--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...> wrote:

> Surely you don't consider Tibetan an Indic script, given the

considerable change in orthographic principles?

Of course Tibetan is an Indic script.

Early in the 20th century an almost identical script was found on
ancient bricks in India. This archaeological discovery is referred to
in the writings on Gendun Chophel on the origins of the Tibetan script.

What is the "considerable change in orthographic principles" you speak of?

A few letters were added to represent sounds in Tibetan absent from
North Indian languages of the time - and the tsheg character was
introduced as a syllable / morpheme delimiter. This was neccesary as
Tibetan has largely unvoiced prefixes and suffixes which would be
mistaken for individual syllables if there were no tsheg character.

Sanskrit words and phrases are still often written in Tibetan without
any tsheg.

Conjunct ligatures in Tibetan are formed vertically rather than
horizontally - but this was once also the case with Devanagari in many
parts of India.

Horizontal ligatures became common in Devanagari & other scripts used
for modern Indian languages with the introduction of metal type. (It
required cutting far fewer individual type forms to create ligatures
this way.) The mechanical typewriter made this even more necessary.

- Chris