# Spelling bees in other languages?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spelling-bees-in-other-languages/282866>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [January 3, 2005, 6:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spelling-bees-in-other-languages/282866 "2005-01-03T18:41:19Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![BobT](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/8e8cbc/32.png) [@BobT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobT)\
**Post date:** [January 5, 2005, 7:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spelling-bees-in-other-languages/282866/21 "2005-01-05T07:08:27Z")

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But I wasn’t referring to the insect. I was referring to people getting together to work. You were contradicting something that was in agreement with you.

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**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\
**Post date:** [January 5, 2005, 2:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spelling-bees-in-other-languages/282866/22 "2005-01-05T14:55:49Z")

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> [@yabob](#):
>
> BTW, it is sometimes claimed that Tibetan, which is written using an alphabet borrowed from Sanskrit, is even worse than English for being non-phonetic.

I don’t know about Tibetan spelling or orthography, but it’s not quite accurate to say that the “alphabet” is borrowed from Sanskrit. Tibetan is written using the Tibetan script, which is unique to that language. It is true, however, that the Tibetan script is a descendant of Brahmi scripts, some of which were used to write Sanskrit (and Pali and the Prakrits). The script usually used to write Sanskrit today, the Devanagari script, is a modern development. Indeed, until the mid-20th century, there was no consensus on what script to use for Sanskrit – most Bengalis, for example, wrote Sanskrit using the Bengali script. Devanagari and other north Indian scripts, such as Bengali, Oriya, and Gurumukhi (Panjabi), are also descended from Brahmi scripts.

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