Dhivehi writing systems

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Thaana alphabet The Dhivehi or Divehi writing systems are the different scripts used by Maldivians during their history. The early Maldivian scripts fell into the abugida category, while the more recent Taana has characteristics of both an abugida and a true alphabet. An ancient form of Nagari script, as well as the Arabic and Latin alphabets have also been extensively used in the Maldives, but with a more restricted function. "Latin" was official only during a very brief period of the Islands' history.

The language of the Maldives has had its very own script since very ancient times. It is likely that the first Maldivian script appeared in association with the expansion of Buddhism throughout South Asia. This was over two millennia ago, in the Mauryan period, during emperor Ashoka's time. Manuscripts used by Maldivian Buddhist monks were probably written in a script that slowly evolved into a characteristic Maldivian form. Unfortunately none of those ancient documents have survived and presently the early forms of the Maldive script are only found etched on a few coral rocks and copper plates.

Contents
[hide]

1 Ancient scripts (Evla Akuru) 2 Latter Divehi or "Dives Akuru" 3 The modern script

3.1 Abolishment of the letter naviyani 3.2 The unique letter of Shaviyani

4 The DIVEHI AKURU book 5 Latin transliteration of Divehi

5.1 Devanagari script for Mahal

6 References

[edit] Ancient scripts (Evla Akuru)

See also: Dhivehi language, Dhives Akuru, and History of the Maldives

The most ancient Maldivian script Divehi Akuru or Dhivehi Akuru (island letters) is a script formerly used to write the Divehi (or Dhivehi) language. Unlike the modern Tna (Thaana) script, Divehi Akuru has its origins in the Brahmi script and thus was written from left to right. The Divehi Akuru or Maldivian script was separated into two variants, namely a more recent and an ancient one and christened Dives Akuru and "Evla Akuru" respectively by H. C. P. Bell in

the early 20th century. Bell was British, and studied Maldive epigraphy when he retired from the colonial government service in Colombo. Bell wrote a monograph on the Archaeology, history and epigraphy of the Maldives. He was the first modern scholar to study these ancient writings and he undertook an extensive and serious research on the available epigraphy. The division that Bell made based on the differences he perceived between the two variants of Divehi Scripts is indeed convenient for the study of the old Maldivian documents. The Divehi Akuru developed from the Grantha script. The letters on old Inscriptions resemble the southern Grantha Script of the Pallava and Chola periods in South India. However, this does not mean that the Maldives were dependent from those kingdoms in the Subcontinent, for the Maldive Islands have been an independent nation practically all along their history. There has been very little interference, cultural or otherwise, from other neighboring kingdoms in South India and Sri Lanka. The early form of this script was also called Divehi Akuru by Maldivians, but it was renamed Evla Akuru (ancient letters) in a tentative manner by H.C.P. Bell in order to distinguish it from the more recent variants of the same script. This name became established and so the most ancient form of the Maldive script is now known as Evla Akuru. Ancient name of this Evla Akuru was Dv Grantha. This is the script that evolved at the time when the Maldives was an independent Buddhist Kingdom and it was still in use one century after the conversion to Islam.

Standard Indic (IAST). This table is provided as a reference for the position of the letters on all the tables. The ancient form of the Divehi Akuru (Evla) can be seen in the Lmfnu (copper plate grants) of the 12th and 13th centuries and in inscriptions on coral stone (hirig) dating back from the Maldive Buddhist period. Two of the few copper plate documents that have been preserved are from Haddhunmathi Atoll. The oldest inscription found in the Maldives to date is an inscription on a coral stone found at an archaeological site on Landh Island in Southern Miladhunmadulhu Atoll, where there are important Buddhist archaeological remains including a large Stupa. The Landh inscription is estimated to be from 8th century A.D. Even though long before that time Maldivian Buddhist

monks had been writing and reading manuscripts in their language, older documents have not yet been discovered. The reason why even at that time the local script was known as "Divehi Akuru" (our letters) by Maldivians was because another non-Maldivian script was used in the country. This was a Devnagari script related to Bengali and it had a kind of ceremonial value. The oldest paleographically datable inscription found in the Maldives is a Prakrit inscription of Vajrayana Buddhism dating back to the 9th or 10th century AD This inscription is written in an early form of the Nagari script. Thus the name "Divehi Akuru" was used historically by Maldivians to distinguish their own writing system from foreign scripts. Foreign scripts were learned and introduced at that time when Maldivian monks visited the Buddhist learning centres of Nalanda and Vikramashila.

[edit] Latter Divehi or "Dives Akuru"

The last version of the Maldivian script used after the Conversion to Islam Among the Divehi (or Dhivehi) Akuru scripts, the later form of the Maldivian script was the script that evolved from the ancient Maldivian script or Evla Akuru after the conversion of the Maldives to Islam. It was still used in some atolls in the South Maldives as the main script until around 70 years ago. Since then it is rarely used, not even having a ceremonial role in scrolls of coats-of-arms or badges of government entities and associations, where Arabic is favoured. This script can be found on gravestones, old grants in paper and wood, and in some monuments, including the stone base of the pillars supporting the main structure of the ancient Friday Mosque in Mal. British researcher H.C.P. Bell obtained an astrology book written in Divehi Akuru in Addu Atoll, in the south of Maldives, during one of his trips. This book is now kept in the National Archives of Sri Lanka in Colombo. Apparently, the Divehi or Dhivehi script was abandoned in other parts of the Maldives in favour of the modern Tna script about 200 years earlier, perhaps at the beginning of the 18th century. Some modern Maldivian historians want to believe that the Tna script was introduced a few centuries before that. But the claim that the Tna letters were devised in the 16th century is not

supported by historical documents, for the oldest writing specimens in the Tna script, interspersed with Arabic, are from the 18th century.

[edit] The modern script

Tna (or Thaana). The contemporary official Maldivian script See also: Thaana Tna is the first Maldivian script written from right to left. It was inspired on numbers. It uses numerals as consonants and adds the diacritical (vowel) marks of the Arabic language. The first Tna manuscripts are written in a crude early version of this script called Gabulhi Thaana (incipient Thaana), where the Arabic numerals have not yet been slanted 45 degrees and still look like numbers. Since no ancient writings in Tna written before the 18th century have been found, it is doubtful that this script could be much older. The main reason why the Divehi Akuru were abandoned in favour of the Tna script was owing to the need the learned Maldivians had to include words and sentences in Arabic while writing in the Divehi language. The most intriguing fact about the Tna alphabet is its order (h, shaviyani, nnu, r, b, etc.). Its sequence doesnt follow the ancient order of the other Indic scripts (like Sinhala or Tamil) or the order of the Arabic alphabet. In fact the order of the Tna alphabet doesnt follow any logic at all. This fact points to a likely esoteric origin of Tna, namely to a script that was scrambled on purpose in order to keep it secret from average islanders. At their origin the Tna characters, which are based on Arabic numerals and other symbols, were used in fandita (local magic or sorcery) to write magical spells. Many of these arcane incantations included Arabic quotations, which were written from right to left. Maldivian learned men, who were all well versed in sorcery, eventually saw the advantages of writing in this simplified hidden script. Hence, with the passing of time, Tna came out of the shadows and was gradually adopted for everyday use. This script is currently in use as the sole Maldivian writing system. While at their origin documents written in Tna were full of Arabic words and quotations, the tendency is now to include as little Arabic script as possible, especially since special Thaana letters with dots were introduced to replace Arabic letters. The Thaana script is widely used nowadays by Maldivians

both in official and unofficial documents, for the literacy rate of the Maldive society is very high by South Asian standards.

[edit] Abolishment of the letter naviyani

Letter naviyani ,the retroflex "n" sound common to all Indic languages (Sinhala, Bengali, Hindi, etc.), was abolished from official documents in 1950 by Muhammad Amin, the ruler of Maldives. The reason why this particular retroflex sound was abolished and not others like Lhaviyani, Daviyani or Taviyani is not known. Perhaps it was a mere whim of the charismatic Maldivian leader of those times.[citation needed] Letter Naviyani's former position in the Thaana alphabet was the nineteenth, between letters Daviyani and Zaviyani. It is still seen in reprints of traditional old books like the Bodu Tartheebu. It is also used by people of Addu and Fuvahmulah when writing songs or poetry in their language variants.

[edit] The unique letter of Shaviyani

Letter Shaviyani ( - formerly Rhaviyani) is the second letter of the Thaana alphabet. The Shaviyani sound ([]) is unique to the Dhivehi language and is most similar to the cerebral t ( [a]) in Sinhalese. Shaviyani is considered a unique characteristic of the language of the first Maldivian settler still reminiscent in the Dhivehi language today.

[edit] The DIVEHI AKURU book

In 1959, during Sultan Mohammed Farids reign, former Prime Minister (and later President) Ibrahim Nasir expressed a wish to have a book written about the former Maldivian script which by that time was largely ignored by Maldivians. Thus, he contacted As-Sayyid Bodufenvalhuge Sidi, an eminent Maldivian scholar, who swiftly obliged.

Cover of the "Divehi Akuru" book written by Bodufenvalhuge Sidi By means of this small book Bodufenvalhuge Sidi (1888-1970) wanted to clearly show the fact that in ancient times Maldivians were writing from left to right in their own script. Hence DIVEHI AKURU is perhaps the only book ever written in Tna that opens from the left side.

As-Sayyid Bodufenvalhuge Sidi was one of the very few Maldivian people of modern times who understood the now-forgotten ancient Divehi letters in which parts of royal grants, warrants and deeds were written. He learnt this ancient script in Addu Atoll. Until early in the twentieth century, all government correspondence to and from Addu Atoll was written using these ancient Divehi letters. The last chapter of this book shows a text where the Divehi Akuru are coming along with Arabic script. As the reader acquainted with Maldivian writing can see, this book is Volume 1 (evvana bai). Perhaps Bodufenvalhuge Sidi had the intention of publishing a second, or perhaps even a third volume on the subject. But unfortunately this important Maldivian learned man died before being able to do so. Even though H.C.P. Bell did a very careful and thorough research on the Maldivian documents, Prime Minister Ibrahim Nasirs intention was to have a book on the ancient script of the Maldives written by a Maldivian. Prime Minister Nasir's request to Bodufenvalhuge Sidi was done in order to clarify H.C.P. Bells misinterpretations, no matter how few. A staunch Maldivian nationalist, Nasir took this issue as a matter of national pride. Present day members of Maldivian cultural institutions are aware of the lacunae in Bell's research and of Bodufenvalhuge Sidi's valuable contribution to mend matters, but little has been done to correct those inaccuracies. Still, H.C.P. Bells broad and valuable contributions to the study of the Maldivian language and scripts should not be underestimated.

[edit] Latin transliteration of Divehi

Towards the mid 1970s, during President Ibrahim Nasir's tenure, Telex machines were introduced by the Maldivian Government in the local administration. The new telex equipment was viewed as a great progress, however the local Tna script was deemed to be an obstacle because messages on the telex machines could only be written in the Latin script. Following this, "Dhivehi Letin", an official Latin transliteration was swiftly approved by the Maldive government in 1976 and was quickly implemented by the administration. Booklets were printed and dispatched to all Atoll and Island Offices, as well as schools and merchant liners. This was seen by many as the demise of the Tna script. Clarence Maloney, the American anthropologist who was in the Maldives at the time of the change, lamented the crude inconsistencies of the "Dhivehi Letin" and wondered why the modern IAST Standard Indic transliteration had not been considered. Standard Indic is a consistent script system that is well adapted to writing practically all languages of South Asia.[1] The Tna script was reinstated by President Maumoon shortly after he took power in 1978. There was widespread relief in certain places, especially rural areas, where the introduction of Latin had been regarded as a preliminary to the introduction of infidel mores. However, the substandard Latin transcription of 1976 continues to be widely used.

[edit] Devanagari script for Mahal

Sinhala language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article contains Indic text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks or boxes, misplaced vowels or missing conjuncts

instead of Indic text.

Sinhala
sihala

Spoken in Total speakers Language family

Sri Lanka 15.6 million[1] Indo-European

Indo-Iranian

IndoAryan

S o u t h

e r n I n d o A r y a n

Sinhala abugida Writing system (developed from the Brahmi) Official status Official language in Regulated by Sri Lanka No official regulation

Language codes ISO 639-1 ISO 639-2

si sin

sin ISO 639-3 This page contains Indic text. Without rendering support you may see irregular vowel positioning and a lack of conjuncts. More...

Sinhala (, ISO 15919: sihala, pronounced [sil], sometimes referred by alternative spelling Singhalese), also known as Helabasa. Sinhala is the mother tongue of the Sinhalese people, who make up the largest ethnic group in Sri Lanka, numbering about 15 million. Sinhala is also spoken by other ethnic groups in Sri Lanka, totalling about 3 million.[2] It belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. Sinhala is the official and national language of Sri Lanka. Sinhala has its own writing system (see Sinhala alphabet) which is a member of the Brahmic family of scripts, and a descendant of the ancient Indian Brahmi script. The oldest Sinhala inscriptions found are from the 6th century BCE, on pottery;[3] the oldest existing literary works date from the 9th century CE.

