Brahmic scripts

The Brahmic scripts are a family of abugida or alphabet writing systems. They are used throughout the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia, and were once used in Japan, and are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India. They are used by languages of several language families: Indo-European, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Mongolic, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Turkic, Tai. They were also the source of the dictionary order of Japanese kana.^[1]

History

Spread of Brahmic family of scripts from India.

Brahmic scripts descended from the Brahmi script. Brahmi is clearly attested from the 3rd century BC during the reign of Ashoka, who used the script for imperial edicts, but there are some claims of earlier epigraphy found on pottery in South India and Sri Lanka. The most reliable of these were short Brahmi inscriptions dated to the 4th century BC and published by Coningham et al.,^[2] but scattered press reports have claimed both dates as early as the 6th century BC and that the characters are identifiably Tamil Brahmi, though these latter claims do not appear to have been published academically. Northern Brahmi gave rise to the Gupta script during the Gupta period, which in turn diversified into a number of cursives during the Middle Ages, including Siddham, Sharada and Nagari.

The Siddhaṃ script was especially important in Buddhism, as many sutras were written in it. The art of Siddham calligraphy survives today in Japan. The syllabic nature and dictionary order of the modern kana system of Japanese writing is believed to be descended from the Indic scripts, most likely through the spread of Buddhism.^[3]

Southern Brahmi evolved into Old-Kannada, Pallava and Vatteluttu scripts, which in turn diversified into other scripts of South India and Southeast Asia.

Bhattiprolu was a great centre of Buddhism during 3rd century BCE and from where Buddhism spread to east Asia. The present Telugu script is derived from Bhattiprolu Script or 'Kannada-Telugu script' or Kadamba script, also known as 'old Telugu script', owing to its similarity to the same.^[4][5]

Initially, minor changes were made which is now called Tamil Brahmi which has far fewer letters than some of the other Indic scripts as it has no separate aspirated or voiced consonants.

Characteristics

Calligraphy
Arabic Chinese Georgian Indian Islamic Japanese Korean Mongolian Persian Tibetan Western

Some characteristics, which are present in most but not all the scripts, are:

• Each consonant has an inherent vowel which is usually short 'a' (in Bengali, and Assamese, it is short 'ô' due to sound shifts). Other vowels are written by adding to the character. A mark, known in Sanskrit as a virama/halant can be used to indicate the absence of an inherent vowel.
• Each vowel has two forms, an independent form when not part of a consonant, and a dependent form, when attached to a consonant. Depending on the script, the dependent forms can be either placed to the left of, to the right of, above, below, or on both the left and the right sides of the base consonant.
• Consonants (up to 4 in Devanagari) can be combined in ligatures. Special marks are added to denote the combination of 'r' with another consonant.
• Nasalization and aspiration of a consonant's dependent vowel is also noted by separate signs.
• The alphabetical order is: vowels, velar consonants, palatal consonants, retroflex consonants, dental consonants, bilabial consonants, approximants, sibilants, and other consonants. Each consonant grouping had four stops (with all four possible values of voicing and aspiration), and a nasal consonant.

Comparison

Below are comparison charts of several of the major Indic scripts, organised on the principle that glyphs in the same column all derive from the same Brahmi glyph. Accordingly:

• The charts are not comprehensive. Glyphs may be unrepresented if they don't derive from any Brahmi character, but are later inventions.
• The pronunciations of glyphs in the same column may not be identical. The pronunciation row is only representative; the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) pronunciation is given for Sanskrit where possible, or another language if necessary.

The transliteration is indicated in ISO 15919.

Consonants

• Javanese. Letters used in Old Javanese. They are now obsolete, but are used for honorifics in contemporary Javanese.
• Thai. A modified form of the letter is used for, but is not restricted to, Sanskrit and Pali in the Thai script.
• Malayalam. Malayalam nna implemented in Unicode 6.0. May not be rendered correctly.
• Tamil. Pallava grantha letters (not used in actual Tamil) but for transcribing foreign words.

