{"id":222,"date":"2011-02-12T23:45:08","date_gmt":"2011-02-13T07:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=222"},"modified":"2024-08-10T15:59:46","modified_gmt":"2024-08-10T22:59:46","slug":"kharosthi-350-bc-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/12\/kharosthi-350-bc-india\/","title":{"rendered":"Kharosthi — 350 BC, Pakistan"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Kharosthi “cha”<\/p><\/div>\n

The Persian Achaemenid<\/a> Empire conquered huge tracts of Asia in around 500 BC, and held it until about 330 BC.\u00a0 They spread the use of their official language, Aramaic, and with it the Aramaic writing system<\/a>.\u00a0 Near the end of the Achaemenid Empire, the Gandhara culture<\/a> of Pakistan\/Afghanistan developed a writing system that probably came from Aramaic, but with additions to handle the different sounds of their language.<\/p>\n

It was deciphered using bilinual Greek-Kharosthi coins.\u00a0 Yes, Greek.\u00a0 (Shortly after the development of Kharosthi, Alexander the Great swept through, bringing not only war and destruction, but also Greek colonists<\/a> in his wake.)<\/p>\n

While Kharosthi has enough clues to make scholars think it came from Aramaic, it is a very different form of writing system: an abugida<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 Abugidas write vowels, but the vowels are written as decorations upon the consonants as opposed to being letters in their own right.\u00a0 In addition, abugidas usually have a “default value” vowel which does not get diacritics.\u00a0 (This is different from the vowel pointing that modern Hebrew and Arabic have, in that vowel pointing is optional and Kharosthi diacritics are not.)\u00a0 The default vowel in Kharosthi is an “a”: glyphs for “consonant plus ‘a'” were undecorated, but otherwise the other vowel’s diacritic would be added to the glyph.<\/p>\n

Kharosthi also has a character for an isolated vowel (which only happens at the beginning of a word).\u00a0 If it is an “a”, then the vowel glyph doesn’t have any decoration; if it is one of the other vowels, it gets a diacritic.\u00a0 Consonant clusters were shown by smooshing the characters together closely, maybe even making it a ligature.\u00a0 In addition, there are a few diacritics for modifying vowels (e.g. to lengthen the vowel) and a few to modify consonants (e.g. to aspirate).<\/p>\n

How did they come up with this idea?\u00a0 Perhaps they came up with it themselves, but perhaps they were influenced by Old Persian cuneiform<\/a>, which died out in around 300 BC.\u00a0 Old Persian also had “a” as a default-value vowel, but it had separate glyphs for the non-default vowels instead of them being decorations on the consonants.<\/p>\n

Unlike other Indic scripts, but like Aramaic, Kharosthi is written from right to left.<\/p>\n

Links: Wikipedia<\/a>, Ancient Scripts<\/a>, Omniglot<\/a>, Unicode proposal<\/a> (which has some discussion of the writing system mechanics, including the diacritics)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Persian Achaemenid Empire conquered huge tracts of Asia in around 500 BC, and held it until about 330 BC.\u00a0 They spread the use of their official language, Aramaic, and with it the Aramaic writing system.\u00a0 Near the end of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,11,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abugida","category-previous-script-didnt-quite-work","category-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}