Brahmic family

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The Brahmic scripts are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout South Asia (including Pakistan and Afghanistan), Southeast Asia, and parts of Central and East Asia, and are descended from the Brāhmī script of the ancient India. They are used by languages of several language families: Indo-European, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Mongolic (Soyombo alphabet), Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Tai. They were also the source of the dictionary order of Japanese kana.

History

Brahmic scripts are 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 BCE and published by Coningham et al.,^[1] but scattered press reports have claimed both dates as early as the 6th century BCE and that the characters are identifiably Tamil Brahmi, though these latter claims do not appear to have been published academically.^{[dubious – discuss]} 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 Siddham 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.^[2]

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.^[3][4]

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

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, 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 traditional ordering can be summarised 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.

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

• Malayalam. Malayalam nna implemented in Unicode 6.0. May not be rendered correctly.
• Tamil. Letters not used in actual Tamil, but for transcribing foreign names.
• Javanese. Letters used in Old Javanese. They are now obsolete, but are used for capitalization in contemporary Javanese ortography.

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 and Thai script can have either an a or an o as the inherent vowel, following the rules of their respective orthographies. Thai and Lao script do not have independent vowel forms, for syllables starting with a vowel sound, a zero consonant, อ and ອ respectively, is used as a placeholder.

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

The Brahmi script was already divided into regional variants at the time of the earliest surviving epigraphy around the 3rd century BCE. Cursives of the Brahmi script began to diversify further from around the 5th century CE 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 Hinduism sent Brahmic scripts throughout Southeast Asia.

• Northern Brahmic
  • Gupta script, 5th century
    • Sharada, 8th century
    • Assamese script, 6th century
      • Bengali alphabet, 11th century
    • Siddham, 7th century
      • Phagspa, 13th century
    • Nagari, 8th century
      • Oriya,10th century
      • Devanagari, 13th century
      • Kaithi, Sylheti Nagari, 16th century
      • Modi, 17th century
  • 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 BCE, 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
  • Vatteluttu
    • Tamil script
  • Grantha, 6th century
    • Dhives Akuru and others
• Tocharian script ("Slanting Brahmi"), 7th century
• Meeitei Mayek

Contemporary

See also

Commons has media related to Brahmic scripts.

• Devanagari transliteration
  • International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration
  • National Library at Kolkata romanization
• Indus script — the earliest writing system on the Indian subcontinent
• ISCII — the coding scheme specifically designed to represent Indic scripts

References

External links

• 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
• IndiX: Indian Language support for the Linux Operating System
• Xlit: Tool for Transliteration between English and Indian Languages
• Firefox add-on