Jenticha

The Jenticha script (also known as Kõits script is used for writing Sunuwar, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by 40,000 people in eastern Nepal and by an unknown number in Sikkim, India. It is recognized in Sikkim as the Sunwar script, and is taught in schools in the area and used for translating the proceedings of the Sikkim legislative assembly into Sunuwar. Jenticha is also used to print a Sunuwar newspaper, for anthologies of Sunuwar poetry, and for academic works. The language can also be written in the Devanagari and Tikamuli scripts.

The Jenticha script is named after its inventor, Krishna Bahadur Jenticha, who created it in 1942. The shapes of some Jenticha letters appear to have been based on Limbu and Latin characters, although it has no genetic relationship to any other writing system. The script is an alphabet with some alphasyllabic features.

Twenty-five consonant letters are used, all of which bear an inherent a vowel except for the glottal stop. This vowel can be changed by writing a vowel letter after the consonant; dependent vowel diacritics are not used. The inherent vowel can also be silenced using a virama character. Consonant clusters are written using either the virama or a half form of the initial letter(s).

At the time of its creation, the script was a pure alphabet and did not exhibit these alphasyllabic features.

This script is not currently recognized by the  ISO 15924 standard, but is included in ScriptSource for research purposes. If you have any information on this script, please add the information to this site. Your contributions can be a great help in refining and expanding the ISO 15924 standard. The  Script Encoding Initiative is working to support the inclusion of this script in the standard, and contributions here will support their efforts.