{"id":377,"date":"2011-04-10T12:38:33","date_gmt":"2011-04-10T19:38:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=377"},"modified":"2011-05-29T14:17:46","modified_gmt":"2011-05-29T21:17:46","slug":"khojki-1350-ad-pakistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/10\/khojki-1350-ad-pakistan\/","title":{"rendered":"Khojki &#8212; 1350 AD, Pakistan"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_378\" style=\"width: 110px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/khojkiDda.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-378\" class=\"size-full wp-image-378\" title=\"khojkiDda\" src=\"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/khojkiDda.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\" height=\"92\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-378\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Khojki &quot;dda&quot;<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Khojki was developed in around 1350 AD by <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pir_Sadardin\">Pir Sadardin<\/a> in the Sindh region of Pakistan for recording <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ismailism#Ismaili_Historiography\">Ismaili<\/a> (a branch of Shia Islam) religious literature, mostly in the Sindhi language.\u00a0 As with its sibling <a href=\"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/10\/gurmurkhi-1539-ad-indiapakistan\/\">Gurmukhi<\/a>, it is very similar to most other Brahmi-derived scripts, including vowel treatment like most Brahmi scripts (instead of like <a href=\"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/05\/punjabi-landa-900-ad-india\/\">Punjabi Landa<\/a>, from which it derives).<\/p>\n<p>If you are reading this, you are probably on a computer with tens of fonts, with hundreds easily available to you.\u00a0 You probably own a printer capable of printing 5000-1500 pages in eight hours in any of those hundreds of fonts.<\/p>\n<p>This is emphatically not how easy it was for minority languages to reproduce printed material until very recently.\u00a0 The first printing in Khojki was not until 1903 AD, and required <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ismaili.net\/Source\/mumtaz\/Heroes1\/hero069.html\">Mr. Laljibhi Devraj<\/a> 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.\u00a0 For all that effort (and expense), he gained the ability to print about 1000 pages per day in one typeface.\u00a0 Still, this was a huge improvement over hand-copied manuscripts (~50 pages per day), and he was lionized for this achievement.<\/p>\n<p>Handwritten Khojki uses marks that look like colons to separate words.\u00a0 (Interestingly, Ga&#8217;ez &#8212; the only African abugida &#8212; also uses that mark for interword separation).\u00a0 Handwritten Khojki uses several other punctuation marks that other Brahmi-derived scripts use.\u00a0 However, <em>printed<\/em> Khojki uses Latin punctuation, like spaces, commas, etc.\u00a0 I don&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Links: <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Khojki\">Wikipedia<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/std.dkuug.dk\/JTC1\/SC2\/WG2\/docs\/n3978.pdf\">Unicode proposal<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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.\u00a0 As with its sibling Gurmukhi, it is very similar &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/10\/khojki-1350-ad-pakistan\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/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":[24,16,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abugida","category-now-ceremonial","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377","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=377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}