Talk:Grantha

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[edit] Accuracy Dispute

I hope someone who really knows about this has looks on this article.

According to my limited exposure to this topic, Grantha refers to those letters in the Tamil alphabet which are not needed to write the Tamil language, but only for transcribing other languages. See also Tamil alphabet.

Hello, as the article says clearly, Grantha is a script used in south India to write sanskrit. So, modern Tamil script has borrowed some characters from Grantha since it gives more range and flexibility in sounds.

I get some Google hits for "Grantha script", but to give a comparison, "Brahmi script" gets 3000 Google hits, whereas "Grantha script" only 200.

Brahmi is much more thoroughly studied and was involved on a wider area, hence more references. Grantha was confined to Tamil world, and the modern Tamils being ashamed of their linguistic heritage don't take much interest in Grantha. Hence less hits.

Pjacobi 11:58, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Actually, the present tamil script itself is derived from Grantha script. Kartheeque 06:40, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

This is the confusing point, the use of "Grantha" for two rather different things. Compare http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn17/tab_to_unicode.pdf where Tamil letters are classifued vowel, consonant and grantha. --Pjacobi 08:06, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Grantha does have two meanings, but they're allied. Grantha originally meant the script used for writing Sanskrit, which was later superseded by Devanagari. In fact, some Sanskrit texts, notably almanacs, are still written in Grantha. Tamil, as you might know, has far fewer letters than Devanagari or Grantha, and in order to transliterate Sanskrit words in Tamil, some Grantha letters were borrowed as-is into Tamil. These are ஶ, ஷ, ஸ, ஹ and ஜ, and are commonly known as "Grantha letters". Ambarish | Talk 18:12, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] More appropriate title

Shouldn't this page should be moved to Grantha script or Grantha (script)? We could then have a disambig page at Grantha which points to:

  • this article,
  • an article Grantha (manuscript) on 'grantha' in the sense of a manuscript (with some details on the material that was used in ancient Tamil manuscripts, how they were made, what was done to worn-out manuscripts, etc.),
  • (possibly) also a pointer to the Guru Granth Saheb. - Vadakkan 15:19, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Please do that. Btw, your recent edits to this article are worth appreciation. -- Sundar 06:19, Dec 6, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Devanagari always used to write Sanskrit?

Devanagari is certainly not the near-universal Sanskrit script in modern times, as implied by the article. Sanskrit can be written phonemically in most Indic scripts except Tamil. Also, there should be some mention of how Malayalam evolved from Manipravalam and how Thunchaththu Ramanujan Ezhuthachan devised the modern Malayalam script from a combination of Grantha and Vattezhuththu. --Grammatical error 06:42, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

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