The closest relative of Sinhala is the language of the Maldives and Minicoy Island (India), Dhivehi.

Contents
[hide]

1 Etymology 2 History

2.1 Stages of historical development 2.2 Phonetic development 2.3 Western vs. Eastern Prakrit features 2.4 Sri Lankan Politics 3.1 Substratum influence in Sinhalese 3.2 Affinities to neighbouring languages 3.3 Foreign influences 3.4 Influences on Other Languages

3 Ecology

4 Numerals 5 Accents and Dialects 6 Diglossia 7 Writing system 8 Phonology 9 Morphology

9.1 Nominal morphology

9.1.1 Cases 9.1.2 Number marking 9.1.3 Indefinite article

9.2 Verbal morphology

10 Syntax 11 Semantics

11.1 Discourse

12 See also 13 Notes 14 References 15 External links

[edit] Etymology

Sinhala (Sihla) is actually a Sanskrit term; the corresponding Middle Indic word is Shala; the actual Sinhala term is Hela* (also Elu, Helu). The Sanskrit and the Middle Indic words have as their first element (siha and sha) the word "lion" in the respective languages.

[edit] History
It is believed that about the 5th century BCE, settlers from North-Eastern India [4] reached the island of Sri Lanka. This group of settlers is referred to as prince Vijaya and his entourage in the chronicle Mahavamsa. These new settlers merged with the native Hela tribes known as Yakka, Naga who spoke Elu language, and a new nation called Sinhala came to exist.[5] In the following centuries, there was substantial immigration from Eastern India-Bengal (Kalinga, Magadha)[6] which led to an admixture of features of Eastern Prakrits.[citation needed]

[edit] Stages of historical development

The development of the Sinhala language is divided into four periods: Sinhala Prakrit (until 3rd century CE) Proto-Sinhala (3rd - 7th century CE) Medieval Sinhala (7th - 12th century CE) Modern Sinhala (12th century - present)

[edit] Phonetic development

The most important phonetic developments of the Sinhala language include

the loss of the aspiration distinction in stops (e.g. kanav "to eat" corresponds to Sanskrit khdati, Hindi khn) the shortening of all long vowels (compare example above) [Long vowels in the modern language are due to borrowings (e.g. vibgaya "exam" < Sanskrit vibhga) and sandhi phenomena either after elision of intervocalic consonants (e.g. dnav "to put" < damanav) or in originally compound words.] the simplification of consonant clusters and geminate consonants into geminates and single consonants respectively (e.g. Sanskrit vi "time" > Sinhala Prakrit via > Modern Sinhala via) development of /j/ to /d/ (e.g. dla "web" corresponds to Sanskrit jla)

[edit] Western vs. Eastern Prakrit features

An example for a Western feature in Sinhala is the retention of initial /v/ which developed into /b/ in the Eastern languages (e.g. Sanskrit viati "twenty", Sinhala visi-, Hindi bs). An example of an Eastern feature is the ending -e for masculine nominative singular (instead of Western -o) in Sinhala Prakrit. There are several cases of vocabulary doublets, e.g. the words mss ("fly") and mkk ("flea"), which both correspond to Sanskrit makik but stem from two regionally different Prakrit words macchi and makkhik (as in Pali).

[edit] Sri Lankan Politics

Main article: Sinhala Only Act In 1956 Sinhala replaced English as the official language. This has historically been viewed by academics as a key point in the development of ethnic discontent between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils. It was implemented by the Sri Lankan Freedom Party as one of its first acts

in government and was perceived by the Tamils as a part of a strategy of placing "Sinhalese culture, language, and religion (Buddhism) to a position of dominance in the society." (Baxter, 2002, p. 354).[7]

[edit] Ecology
[edit] Substratum influence in Sinhalese
According to Geiger, Sinhalese language has features that set it apart from other Indo-Aryan languages. Some of the differences can be explained by the substrate influence of parent stock of the Vedda language.[8] Sinhalese has many words that are only found in Sinhalese or it is shared between Sinhalese and Vedda language and cannot be etymologically derived from Middle or Old Indo-Aryan. Common examples are Kola in Sinhalese and Vedda for leaf, Dola in Sinhalese for Pig and offering in Vedda. Other common words are Rera for wild duck and Gala for stones in Toponyms found throughout the island.[9] There are also high frequency words denoting body parts in Sinhalese such as Olluva for head, Kakula for leg, bella for neck and kalava for thighs that are derived from pre-Sinhalese languages of Sri Lanka.[10] The author of the oldest Sinhalese grammar, Sidatsangarava, written in the 13th century ACE have recognized a category of words that exclusively belonged to early Sinhalese. It lists naramba (to see) and kolamba (fort or harbor) as belonging to an indigenous source. Kolamba is the source of the name of the commercial capital Colombo.[11][12]

[edit] Affinities to neighbouring languages

In addition to many Tamil loanwords, several phonetic and grammatical features present in neighbouring Dravidian languages, setting today's spoken Sinhala apart from its Northern IndoAryan siblings, bear witness to the close interactions between Dravidian speakers. Some of the features that may be traced to Dravidian influence are

the distinction between short e, o and long , the loss of aspiration left-branching syntax the use of the verbal adjective of kiyanav "to say" as a subordinating conjunction with the meanings "that" and "if", e.g.:

ka aluth kiyal mama dannaw it new having-said I know "I know that it is new." ka aluth-da kiyal mama dann nh it new-? having-said I know not "I do not know whether it is new."

[edit] Foreign influences

As a result of centuries of colonial rule, contemporary Sinhala contains many Portuguese, Dutch and English loanwords.

[edit] Influences on Other Languages

Macanese language or Macau Creole (known as Patu to its speakers) is a creole language derived mainly from Malay, Sinhalese, Cantonese, and Portuguese, which was originally spoken

by the Macanese community of the Portuguese colony of Macau. It is now spoken by a few families in Macau and in the Macanese diaspora The language developed first mainly among the descendants of Portuguese settlers whom often married women from Malacca and Sri Lanka rather than from neighboring China, so the language had strong Malay and Sinhalese influence from the beginning.

[edit] Numerals
Sinhala shares many features common to other Indo-European languages. Shared vocabulary includes the numbers up to ten: Numeral Sinhala Konkani Sanskrit Greek Latin Portuguese German English French Russian eka 1 eka ka heis unus um eins one un odin () deka 2 don dv do duo dois zwei two deux dva () thuna 3 theen tr treis tres trs drei three trois tri () hathara 4 chaar chatr tttares quattuor quatro vier four quatre chetyre () paha 5 panch pca pnte quinque cinco fnf five cinq pyat' () haya 6 sa shat hx sex seis sechs six six shest' () hatha 7 saath sapt hept septem sete sieben seven sept sem' () ata 8 aat a okt octo oito acht eight huit vosem' () navaya 9 nav nva enna novem nove neun nine neuf devyat' () dahaya 10 dha da dka decem dez zehn ten dix desyat' ()

[edit] Accents and Dialects

Sinhalese spoken in the Southern province of Sri Lanka (Galle, Matara and Hambantota districts) uses several words that are not found elsewhere in the country; this is also the case for the Central province, North-Central province and south-eastern part (Uva & the surrounding area). For native speakers all dialects are mutually intelligible, and they might not even realize that the differences are significant. The language of the Veddah people resembles Sinhala to a great extent, although it has a large number of words which cannot be traced to another language. Rodiya people use another dialect of Sinhala.

[edit] Diglossia
In Sinhala there is distinctive diglossia, as in many languages of South Asia. The literary language and the spoken language differ from each other in many aspects. The written language is used for all forms of literary texts but also orally at formal occasions (public speeches, TV and

radio news broadcasts, etc.), whereas the spoken language is used as the language of communication in everyday life (see also Sinhala slang and colloquialism). As a rule the literary language uses more Sanskrit-based words. The most important difference between the two varieties is the lack of inflected verb forms in the spoken language. The situation is analogous to one where Middle or even Old English would be the written language in Great Britain. The children are taught the written language at school almost like a foreign language. Sinhala language also has diverse slang. Some is regarded as taboo and most is frowned upon as non-scholarly.[citation needed]

[edit] Writing system

Main article: Sinhala script The Sinhalese writing system, Sinhala Hodiya, is based - as all other surviving Indo-aryan language scripts - on ancient Brahmi. The Sinhala script can be considered semi-syllabic, sometimes referred to as abugida or alphasyllabic, meaning that a basic letter such as represents a syllable with a default vowel, in this case ka ([k]). This inherent vowel may be changed by adding so called pilla, vowel marks (diacritics), around the syllabic character, producing syllables such as k, k, k, ki, k, ku, k, ke, k, ko, k. Pili may appear above, below, to the left, to the right, or around the consonant. Sinhala also knows hal kirama and uses two differing virama symbols depending on the basic grapheme to explicitly indicate the lack of a vowel. The complete writing system, Elu Hodiya, consist of 54 basic characters. It includes 18 vowel characters and 36 consonant characters. Only 36 characters (12 vowel and 24 consonant symbols) are required for writing spoken Sinhala in Suddha Sinhala. The remaining symbols for sounds that have gotten lost in the course of linguistic change, such as aspirates, are required to write Sanskrit and Pali loan words. Sinhala is written from left to right and the Sinhala character set is only used for this singular Indo-Aryan language. The alphabetic sequence is similar to those of other Brahmic scripts: a/ / i/ u/ [] e/ [ai] o/ [au] k [kh] g [g] c [ch] j [jh] [] [a] [h] [h] t [th] d [dh] n p [ph] b [bh] m y r l v [ ] s h f

[edit] Phonology

The presence of so-called prenasalized stops. A very short homorganic nasal is added before a voiced stop. The nasal is syllabified with the onset of the following syllable, which means that the moraic weight of the preceding syllable is left unchanged. The pronunciation of unstressed short a as schwa , which otherwise has no written symbol. Labial Nasal
voiceless voiced prenasalized

Stop

m p b b

Dental/ Retroflex Palatal Velar Glottal Alveolar n t t k d d d

Fricative Rhotic Approximant Front Close i Mid e Open i e

(f) Central

s r l Back u o

( ) j

long short long short long short

u () o a a

[edit] Morphology
[edit] Nominal morphology
The main features marked on Sinhala nouns are case, number, definiteness and animacy. [edit] Cases Sinhala distinguishes several cases. Next to the cross-linguistically rather common nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative, there are also less common cases like the instrumental. The exact number of these cases depends on the exact definition of cases one wishes to employ. For instance, the endings for the animate instrumental and locative cases, ati and lag, are also independent words meaning "with the hand" and "near" respectively, which is why they are not regarded to be actual case endings by some scholars. Depending on how far an independent word has progressed on a grammaticalization path, scholars will see it as a case marker or not. The brackets with most of the vowel length symbols indicate the optional shortening of long vowels in certain unstressed syllables. animate sg NOM miniha() ACC miniha()v INSTR miniha() ati DAT miniha() ABL miniha()ge GEN miniha()ge() LOC miniha() lag VOC miniho() Gloss man [edit] Number marking In Sinhala animate nouns, the plural is marked with -o(), a long consonant plus -u, or with -la(). Most of the inanimates mark the plural by subtractive morphology. Loan words from English mark the singular with ek, and do not mark the plural. This can be interpreted as singulative. SG amma deviya hora pot redd kantoruv satiy bas ek par PL ammla() deviyo() horu pot redi kantoru sati bas parval Gloss mother(s) god(s) thief(ves) book(s) cloth(es) office(s) week(s) bus(ses) street(s) On the left hand side of the table, plurals are longer than singulars. On the right hand side, it is the other way round, with the exception of par "street". Note that [+animate] lexemes are inanimate sg animate pl pot minissu pot minissu(nv) pote minissu(n) ati pot minissu() pote minissu(n)ge pote() minissu()ge() pote() minissu(n) lag minissune book men inanimate pl pot pot potvli potvl potvali potvl potvl books

mostly in the classes on the left-hand side, while [-animate] lexemes are most often in the classes on the right hand. [edit] Indefinite article The indefinite article is -ek for animates and -ak for inanimates. The indefinite article exists only in the singular, where its absence marks definiteness. In the plural, (in)definiteness does not receive special marking.

[edit] Verbal morphology

Sinhala distinguishes three conjugation classes. Spoken Sinhala does not mark person, number or gender on the verb (literary Sinhala does). In other words there is no subjectverb agreement. 1st class verb present (future) past anterior kanva 2nd class verbal verb adjective kan kv kapu / / / / arinva riya rla arin arin / ara ara(spoken) arinn/arin arinne open 3rd class verbal verb adjective arin riy rpu / / / / pipenva pipuna pipila pipen pipen/ pipi pipi(spoken) pipenn/pipen pipenne blossom verbal adjective pipen pipun pipicca / / / /

kva kala kan kan / ka simultaneous kaa(spoken) infinitive kann/kan emphatic kanne form gloss eat

[edit] Syntax

SOV (subjectobjectverb) word order. There are almost no conjunctions as English that or whether, but only non-finite clauses that are formed by the means of participles and verbal adjectives. Example: "The man who writes books" translates to pot lin miniha, literally "books writing man". It is a left-branching language (see branching), which means that determining elements are usually put in front of what they determine (see example above). An exception to this is statements of quantity which usually stand behind what they define. Example: "the four flowers" translates to mal hatr, literally "flowers four". On the other hand it can be argued that the numeral is the head in this construction, and the flowers the modifier, so that a better English rendering would be "a floral foursome" There are no prepositions, only postpositions (see Adposition). Example: "under the book" translates to pot ya, literally "book under". Sinhala has no copula: "I am rich" translates to mam posat, literally "I rich". There are two existential verbs, which are used for locative predications, but these verbs are not used for predications of class-membership or property-assignment, unlike English is.

