Tibetan Shorthand Contractions

Table of Contractions

The table below lists nearly 300 Tibetan shorthand contractions (bskungs yig བསྐུངས་ཡིག, bsdu yig བསྡུ་ཡིག) that I have garnered from various sources, as well as from a secondhand list of contractions from the Tibetan-English dictionary of Alexander Csoma de Körös (published 1834). The sources are generally not very reliable, and although I have corrected some obvious mistakes I have erred on the side of caution in other cases where the contraction looks suspicious. As shorthand contractions are informal, the contraction used for a given word may vary from source to source.

Note that the Unicode Tibetan of the contractions has been normalized to Normalization Form NFD, which may not render correctly with current fonts when a tsa 'phru mark (U+0F39) is separated from a preceding consonant by a vowel sign or when a consonant has both a zhabs kyu vowel (subjoined u) and another (superfixed) vowel. Reordering into a non-normalized form should correct the misrendering in most cases, but ideally the rendering system should render correctly without such reordering.

BabelStone Home Page