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The Brahmic or Indic scripts are a family of abugidas used in the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and parts of Central and East Asia, which are descended from the Brāhmī script of northern India. They are used by languages of several language families: Indo-European, Tibeto-Burman, Mongolic, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian, Tai, and possibly Korean. 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 BCE during the reign of Ashoka, who used the script for imperial edicts, but there are some recent finds of epigraphy found on pottery in South India and Sri Lanka, dating back to the 6th century BCE or even earlier (see also Tamil Brahmi).

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 (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.

Southern Brahmi evolved into the Grantha script among others, which in turn diversified into numerous scripts of Southeast Asia.

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^[1][2].

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.

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.

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, 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.

Comparison

Below are comparison charts of several of the major Indic scripts; transliteration is indicated in ISO 15919; pronunciation is indicated in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Pronunciation is taken from Sanskrit where possible, but other languages where necessary. These lists are not comprehensive; some glyphs are unrepresented. Some pronunciations may be inaccurate or different from the ones listed, partly because the graphemically corresponding glyphs listed in the same column are not necessarily phonetically identical.

Consonants

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.

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 Grantha script with the spread of Hinduism spread Brahmic scripts throughout Southeast Asia.

• Northern Brahmic
  • Gupta script, 5th century
    • Sharada, 8th century
    • Siddham, 7th century
      • Phagspa, 13th century
    • Nagari, 8th century
      • Eastern Nagari, 11th century
      • Devanagari, 13th century
      • Kaithi, Sylheti Nagari, 16th century
      • Modi, 17th century
  • Nepal
    • Bhujimol, 6th century
    • Ranjana, 12th century
      • Soyombo, 17th century
    • Prachalit
  • Mithilakshar, 15th century
• Southern Brahmi (Tamil Brahmi, Kalinga, Bhattiprolu)
  • Vatteluttu
  • Grantha, 6th century
    • Dhives Akuru
    • Kawi script, 8th century
      • Batak, 14th century
  • Kadamba, 5th century
• Tocharian script ("Slanting Brahmi"), 7th century
• Ahom, 13th century
• Tai Tham (Lanna), 14th century
• Meeitei Mayek

Contemporary

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.
• Imperial Brahmi Font and Text-Editor
• Brahmi Script
• Padma: Transformer for Indic Scripts – a Firefox add-on

References

ceb:Brahminhong pamilya