Brahmic scripts
Family of abugida writing systems
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Through Writing system, South Asia and East Asia
History
Brahmic scripts descended from the Brahmi script. Brahmi is clearly attested from the 3rd century BCE during the reign of Ashoka, who used the script for imperial edicts. Northern Brahmi gave rise to the Gupta script during the Gupta period, which in turn diversified into a number of cursives during the medieval period. Notable examples of such medieval scripts, developed by the 7th or 8th century, include Nagari, Siddham and Sharada.
The Siddhaṃ script was especially important in Buddhism, as many sutras were written in it. The art of Siddham calligraphy survives today in Japan. The tabular presentation and dictionary order of the modern kana system of Japanese writing is believed to be descended from the Indic scripts, most likely through the spread of Buddhism.
Southern Brahmi evolved into the Kadamba, Pallava and Vatteluttu scripts, which in turn diversified into other scripts of South India and Southeast Asia. Brahmic scripts spread in a peaceful manner, Indianization, or the spread of Indian learning. The scripts spread naturally to Southeast Asia, at ports on trading routes. At these trading posts, ancient inscriptions have been found in Sanskrit, using scripts that originated in India. At first, inscriptions were made in Indian languages, but later the scripts were used to write the local Southeast Asian languages. Hereafter, local varieties of the scripts were developed. By the 8th century, the scripts had diverged and separated into regional scripts.
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Characteristics
Some characteristics, which are present in most but not all the scripts, are:
- Each consonant has an inherent vowel which is usually a short ‘ə’ (in Bengali, Assamese and Odia, the phoneme is /ɔ/ due to sound shifts). Other vowels are written by adding to the character. A mark, known in Sanskrit as a virama/halanta/hasanta, can be used to indicate the absence of an inherent vowel, although it is rarely used.
- Each vowel has two forms, an independent form when not attached to a consonant, and a dependent form, when attached to a consonant. Depending on the script, the dependent forms can be either placed to the left of, to the right of, above, below, or on both the left and the right sides of the base consonant.
- Consonants (up to 4 in Devanagari) can be combined in ligatures. Special marks are added to denote the combination of 'r' with another consonant.
- Nasalization and aspiration of a consonant's dependent vowel is also noted by separate signs.
- The alphabetical order is: vowels, velar consonants, palatal consonants, retroflex consonants, dental consonants, bilabial consonants, approximants, sibilants, and other consonants. Each consonant grouping had four stops (with all four possible values of voicing and aspiration), and a nasal consonant.
Comparison
Below are comparison charts of several of the major Indic scripts, organised on the principle that glyphs in the same column all derive from the same Brahmi glyph. Accordingly:
- The charts are not comprehensive. Glyphs may be unrepresented if they are later inventions not derived from any Brahmi character.
- The pronunciations of glyphs in the same column may not be identical. The pronunciation row is only representative; the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) pronunciation is given for Sanskrit where possible, or another language if necessary.
The transliteration is indicated in ISO 15919.
Consonants
This list tries to include characters of same origins, not same sounds.
- Notes
Vowels
Vowels are presented in their independent form on the left of each column, and in their corresponding dependent form (vowel sign) combined with the consonant k on the right. A glyph for ka is an independent consonant letter itself without any vowel sign, where the vowel a is inherent.
Notes
Numerals
Notes
List of Brahmic scripts
Historical
The Brahmi script was already divided into regional variants at the time of the earliest surviving epigraphy around the 3rd century BC. Cursives of the Brahmi script began to diversify further from around the 5th century AD and continued to give rise to new scripts throughout the Middle Ages. The main division in antiquity was between northern and southern Brahmi. In the northern group, the Gupta script was very influential, and in the southern group the Vatteluttu and Kadamba/Pallava scripts with the spread of Buddhism sent Brahmic scripts throughout Southeast Asia.
Northern Brahmic
- Gupta, 4th century
- Tocharian (Slanting Brahmi)
Southern Brahmic
- Tamil-Brahmi, 2nd century BC
- Pallava
- Vatteluttu
- Kolezhuthu
- Malayanma
- Sinhala
- Bhattiprolu script
- Kadamba
Unicode of Brahmic scripts
As of Unicode version 18.0, the following Brahmic scripts have been encoded: