Takri — 1550 AD, India

Posted on April 11, 2011 by ducky

Takri "au"

Takri — also called Takkari, Takari, and Tankri — descended from Sharada.  Sharada evolved gradually, and at some point it started being called Devasesa; in the sixteenth century, a version called Takri (used for commerce) became distinct enough from Devasesa (used for administration and ceremony) that it got a separate name.

Then, about a century later, Takri started being used for administrative purposes in some principalities in northern India.  As there were a number of different small princedoms, there was not a strong incentive to standardize across princedoms, and thus there is quite a lot of variation among the glyph shapes in different princedoms, and occasionally different spoken languages with unique phonemes gave rise to unique characters.  However, the users of the different variants consider the variants to all be “Takri”.  (By analogy, Danish and French have characters that do not appear in English, yet English, Danish, and French readers would all consider that the script they write in is Latin script.)

In the 1800s, Takri started losing ground to Devanagari, and ceased being used for official purposes in the mid 1900s.  It is now little-used and in danger of going extinct.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Unicode proposal

Posted in Abugida, Rating: 1 "Dull, only here for completeness" | Leave a comment

Still sick-ish

Posted on April 10, 2011 by ducky

No, I haven’t lost interest, I am still getting over this cold.  I thought I was better; I went in to the office WThFri… but that took a lot more out of me than working from home.  I just couldn’t marshall the energy to write posts.  We’ll see how I do next workweek.

Posted in Administration | 1 Comment

Khojki — 1350 AD, Pakistan

Posted on April 10, 2011 by ducky

Khojki "dda"

Khojki was developed in around 1350 AD by Pir Sadardin in the Sindh region of Pakistan for recording Ismaili (a branch of Shia Islam) religious literature, mostly in the Sindhi language.  As with its sibling Gurmukhi, it is very similar to most other Brahmi-derived scripts, including vowel treatment like most Brahmi scripts (instead of like Punjabi Landa, from which it derives).

If you are reading this, you are probably on a computer with tens of fonts, with hundreds easily available to you.  You probably own a printer capable of printing 5000-1500 pages in eight hours in any of those hundreds of fonts.

This is emphatically not how easy it was for minority languages to reproduce printed material until very recently.  The first printing in Khojki was not until 1903 AD, and required Mr. Laljibhi Devraj to travel from Bombay to Germany for three months to oversee carving of Khojki metal type and arranging to ship it (and him) back to Bombay to use with his press.  For all that effort (and expense), he gained the ability to print about 1000 pages per day in one typeface.  Still, this was a huge improvement over hand-copied manuscripts (~50 pages per day), and he was lionized for this achievement.

Handwritten Khojki uses marks that look like colons to separate words.  (Interestingly, Ga’ez — the only African abugida — also uses that mark for interword separation).  Handwritten Khojki uses several other punctuation marks that other Brahmi-derived scripts use.  However, printed Khojki uses Latin punctuation, like spaces, commas, etc.  I don’t know if this is because Laljibhi Devraj thought the Latin punctuation was visually better somehow, but it is very clear that it is cheaper to use a space than a colon for interword separation: a space type slug needs no specialized skill to create, while carving a colon does, and you would need hundreds if not thousands of interword space characters.

Links: Wikipedia, Unicode proposal

Posted in Abugida, now ceremonial, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!" | Leave a comment

Gurmukhi — 1539 AD, India/Pakistan

Posted on April 10, 2011 by ducky

Gurmurkhi “k” with falling tone

In about 1539 AD, the second Sikh Guru Angad Dev Ji developed a script, Gurmukhi, from Punjabi Landa.  While he used this script to write religious works in several different languages, it came to be a symbol of Punjabi — and Punjabi Sikh specifically — nationalism.

Gurmukhi is an abugida and behaves like the vast majority of the other Brahmi-derived abugidas.  This is a bit surprising.  First, while it is one of very few Indo-European languages to have tones, the tones are not written with diacritics, but with different glyphs for consonants on syllables with a falling tone (vs. with no change).  Second, as you will recall from Sharada, Sharada dropped the vowel diacritics, so Ji had to recreate them based on one of the other Indic scripts (e.g. Devanagari).

