Brahmi script

Brāhmī
File:Asoka1.gif
Script type	Abugida
Time period	6th century BC to c. 3rd century CE
Direction	Left-to-right
Languages	Indian subcontinent
Related scripts
Parent systems	Proto-Canaanite alphabet Phoenician alphabet Aramaic alphabet Brāhmī
Child systems	Gupta, Pallava, and numerous others in the Brahmic family of scripts.
Sister systems	Kharoshthi
ISO 15924
ISO 15924	Brah (300), ​Brahmi
Unicode
Unicode alias	Brahmi

Brāhmī is the modern name given to the oldest members of the Brahmic family of alphabets. The earliest known Brahmi inscriptions date back to 6th century BC, found in various parts of South India and Sri Lanka. The best known inscriptions in Brāhmī are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dated to the 3rd century BCE. These were considered the earliest known examples of Brāhmī writing for a long time until new discoveries shed new light on the subject. The script was deciphered in 1837 by James Prinsep, an archaeologist, philologist, and official of the British East India Company.

Brāhmī was an abugida—a consonantal script augmented by diacritics for vowels. It was innovative in its presentation, with the alphabet arranged in a grid (varga) according to phonetic principles.

Brāhmī was ancestral to most of the scripts of South Asia, Southeast Asia, some Central Asian scripts like Tibetan and Khotanese.. The alphabetic order Brāhmī was adopted as the modern order of Japanese kana, though the letters themselves are unrelated.

Origin hypothesis and earliest attestations

File:Sanskrit Brhama English alphabets.JPG

Connections between Phoenician (4th column) and Brahmi (5th column). Note that 6th- to 4th-century BCE Aramaic (not shown) is in many cases intermediate in form between the two.

Brāhmī is believed by most scholars to be derived or at least influenced by a Semitic script such as the Imperial Aramaic alphabet, as was clearly the case for the contemporary Kharosthi alphabet that arose in a part of northwest Indian under the control of the Achaemenid Empire. A possibility is with the Achaemenid conquest in the late 6th century BCE, or that it was a planned invention under Ashoka as a prerequiste for his edicts.

A glance at the oldest Brāhmī inscriptions shows striking parallels with contemporary Aramaic for the phonemes that are equivalent between the two languages, especially if the letters are flipped to reflect the change in writing direction. (Aramaic is written from right to left, as was Brāhmī originally, whereas Brāhmī later came to be written from left to right.) For example, both Brāhmī and Aramaic g resemble Λ; both Brāhmī and Aramaic t resemble ʎ, etc.

However, Semitic is not a good phonological match to Indic, so any Semitic alphabet would have needed extensive modification to represent Brahmi. Indeed, this is the most convincing circumstantial evidence for a link: The similarities between the scripts are just what one would expect from such an adaptation. For example, Aramaic did not distinguish dental from retroflex stops; in Brāhmī the dental and retroflex series are graphically very similar, as if both had been derived from a single prototype. Aramaic did not have Brāhmī’s aspirated consonants (kʰ, tʰ), whereas Brāhmī did not have Aramaic's emphatic consonants (q, ṭ, ṣ); and it appears that these emphatic letters were used for Brāhmī's aspirates: Aramaic q for Brāhmī kh, Aramaic ṭ (Θ) for Brāhmī th (ʘ). And just where Aramaic did not have a corresponding emphatic stop, p, Brāhmī seems to have doubled up for its aspirate: Brāhmī p and ph are graphically very similar, as if taken from the same source in Aramaic p. The first letters of the alphabets also match: Brāhmī a, which resembled a reversed κ, looks a lot like Aramaic alef, which resembled Hebrew א. (See the illustration above for some examples.)

According to many Indian scholars and a few English scholars G.R. Hunter and F. Raymond Allchin, Brāhmī was a purely indigenous development, perhaps with the Indus script as its predecessor. In northern India, there is a gap of over a millennium between the Indus script and Brāhmī, but early fragments of Brāhmī from Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu include samples that may be pre-Mauryan. Since the Indus script survived longest in the south, the gap with Brāhmī may be shorter there.

Early regional variants

Recent claims for early dates include fragments of pottery from the trading town of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, which have been dated to between the 6th and the early 4th centuries BCE; and on pieces of pottery in Adichanallur, Tamil Nadu, which have been radio-carbon dated to the 6th century BCE.