[edit] Semantics

There is a four-way deictic system (which is rare): There are four demonstrative stems (see demonstrative pronouns) me "here, close to the speaker", o "there, close to the

person addressed", ar "there, close to a third person, visible" and e "there, close to a third person, not visible".

[edit] Discourse

Sinhala is a pro-drop language; that is, arguments of a sentence can be omitted when they can be inferred from context. This is true for subjectas in Italian, for instancebut also objects and other parts of the sentence can be "dropped" in Sinhala if they can be inferred. In that sense, Sinhala can be called a "super pro-drop language", like Japanese.

Example: The sentence [koed ie], literally "where went", can mean "where did I/you/he/she/we... go".

[edit] See also

Sinhala Wikipedia Elu Sinhala script Sinhala slang

[edit] Notes
1. ^ Lewis, M. Paul (2009). "Statistical Summaries". Ethnologue: Languages of the World.

SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.org/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size. Retrieved 22 March 2010.

2. ^ http://www.statistics.gov.lk/PopHouSat/PDF/Population/p9p11%20Speaking.pdf 3. ^ http://www.lankalibrary.com/geo/dera1.html SU Deraniyagala, PRE- AND

PROTOHISTORIC SETTLEMENT IN SRI LANKA

4. ^ http://www.lankalibrary.com/books/sinhala.htm 5. ^ The story of prince Pandukabhaya 6. ^ http://www.lankalibrary.com/books/sinhala_history.htm 7. ^ Baxter, Craig, Yogendra K. Malik, Charles H. Kennedy, Robert C. Oberst (eds.),

(2002), Government and Politics in South Africa, Westview Press, USA.

8. ^ Gair 1998, p. 4 9. ^ Van Driem 2002, p. 230 10. ^ Indrapala 2007, p. 45 11. ^ Indrapala 2007, p. 70 12. ^ Gair 1998, p. 5

[edit] References

Gair, James: Sinhala and Other South Asian Languages, New York 1998. Gair, James and Paolillo, John C.: Sinhala, Mnchen, Newcastle 1997. Geiger, Wilhelm: A Grammar of the Sinhalese Language, Colombo 1938. Karunatillake, W.S.: An Introduction to Spoken Sinhala, Colombo 1992 [several new editions].

Clough, B.: Sinhala English Dictionary, 2nd new & enlarged edition, New Delhi, Asian Educational Services, 1997. Gair, James (1998). Studies in South Asian Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509521-9. Van Driem, George (Jan 15, 2002). Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region. Brill Academic Publishers. ISBN 900-410390-2. Indrapala, Karthigesu (2007). The evolution of an ethnic identity: The Tamils in Sri Lanka C. 300 BCE to C. 1200 CE. Colombo: Vijitha Yapa. ISBN 978-955-1266-72-1.

[edit] External links

Sinhala language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sinhala language edition of Wiktionary, the free dictionary/thesaurus

Guide to Sinhala language & Culture Sinhala Language tools download center Sinhala Input Method Editor Kapruka Sinhala dictionary Madhura Sinhala English Dictionary Sinhala dictionary (Beta) Sinhala dictionary resources online Sinhala books/novels USA Foreign Service Institute (FSI) Sinhala basic course [show]v d e

Indo-Iranian languages
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Dramatic Prakrits (Magadhi Maharashtri Shauraseni) Elu Gndhr Jain Paisaci Pli Prakrit [show] Modern Awadhi Bagheli Bambaiya Hindi Brij Bhasha Bundeli Chhattisgarhi Fiji Hindi Haryanvi Kannauji Sansiboli Sadhukaddi
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form)

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Bishnupriya Manipuri Chakma Halbi Hajong Kayort Kharia Thar Magahi Maithili Majhi Mal Paharia Nahari Oriya Rajbanshi Rohingya Sadri Garhwali Kumaoni Nepali (Palpa) Potwari Saraiki Majhi Aer Derawali Dogri Hindko Kangri Kutchi Sindhi

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Bagri Goaria Gojri Jaipuri Rajasthani Malvi Marwari Mewari Dhatki

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[show] Other Indo-Iranian languages Dameli Domaaki Gawar-Bati Kalami Kalash Kashmiri Khowar Kohistani Nangalami Palula Pashayi Shina Shumashti Torwali Ushoji Kamviri Kata-vari Mumviri Askunu Kalashaala Kamkataviri Tregami language Vasi-vari

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Italics indicate extinct languages. [show]v d eLanguages of Sri Lanka

O Sinhala Tamil (dialects) f f i c i a l s t a t u s W English Malay i d e l y s p o k e n L Kaffir Portuguese Creole Vedda Gypsy Telugu e a s t s p o k e n F o A r rabic Dutch Portuguese

m e r l y s p o k e n E x Arwi Ceylon Dutch Rodiya1 t i n c t Rodiya is a dialect of Sinhala Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinhala_language" View page ratings Rate this page Rate this page Page ratings What's this? Current average ratings. Trustworthy Objective Complete Well-written
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It is part of my profession It is a deep personal passion The source of my knowledge is not listed here I would like to help improve Wikipedia, send me an e-mail (optional) We will send you a confirmation e-mail. We will not share your address with anyone. (Privacy policy) Submit ratings Saved successfully Your ratings have not been submitted yet Your ratings have expired Please reevaluate this page and submit new ratings. An error has occured. Please try again later. Thanks! Your ratings have been saved. Please take a moment to complete a short survey. Start survey Maybe later Thanks! Your ratings have been saved. Do you want to create an account? An account will help you track your edits, get involved in discussions, and be a part of the community. Create an accountorLog in Maybe later Thanks! Your ratings have been saved. Did you know that you can edit this page? Edit this page Maybe later Categories: Indo-Aryan languages | Languages of Sri Lanka | SOV languages | Sinhala Hidden categories: All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements from April 2009 | Articles with unsourced statements from August 2007
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Devanagari script for Mahal Though the Mahal dialect of the Dhivehi language spoken in the island of Minicoy in Union territory of Lakshadweep, India is also written mainly using the Tna alphabet, around the 1950s a Devanagari script was modified to write the Language. However, the script is rarely used and never preferred over Tna by the locals in their writings.

[edit] References
1. ^ Clarence Maloney; People of the Maldive Islands

Bell, H.C.P. Excerpta Maldiviana. Reprint 1922-1935 edn. New Delhi 1998. Bell, H.C.P. The Maldive islands. Monograph on the History, Archaeology and Epigraphy. Reprint 1940 edn. Mal 1986. Bodufenvahuge Sidi. Divehi Akuru; Evvana Bai. Mal 1958. Divehi Bahuge Qawaaaid. Vols 1 to 5. Ministry of Education. Mal 1978. Divehnge Tarika. Divehnge Bas. Divehibahi Trikhah Khidumaykur Qaum Majlis. Male 2000. Geiger, Wilhelm. Maldivian Linguistic Studies. Reprint 1919 edn. Novelty Press. Mal 1986. Gunasena, Bandusekara. The Evolution of the Sinhalese Script. Godage Poth Mendura. Colombo 1999. Romero-Frias, Xavier. The Maldive Islanders, A Study of the Popular Culture of an Ancient Ocean Kingdom. Barcelona 1999. C. Sivaramamurti, Indian Epigraphy and South Indian Scripts. Bulletin of the Madras Government Museum. Chennai 1999.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhivehi_writing_systems" View page ratings Rate this page Rate this page Page ratings What's this? Current average ratings. Trustworthy Objective Complete Well-written

I am highly knowledgeable about this topic (optional) I have a relevant college/university degree It is part of my profession It is a deep personal passion The source of my knowledge is not listed here I would like to help improve Wikipedia, send me an e-mail (optional) We will send you a confirmation e-mail. We will not share your address with anyone. (Privacy policy) Submit ratings Saved successfully Your ratings have not been submitted yet Your ratings have expired Please reevaluate this page and submit new ratings. An error has occured. Please try again later. Thanks! Your ratings have been saved. Please take a moment to complete a short survey. Start survey Maybe later Thanks! Your ratings have been saved. Do you want to create an account? An account will help you track your edits, get involved in discussions, and be a part of the community. Create an accountorLog in Maybe later Thanks! Your ratings have been saved. Did you know that you can edit this page? Edit this page Maybe later Categories: Maldivian culture | Brahmic scripts

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An inscription of Swampy Cree using Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, an abugida developed by Christian missionaries for Aboriginal Canadian languages This article contains Indic text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks or boxes, misplaced vowels or missing conjuncts instead of Indic text.
This article contains Canadian Aboriginal syllabic characters. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of syllabics. This article contains Ethiopic text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Ethiopic characters.

An abugida ( /buid/; from Geez bugida), also called an alphasyllabary, is a segmental writing system which is based on consonants, and in which vowel notation is obligatory but secondary. This contrasts with an alphabet proper, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad, in which vowel marking is absent or optional. (In less formal treatments, all three are commonly called alphabets.) Abugidas include the extensive Brahmic family of scripts used in "South" and Southeast Asia. The term abugida was suggested by Peter T. Daniels in his 1990 typology of writing systems.[1] It is an Ethiopian name of the Geez script, bu gi da, taken from four letters of that script the way abecedary derives from Latin a be ce de. As Daniels used the word, an abugida contrasts with a syllabary, where letters with shared consonants or vowels show no particular resemblance to each another, and with an alphabet proper, where independent letters are used to denote both consonants and vowels. The term alphasyllabary was suggested for the Indic scripts in 1997 by William Bright, following "South Asian" linguistic usage, to convey the idea that "they share features of both alphabet and syllabary".[2][3] Abugidas were long considered to be syllabaries or intermediate between syllabaries and alphabets, and the term "syllabics" is retained in the name of Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics. Other terms that have been used include neosyllabary (Fvrier 1959), pseudo-alphabet (Householder 1959), semisyllabary (Diringer 1968; a word which has other uses) and syllabic alphabet (Coulmas 1996; this term is also a synonym for syllabary).[3]

Writing systems
History Grapheme List of writing systems Types Featural alphabet Alphabet Abjad Abugida Syllabary Logography Shorthand Related topics Pictogram Ideogram

Contents
[hide]

1 Description

1.1 Indic (Brahmic) 1.2 Ethiopic 1.3 Canadian Aboriginal syllabics

2 Borderline cases

2.1 Voweled abjads 2.2 Phagspa 2.3 Pahawh 2.4 Meroitic 2.5 Shorthand

3 Development 4 Other types of writing systems 5 Partial list of abugidas

5.1 True abugidas 5.2 Abugida-like scripts

6 References 7 External links

[edit] Description
In general, a letter of an abugida transcribes a consonant. Letters are written as a linear sequence, in most cases left to right. Vowels are written through modification of these consonant letters, either by means of diacritics (which may not follow the direction of writing the letters) or by changes in the form of the letter itself. Vowels not preceded by a consonant may be represented with a zero consonant letter, modified to indicate the vowel, or separate letters for each vowel, that are distinct from the corresponding dependent vowel signs. Consonants not followed by a vowel may be represented with:

a modification which explicitly indicates the lack of a vowel (virama), a lack of vowel marking (often with ambiguity between no vowel and a default inherent vowel), vowel marking for a short or neutral vowel such as schwa (with ambiguity between no vowel and that short or neutral vowel), conjunct consonant letters where two or more letters are graphically joined in a ligature, or dependent consonant signs, which may be smaller or differently placed versions of the full consonant letters, or may be distinct signs altogether.

There are three principal families of abugidas, depending on whether vowels are indicated by modifying consonants by diacritics, distortion, or orientation.[4]

The oldest and largest is the Brahmic family of India and Southeast Asia, in which vowels are marked with diacritics and syllable-final consonants, when they occur, are indicated with ligatures, diacritics, or with a special vowel-canceling mark. In the Ethiopic family, vowels are marked by modifying the shapes of the consonants, and one of these pulls double duty for final consonants.

In the Cree family, vowels are marked by rotating or flipping the consonants, and final consonants are indicated with either special diacritics or superscript forms of the main initial consonants.

