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Monthly Archives: May 2011
Dhivas Akuru — 1200 AD, Maldives
The Maldives, despite being a chain of really tiny islands ~400km off the coast of India, was literate enough to develop its own script no later than the 12th century AD. This script was a evolutionary derivative of Grantha. In … Continue reading
Saurashtra — <1880AD, India
The Saurashtra people have a very unsettled past. They lived in Gujarat, but then Gazni Mohammed invaded around 1000 AD and the Saurashtras took off for Devagiri, farther south. They stayed there for two centuries, but then that empire collapsed … Continue reading
Sinhala — 700 AD, Sri Lanka
Sinhala has my vote for the prettiest script on the planet. Sinhala has two sets of characters: the Elu set represents all the spoken Sinhala phonemes, while the Mixed set represents characters for loan words, mostly from Sanskrit and Pali … Continue reading
Posted in Abugida, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!"
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Malayalam — ~830 AD? ~1600 AD, India
The Malayalam script is used in Kerala, the southernmost province on India’s western shore. Kerala has been a destination for trade and travellers for thousands of years; Kerala is the easternmost point on the only surviving map of the Roman … Continue reading
Tamil — 700 AD, India
Tamil is descended in part from Grantha and in part from Vatteluttu. Grantha and Vatteluttu are relatively closely related, and the two were used together for a time, so it was relatively easy to smear the two together. Tamil has … Continue reading
Grantha — 500 AD, India
Around 500 AD, the Tamil people of Southern Inda started using Grantha, a slightly different form of the Brahmi alphabet, to write Sanskrit (the language of sacred Hindu texts), while still continuing to use Vatteluttu to write representations of the … Continue reading
Vatteluttu — 500 AD, India
In southern India, the Tamil people first used the Tamil-Brahmi script, and then over time, developed the Vatteluttu (also called Vattezhuttu) script. From what I can tell, this was an evolutionary change and not a sudden invention. Vatteluttu was used … Continue reading
Tamil-Brahmi — 400 BC?, India
The Brahmi script had two major branches: a northern branch (frequently called Ashokan Brahmi, after the king who put up the Edicts of Ashoka) and a southern (frequenly called Tamil-Brahmi). So far, all the Brahmi-derived scripts that I have described … Continue reading
Lepcha — ~1700 AD, India
The Lepcha script was developed either by prince Phyagdor Namgyal or by the scholar Thikúng Men Salóng sometime around 1700 AD. Although it was pretty clearly derived from Tibetan, which is written left-to-right, early Lepcha was written vertically, probably from … Continue reading
Posted in Abugida, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!"
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Tani Lipi — 2001 AD, India
A gentleman named Tony Koyu designed the Tani Lipi script in 2001 for the Tani group of languages in the far northeast of India. It is explicitly designed to unify the many Tani tribes. There is pretty fierce debate over … Continue reading