{"id":430,"date":"2011-05-09T21:20:54","date_gmt":"2011-05-10T04:20:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=430"},"modified":"2011-05-09T21:26:02","modified_gmt":"2011-05-10T04:26:02","slug":"mahajani-1600-ad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/09\/mahajani-1600-ad\/","title":{"rendered":"Mahajani — 1600 AD? <1850 AD?, India"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Mahajani "nn"<\/p><\/div>\n

Mahajani, like the Punjabi Landa<\/a>, was used as a mercantile script (and is sometimes classified with Landa).\u00a0 Unlike Punjabi Landa, which dispenses with vowels altogether, Mahajani is sort of like a sloppy alphabet.\u00a0 It is possible to show a vowel by writing in a separate vowel glyph (not with a diacritic), but the vowel is frequently omitted.\u00a0 Even when a vowel is written, it can be ambiguous: “ka” + “i” can represent either “ki” or “kai”.<\/p>\n

I described Syloti Nagari<\/a> earlier as having “Semitic attitude” towards its writing system, trusting that the readers would understand ambiguous use of vowels.\u00a0 One might suggest that I should say that Mahajani is also somewhat Semitic, or that Syloti Nagari is somewhat like the mercantile Khudawadi<\/a>, Landa, or Mahajani scripts.\u00a0 However, the mercantile scripts were intended for personal or family use, not for communicating with strangers.<\/p>\n

Written Mahanaji sometimes looks like it has a horizontal “head line” like Devanagari, however the glyphs normally do not have a head line.\u00a0 If a head line is written in, it signifies emphasis much like underlining in the Latin script.<\/p>\n

Links: Unicode proposal<\/a>, Wikipedia<\/a> (very skimpy as of 9 May 2011, but it might get better)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mahajani, like the Punjabi Landa, was used as a mercantile script (and is sometimes classified with Landa).\u00a0 Unlike Punjabi Landa, which dispenses with vowels altogether, Mahajani is sort of like a sloppy alphabet.\u00a0 It is possible to show a vowel … 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":[9,18,33,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abjad","category-alphabet","category-mercantile-script","category-unknown"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430","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=430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}