Brahmic family

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The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas (writing systems) used in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria.

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

History

Brahmic scripts are descended from the Brāhmī script of ancient India, which according to evangelists, descended from a Semitic script^{[citation needed]}, thus they may have a common ancestor with the European scripts. However, some academics (see references in Rastogi 1980:88-98) believe that the Viramkhol inscription is conclusive evidence that Brahmi had indigenous origins, probably from the Indus Valley (Harappan) script.

The most prominent member of the family is Devanagari, which is used to write several languages of India and Nepal, including Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Nepal Bhasa and Sanskrit. Other northern Brahmic scripts include the Bengali-Assamese script, the Oriya script, the Gujarati script, the Ranjana script, the Prachalit script, the Bhujimol script and the Gurmukhi script. The Dravidian languages of southern India have Brahmic scripts with a rounded appearance (like in Telugu), as they were traditionally written on palm leaves, on which straight lines could not easily be formed. Tamil has far fewer letters than some of the other Indic scripts as it has no separate aspirated or voiced consonants.

Brahmi Script Chart

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.

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 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, but these practices have made little headway in South Asia itself.

Urdu, Kashmiri, and Sindhi all primarily use the non-Brahmic Perso-Arabic script, although they are also written in Devanagari by some in India.

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.

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

• Balinese - accepted for Unicode 5.0
• Batak - added in Unicode 4.1
• Baybayin
• Bengali
• Buhid
• Devanagari
• Gujarati
• Gurmukhi
• Hanunó'o
• Javanese
• Kannada
• Khmer
• Lao
• Lepcha
• Limbu
• Malayalam
• Myanmar
• New Tai Lue
• Oriya
• 'Phags-pa - accepted for Unicode 5.0
• Rejang
• Sinhala
• Syloti Nagri - added in Unicode 4.1
• Tagbanwa
• Tai Le
• Tamil
• Telugu
• Thai
• Tibetan

Other Brahmic Scripts

• Ahom
• Brahmi
• Chakma
• Cham
• Grantha
• Hangul (partially Brahmic)
• Lanna
• Manchu
• Mithilakshar
• Ranjana
• Siddham
• Soyombo
• Tocharian - Extinct

See also

• Kharosthi alphabet
• 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

Rastogi, Naresh Prasad 1980.Origin of Brāhmī Script: The Beginning of Alphabet in India.Varanasi: Chowkhamba Saraswatibhawan.

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