84. Jenticha

 

Jenticha was developed by Krishna Bahadur Jenticha (1926-1991) in the 1942 to write Sunuwar. It is used mainly in Sikkim, where it officially recognised, though Devanagari is more commonly used to write Sunuwar. Jenticha was originally a phonemic alphabet, but later became a syllabic alphabet
Jenticha has been used to produce books for use in primary schools, for poetry, histories, a newspaper, a grammar, government records, academic works and so on.

Notable features

• Type of writing system: syllabic alphabet / abugida
• Direction of writing: left to right in horizontal lines
• Consonants have an inherent vowel which is changed by adding another vowel after them.

Used to write

Sunuwar (कोँइच / Kõits), a member of the Kiranti branch of the Tibeto-Burman language family spoken by about 40,000 people in eastern Nepal and Sikkim, where it is an official language. It is also known as Kõits-Lo (कोँइच लो / kõica lo), Mukhiya (मुखिया / mukhiyā) and Kiranti-Kõits (किराँती-कोँइच / kirā̃tī-kõica). The native name for the language is Kõits (कोँइच / kõica,), which is also written Koinch, Koincha and Koints.

Jenticha and Devanagari scripts for Sunuwar

Download a speadsheet of this chart | Preliminary Proposal to Encode the Jenticha Script
Tower of Babel in Sunuwar (Devanagari script)

Links

Information about the Jenticha script
http://scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=script_detail&uid=ssw8skfwtg
http://anshumanpandey.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/jenticha-script-for-writing-sunuwar.html
http://glyphs.webfoot.com/blog/2011/04/30/jenticha-1942-ad-india/
Information about Sunuwar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunwar_language
http://www.ethnologue.com/language/suz