Brahmic family of scripts

The Brahmic family is a family of syllabaries (writing systems) used in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and parts of Central Asia and East Asia, descended from the Brāhmī script of Mauryan India.

The individual syllabaries may be called Brahmic scripts or Indic scripts.

History

An inscription in Old Tamil script (Vatteluttu) from the Later Chola period, circa 11th century AD. Old Tamil is a direct descendant of the Brahmi writing system

Brahmic scripts are descended from the Brāhmī script of ancient India, the earliest attested source of which being the Vikramkhol inscription. Most scholars believe that Brahmi originated from or was at least inspired by the Semitic Aramaic alphabet.^[1][2] Others speculate that Brahmi may have had an origin indigenous to the Indian subcontinent via the Indus script. This script may, in turn, have derived from Sumerian cuneiform, or it may have been developed separately from any other script.^[3]

The most prominent member of the family is Devanagari, which is used to write several languages of India and Nepal, including Hindi, Konkani, Marathi, Nepali, Nepal Bhasa and Sanskrit. Other northern Brahmic scripts include the Eastern Nagari script, which is used to write Bengali, Assamese, Bishnupriya Manipuri, and other eastern Indic languages, the Oriya script, the Gujarāti script, the Ranjana script, the Prachalit script, the Bhujimol script, the Modi and the Gurmukhi script. The Dravidian languages of southern India have some aspects of Brahmic scripts but share very little structural characteristics with the Northern scripts giving credence to the theory that they originated indigenously and separately from the northern Indo-European family of languages. The earliest evidence for Brahmi script in South India comes from Bhattiprolu in Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh^[4]. Bhattiprolu was a great centre of Buddhism during 3rd century CE and from where Buddhism spread to east Asia. The present Telugu script is derived from Bhattiprolu Script or 'Kannada-Telugu script', also known as 'old Kannada script', owing to its similarity to the same^{[5] [6]}.

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. Later under the influence of Granta vetteluthu evolved which looks similar to present day malayalam script. Still further changes were made in 19th and 20th centuries to make use of printing and typewriting needs before we have the present script.

Burmese, Cambodian, Lao, Thai, Javanese, Balinese and Tibetan are also written in Brahmic scripts, though with considerable modification to suit their phonology. The Siddham (kanji: 悉曇, modern Japanese pronunciation: shittan) script was especially important in Buddhism because many sutras were written in it, and the art of Siddham calligraphy survives today in Japan. these areas were once ruled and controlled by people of the Southern kingdoms and so their languages show evidence of being influenced more by southern script (i.e. no line running through the top of words).

Some characteristics, which may not be present in all the scripts are:

• Each consonant has an inherent vowel which is usually short 'a' (in Bengali, Oriya, 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 5 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 traditional ordering can be summarized as follows: vowels, velar consonants, palatal consonants, retroflex consonants, dental consonants, bilabial consonants, approximants, sibilants, and other consonants. Each consonant grouping had four consonants (with all four possible values of voicing and aspiration), and a nasalised consonant.

Many languages using Brahmic scripts are sometimes written in Latin script, primarily for the benefit of non-native speakers or for use in computer software without support for said scripts.

Professor Gari Ledyard has hypothesized that the hangul script used to write Korean is based on the Mongol Phagspa script, a descendant of the Brahmic family via Tibetan.

Comparison

Below are comparison charts of several of the major Indic scripts; pronunciation is indicated in National Library at Calcutta romanization and IPA. Pronunciation is taken from Sanskrit where possible, but other languages where necessary. These lists are not comprehensive; some glyphs are unrepresented. Some pronunciations are different from the ones listed.

Consonants

Vowels

Vowels are presented in their independent form on the left of each column, and combined with the corresponding consonant ka on the right.

Numerals

List of Brahmic scripts encoded in Unicode

Brahmi script - Kanheri Caves

• Balinese
• Baybayin (Tagalog)
• Buhid
• Burmese (Myanmar)
• Cham - added in Unicode 5.1
• Devanagari
• Eastern Nagari (Bengali, Assamese, etc.)
• Gujarati
• Gurmukhi
• Hanunó'o
• Javanese
• Kannada
• Khmer
• Lao
• Lepcha - added in Unicode 5.1
• Limbu
• Lontara (Buginese)
• Malayalam
• New Tai Lue
• Oriya
• Phagspa
• Rejang - added in Unicode 5.1
• Saurashtra - added in Unicode 5.1
• Sinhala
• Sundanese - added in Unicode 5.1
• Sylheti Nagari
• Tagbanwa
• Tai Le
• Tamil
• Telugu
• Thai
• Tibetan

Other Brahmic scripts

A name board on a Buddhist temple in Chiang Mai written in Tai Tham characters.

• Ahom
• Batak
• Bhujimol
• Brahmi
• Burmese script with modifications
  • Eastern and Western Pwo Karen
  • Geba Karen
  • Kayah
  • Mon
  • Rumai Palaung
  • S'gaw Karen
  • Shan
• Chakma
• Divehi Akuru - extinct
• Golmol
• Grantha
• Gupta
• Hangul - hypothesized
• Javanese
• Kadamba
• Kaithi
• Kutila
• Tai Tham
• Litumol
• Meeitei Mayek
• Mithilakshar
• Modi
• Nepal
• Prachalit
• Ranjana
• Sharada
• Siddham
• Soyombo
• Tai Dam
• Varang Kshiti

Brahmic-like scripts

• Kharosthi script
• Thaana
• Tocharian - extinct

See also

• ISCII — the coding scheme specifically designed to represent Indic scripts.

External links

• Windows Indic Script Support
• An Introduction to Indic Scripts
• South Asian Writing Systems
• Indian Transliterator A means to transliterate from romanized to Unicode Indian scripts.
• Bonji Siddham Character & Pronunciation
• Imperial Brahmi Font and Text-Editor
• Brahmi Script

References