In 1947 AD, Pakistan gained independence from India, and things got very ugly.  The old Punjab region (which had historically seen lots of conflict, but been its own country from 1799 to 1849 AD) straddled the border, with more Muslims on the Pakistan side and more Sikhs on the Indian side.  Both sides behaved very badly, killing lots of the minority, with the result that basically all the Pakistani Sikhs fled to India (and stayed there) and basically all the Indian Muslims in Punjab fled to Pakistan (and stayed there).

Today, the Punjabi language is almost always written in Gurmukhi in India, and almost always in Shahmukhi (a variant of Arabic) in Pakistan.  The writing system used is thus a marker for religious and political affiliation.  A similar situation exists in the former Yugoslavia: Serbian and Croatian are essentially the same spoken language, but the mostly-Eastern Orthodox Serbs write in Cyrillic script and the mostly-Roman Catholic Croatians write in Latin script.  (You might recall that the Serbs and Croats also behaved badly towards each other as the former Yugoslavia slowly fell apart.)

While writing apparently first started to make accounting easier, it is also very common for a writing system to be used (or retained) in a purely religious or ceremonial function.  Of the writing systems I have already discussed, Naxi Geba, Naxi Dongba, Sharada, and the Nestorite branch of Syriac are clearly now ceremonial/religious scripts; Oracle bones Chinese was probably principally a religious script.  I will cover many others as I continue this blog.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahmukhi
Posted in Abugida, inventor known, National pride, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!" | 4 Comments

Punjabi Landa — 900 AD, India

Posted on April 5, 2011 by ducky

Landa "jha"

As I mentioned in the Khudawadi post yesterday, merchants simplified Sharada, presumably to let them write more quickly.  In addition to dropping the vowel diacritics, they also used the same character for aspirated (“breathy”) and non-aspirated consonants, and dropped punctuation (including spaces between words).  This happened in both the Khudawadi and Punjabi (AKA Multani) versions of Landa.

As late as 1916 AD, a Westerner noted that Landa was “current all over the Punjab, and is especially used by shop-keepers”.  Wikipedia suggests that part of the reason to use Landa was as a code language, to keep commercial interests private.  If so, that would be another reason why Landa was not particularly well-standardized: it is a language for communicating with oneself, not interpersonally, similar to Naxi Dongba and Naxi Geba.

 

Links: Unicode, Wikipedia Landa, Ancient Scripts Landa, Unicode proposal

Posted in Abugida, mercantile script, private or secret, Rating: 2 "Not all that interesting" | 2 Comments

Khudawadi — 900 AD, Pakistan

Posted on April 4, 2011 by ducky

Khudawadi "bba"

In the tenth century AD, merchants simplified the Sharada script for quick note-taking.  There were a number of common features in their scripts, common enough that the name “Landa” was given to all of these scripts.  However, as Landa was used mostly for quick, mercantile notes, there wasn’t a significant reason to standardize, and so regional variations appeared.  The variations could be classified into two major groupings, one used in Sindh (called Khudawadi) and one in Punjab (called Multani).

One way that the merchants simplified the script was to omit the vowel-changing diacritics.  (Remember, as an abugida, Khudawadi has an inherent vowel, which is changed by adding a diacritic.)  In some sense then, the simplified merchant script was more like an abjad than like an abugida.

In 1860 AD, Khudawadi was regularized and formalized for official use in Sindh, and as part of that, vowel diacritics were added back to Khudawadi.  There are also more characters in Khudawadi than Multani due to there being more phonemes in the Sindhi language than in the Punjabi language.  There are also differences in the glyph shapes and minor differences in the sort order.

