Ol Chiki script

Ol Chiki
Type	Alphabet
Languages	Santali language
Direction	Left-to-right
ISO 15924	Olck, 261
Unicode alias	Ol Chiki
Unicode range	U+1C50–U+1C7F

The Ol Chiki (ᱚᱞ ᱪᱤᱠᱤ) script, also known as Ol Cemetʼ (Santali: ol 'writing', cemet' 'learning'), Ol Ciki, Ol, and sometimes as the Santali alphabet, was created in 1925 by Raghunath Murmu for the Santali language.

Previously, Santali had been written with the Latin script. However, Santali is not an Indo-Aryan language (like most other languages in the north of India), and Indic scripts did not have letters for all of Santali's phonemes, especially its stop consonants and vowels, which made writing the language accurately in an unmodified Indic script difficult. The detailed analysis was given by Byomkes Chakrabarti in his "Comparative Study of Santali and Bengali". Missionaries (first of all Paul Olaf Bodding, a Norwegian) brought the Latin script, which is better at representing Santali stops, phonemes and nasal sounds with the use of diacritical marks and accents. Unlike most Indic scripts, which are derived from Brahmi, Ol Chiki is not an abugida, with vowels given equal representation with consonants. Additionally, it was designed specifically for the language, but one letter could not be assigned to each phoneme because the sixth vowel in Ol Chiki is still problematic.

Ol Chiki has 30 letters, the forms of which are intended to evoke natural shapes. The script is written from left to right.

The shapes of the letters are not arbitrary, but reflect the names for the letters, which are words, usually the names of objects or actions representing conventionalized form in the pictorial shape of the characters.

— Norman Zide, ^[1]

Letters

The values of the letters are as follows:

Diacritics

• ᱸ nasal vowel
• ᱹ modified vowel: ᱚᱹ ɔ, ᱟᱹ ə, ᱮᱹ ɛ
• ᱺ nasalized alternate vowel: ᱟᱺ ə̃
• ᱻ vowel length

Digits

The digits 0–9 are ᱐, ᱑, ᱒, ᱓, ᱔, ᱕, ᱖, ᱗, ᱘, ᱙.

Punctuation

• ᱼ hyphen (used to indicate consonants do not become voiced before a vowel)
• ᱽ hyphen (used to indicate consonants do not devoice without a vowel)
• ᱾ minor break
• ᱿ major break

Unicode chart

Ol Chiki script was added to the Unicode Standard in April, 2008 with the release of version 5.1.

The Unicode block for Ol Chiki is U+1C50–U+1C7F:

See also

• Byomkes Chakrabarti
• Santali Latin alphabet

References

External links

• Santali alphabet (Omniglot)