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- developed by illiterate(s)
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- previous script didn't quite work
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- revealed in a dream
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Author Archives: ducky
Sora Sompeng — 1936 AD, India
In the history of writing systems, it is not uncommon for people create writing systems based on dreams or visions. It is also not uncommon for writing systems to have particular religious significance. It *is* somewhat rare for people to … Continue reading
Gondi — 1928 AD, India
Gondi was developed by a gentleman named Munshi Mangal Singh Masaram, to be used in central India to write the Gondi language. (In India, it almost appears that people don’t take a spoken language (and hence ethnicity) seriously unless it … Continue reading
Thanna — 1700 AD, Maldives
Thaana, used in the island chain of the Maldives off of the Indian coast, is one of the very very few alphabetic or abugida writing systems whose glyphs (apparently) are not ultimately derived from Proto-Sinaitic. Like most blanket statements on … Continue reading
Tulu — 1500 AD, India
There are arguments about whether the Tulu script descended from the Malayalam script or whether Malayalam descended from Tulu. I tend to believe the camp which posits that there was a single script, derived from Grantha, which diverged into Tulu … Continue reading
Telugu – 1300 AD, India
The Telugu script, like the Kannada script, derived from the Old Kannada script. In fact, the demarcation between Kannada and Old Kannada is when Telugu and Kannada started to diverge. If there hadn’t been the Telugu branch, scholars would probably … Continue reading
Kannada — 1300 AD, India
Not surprisingly, Kannada evolved gradually from Old Kannada. As such, it is tricky to specify a date when Kannada split from Old Kannada; I’ve seen dates between 1100 AD (when the first differences appeared) to 1800 AD (when, under the … Continue reading
Posted in Abugida, Rating: 2 "Not all that interesting"
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Old Kannada — 1100 AD, India
Old Kannada, also called Halegannada, Proto-Kannada, and Old Karanese, developed from Kadamba. It has evolved into present-day Kannada and Telugu, but has a couple of characters which are no longer used, including “rra” (shown illustrating this posting). Links: Wikipedia, Ancient … Continue reading
Kadamba — 400 AD, India
Kadamba derived from Bhattiprolu script, and was the ancestor of two more modern scripts, Kannada and Telugu. There is very little information about the script. It is even sometimes called “Pre-Old-Kannada script”, which just goes to show how little of … Continue reading
Bhattiprolu — 100 BC, India
Bhattiprolu is a very close variant of Brahmi script. Some inscriptions were found at a site in Andhra Pradesh — on the Eastern coast of India, a bit south of the north-south center line but not yet at the southern … Continue reading
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