Tna of the Maldives has dependent vowels and a zero vowel sign, but no inherent vowel. Feature North Indic South Indic Thaana Ethiopic Canadian Vowel after consonant Dependent sign (diacritic) Fused diacritic Rotate/reflect Initial vowel letter(s) 1 per vowel Zero consonant in SEA Glottal stop Zero consonant Absence of vowel sign [], [], [a], or [o] N/A [] N/A Virama (zero vowel sign) Often Always No Consonant ligatures Conjunct D, B Stack or none No Final consonant dependents , only No All Distinct final forms , only No Western only Small raised, Final consonant position Top or inline Inline or full letter

[edit] Indic (Brahmic)

See also: Brahmic family of scripts. Indic scripts originated in India and spread to Southeast Asia. All surviving Indic scripts are descendants of the Brahmi alphabet. Today they are used in most languages of South Asia (although replaced by Perso-Arabic in Urdu, Kashmiri and some other languages of Pakistan and India) and mainland Southeast Asia (Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia; but not Malaysia or Vietnam). The primary division is into North Indic scripts used in Northern India, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan and Southern Indic scripts used in South India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia. South Indic letter forms are very rounded; North Indic less so, though Oriya, Golmol and Litumol of Nepal script are rounded. Most North Indic scripts' full letters incorporate a horizontal line at the top, with Gujarati script an exception; South Indic scripts do not. Indic scripts indicate vowels through dependent vowel signs (diacritics) around the consonants, often including a sign that explicitly indicates the lack of a vowel. If a consonant has no vowel sign, this indicates a default vowel. Vowel diacritics may appear above, below, to the left, to the right, or around the consonant. The most populous Indic script is Devanagari, used for Hindi, Bhojpuri, Marathi, Nepali, and often Sanskrit. A basic letter such as represents a syllable with the default vowel, in this case ka ([k]), or, in final position, a final consonant, in this case k. This inherent vowel may be changed by adding vowel marks (diacritics), producing syllables such as ki, ku, ke, ko. The mora a consonant letter represents, either with or without a marked vowel, is called an akshara.

A 19th century manuscript in the Devanagari script Diacritic placement in Brahmic abugidas position syllable pronunciation base form script above /ke/ below /ku/ /k(a)/ Devanagari left /ki/ right /ko/ around /kau/ Tamil /ka/ surround /kie/ Khmer /k/ within /ki/ Kannada /ka/ In many of the Brahmic scripts, a syllable beginning with a cluster is treated as a single character for purposes of vowel marking, so a vowel marker like -i, falling before the character it modifies, may appear several positions before the place where it is pronounced. For example, the game cricket in Hindi is krike; the diacritic for /i/ appears before the consonant cluster /kr/, not before the /r/. A more unusual example is seen in the Batak alphabet: Here the syllable bim is written ba-ma-i-(virama). That is, the vowel diacritic and virama are both written after the consonants for the whole syllable. In many abugidas, there is also a diacritic to suppress the inherent vowel, yielding the bare consonant. In Devanagari, is k, and is l. This is called the virama in Sanskrit, or halant in Hindi. It may be used to form consonant clusters, or to indicate that a consonant occurs at the end of a word. For writing two consonants without a vowel in between, instead of using diacritics on the first consonant to remove its vowel, another popular method of special conjunct forms is used in which two or more consonant characters are merged to express a cluster, such as Devanagari: kla. (Note that on some fonts display this as followed by , rather than forming a conjunct. This expedient is used by ISCII and South Asian scripts of Unicode.) Thus a closed syllable such as kal requires two akshara to write. The Rng script used for the Lepcha language goes further than other Indic abugidas, in that a single akshara can represent a closed syllable: Not only the vowel, but any final consonant is indicated by a diacritic. For example, the syllable [sok] would be written as something like s, here with an underring representing /o/ and an overcross representing the diacritic for final /k/.

Most other Indic abugidas can only indicate a very limited set of final consonants with diacritics, such as // or /r/, if they can indicate any at all.

[edit] Ethiopic

The Ge'ez script, an abugida of Eritrea and Ethiopia In Ethiopic, where the term abugida originates, the diacritics have been fused to the consonants to the point that they must be considered modifications of the form of the letters. Children learn each modification separately, as in a syllabary; nonetheless, the graphic similarities between syllables with the same consonant is readily apparent, unlike the case in a true syllabary. Though now an abugida, the Ge'ez alphabet, until the advent of Christianity (ca. 350 CE), had originally been what would now be termed an abjad. In the Ge'ez abugida (or 'fidel'), the base form of the letter (also known as 'fidel') may be altered. For example, h [h] (base form), hu (with a right-side diacritic that doesn't alter the letter), hi (with a subdiacritic that compresses the consonant, so it is the same height), h [h] or [h] (where the letter is modified with a kink in the left arm).

[edit] Canadian Aboriginal syllabics

In the family known as Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, vowels are indicated by changing the orientation of the akshara. Each vowel has a consistent orientation; for example, Inuktitut pi, pu, pa; ti, tu, ta. Although there is a vowel inherent in each, all rotations have equal status and none can be identified as basic. Bare consonants are indicated either by separate diacritics, or by superscript versions of the aksharas; there is no vowel-killer mark.

[edit] Borderline cases

[edit] Voweled abjads

Consonantal scripts ("abjads") are normally written without indication of many vowels. However in some contexts like teaching materials or scriptures, Arabic and Hebrew are written with full indication of vowels via diacritic marks (harakat, niqqud) making them effectively abugidas. The Brahmic and Ethiopic families are thought to have originated from the Semitic abjads by the addition of vowel marks. The Arabic-alphabet scripts used for Kurdish in Iraq and for Uighur in Xinjiang, People's Republic of China) are fully voweled, but since the vowels are full letters rather than diacritics, and there are no inherent vowels, these are considered alphabets rather than abugidas.

[edit] Phagspa
The imperial Mongol script called Phagspa was derived from the Tibetan abugida, but all vowels are written in-line rather than as diacritics. However, it retains the features of having an inherent vowel /a/ and having distinct initial vowel letters.

[edit] Pahawh
Pahawh Hmong is a non-segmental script that indicates syllable onsets and rimes, such as consonant clusters and vowels with final consonants. Thus it is not segmental and cannot be considered an abugida. However, it superficially resembles an abugida with the roles of consonant and vowel reversed. Most syllables are written with two letters in the order rimeonset (typically vowel-consonant), even though they are pronounced as onset-rime (consonant-vowel), rather like the position of the /i/ vowel in Devanagari, which is written before the consonant. Pahawh is also unusual in that, while an inherent rime /u/ (with mid tone) is unwritten, it also has an inherent onset /k/. For the syllable /kau/, which requires one or the other of the inherent sounds to be overt, it is /au/ that is written. Thus it is the rime (vowel) which is basic to the system.

[edit] Meroitic
It is difficult to draw a dividing line between abugidas and other segmental scripts. For example, the Meroitic script of ancient Sudan did not indicate an inherent a (one symbol stood for both m and ma, for example), and is thus similar to Brahmic family abugidas. However, the other vowels were indicated with full letters, not diacritics or modification, so the system was essentially an alphabet that did not bother to write the most common vowel.

[edit] Shorthand
Several systems of shorthand use diacritics for vowels, but they do not have an inherent vowel, and are thus more similar to Thaana and Kurdish script than to the Brahmic scripts. The Gabelsberger shorthand system and its derivatives modify the following consonant to represent vowels. The Pollard script, which was based on shorthand, also uses diacritics for vowels; the placements of the vowel relative to the consonant indicates tone. Pitman shorthand uses straight strokes and quarter-circle marks in different orientations as the principal "alphabet" of consonants; vowels are shown as light and heavy dots, dashes and other marks in one of 3 possible positions to indicate the various vowel-sounds. However, to increase writing-speed Pitman has rules for "vowel indication" using the positioning or choice of consonant signs so that writing vowel-marks can be dispensed with.

[edit] Development
As the term alphasyllabary suggests, abugidas have been considered an intermediate step between alphabets and syllabaries. Historically, abugidas appear to have evolved from abjads

(vowelless alphabets). They contrast with syllabaries, where there is a distinct symbol for each syllable or consonant-vowel combination, and where these have no systematic similarity to each other, and typically develop directly from logographic scripts. Compare the Devanagari examples above to sets of syllables in the Japanese hiragana syllabary: ka, ki, ku, ke, ko have nothing in common to indicate k; while ra, ri, ru, re, ro have neither anything in common for r, nor anything to indicate that they have the same vowels as the k set. Most Indian and Indochinese abugidas appear to have first been developed from abjads with the Kharoh and Brhm scripts; the abjad in question is usually considered to be the Aramaic one, but while the link between Aramaic and Kharosthi is more or less undisputed, this is not the case with Brahmi. The Kharosthi family does not survive today, but Brahmi's descendants include most of the modern scripts of South and Southeast Asia. Ge'ez derived from a different abjad, the Sabean script of Yemen; the advent of vowels coincided with the introduction of Christianity about 350 CE.[5]

[edit] Other types of writing systems

Featural alphabet Abjad Alphabet Logogram Syllabary

[edit] Partial list of abugidas

For a more complete list, see List of writing systems.

[edit] True abugidas

Comparison of various abugidas descended from Brahmi script. May iva bless those who take delight in the language of the gods. (Kalidasa)

Brahmic family, descended from Brhm (c. 6th century BC)

Ahom (Assamese) Balinese Balti Batak Baybayin, pre-Hispanic script of Tagalog and other Philippine languages Bengali Bhujimol Box-head a script in India Bugis also known as Makassar or Lontara Buhid, used by Mangyans in Mindoro, Philippines Burmese Chalukya Cham Chola Devanagari (used to write Nepali, Sanskrit, Pali, modern Hindi, Marathi etc.) Dehong Dai Golmol Grantha Gujarati Gurmukhi Hanuno'o, a script used by Mangyans in Mindoro, Philippines Javanese Kadamba Kaithi Kannada Khmer Lanna Lepcha Limbu Lao (before spelling reforms)

Malayalam Manipuri (also known as Meitei Mayek script) Modi used to write Marathi Oriya Old Kawi progenitor of Indonesian and Philippine scripts Pachumol Phags-Pa created for Kublai Khan's Yuan China Prachalit Nepal Ranjana Redjang Sharada Siddham used to write Sanskrit Sinhala Sorang Sompeng Sourashtra Soyombo script Sundanese Syloti Nagri Tagbanwa in Palawan, Philippines Tai Dam Tamil Telugu Thai Tibetan Tirhuta used to write Maithili Tocharian extinct Varang Kshiti Vatteluttu aka round script

Kharoh (extinct), from the 3rd century BC Ge'ez (Ethiopic), from the 4th century AD Canadian Aboriginal syllabics

Cree-Ojibwe syllabics Inuktitut syllabics Blackfoot syllabics

Carrier syllabics

[edit] Abugida-like scripts

Meroitic (extinct) Thaana Pitman shorthand Pollard script

[edit] References
1. ^ "?". http://www.jstor.org/pss/602899. 2. ^ He describes this term as "formal", i.e. more concerned with graphic arrangement of

symbols, whereas abugida was "functional", putting the focus on soundsymbol correspondence, but this is not a distinction made in the literature.
3. ^ a b William Bright (2000:6566): A Matter of Tpology: Alphasyllabaries and Abugidas.

In: Studies in the Linguistic Sciences. Volume 30, Number 1, pages 6371
4. ^ John D. Berry (2002:19) Language Culture Type 5. ^ Getatchew Haile, "Ethiopic Writing". In Daniels & Bright (1996) The World's Writing

Systems

[edit] External links

Syllabic alphabets Omniglot's list of abugidas, including examples of various writing systems Alphabets list of abugidas and other scripts (in Spanish) Comparing Devanagari with Burmese, Khmer, Thai, and Tai Tham scripts [show]v d eWriting systems

O v e r History of writing History of the alphabet Graphemes Scripts in Unicode v i e w L i Writing systems Languages by writing system / by first written account Undeciphered writing s tsystems Inventors of writing systems s T Featural alphabets Alphabets Abjads Alphasyllabaries / Abugidas Syllabaries Semi-

y p syllabaries Ideogrammic Pictographic Logographic Numeral e s Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida" View page ratings Rate this page Rate this page Page ratings What's this? Current average ratings. Trustworthy Objective Complete Well-written Adequate clarity I am highly knowledgeable about this topic (optional) I have a relevant college/university degree It is part of my profession It is a deep personal passion The source of my knowledge is not listed here I would like to help improve Wikipedia, send me an e-mail (optional) We will send you a confirmation e-mail. We will not share your address with anyone. (Privacy policy) Submit ratings Saved successfully Your ratings have not been submitted yet Your ratings have expired Please reevaluate this page and submit new ratings. An error has occured. Please try again later. Thanks! Your ratings have been saved.