Links: Unicode Landa proposal, Unicode Khudawadi proposal, Wikipedia Landa, Ancient Scripts Landa

Ancient Scripts,
Posted in Abugida, mercantile script, Rating: 3 "I did not know that" | 1 Comment

Sharada — 800 AD, India

Posted on April 3, 2011 by ducky

Sharada "k"

Sharada — also called Sarada and Sharda — is descended from Gupta through Kutila (a writing system so obscure that I wasn’t able to find enough to write about, and I have pretty low standards).  Sharada’s use centered in Kashmir, but extended out into what are now neighbouring countries.

It was commonly used from about 800 AD until around 1925 AD.  It did change so much by around 1400 AD that it is commonly given a different name, Devasesa after that.  Sharada doesn’t suit spoken Kashmiri particularly well, and it got pushed out by a variant of Arabic in the 20th century.  Sharada is still used, but only a little bit for ceremonial purposes.

Sharada, like all the Brahmi-derived scripts, is an abugida with little to differentiate it from the other Brahmi-derived scripts.  Like essentially all of the Indic scripts, it has a virama — a diacritic which “kills” the vowel in the syllable, turning the character from a syllable into a consonant.  Unlike most Brahmi-derived scripts, in Sharada, the virama is drawn to the right of the glyph that it modifies.  (Above or below  is more common.)

 

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot, Unicode proposal, Kashmiri Language

Posted in Abugida, now ceremonial, Rating: 2 "Not all that interesting" | 3 Comments

Gupta — 400 AD, India

Posted on April 2, 2011 by ducky

Gupta "sa"

Gupta was an immediate descendant of Brahmi, used in Northern India from about 400-800 AD, and the forerunner of many important scripts of Northern India and the Himalaya.

The Gupta empire was very powerful and important.  “Gupta” is still a common name in India today.

Surviving examples of the script are mostly on stone and iron pillars, and on gold coins.  If you want to leave a message for the future, stamping it on coins is probably a good way to do it.  (I am a little concerned that future archeologists will think that Canadians worshiped loons, beavers, and moose, and that Americans spoke Latin.)

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot, Indic writing systems comparison

Posted in Abugida, Rating: 1 "Dull, only here for completeness" | 5 Comments

Gibberish font — ~2000 AD, USA

Posted on April 1, 2011 by ducky

Gibberish font "I"

There is a highly entertaining site “Hanzismatter” which is dedicated to helping people figure out just what exactly that tattoo they got really says in Chinese or Japanese.

The authors of that site were somewhat puzzled by the number of people with stories of going into a tattoo parlour, asking for their initials, and getting a tattoo that looks like Chinese or Japanese to Western eyes, but which is gibberish in either Chinese or Japanese.  Some of the characters are legitimate characters, but make no sense in combination with the other characters.

The authors finally figured it out.  Somebody sells a design which has an array of characters.  Some are legitimate characters, some are just pieces of legitimate characters (radicals), and some characters are just plain wrong.  Each character in the design is next to a letter of the English alphabet, implying that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the two.

This is so very very wrong that I can’t even figure out how to make an analogy of how wrong it is.  And, while I wish I were pulling your leg with an April Fool’s prank, sadly I am not.

 

Modern culturally-European people are not the only ones who have ever been too lazy to check the authenticity of their glyphs: apparently 15th century Europeans put gibberish Hebrew into their paintings!

Posted in Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!", stupid | 2 Comments

Update: sickness, next scripts, ratings

Posted on March 29, 2011 by ducky

I have not decided to cease work on Glyph of the Day, I’ve just been down with a really nasty cold.  Posting should resume soon, probably tomorrow or the next day.

I am going to launch into the Brahmi-derived languages next.  I am a little nervous about the Indic scripts because there might not be enough differences between the scripts to make more than the first one or two interesting.

I’m considering adding categories to show how interesting I think each of the posts are, with five being “Everybody should read this!” (e.g. Cherokee) and one being “Here for completeness, not very interesting” (e.g. Old Elamite).

If I do that, expect the average of my ratings to be way above 2.5 — I try to make things interesting!

Posted in Administration | 1 Comment