Tibetan

Tibetan is the great example of frozen orthography. When the script was standardised around the 9th century, its spelling recorded the language as it was then spoken — with clusters of prefix, superscript, subscript and suffix consonants all pronounced. But the spoken language kept changing over the next thousand-plus years while the spelling did not, so today's Tibetan is written with whole stacks of letters that have gone silent — much as English still writes the k in "knight."

A word like བསྒྲུབས is spelled with six consonant slots and pronounced roughly "drup." Syllables are marked off by a dot, the tsheg (་); it separates syllables, not words.

The spelling remembers a pronunciation the speakers forgot a thousand years ago.

Like its Indic cousins it stacks consonants vertically, with superscript and subscript letters around a root. See the descent diagram in the Hall of Lineages; the Reading Room treats Tibetan under WI·ORT Orthographies.

The inherent vowel of every consonant is 'a'; four signs — placed above or below the letter — mark i, u, e and o instead. Syllables are divided by the tsheg dot rather than by spaces, and consonants that meet within a syllable stack vertically, a superscript or subscript letter clinging to a root. Because the standardised spelling records a much older pronunciation, many of these stacked letters are now silent.