Please take a moment to complete a short survey. Start survey Maybe later Thanks! Your ratings have been saved. Do you want to create an account? An account will help you track your edits, get involved in discussions, and be a part of the community. Create an accountorLog in Maybe later Thanks! Your ratings have been saved. Did you know that you can edit this page? Edit this page Maybe later Categories: Abugida writing systems Hidden categories: Requests for audio pronunciation (English)
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Proto-Sinaitic script
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Proto-Sinaitic alphabet)

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A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script containing a phrase which may mean 'to Baalat'. The line running from the upper left to lower right reads mt l bclt. [show]History of the alphabet Proto-Sinaitic script? 19 c. BCE Ugaritic 15 c. BCE Proto-Canaanite 14 c. BCE Phoenician 12 c. BCE Greek 8 c. BCE Etruscan 8 c. BCE Latin 7 c. BCE Runic 2 c. CE Coptic 3 c. CE Gothic 3 c. CE Armenian 405 Georgian 3 c. BCE Glagolitic 862 Cyrillic ca. 940 Aramaic 8 c. BCE Kharoh 6 c. BCE Brhm & Indic 6 c. BCE Bhattiprolu Script Telugu Script Brahmic

abugidas Oriya10 c. CE Bengali1 1 c. CE Devanag ari 13 c. CE Hebrew 3 c. BCE Thaana 4 c. BCE Pahlavi 3 c. BCE Avestan 4 c. CE Palmyrene 2 c. BCE Syriac 2 c. BCE Sogdian 2 c. BCE Orkhon (Old Turkic) 6 c. CE O l d H u n g a r i a n c a. 6 5 0 Old Uyghur M o n

g o li a n 1 2 0 4 h h Nabataean 2 c. BCE Arabic 4 c. CE Mandaic 2 c. CE Paleohispanic 7 c. BCE Paleo-Hebrew 10 c. BCE Samaritan 6 c. BCE Epigraphic South Arabian 9 c. BCE Geez 56 c. BCE Meroitic 3 c. BCE Ogham 4 c. CE Hangul 1443 Zhuyin (Bopomofo) 1913 This box: view talk edit Proto-Sinaitic is a Middle Bronze Age script attested in a very small collection of inscriptions at Serabit el-Khadim on the Sinai Peninsula. Due to the extreme scarcity of Proto-Siniatic signs, very little is known with certainty about the nature of the script. Because the script co-existed with Egyptian hieroglyphs, it is likely that it represented true writing, but this is by no means certain. It has also been argued that Proto-Sinaitic was an alphabet and the ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, from which nearly all modern alphabets descend. There have been two major discoveries of inscriptions that may be related to the Proto-Sinaitic script, the first in the winter of 19041905 in Sinai by Hilda and Flinders Petrie, dated to the mid 19th century BCE, and more recently in 1999 in Middle Egypt by John and Deborah Darnell, dated to the 18th century BCE.[1]

Contents

[hide]

1 Serabit inscriptions 2 Alphabet hypothesis 3 Proto-Canaanite inscriptions 4 Wadi el-Hol inscriptions 5 See also 6 References 7 Literature 8 External links

8.1 News articles

[edit] Serabit inscriptions

The Sinai inscriptions are best known from carved graffiti and votive texts from a mountain in the Sinai called Serabit el-Khadim and its temple to the Egyptian goddess Hathor (wt-r). The mountain contained turquoise mines which were visited by repeated expeditions over 800 years. Many of the workers and officials were from the Nile Delta, and included large numbers of "Asiatics", speakers of the Canaanite language that was ancestral to Phoenician and Hebrew, who had been allowed to settle the eastern Delta.[1] Most of the thirty or so inscriptions have been found among much more numerous hieratic and hieroglyphic inscriptions, scratched on rocks near and in the turquoise mines and along the roads leading to the temple. Four inscriptions have been found in the temple, on two small human statues and on either side of a small stone sphinx. They are crudely done, suggesting that the workers who made them were illiterate apart from this script. In 1916, Alan Gardiner, using sound values derived from the alphabet hypothesis, translated a collection of signs as l blt (to the Lady)[2] One of the instances of this collection of sings was on the small stone sphinx, which contained a bilingual inscription: The Egyptian reads The beloved of Hathor, the mistress of turquoise, and according to Gardiner's translation, the Proto-Sinaitic reads mhbl (the beloved of the Lady; mhb beloved), with the final t of blt (Lady) not surviving. Egyptologist Orly Goldwasser believes the script was most likely invented during the reign of pharaoh Amenemhet III of the Twelfth Dynasty.[1] The script has graphic similarities with the Egyptian hieratic script, the less elaborate form of the hieroglyphs. In the 1950s and 60s it was common to show the derivation of the Canaanite alphabet from hieratic, using William Albright's interpretations of Proto-Sinaitic as the key. It was generally accepted that the language of the inscriptions was Semitic and that the script had a hieratic prototype. If correctly translated, the word balat (Lady) lends credence to the identification of the language as Semitic. However, the lack of further progress in decipherment casts doubt over the other suppositions, and the identification of the hieratic prototypes remains speculative.[citation needed]

[edit] Alphabet hypothesis

Proto-Sinaitic is hypothesized to be an intermediate step between Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Phoenician alphabet. If this is the case, Proto-Sinaitic may be the first alphabet. According to the alphabet theory, the alphabet began with Proto-Sinaitic at the end of the Middle Bronze Age and

split into the South Arabian script and the Proto-Canaanite script in the Late Bronze Age. The Proto-Canaanite script would then have evolved into Phoenician proper by 1100 BCE.[3] The theory centers around the idea that the forms of the Proto-Sinaitic signs resemble the names of the letters in the Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets. For instance, a sign resembling an animal head has been correlated with the letter aleph, which means "ox," and a square sign has been connected to the letter bet, which means "house."[1] According to the alphabet hypothesis, the shapes of the letters would have evolved from Proto-Sinaitic forms into Phoenician forms, but the names of the letters would have remained the same. Below is a table showing selected ProtoSinaitic signs and the proposed correspondences with Phoenician letters. Also shown are the sound values, names, and descendants of the Phoenician letters. Possible correspondences between Proto-Sinaitic and Phoenician Proto-Sinaitic Phoenician Phoen. value Phoen. name Descendants alp "ox" A

b.

bet "house"

kap "hand"

mem "water" M

en "eye"

O -

ras "head"

[edit] Proto-Canaanite inscriptions

Only a few inscriptions have been found in Canaan itself, dated from ca. the 17th century BCE. They are all very short, most consisting of only a couple of letters, and may have been written by Canaanite caravaners or soldiers from Egypt.[1] They sometimes go by the name Proto-Canaanite, [4] , although the term "Proto-Canaanite" is also applied to early Phoenician or Hebrew inscriptions.[5]

[edit] Wadi el-Hol inscriptions

This article's factual accuracy may be compromised due to out-of-date information. Please help improve the article by updating it. There may be additional information on the talk page. (March 2010)

The Wadi el-Hol inscriptions (Arabic Wd al-Hl 'Ravine of Terror') were carved on the stone sides of an ancient high-desert military and trade road linking Thebes and Abydos, in the heart of literate Egypt. They are in a wadi in the Qena bend of the Nile, at approx. 2557N 3225E / 25.95N 32.417E / 25.95; 32.417, among dozens of hieratic and hieroglyphic inscriptions. The inscriptions are graphically very similar to the Serabit inscriptions, but show a greater hieroglyphic influence, such as a glyph for a man that was apparently not read alphabetically.[1]

Traces of the 16 and 12 characters of the two Wadi el-Hol inscriptions. (Photos here and here) H1 is a figure of celebration [Gardiner A28], whereas h2 is either that of a child [Gardiner A17] or of dancing [Gardiner A32]. If the latter, h1 and h2 may be graphic variants (such as two hieroglyphs both used to write the Canaanite word hillul "jubilation") rather than different consonants.

Hieroglyphs representing celebration, a child, and dancing respectively. The first appears to be the prototype for h1, while the latter two have been suggested as the prototype for h2.
[citation needed]

Several scholars[who?] agree that the rb at the beginning of Inscription 1 is likely rebbe (chief; cognate with rabbi). Several scholars[who?] have also asserted that the l at the end of Inscription 2 is likely el "(a) god".

[edit] See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Proto-Canaanite alphabet

Alphabet Abjad

Byblos syllabary Egyptian hieroglyphs Ugaritic script

[edit] References
1. ^ a b c d e f "How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs" o Biblical Archaeology

Review, Mar/Apr 2010

2. ^ balat (Lady) is a title of Hathor and the feminine of the title Baal (Lord) given to the

Semitic god.

3. ^ John F. Healey, The early alphabet University of California Press, 1990, ISBN 978-0-

520-07309-8, p. 18.
4. ^ Roger D. Woodard, 2008, "The Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet in Egyptian

Scripts", in The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia

5. ^ "Earliest Known Hebrew Text In Proto-Canaanite Script Discovered In Area Where

'David Slew Goliath'". November 3, 2008. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081103091035.htm. ]

[edit] Literature

Albright, Wm. F. (1966) The Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions and their Decipherment Colless, Brian E., "The proto-alphabetic inscriptions of Sinai", Abr-Nahrain 28 (1990). Colless, Brian E., "The proto-alphabetic inscriptions of Canaan", Abr-Nahrain 29 (1991). Stefan Jakob Wimmer / Samaher Wimmer-Dweikat: The Alphabet from Wadi el-Hl A First Try, in: Gttinger Miszellen. Beitrge zur gyptologischen Diskussion, Heft 180, Gttingen 2001, p. 107-111 J. Darnell and C. Dobbs-Allsopp, et al., Two Early Alphabetic Inscriptions from the Wadi el-Hol: New Evidence for the Origin of the Alphabet from the Western Desert of Egypt, Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 2005. Hamilton, Gordon J, The origins of the West Semitic alphabet in Egyptian scripts (2006) Fellman, Bruce (2000) "The Birthplace of the ABCs." Yale Alumni Magazine, December 2000.[1] Sacks, David (2004). Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from A to Z. Broadway Books. ISBN 0-7679-1173-3. Millard, A. R. (1986) "The Infancy of the Alphabet" World Archaeology. pp. 390398. Ray, John D. (1986) "The Emergence of Writing in Egypt" Early Writing Systems; 17/3 pp. 307316.

[edit] External links

USC West Semitic Research Project site on Wadi el-Hol, with photos Photos of Proto-Sinaitic and later Semitic inscriptions Proto-Sinaitic TrueType font for your computer Ancient Hebrew Alphabet chart for comparison

Comprehensive study of Proto-Sinaitic corpus (in Spanish) The Tower of Babel an academically-affiliated etymology database How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs Biblical Archaeology Review, Mar/Apr 2010 Yale news article on Wadi el-Hol from 2000 Dec Archeology article on Wadi el-Hol from 2000 Jan New York Times article on Wadi el-Hol from 1999 Nov BBC article on Wadi el-Hol from 1999 Nov

[edit] News articles

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Brhm script
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May
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Brhm
Type Spoken languages Time period abugida Early Prakrit languages perhaps 6th, and certainly 3rd, century BCE, to c. 3rd century CE Unclear. Indigenous or Aramaic (as follows) Parent systems Proto-Sinaitic alphabet

Phoenician alphabet

Aramaic alphabet Brhm

Child systems Sister systems

Gupta, Pallava, and numerous others in the Brahmic family of scripts. Unclear. Per Aramaic hypothesis:

Kharoshthi Unicode range U+11000U+1107F Brah ISO 15924 Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols.

Brhm is the modern name given to the oldest members of the Brahmic family of scripts.[citation needed] The best-known Brhm inscriptions are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dated to the 3rd century BCE. These are traditionally considered to be early known examples of Brhm writing. Recent discoveries have revealed earlier epigraphy in TamilBrahmi, a Southern Brahmic alphabet found on pottery in South India and Sri Lanka dating from before the 6th century BCE Sangam period. Southern Brahmi gave rise to Tamil Brahmi, Vatteluttu and Pallava Grantha scripts that diversified into many South East Asian scripts like the Mon script in Burma, the Javanese script in Indonesia and the Khmer script in Cambodia. Northern Brahmi gave rise to the Gupta script during the Gupta period, which in turn diversified into a number of cursives during the Middle Ages, including Siddham, Sharada and Nagari. The script was deciphered in 1837 by James Prinsep, an archaeologist, philologist, and official of the British East India Company.[1] Like its contemporary in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, Kharoh, Brhm was an abugida. Brhm was ancestral to most of the scripts of South Asia and Southeast Asia, several Central Asian scripts such as Tibetan and Khotanese, and possibly, in part, Korean Hangul. The varga arrangement of Brhm was adopted as the modern order of Japanese kana, though the letters themselves are unrelated.[2]

Gupta script on stone Kanheri Caves

Contents
[hide]

1 Origins

1.1 Aramaic hypothesis 1.2 Pre-Ashokan epigraphy

2 Ashokan inscriptions 3 Early regional variants 4 Characteristics

4.1 Punctuation[10]

5 Descendants 6 Etymology and legend of Brahmi 7 Unicode 8 See also 9 References 10 Further reading 11 External links

[edit] Origins
Main article: Early Indian epigraphy [show]History of the alphabet Proto-Sinaitic script? 19 c. BCE Ugaritic 15 c. BCE Proto-Canaanite 14 c. BCE Phoenician 12 c. BCE Greek 8 c. BCE Etruscan 8 c. BCE Latin 7 c. BCE Runic 2 c. CE Coptic 3 c. CE Gothic 3 c. CE Armenian 405 Georgian 3 c. BCE Glagolitic 862 Cyrillic ca. 940 Aramaic 8 c. BCE Kharoh 6 c. BCE Brhm & Indic 6 c. BCE Bhattiprolu Script Telugu Script Brahmic abugidas Oriya10

c. CE Bengali1 1 c. CE Devanag ari 13 c. CE Hebrew 3 c. BCE Thaana 4 c. BCE Pahlavi 3 c. BCE Avestan 4 c. CE Palmyrene 2 c. BCE Syriac 2 c. BCE Sogdian 2 c. BCE Orkhon (Old Turkic) 6 c. CE O l d H u n g a r i a n c a. 6 5 0 Old Uyghur M o n g o li

a n 1 2 0 4 h h Nabataean 2 c. BCE Arabic 4 c. CE Mandaic 2 c. CE Paleohispanic 7 c. BCE Paleo-Hebrew 10 c. BCE Samaritan 6 c. BCE Epigraphic South Arabian 9 c. BCE Geez 56 c. BCE Meroitic 3 c. BCE Ogham 4 c. CE Hangul 1443 Zhuyin (Bopomofo) 1913 This box: view talk edit

A fragment of Ashoka's 6th pillar edict. The origins of the Brahmi script are unclear. Several hypotheses have been proposed, but none are supported by enough evidence for agreement among scholars. One consensus, based on Albrecht Weber (1856) and Georg Bhler's On the origin of the Indian Brahma alphabet (1895), sees Brhm deriving from the Imperial Aramaic script. As of 1996, this Aramaic hypothesis was still considered the most likely scenario.[3][4] However, it has never been conclusive, and continues to be debated, especially within India.

