{"id":477,"date":"2011-05-19T21:37:14","date_gmt":"2011-05-20T04:37:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=477"},"modified":"2011-05-22T23:05:03","modified_gmt":"2011-05-23T06:05:03","slug":"tamil-brahmi-400-bc-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/19\/tamil-brahmi-400-bc-india\/","title":{"rendered":"Tamil-Brahmi — 400 BC?, India"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Early Tamil-Brahmi "ma"<\/p><\/div>\n

The Brahmi script had two major branches: a northern branch (frequently called Ashokan Brahmi, after the king<\/a> who put up the Edicts of Ashoka<\/a>) and a southern (frequenly called Tamil-Brahmi).\u00a0 So far, all the Brahmi<\/a>-derived scripts that I have described were from the Northern branch, with the possible exception of Oriya<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Tamil-Brahmi is a bit different from Ashokan Brahmi.\u00a0 It has characters for sounds not found in Ashokan Brahmi; it went through three different phases trying to deal with terminal consonants.<\/p>\n

The first attempt was alphabetic: the inherent vowel didn’t exist, and if you wanted a vowel, you needed to put a diacritic.\u00a0 The second thing they tried was to make the reader figure out if there was a vowel there or not.\u00a0 The third thing — and what they stuck with — was to use a pulli<\/em>, which is just a different name for virama<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There is evidence<\/a> that literacy in Tamil-Brahmi was higher than Ashokan\u00a0 Brahmi.\u00a0 A strong bardic\/poetic tradition, local rule (in the local language, instead of a foreign elite’s language imposed upon them), and extensive seafaring trade from their long coastline all contributed to making literacy more common.<\/p>\n

Links: Wikipedia Tamil-Brahmi<\/a>, Wikipedia Tamil history<\/a>, Ponniyin Selvan I<\/a>, II<\/a>, and III<\/a>, Saigan<\/a><\/p>\n

Update: Ooops, I said that all the previous posts were Southern Brahmi scripts, while I meant to say Northern.\u00a0 Fixed.<\/em><\/p>\n

Update2: Found out more about how Tamil-Brahmi handled terminal consonants.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Brahmi script had two major branches: a northern branch (frequently called Ashokan Brahmi, after the king who put up the Edicts of Ashoka) and a southern (frequenly called Tamil-Brahmi).\u00a0 So far, all the Brahmi-derived scripts that I have described … 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":[24,15,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abugida","category-first-in-its-area","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477","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=477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}