{"id":415,"date":"2011-04-26T23:30:49","date_gmt":"2011-04-27T06:30:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=415"},"modified":"2024-08-10T17:02:13","modified_gmt":"2024-08-11T00:02:13","slug":"syloti-nagari-1550-ad-bangladesh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/26\/syloti-nagari-1550-ad-bangladesh\/","title":{"rendered":"Syloti Nagari — 1550? AD, Bangladesh"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Syloti Nagari “ka”<\/p><\/div>\n

Syloti Nagari, also called Sylheti Nagari, was used in northern India, what is now the Sylhet region of Bangladesh, from around 1550 AD until the 1970s.\u00a0 The region where it was used has been Muslim for a very long time, which might have had interesting effects on the writing system: Syloti Nagari “feels” much more like one of the Semitic abjads than any of the other Brahmi-derived languages.<\/p>\n

Sylhet was conquered by Shah Jalal<\/a>, a Muslim from Yemen, in 1303 AD.\u00a0 More Muslims — mostly Afghans and Central Asians — immigrated to that area as first the Hindu Hemu<\/a> took over, then lost northern India to the Mughal (Turkish-speaking Mongolian Muslim) Akbar<\/a>.\u00a0 Even during the British rule, there were still pockets of people who spoke Persian as their mother tongue in Sylhet.<\/p>\n

Sylhet treats its vowels more cavalierly than most of the Brahmic languages.\u00a0 Most of the Brahmi-derived languages have a virama<\/a> (also called a halant in some languages) to “kill” vowels, but Syloti Nagari did not traditionally have a virama.\u00a0 A virama crept into some — but not all — documents after about 1950 AD.<\/p>\n

Another way that Brahmi-derived writing systems show that there is no vowel is to smoosh two characters together horizontally in a ligature called a conjunct.\u00a0 In many Brahmic writing systems, most glyphs have a vertical line; in the smooshed characters, that line is removed when the vowel is removed.\u00a0 In other Brahmic writing systems, the two characters are smooshed together vertically instead of horizontally.\u00a0 Either way, the idea gets acrossed that the vowel gets smooshed out.\u00a0 While the Sylheti language doesn’t have many consonant clusters in the spoken languages, it does have some; they don’t always use the appropriate conjunct, however.<\/p>\n