Some scholars, such as F. Raymond Allchin, take Brhm as a purely indigenous development, perhaps with the Bronze Age Indus script as its predecessor.[citation needed] The Indus hypothesis has been challenged for the lack of any intervening evidence for writing during the millennium and a half between the collapse of the Indus Valley civilisation ca. 1900 BCE and the first appearance of Brahmi in the mid-4th century BCE.[4] Like Kharosthi, Brhm was used to write the early dialects of Prakrit. Surviving records of the script are mostly restricted to inscriptions on buildings and graves as well as liturgical texts. Sanskrit was not written until many centuries later, and as a result, Brhm is not a perfect match for Sanskrit; several Sanskrit sounds cannot be written in Brhm.[citation needed]

[edit] Aramaic hypothesis

The origin of Brhm remains doubtful. However, a weak consensus exists among scholars for link with Aramaic[citation needed]. According to the Aramaic hypothesis, the oldest Brhm inscriptions shows striking parallels with contemporary Aramaic for the sounds that are congruent between the two languages, especially if the letters are flipped to reflect the change in writing direction.[citation needed] (Aramaic is written from right to left, as was Brhm originally, whereas Brhm later came to be written left to right.[citation needed]) For example, both Brhm and Aramaic g resemble ; both Brhm and Aramaic t resemble , etc. Brhm does feature a number of extensions to the Aramaic alphabet, as it was required to write more sounds. For example, Aramaic did not distinguish dental stops such as d from retroflex stops such as , and in Brhm the dental and retroflex series are graphically very similar, as if both had been derived from a single Aramaic prototype. Aramaic did not have Brhms aspirated consonants (kh, th, etc.), whereas Brhm did not have Aramaic's emphatic consonants (q, , the dot diacritic here has a different meaning from the retroflex stops of Brhm), and it appears that these unneeded emphatic letters filled in for Brhm's aspirates: Aramaic q for Brhm kh, Aramaic () for Brhm th (), etc. And just where Aramaic did not have a corresponding emphatic stop, p, Brhm seems to have doubled up for the corresponding aspirate: Brhm p and ph are graphically very similar, as if taken from the same source in Aramaic p. The first letter of the two alphabets also match: Brhm a, which resembled a reversed , looks a lot like Aramaic alef, which resembled Hebrew .The following table compares Brhm with Phoenician and Aramaic. Possible derivation of Brhm from the Phoenician script Greek Phoenici an Aramaic Brahmi Devana gari Tamil Kannad

, ?

a IAST a ba g dh h a a a v da a a ? ? th y k c m n ha la a* a a a a a a a p ph sa kh ch a ra ta a a a * a a *

* Both Phoenician/Aramaic and Brahmi had three voiceless sibilants, but because the alphabetical ordering was lost, the correspondences among them are not clear. Not accounted for are the six Brahmi consonants bh, gh, h, j, jh, ny, some of which could conceivable derive from the three Aramaic consonants with no obvious correspondence. (Brahmi ng was a later development.)

[edit] Pre-Ashokan epigraphy

Main article: Tamil Brahmi

Some common variants of Brahmic letters The earliest likely contact of the Hindu Kush region with the Aramaic script occurred in the 6th century BCE with the expansion of the Achaemenid Empire under Darius the Great to the Indus valley. It appears that no use of any script to write an Indo-Aryan languages occurred before the reign of Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE, despite the evident example of Aramaic. Megasthenes, an ambassador to the Mauryan court only a quarter century before Ashoka, noted explicitly that the Indians "have no knowledge of written letters". This might be explained by the cultural importance at the time (and indeed to some extent today) of oral literature for history and Hindu scripture. There have been claims that fragmentary of Brhm epigraphy found in Tamil Nadu[5] and Sri Lanka date as far back as the 5th or 6th century BCE,[6] which have been taken as evidence for an early spread of Buddhism.[4] However, evidence for pre-Mauryan Brahmi inscriptions remains inconclusive, restricted to pottery fragments with possible individual glyphs. The earliest complete inscriptions remain the 3rd-century-BCE Ashokan texts. Many early post-Ashokan

remains show regional variation thought to have developed after a period of unity across India during the Ashokan period.

[edit] Ashokan inscriptions

Connections between Phoenician (4th column) and Brahmi (5th column). Note that 6th-to-4thcentury BCE Aramaic (not shown) is in many cases intermediate in form between the two. Brhm 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.[7]

[edit] Early regional variants

The earliest Ashokan inscriptions are found across Indiaapart from the Kharosthi-writing northwestand are highly uniform. By the late third century BCE regional variants had developed, due to differences in writing materials and to the structures of the languages being written. For example, Tamil-Brahmi had a divergent system of vowel notation. The earliest definite evidence of Brahmi script in South India comes from Bhattiprolu in Andhra Pradesh.[8][9] The Bhattiprolu script was written on an urn containing Buddhist relics, apparently in 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.

[edit] Characteristics

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

Variants of Brahmi over time Brhm 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 Brhm running from right to left, as in Aramaic. Brhm 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/. In modern Devanagari conjunct consonant are written left to right to join them as one composite character whereas in Brhm characters are joined vertically downwards. Vowels following a consonant are written by diacritics, but initial vowels have dedicated letters. There are three vowels in Brhm, /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.

[edit] Punctuation[10]
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[show]Brhm The Brahmic script and its descendants Northern Brahmic Kusan Tocharian Meitei Mayek Gupta rad Landa Old Kash miri Gurm ukh Khojk i Khuda wadi Takri Dogri Cham eali Siddha Tibetan Phags pa Lepch a Ngar Devangar Modi

 Nandingar Gujarati Anga Script Proto-Bengali Kaithi Sylhet i Nagari Eastern Nagari Assam ese Benga li Tirhuta Nepal Bhujimol Prachalit Nepal Ranjana Soyo mbo Southern Brahmic Tamil Brahmi Vatteluttu Kolezhuthu Tamil Pallava Grantha Malayalam Tulu Sinhala Dhives Akuru Saurashtra Khmer Lao

 Thai Cham Old Kawi Balinese Javanese Baybayin Batak Buhid Hanun'o Tagbanwa Sundanese Lontara Rejang Mon Burmese Ojhopath Kalinga Oriya Bhattiprolu Script Kadamba Kannada Telugu Tai Le New Tai Lue Ahom

This box: view talk edit Punctuation can be perceived as more of an exception than as a general rule in Asokan Brhm. 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 Brhm 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 interpunctuation 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: dash or horizontal bar vertical bar dot circle

[edit] Descendants
Main article: Brahmic family of scripts Over the course of a millennium, Brhm 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 Brhm 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.[citation needed] As the script of Buddhist scripture, Brahmic alphabets are used for religious purposes throughout China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Gary Ledyard has 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 Brhm.

[edit] Etymology and legend of Brahmi

The name Brahmi is said to have come from a Jain Legend. According to South Indian legend the Jain thirthankara (monk) Vrushabhadeva explained the script to his daughters, Brahmi and Soundhary. Therefore as a mark of this, the writing script is called Brahmi and the numerals are called Soundhary.

[edit] Unicode
Brhm was added to the Unicode Standard in October, 2010 with the release of version 6.0. The Unicode block for Brhm is U+11000 ... U+1107F: Brahmi[1] Unicode.org chart (PDF) 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F

U+1100x

U+1101x

U+1102x

U+1103x

U+1104x

U+1105x

U+1106x U+1107x Notes

1.^ As of Unicode version 6.0

[edit] See also

Indian inscriptions Pre-Islamic scripts in Afghanistan

[edit] References
1. ^ More details about Buddhist monuments at Sanchi, Archaeological Survey of India,

1989.
2. ^ Daniels & Bright, The World's Writing Systems, Oxford University Press, 1996, ISBN

0-19-507993-0
3. ^ Richard Salomon, "Brahmi and Kharoshthi", in The World's Writing Systems 4. ^ a b c Salomon, Richard, On The Origin Of The Early Indian Scripts: A Review Article.

Journal of the American Oriental Society 115.2 (1995), 271-279

5. ^ Subramanian, T.S., Skeletons, script found at ancient burial site in Tamil Nadu 6. ^ Recent claims for earlier 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 (Salomon 1998); from Bhattiprolu;[1] and on pieces of pottery in Adichanallur, Tamil Nadu, which have been radio-carbon dated to the 6th century BCE (Subramanian 2004).
7. ^ Richard Salomon, "Brahmi and Kharoshthi", in Daniels and Bright, The World's

Writing Systems
8. ^ "The Bhattiprolu Inscriptions", G. Buhler, 1894, Epigraphica Indica, Vol.2 9. ^ Buddhist Inscriptions of Andhradesa, Dr. B.S.L Hanumantha Rao, 1998, Ananda

Buddha Vihara Trust, Secunderabad

10. ^ Ram Sharma, Brhm Script: Development in North-Western India and Central Asia,

2002

[edit] Further reading

Kenneth R. Norman, The Development of Writing in India and its Effect upon the Pli Canon, in Wiener Zeitschrift fr die Kunde Sdasiens (36), 1993 Oscar von Hinber, Der Beginn der Schrift und frhe Schriftlichkeit in Indien, Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990 (in German) Grard Fussman, Les premiers systmes d'criture en Inde, in Annuaire du Collge de France 19881989 (in French) Siran Deraniyagala, The prehistory of Sri Lanka; an ecological perspective (revised ed.), Archaeological Survey Department of Sri Lanka, 1992.

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Brahmi script

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 Buddhist Text in Brahmi Script Windows Indic Script Support [show]v d eLanguages of South Asia

M Languages of India (list by number of speakers - scheduled) Languages of Pakistan a Languages of Bangladesh Languages of Nepal Languages of Sri Lanka i n a r t i

c l e s C o n t e m p Austronesian: Sri Lanka Malay Dravidian: Brahui Jeseri Kannada Malayalam Tamil o Telugu Tulu Indo-Aryan: Angika Assamese Bhojpuri Bengali Dhivehi Dogri r Gujarati Hindi Hindko Kashmiri Konkani Kumaoni Magahi Mahal Maithili a Marathi Nepali Oriya Punjabi Saraiki Sindhi Sinhala Urdu Iranian: Balochi Pashto r Persian Wakhi Isolates: Great Andamanese Burushaski Nihali Kusunda Mon-Khmer: y Khasi Nicobarese Munda: Ho Korku Mundari Santali Sora Ongan: nge Jarawa Tibeto-Burman: Ao Bodo Garo Meitei Mizo Nepal Bhasa Sikkimese Tenyidie l Tibetan Tripuri European influence: English (India Pakistan Sri Lanka) French a Portuguese n g u a g e s S c r Indus Brahmi Brahmic family: Devanagari Sinhala Telugu Tamil Tulu Gurmukhi iBengali Ranjana Oriya Malayalam Kannada Gujarati Arabic: Arwi Nasta'liq p Shahmukhi Arabi Malayalam t s L Hela Havula Bengali Language Movement Sanskrit revival Pure Tamil movement Nepal a Bhasa movement Madras anti-Hindi agitation of 1965 Urdu movement n g u a g e a c t

i v i s m [show]v d eTypes of writing

systems
History of writing Grapheme Writing systems (undeciphered inventors) Languages by writing system / by first written accounts [hide] Types [show] Abjads Numerals Aramaic Arabic Pitman shorthand Hebrew Jawi Nabataean Pahlavi Pegon Phoenician Proto-Canaanite Psalter Samaritan South Arabian Sogdian Syriac Tifinagh Ugaritic [show] Abugidas Brahmic Ahom Balinese Batak Baybayin Brhm Buhid

Overview

Lists

Burmese Chakma Cham Devangar Dhives Akuru Eastern Nagari Grantha Gujarati Gupta Gurmukh Hanun'o Javanese Kadamba Kaithi Kalinga Kannada Khmer Lanna Lao Lepcha Limbu Lontara Malayalam Meitei Mayek Mithilakshar Modi Mon Ngar Nepal Old Kawi Old Sundanese Oriya Pallava 'Phags-pa Ranjana Rejang Rencong rad Saurashtra Sinhala Siddha Soyombo Sundanese

