべての人間は、生まれながらにして自由であり、かつ、尊厳と権利とについて平等である。人間は、理性と良心を授けられてあり、互いに同胞の精神をもって行動しなければならない。

Transliteration (Rōmaji)

Subete no ningen wa, umarenagara ni shite jiyū de ari, katsu, songen to kenri to ni tsuite byōdō de aru. Ningen wa, risei to ryōshin to o sazukerarete ori, tagai ni dōhō no seishin o motte kōdō shinakereba naranai.

Translation

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Information about Tibetan | Phrases | Numbers | Tower of Babel | Books about Tibetan on: Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk [affilate links]

Scripts created by Punya Pranava Pasumarty

Bhāratalipi Unified Indian Script (BLUIS), Charunagari, Deccan Lipi, Devadeshi, Ethiofarsi, Españabugida, Farsi Alefbet, Featural Lojban Abjad, Haruf-e-Tana, Palimukhi, Neobrahmi, SEAscript, West Eurolex

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