The earliest linguistic evidence of Brahmi script in a Dravidian language comes from Bhattiprolu in Andhra Pradesh ca. 400 BCE. The Bhattiprolu script was written on an urn containing Buddhist relics. The languages were Prakrit and old Telugu. Twenty-three letters have been identified. The letters ga and sa are similar to Mauryan Brahmi, while bha and da resemble those of modern Telugu script.

Ashokan inscriptions

A fragment of Ashoka's 6th pillar edict.

Brāhmī is clearly attested from the 3rd century BCE during the reign of Ashoka, who used the script for imperial edicts. It has commonly been supposed that the script was developed at around this time, both from the paucity of earlier dated examples, the alleged unreliability of those earlier dates, and from the geometric regularity of the script, which some have taken to be evidence that it had been recently invented.

Characteristics

Some common variants of Brahmic letters

The Brāhmī symbol for /ka/, modified to represent different vowels

Brāhmī is usually written from left to right, as in the case of its descendants. However, a coin of the 4th century BCE has been found inscribed with Brāhmī running from right to left, as in Aramaic.

Brāhmī is an abugida, meaning that each letter represents a consonant, while vowels are written with obligatory diacritics. When no vowel is written, the vowel /a/ is understood. Special conjunct consonants are used to write consonant clusters such as /pr/ or /rv/.

Vowels following a consonant are written by diacritics, but initial vowels have dedicated letters. There are three vowels in Brāhmī, /a, i, u/; long vowels are derived from the letters for short vowels. However, there are only five vowel diacritics, as short /a/ is understood if no vowel is written.

Punctuation

Punctuation can be perceived as more of an exception than as a general rule in Asokan Brāhmī. For instance, distinct spaces in between the words appear frequently in the pillar edicts but not so much in others. ("Pillar edicts" refers to the texts that are inscribed on the stone pillars oftentimes with the intention of making them public.) The idea of writing each word separately was not consistently used.

In early Brāhmī period, the existence of punctuation marks is not very well shown. Each letter has been written independently with some space between words and edicts occasionally.

In the middle period, the system seems to be in progress. The use of a dash and a curved horizontal line is found. A flower mark seems to mark the end, and a circular mark appears to indicate the full stop. There seem to be varieties of full stop.

In the late period, the system of interpuctuation marks gets more complicated. For instance, there are four different forms of vertically slanted double dashes that resemble "//" to mark the completion of the composition. Despite all the decorative signs that were available during the late period, the signs remained fairly simple in the inscriptions. One of the possible reasons may be that engraving is restricted while writing is not.

Four basic forms of the punctuation marks can be cited as: 1) dash or horizontal bar, 2) vertical bar, 3) dot, 4) circle.

Descendants

Main article: Brahmic family of scripts

Over the course of a millennium, Brāhmī developed into numerous regional scripts, commonly classified into a more rounded Southern India group and a more angular Northern India group. Over time, these regional scripts became associated with the local languages. Alphabets of the Southern group spread with Hinduism and Buddhism into Southeast Asia, while the Northern group spread into Tibet. Today descendants of Brāhmī are used throughout India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and in scattered enclaves in Indonesia, southern China, Vietnam, and the Philippines. As the script of Buddhist scripture, Brahmic alphabets are used for religious purposes throughout China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

Gary Ledyard has been suggested that the basic letters of hangul were taken from the Phagspa script of the Mongol Empire, itself a derivative of the Brahmic Tibetan alphabet. Canadian Aboriginal syllabics also show systematic similarity with principles and characters of Brāhmī.

See also

• Indian inscriptions

Further reading

• Kenneth R. Norman, The Development of Writing in India and its Effect upon the Pâli Canon, in Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens (36), 1993
• Oscar von Hinüber, Der Beginn der Schrift und frühe Schriftlichkeit in Indien, Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990 (in German)
• Gérard Fussman, Les premiers systèmes d'écriture en Inde, in Annuaire du Collège de France 1988-1989 (in French)
• Siran Deraniyagala, The prehistory of Sri Lanka; an ecological perspective (revised ed.), Archaeological Survey Department of Sri Lanka, 1992.

External links

• On The Origin Of The Early Indian Scripts: A Review Article by Richard Salomon, University of Washington (via archive.org)
• Brahmi project of the Indian Institute of Science
• Ancient Scripts - Brahmi
• Windows Indic Script Support