Vowels

Vowels are presented in their independent form on the left of each column, and in their corresponding dependent form (vowel sign) combined with the consonant k on the right. A glyph for ka is an independent consonant letter itself without any vowel sign, where the vowel a is inherent. When used to write their own languages, Khmer can have either an a or an o as the inherent vowel, following the rules of its orthography. Thai and Lao script do not have independent vowel forms, for syllables starting with a vowel sound, a "zero" consonant, อ and ອ, respectively, to represent the glottal stop /ʔ/.

Note: Glyphs for r̥̄, l̥, l̥̄ and a few other glyphs are obsolete or very rarely used.

Numerals

List of Brahmic scripts

Scripts derived from Brahmi.

Historical

A fragment of Ashoka's 6th pillar edict.

Indo-Aryan languages (incl Dogri) using their respective Brahmic family scripts (except dark blue colored- Sindhi, Lahnda, Western Panjabi, Shina, Kashmiri, Urdu- not marked here, which use Arabic derived scripts).

Dravidian languages using their respective Brahmic family scripts (except Brahui which uses Arabic derived script).

The Brahmi script was already divided into regional variants at the time of the earliest surviving epigraphy around the 3rd century BC. Cursives of the Brahmi script began to diversify further from around the 5th century AD and continued to give rise to new scripts throughout the Middle Ages. The main division in antiquity was between northern and southern Brahmi. In the northern group, the Gupta script was very influential, and in the southern group the Vatteluttu and Old-Kannada/Pallava scripts with the spread of Buddhism sent Brahmic scripts throughout Southeast Asia.

Northern Brahmic

• Gupta script, 5th century
  • Sharada, 8th century
    • Landa, 10th century
      • Gurmukhi, 14th century
      • Khojki, 16th century
      • Khudawadi, 1550s
      • Mahajani
      • Multani
    • Takri
  • Siddham, 7th century
    • Assamese script, 13th century
    • Bengali alphabet, 11th century
    • Tibetan script, 7th century
    • 'Phags-pa, 13th century
  • Tirhuta
• Kalinga Alphabet
  • Odia, 10th century
  • Nagari, 8th century
    • Devanagari, 13th century
      • Gujarati, 16th century
      • Modi, 17th century
    • Kaithi, 16th century
    • Sylheti Nagari, 16th century
  • Bhaiksuki
• Nepal
  • Bhujimol, 6th century
  • Ranjana, 12th century
    • Soyombo, 17th century
  • Prachalit
• Anga Lipi, 720
• Mithilakshar, 15th century

Southern Brahmic

(Tamil Brahmi, perhaps 5th or older but certainly 3rd, century BC, Kalinga, Bhattiprolu)

• Proto Kannada
  • Kadamba or Old Kannada, 5th century
  • Pallava, 6th century
    • Kawi script, 8th century
      • Javanese script
    • Mon script
      • Burmese script
    • Ahom, 13th century
    • Tai Tham (Lanna), 14th century
  • Batak, 14th century
    • Chakma, 8th century
• Vatteluttu
  • Tamil script
• Grantha, 6th century
  • Dhives Akuru
  • Malayalam script
  • Tulu script
• Tocharian script ("Slanting Brahmi"), 7th century
• Meeitei Mayek

Unicode

As of Unicode version 9.0, the following Brahmic scripts have been encoded:

See also

• Devanagari transliteration
  • International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration
  • National Library at Kolkata romanization
• Bharati Braille, the unified braille assignments of Indian languages
• Indus script – the earliest writing system on the Indian subcontinent
• ISCII – the coding scheme specifically designed to represent Indic scripts

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Brahmic scripts.

• Online Tool which supports Conversion between various Brahmic Scripts
• Windows Indic Script Support
• An Introduction to Indic Scripts
• South Asian Writing Systems
• Indian Transliterator A means to transliterate from romanised to Unicode Indian scripts.
• Imperial Brahmi Font and Text-Editor
• Brahmi Script
• Xlit: Tool for Transliteration between English and Indian Languages
• Padma: Transformer for Indic Scripts – a Firefox add-on