Sylheti Nagari Tagbanwa Tai Dam Tai Le Takri Tamil Telugu Thai Tibetan Tocharian Varang Kshiti Boyd's syllabic shorthand Canadian Aboriginal Ge'ez Japanese braille Kharoh Meroitic Pollard script Sorang Sompeng Tna Thomas Natural Shorthand [show] Alphabets Linear Armenian Avestan Beitha Kukju Borama Coptic Cyrillic Deseret Duployan shorthand Eclectic shorthand Elbasan

Others

Fraser Gabelsberger shorthand Georgian Glagolitic Gothic Gregg shorthand Greek GrecoIberian alphabet Euboean Hangul International Phonetic Kaddare Latin Manchu Mandaic Mongolian Neo-Tifinagh N'Ko Ogham Ol Chiki Old Hungarian Old Italic Old Permic Orkhon Osmanya Runic Shavian alphabet New Tai Lue Bassa Vah Visible Speech Non-linear Braille (Hebrew Korean) Maritime flags

Morse code New York Point Semaphore line Flag semaphore Moon type [show] Ideo/Pictograms Aztec Blissymbol DanceWriting Dongba Mkmaq New Epoch Notation Painting Nsibidi SignWriting [show] Logograms Traditional Simplified Ch Nm Hanja Kanji Jurchen Khitan large script Tangut Zhuang Anatolian Cuneiform Maya Yi Demotic Hieratic Hieroglyphs Hindu-Arabic Abjad Greek (Attic)

Chinese

Chinese-based

Other logo-syllabic

Logo-consonantal

Numerals

Roman [show] Semi-syllabaries Celtiberian Northeastern Iberian Southeastern Iberian Southwest Pahawh Hmong Zhyn fho Khitan small script [show] Syllabaries Afaka Cherokee Cypriot Geba Hiragana Katakana Kikakui Kpelle Linear B Man'ygana Nshu Old Persian Cuneiform Vai Woleai Yi Yugtun

Full

Redundant

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Mal Latin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Dhivehi Latin or Maldivian Latin, known colloquially as Mal Latin or Nasiri Latin, is a romanization scheme for Dhivehi (called Mahal in Minicoy) and Arabic. Use of the scheme was briefly officially mandated in the Maldives from 1976, but the country reverted to the native Tna and Arabic scripts in 1978. The scheme is still widely used in non-academic literature for transliterating Maldivian place names.

Contents
[hide]

1 History 2 See also 3 Footnotes 4 References

[edit] History
Maldivians traditionally used two alphabets simultaneously, the Tna script for Dhivehi and the Arabic script for Arabic. All learned Maldivians were well versed in the Quran and Arabic was the first script they learned since childhood. This was followed by their local script, Tna, in which there were not many books printed, but that was important for official use. Therefore the primary knowledge of the letters was called Arabitna. Toward the mid-1970s, during President Ibrahim Nasir's tenure, Telex machines were introduced by the Maldivian Government in the local administration. The new telex equipment was viewed as a great progress, however the local Tna script was deemed to be an obstacle because messages on the telex machines could only be written in the Latin script. Following this, a Latin transliteration not done by experts in linguistics was swiftly approved by the Maldive government in 1976 and was quickly implemented by the administration. Booklets were printed and dispatched to all atoll and island offices, as well as schools and merchant liners. This official Latin script has been criticized by several scholars because the transliteration of vowels did not follow the consistency of the Thaana alphabet and was more difficult to master for Maldivian learners.[1] In the Maldivian alphabet there is one single diacritical sign (fili) for 'a' 'e' 'i' and 'u', and this single sign is repeated when the sound is lengthened. In the new romanization only one of the short vowels is consistent with the way of the traditional script "aa", but most long vowels "oo", "ee", "ey" and "oa" are pronounced as in English.[2] However, only a very small group of Maldivians belonging to the elite were familiar with written English in 1977. Anthropologist Clarence Maloney notes that the use of th and dh to represent unaspirated dental consonants but lh for retroflex l; is confusing and misleading, as in IAST, the most common

transcription method for Indic languages, the first two would be read as aspirated consonants and the latter, which is instead a retroflex, as an aspirated "l".[3] The new romanization also used aberrant combinations of letters and apostrophes for some Arabic sounds, effectively ignoring the Arabic transliterations accepted in academic circles worldwide.[4] Maldivian officials were used to read Arabic since childhood, as the religious education had precedence over the secular one. In documents which contained only one script, it became harder to identify religious Arabic quotations, a fact which was important because they had to be read in a different tone. The Tna script was reinstated by President Maumoon shortly after he took power in 1978. Romanization of the Arabitna scripts; CONSONANTS Arabitna HTML Unicode Maldivian Latin Observations IPA value h [h] and ;0291#& &#1921; sh No Arabic equivalent [] n [n] and ;2291#& r [r] and ;3291#& b [b] and ;4291#& &#1925; lh No Arabic equivalent [] k [k] and ;6291#& (alifu) See vowel list and ;7291#& v [v] and ;8291#& m [m] and ;9291#& f [f] and ;0391#& dh [d] and ;1391#& th [t] and ;2391#& l [l] and ;3391#& &#1934; g No Arabic equivalent [] &#1935; gn No Arabic equivalent [] s [s] and ;6391#& &#1937; d No Arabic equivalent [] z [z] and ;8391#& &#1939; t No Arabic equivalent [] y [j] and ;0491#& &#1941; p No Arabic equivalent [p] j [ ] and ;2491#& &#1943; ch No Arabic equivalent [c] Arabic letters without sh' and ;9491#& &#1944; th' Divehi equivalent &#1945; h' &#1946; kh &#1947; dh' &#1950; s &#1951; s

&#1952; &#1953; &#1954; &#1955; &#1956;

th dh (vowel) + gh q

Romanization of the Arabitna Scripts; VOWELS Arabitna HTML Unicode Maldivian Latin Observations IPA value &#1958; a [a] &#1959; aa [] &#1960; i [i] &#1961; ee [] &#1962; u [u] &#1963; oo [] &#1964; e [e] &#1965; ey [] &#1966; o [o] &#1967; oa [] &#1968; alifu sukun silent when on a consonant Being able to master and combine both Arabic and Tna was a prerequisite to be a Katiibu, Mudiimu or Atoll chief. The weekly Khutuba or Friday prayer sermon, was sent by the government to every inhabited island, and it was written in both scripts, because it contained texts both in Arabic and in the Maldivian language. Even other documents of the time, like private letters, astrological writings or storybooks contained texts, in which both scripts were present, because not only quotations from the Muslim religious texts, but also certain words of Arabic origin (for example the local words for "special", "rule", "important", "declaration", and "service" among others) were written in the Arabic script.
[5]

At the time of the romanization every island's officials were required to use only one script and they became illiterate overnight. From their point of view it was a traumatic period and these old government officers were indeed relieved when the romanization was revoked.

[edit] See also

Romanization of Dhivehi Dhivehi writing systems

[edit] Footnotes
1. ^ Xavier Romero-Frias, The Maldive Islanders, A Study of the Popular Culture of an

Ancient Ocean Kingdom

2. ^ Gair, James W. & Cain, Bruce D. (1996), "Divehi Writing" in Peter T. Daniels &

William Bright, ed., The World's Writing Systems

3. ^ Clarence Maloney; People of the Maldive Islands, p.96.

4. ^ Haywood J.A. & Nahmad H.M. A New Arabic Grammar of the Written Language 5. ^ Maldives

[edit] References

H. C. P. Bell, Excerpta Maldiviana. Reprint Colombo 1922/35 edn. Asian Educational Services. New Delhi 1999 Divehi Bahuge Qawaaaid. Vols 1 to 5. Ministry of Education. Mal 1977. Divehi Trkhah Au Alikameh. Divehi Bahi Trikhah Khidmaiykur Qaum Markazu. Reprint 1958 edn. Mal 1990. Divehnge Tarika 3 vana bai. "Divehnge bas". Divehi Bahi Trikhah Khidmaiykur Qaum Markazu. Mal 2004. Gair, James W. & Cain, Bruce D. (1996), "Divehi Writing" in Peter T. Daniels & William Bright, ed., The World's Writing Systems, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 564568. ISBN 0-19-507993-0. Haywood J.A. & Nahmad H.M. A New Arabic Grammar of the Written Language. London 1990 Xavier Romero-Frias, The Maldive Islanders, A Study of the Popular Culture of an Ancient Ocean Kingdom. Barcelona 1999, ISBN 84 7254 801 5

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mal%C3%A9_Latin" View page ratings Rate this page Rate this page Page ratings What's this? Current average ratings. Trustworthy Objective Complete Well-written

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It is a deep personal passion The source of my knowledge is not listed here I would like to help improve Wikipedia, send me an e-mail (optional) We will send you a confirmation e-mail. We will not share your address with anyone. (Privacy policy) Submit ratings Saved successfully Your ratings have not been submitted yet Your ratings have expired Please reevaluate this page and submit new ratings. An error has occured. Please try again later. Thanks! Your ratings have been saved. Please take a moment to complete a short survey. Start survey Maybe later Thanks! Your ratings have been saved. Do you want to create an account? An account will help you track your edits, get involved in discussions, and be a part of the community. Create an accountorLog in Maybe later Thanks! Your ratings have been saved. Did you know that you can edit this page? Edit this page Maybe later Categories: Maldivian culture | Arabic-derived alphabets | Romanization | Dhivehi language
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List of writing systems

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. (Consider using more specific clean up instructions.) Please improve this article if you can. The talk page may contain suggestions. (December 2006) This is a list of writing systems (or scripts), classified according to some common distinguishing features. The usual name of the script is given first; the name of the language(s) in which the script is written follows (in brackets), particularly in the case where the language name differs from the script name. Other informative or qualifying annotations for the script may also be provided.

Principal scripts at the national level, with selected regional and minority scripts. Alphabet Latin Cyrillic&Latin Logographic+Syllabic Hanzi (L) Kana (2S)+Kanji(L) Greek Georgian Armenian Hangul(Featural-alphabetic S)+limited Hanja(L) Abjad Arabic&Latin Hebrew Abugida N, S Indic Ethiopic Thaana Canadian Syllabic

Writing systems of the world today.

Contents
[hide]

1 Pictographic/ideographic writing systems 2 Logographic writing systems

2.1 Consonant-based logographies 2.2 Syllable-based logographies 3.1 Semi-syllabaries: Partly syllabic, partly alphabetic scripts

3 Syllabaries

4 Segmental scripts

4.1 Abjads 4.2 True alphabets

4.2.1 Linear nonfeatural alphabets 4.2.2 Featural linear alphabets 4.2.3 Manual alphabets 4.2.4 Other non-linear alphabets 4.3.1 Abugidas of the Brhm family 4.3.2 Other Abugidas 4.3.3 Final consonant-diacritic abugidas 4.3.4 Vowel-based abugidas

4.3 Abugidas

5 Undeciphered systems thought to be writing 6 Undeciphered manuscripts 7 Other

7.1 Phonetic alphabets 7.2 Special alphabets

7.2.1 Tactile alphabets 7.2.2 Manual alphabets 7.2.3 Long-Distance Signaling

7.3 Alternative alphabets 7.4 Fictional writing systems

8 See also 9 References

Pictographic/ideographic writing systems

Writing systems
History Grapheme List of writing systems Types Featural alphabet Alphabet Abjad

Abugida Syllabary Logography Shorthand Related topics Pictogram Ideogram

Ideographic scripts (in which graphemes are ideograms representing concepts or ideas, rather than a specific word in a language), and pictographic scripts (in which the graphemes are iconic pictures) are not thought to be able to express all that can be communicated by language, as argued by the linguists John DeFrancis and J. Marshall Unger. Essentially, they postulate that no full writing system can be completely pictographic or ideographic; it must be able to refer directly to a language in order to have the full expressive capacity of a language. Unger disputes claims made on behalf of Blissymbols in his 2004 book Ideogram. Although a few pictographic or ideographic scripts exist today, there is no single way to read them, because there is no one-to-one correspondence between symbol and language. Hieroglyphs were commonly thought to be ideographic before they were translated, and to this day Chinese is often erroneously said to be ideographic. In some cases of ideographic scripts, only the author of a text can read it with any certainty, and it may be said that they are interpreted rather than read. Such scripts often work best as mnemonic aids for oral texts, or as outlines that will be fleshed out in speech.

Aztec Nahuatl Although some proper nouns have phonetic components.[1] Mixtec Mixtec Dongba Naxi Although this is often supplemented with syllabic Geba script. Ersu Shb Ersu Mkmaq hieroglyphic writing Mkmaq Does have phonetic components, however. Nsibidi Ekoi, Efik/Ibibio, Igbo Testerian used for missionary work in Mexico Other Mesoamerican writing systems with the exception of Maya Hieroglyphs. Blissymbols A constructed ideographic script used primarily in Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). iConji A constructed ideographic script used primarily in social networking DanceWriting New Epoch Notation Painting

There are also symbol systems used to represent things other than language. Some of these are

Logographic writing systems

In logographic writing systems, glyphs represent words or morphemes (meaningful components of words, as in mean-ing-ful), rather than phonetic elements. Note that no logographic script is comprised solely of logograms. All contain graphemes which represent phonetic (sound-based) elements as well. These phonetic elements may be used on their own (to represent, for example, grammatical inflections or foreign words), or may serve as

phonetic complements to a logogram (used to specify the sound of a logogram which might otherwise represent more than one word). In the case of Chinese, the phonetic element is built into the logogram itself; in Egyptian and Mayan, many glyphs are purely phonetic, while others function as either logograms or phonetic elements, depending on context. For this reason, many such scripts may be more properly referred to as logosyllabic or complex scripts; the terminology used is largely a product of custom in the field, and is to an extent arbitrary.

