{"id":494,"date":"2011-05-28T21:06:23","date_gmt":"2011-05-29T04:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=494"},"modified":"2011-05-29T12:57:18","modified_gmt":"2011-05-29T19:57:18","slug":"malayalam-830-ad-1600-ad-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/28\/malayalam-830-ad-1600-ad-india\/","title":{"rendered":"Malayalam — ~830 AD? ~1600 AD, India"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Malayalam "nya"<\/p><\/div>\n

The Malayalam script is used in Kerala, the southernmost province on India’s western shore.\u00a0 Kerala has been a destination for trade and travellers for thousands of years; Kerala is the easternmost point on the only surviving map of the Roman postal service<\/a>, for example.<\/p>\n

The script has had a long evolution, which makes assigning one date difficult. However, the evolution of the Malayalam script is punctuated with three significant events.<\/p>\n

Background: <\/strong>The Malayalam spoken language was originally written in Vatteluttu<\/a>.\u00a0 Like in the Tamil-speaking areas, most people moved to a hybrid of Grantha<\/a> for for Sanskrit (in the Indo-European or Aryan language family), and Vatteluttu for the local language (in the Dravidian language family).\u00a0 This hybrid was commonly called Arya-eluttu.<\/p>\n

First significant event:<\/strong> Around 1600 AD, the poet Thunchath Ezhuthachan<\/a> wrote his poetry in the Malayalam language, but based on Sanskrit themes, using Arya-eluttu.\u00a0 When he needed a sound that was not in Arya-eluttu, he would use the Vatteluttu glyph.\u00a0 His poetry was wildly popular, and served to popularize the Arya-eluttu hybrid.\u00a0 It was not a perfect fit for the Malayalam language, as there were some distinctions that the script did not capture.<\/p>\n

Second significant event: <\/strong>In around 1850 AD, a German missionary named Hermann Gundert<\/a> published the first Malayalam-English dictionary, a Malayalam grammar, and a Malayalam translation of the Bible.\u00a0 Gundert also added a few new vowel diacritics to disambiguate the vowels, and they stuck.\u00a0 (This is the first time that I noticed that a foreigner made a change to a writing system that stuck!)<\/p>\n

Third significant event: <\/strong>In 1969-1971 AD, the government reformed the script.\u00a0 In particular, they separated ligatures into independent glyphs.\u00a0 For example, diacritics which modified the vowel were subsequently written with two separate (non-conjoined) glyphs, the modifier to the right of the modified glyph.\u00a0 (Presumably this was to make printing with movable type easier.)\u00a0 They also eliminated some (but not all) consonant conjuncts.<\/p>\n

Malayalam has a virama (called chandrakkala<\/em> in Malayalam) to kill vowels, but also has six special consonants (called chillus<\/em>) which never have a vowel following them.\u00a0 The chandrakkala is written above the consonant glyph, not to its right like the vowel diacritics; I guess there were limits to how much they were willing to reform the language in 1970 AD.<\/p>\n

Malayalam, like Tamil, was written on palm leaves, which enforced a very curvaceous style.\u00a0 Like Tamil, it is a very pretty script.<\/p>\n

Links: Technology Development for Indian Languages<\/a>, Wikipedia<\/a>, Omniglot<\/a>, Ancient Scripts<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Malayalam script is used in Kerala, the southernmost province on India’s western shore.\u00a0 Kerala has been a destination for trade and travellers for thousands of years; Kerala is the easternmost point on the only surviving map of the Roman … 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":[24,21,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abugida","category-evolved-from-parent","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494","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=494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}