{"id":444,"date":"2011-05-16T19:37:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-17T02:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=444"},"modified":"2011-05-17T21:11:57","modified_gmt":"2011-05-18T04:11:57","slug":"varang-chiti-1963-ad-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/16\/varang-chiti-1963-ad-india\/","title":{"rendered":"Varang Chiti &#8212; 1963 AD?, India"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_468\" style=\"width: 110px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/varangKshitiHa.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-468\" class=\"size-full wp-image-468\" title=\"varangKshitiHa\" src=\"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/varangKshitiHa.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\" height=\"94\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-468\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Varang Chiti &quot;ha&quot;<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The Ho language is a minority language in northeastern India, but in India, minority languages can have a large number of speakers: there are over a million Ho speakers.<\/p>\n<p>At some point in the 20th century, a gentleman named Lako Bodra developed or discovered the Varang Chiti writing system.\u00a0 Bodra asserted that the Varang Chiti script was invented in the 13th century by <a title=\"Dhawan Turi (page does not exist)\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/w\/index.php?title=Dhawan_Turi&amp;action=edit&amp;redlink=1\">Dhawan Turi<\/a>, and that it was revealed to Bodra in a dream.\u00a0 He modernized it, and released it to the world.\u00a0 Note that this is not an uncommon story: I will describe more cases in later posts where an ancient script was revealed to someone in modern times who popularized it.<\/p>\n<p>Like Santali, which I mentioned in yesterday&#8217;s post on <a href=\"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/15\/ol-chiki-1925-ad-india\/\">Ol Chiki<\/a>, Ho is an Austro-Asiatic language, somewhat related to Santali.<\/p>\n<p>Varang Chiti is an abugida, but a somewhat unusual one.\u00a0 Most Brahmi-derived writing systems have a default vowel attached to consonants that can be changed with diacritics or killed with a virama.\u00a0 Varang Chiti is similar, but while most Brahmi-derived writing systems have the same default vowel for all of their consonant+vowel syllables, Varang Chiti has a different vowel for different syllables.<\/p>\n<p>Links: <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Varang_Kshiti\">Wikipedia<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/writing\/varangkshiti.htm\">Omniglot<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.swarthmore.edu\/SocSci\/langhotspots\/Ho\/alphabet.html\">Swarthmore<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lisindia.net\/Ho\/Ho_Hist.html\">LisIndia<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Ho language is a minority language in northeastern India, but in India, minority languages can have a large number of speakers: there are over a million Ho speakers. At some point in the 20th century, a gentleman named Lako &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/16\/varang-chiti-1963-ad-india\/\">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":[24,34,25,28,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abugida","category-inventor-known","category-national-pride","category-interesting","category-revealed-in-a-dream"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444","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=444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}