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The individual abugidas may be called ''Brahmic scripts'' or '''''Indic scripts'''''.


HISTORY


Brahmic scripts are descended from the inscription is conclusive evidence that Brahmi had indigenous origins, probably from the Indus Valley (or Harappan) Script .

The most prominent member of the family is Devanagari , which is used to write several languages of India and Nepal , including Hindi , Marathi , Nepali , and Sanskrit . Other northern Brahmic scripts include the Bengali-Assamese Script , the Oriya Script , the Gujarati Script , and the Gurmukhi Script . The Dravidian Languages of southern India have Brahmic scripts with a rounded appearance as they were traditionally written on Palm leaves, on which straight lines could not easily be formed. Tamil has far fewer letters than some of the other Indic scripts as it has no separate Aspirated or Voiced consonants.

Burmese , Cambodian , Lao , Thai , Javanese , and Tibetan are also written in Brahmic scripts, though with considerable modification to suit their Phonology . The Siddham script was especially important in Buddhism because many Sutra s were written in it, and the art of Siddham Calligraphy survives today in Japan .

Some characteristics, which may not be present in all the scripts are:
  • Each Consonant has an inherent vowel which is usually short 'a' (in Bengali , Oriya , and Assamese , it is short 'ô' due to sound shifts). Other vowels are written by adding to the character. A mark, known in Sanskrit as a Virama can be used to indicate the absence of an inherent consonant.

  • Each vowel has two forms, an independent form when not part of 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 5 in Devanagari) can be combined in Ligature s. 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 traditional ordering can be summarized as follows: Vowels , Velar Consonants , Palatal Consonants , Retroflex Consonants , Dental Consonants , Bilabial Consonants , Approximants , Sibilants , and other consonants. Each consonant grouping had four consonants (with all four possible values of voicing and aspiration), and a nasalised consonant.


Many languages using Brahmic scripts are sometimes written in Latin Script , primarily for the benefit of non-native speakers or for use in computer software without support for said scripts, but these practices have made little headway in South Asia itself.

Urdu , Kashmiri , and Sindhi all primarily use the non-Brahmic Perso-Arabic Script , although they are also written in Devanagari by some in India .


LIST OF BRAHMIC SCRIPTS ENCODED IN UNICODE





OTHER BRAHMIC SCRIPTS



SEE ALSO




EXTERNAL LINKS




REFERENCES


Rastogi, Naresh Prasad 1980.
''Origin of Brāhmī Script: The Beginning of Alphabet in India.''
Varanasi: Chowkhamba Saraswatibhawan.