Consonant-based logographies

Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, and Demotic writing systems of Ancient Egypt

Egyptian hieroglyphs

List of Egyptian hieroglyphs by common name: A-L List of Egyptian hieroglyphs by common name: M-Z

Syllable-based logographies

Anatolian hieroglyphs Luwian Cuneiform Sumerian, Akkadian, other Semitic languages, Elamite, Hittite, Luwian, Hurrian, and Urartian Chinese characters (Hanzi) Chinese, Japanese (called Kanji), Korean (called Hanja), Vietnamese (called Han tu, obsolete)

Jurchen script Jurchen Khitan large script Khitan Tangut script Tangut Zhuang script Zhuang Ch Nm Vietnamese (for vernacular Vietnamese, now obsolete)

Eghap (or Bagam) script Mayan Chorti, Yucatec, and other Classic Maya languages Yi (classical) various Yi/Lolo languages Shui script Shui language

Syllabaries
In a syllabary, graphemes represent syllables or moras. (Note that the 19th century term syllabics usually referred to abugidas rather than true syllabaries.)

Afaka Ndyuka Alaska script Central Yup'ik Cherokee Cherokee Cypriot Mycenean Greek Geba Naxi Kana Japanese

Hiragana Katakana

Man'ygana

Kikakui Mende Kpelle Kpelle Linear B Mycenean Greek N Shu Chinese Vai Vai Woleaian Woleaian (a likely syllabary) Yi (modern) various Yi/Lolo languages

Semi-syllabaries: Partly syllabic, partly alphabetic scripts

In most of these systems, some consonant-vowel combinations are written as syllables, but others are written as consonant plus vowel. In the case of Old Persian, all vowels were written regardless, so it was effectively a true alphabet despite its syllabic component. In Japanese a similar system plays a minor role in foreign borrowings; for example, [tu] is written [to]+[u], and [ti] as [te]+[i]. Paleohispanic semi-syllabaries behaved as a syllabary for the stop consonants and as an alphabet for the rest of consonants and vowels. The Tartessian or Southwestern script is typologically intermediate between a pure alphabet and the Paleohispanic full semi-syllabaries. Although the letter used to write a stop consonant was determined by the following vowel, as in a full semi-syllabary, the following vowel was also written, as in an alphabet. Some scholars treat Tartessian as a redundant semi-syllabary, others treat it as a redundant alphabet. Zhuyin is semi-syllabic in a different sense: it transcribes half syllables. That is, it has letters for syllable onsets and rimes (kan = "k-an") rather than for consonants and vowels (kan = "k-a-n").

Paleohispanic semi-sillabaries Paleohispanic languages

Tartessian or Southwestern script Tartessian or Southwestern language Southeastern Iberian script Iberian language Northeastern Iberian script Iberian language Celtiberian script Celtiberian language

Old Persian Cuneiform Old Persian Zhuyin fuhao phonetic script for Chinese languages, and principal script for several Formosan languages. Eskayan Bohol, Philippines (a syllabary apparently based on an alphabet; some alphabetic characteristics remain) Bamum script Bamum (a defective syllabary, with alphabetic principles used to fill the gaps)

Segmental scripts
A segmental script has graphemes which represent the phonemes (basic unit of sound) of a language. Note that there need not be (and rarely is) a one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes of the script and the phonemes of a language. A phoneme may be represented only by some combination or string of graphemes, the same phoneme may be represented by more than one

distinct grapheme, the same grapheme may stand for more than one phoneme, or some combination of all of the above. Segmental scripts may be further divided according to the types of phonemes they typically record:

Abjads
An abjad is a segmental script containing symbols for consonants only, or where vowels are optionally written with diacritics ("pointing") or only written word-initially.

Aramaic Arabic Arabic, Azeri, Punjabi, Baluchi, Kashmiri, Pashto, Persian, Kurdish (vowels obligatory), Sindhi, Uighur (vowels obligatory), Urdu, and the languages of many other Muslim peoples Estrangelo Syriac Hebrew Square Script Hebrew, Yiddish, and other Jewish languages Jawi Arabic, Malay Manichaean script Nabataean the Nabataeans of Petra Pahlavi script Middle Persian

Parthian Psalter

Phoenician Phoenician and other Canaanite languages Proto-Canaanite Sabaean

South Arabian Sabaic, Qatabanic, Himyaritic, and Hadhramautic

Sogdian Samaritan (Old Hebrew) Aramaic, Arabic, and Hebrew Tifinagh Tuareg Ugaritic Ugaritic, Hurrian

True alphabets
A true alphabet contains separate letters (not diacritic marks) for both consonants and vowels. Linear nonfeatural alphabets Linear alphabets are composed of lines on a surface, such as ink on paper.

Arabic (for Uyghur) Armenian Armenian Avestan alphabet Avestan language Beitha Kukju Albanian Borama Somali

Caucasian Albanian alphabet Old Udi language Coptic Egyptian Cyrillic Eastern Slavic languages (Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian), eastern South Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian), the other languages of Russia, Kazakh language, Kyrgyz language, Tajik language, Mongolian language. Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan are changing to the Latin alphabet but still have considerable use of Cyrillic. See Languages using Cyrillic. Eclectic Shorthand Elbasan Albanian Fraser Lisu Gabelsberger shorthand Georgian Georgian and Mingrelian. Variants include Mkhedruli, Khutsuri, Asomtavruli, Nuskhuri Glagolitic Old Church Slavonic Gothic Gothic Greek Greek International Phonetic Alphabet Kaddare Somali Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet originally Latin language; most current western and central European languages, Turkic languages, sub-Saharan African languages, indigenous languages of the Americas, languages of maritime Southeast Asia and languages of Oceania use developments of it. Languages using a non-Latin writing system are generally also equipped with Romanization for transliteration or secondary use. Manchu Manchu Mandaic Mandaic dialect of Aramaic Mongolian Mongolian Neo-Tifinagh Tamazight N'Ko Maninka language, Bambara, Dyula language Ogham (Irish pronunciation: [om]) Gaelic, Britannic, Pictish Old Hungarian (in Hungarian magyar rovsrs or szkely-magyar rovsrs) Hungarian Old Italic Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian, Raetic, Venetic, Lepontic, Messapian, South Picene language Old Permic (also called Abur) Komi Old Turkic Turkic Old Uyghur alphabet Uyghur Osmanya Somali

Runic alphabet Germanic languages Ol Cemet' Santali Tai Lue Lue Vah Bassa Zaghawa Zaghawa

Featural linear alphabets A featural script has elements that indicate the components of articulation, such as bilabial consonants, fricatives, or back vowels. Scripts differ in how many features they indicate.

Gregg Shorthand Hangul Korean Shavian alphabet Tengwar (a fictional script) Visible Speech (a phonetic script) Stokoe notation for American Sign Language SignWriting for sign languages

Manual alphabets Manual alphabets are frequently found as parts of sign languages. They are not used for writing per se, but for spelling out words while signing.

American manual alphabet (used with slight modification in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Paraguay, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand) British manual alphabet (used in some of the Commonwealth of Nations, such as Australia and New Zealand) Catalonian manual alphabet Chilean manual alphabet Chinese manual alphabet Dutch manual alphabet Ethiopian manual alphabet (an abugida) French manual alphabet Greek manual alphabet Icelandic manual alphabet (also used in Denmark) Indian manual alphabet (a true alphabet?; used in Devanagari and Gujarati areas) International manual alphabet (used in Germany, Austria, Norway, Finland) Iranian manual alphabet (an abjad; also used in Egypt) Israeli manual alphabet (an abjad) Italian manual alphabet Korean manual alphabet

Latin American manual alphabets Polish manual alphabet Portuguese manual alphabet Romanian manual alphabet Russian manual alphabet (also used in Bulgaria and ex-Soviet states) Spanish manual alphabet (Madrid) Swedish manual alphabet Yugoslav manual alphabet

Other non-linear alphabets These are other alphabets composed of something other than lines on a surface.

Braille (Unified) an embossed alphabet for the visually impaired, used with some extra letters to transcribe the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets, as well as Chinese Braille (Korean) Braille (American) (defunct) New York Point a defunct alternative to Braille International maritime signal flags (both alphabetic and ideographic) Morse code (International) a trinary code of dashes, dots, and silence, whether transmitted by electricity, light, or sound) representing characters in the Latin alphabet. American Morse code (defunct) Optical telegraphy (defunct) Flag semaphore (made by moving hand-held flags)

Abugidas
An abugida, or alphasyllabary, is a segmental script in which vowel sounds are denoted by diacritical marks or other systematic modification of the consonants. Generally, however, if a single letter is understood to have an inherent unwritten vowel, and only vowels other than this are written, then the system is classified as an abugida regardless of whether the vowels look like diacritics or full letters. The vast majority of abugidas are found from India to Southeast Asia and belong historically to the Brhm family. Abugidas of the Brhm family

Anga Script Angika Ahom Brhm Prakrit, Sanskrit Balinese Batak Toba and other Batak languages Baybayin Ilokano, Kapampangan, Pangasinan, Tagalog, Bikol languages, Visayan languages, and possibly other Philippine languages Bengali Bengali, Assamese, Maithili

Buhid Burmese Burmese, Karen languages, Mon, and Shan Cham Dehong Dehong Dai Devangar Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, Nepali, and many other languages of northern India Gujarti Gujarti, Kachchi Gurmukhi script Punjabi Hanunoo Javanese Kaganga Rejang Kaithi Kannada Kannada, Tulu Kawi Khmer Lao Limbu Lontara Buginese, Makassar, and Mandar Malayalam Modi Marathi Nepal Nepal Bhasa, Sanskrit Oriya Phags-pa Mongolian, Chinese, and other languages of the Yuan Dynasty Mongol Empire Ranjana Nepal Bhasa, Sanskrit rad Siddham used to write Sanskrit Sinhala Sourashtra Soyombo Sundanese Syloti Nagri Sylheti Tagbanwa Languages of Palawan Tai Dam Tai Tham Khn, and Northern Thai Tamil

Telugu Thai Tibetan Tirhuta used to write Maithili Tocharian Varang Kshiti Ho Canadian Aboriginal syllabics Cree syllabics (for Cree), Inuktitut syllabics (for Inuktitut), and other variants for Ojibwe, Carrier, Blackfoot, and other languages of Canada Ethiopic Amharic, Geez, Oromo, Tigrigna Kharoh Gandhari, Sanskrit Mandombe Meroitic Mero Pitman Shorthand Pollard script Miao Sorang Sompeng Sora Thaana Dhivehi Thomas Natural Shorthand

Other Abugidas

Final consonant-diacritic abugidas In at least one abugida, not only the vowel but any syllable-final consonant is written with a diacritic. That is, representing [o] with an under-ring, and final [k] with an over-cross, [sok] would written as s.

Rng Lepcha

Vowel-based abugidas In a couple abugidas, the vowels are basic, and the consonants secondary. If no consonant is written in Pahawh Hmong, it is understood to be /k/; consonants are written after the vowel they precede in speech. In Japanese Braille, the vowels but not the consonants have independent status, and it is the vowels which are modified when the consonant is y or w.

Boyd's Syllabic Shorthand Japanese Braille Japanese Pahawh Hmong abugida Hmong

Undeciphered systems thought to be writing

Main article: Undeciphered writing systems These writing systems have not been deciphered. In some cases, such as Meroitic, the sound values of the glyphs are known, but the texts still cannot be read because the language is not understood. In others, such as the Phaistos Disc, there is little hope of progress unless further texts are found. Several of these systems, such as Epi-Olmec and Indus, are claimed to have been

deciphered, but these claims have not been confirmed by independent researchers. In Vina and other cases the system, although symbolic, may turn out not to be writing.

Byblos syllabary the city of Byblos Isthmian (apparently logosyllabic) Indus Indus Valley Civilization Quipu Inca Empire (probably numerical only) Khitan small script Khitan Cretan hieroglyphs Linear A (a syllabary) Minoan Mixtec Mixtec (perhaps pictographic) Vina symbols (perhaps proto-writing) Olmec Olmec civilization (possibly the oldest Mesoamerican script) Phaistos Disc (a unique text, very possibly not writing) Proto-Elamite Elam (nearly as old as Sumerian) Rongorongo Rapa Nui (perhaps a syllabary) Wadi el-l & Proto-Sinaitic (likely an abjad) Zapotec Zapotec (another old Mesoamerican script) Banpo symbols Yangshao culture (perhaps proto-writing) Jiahu symbols Peiligang culture (perhaps proto-writing)

Undeciphered manuscripts
A number of manuscripts from comparable recent past may be written in an invented writing system, a cipher of an existing writing system or may only be a hoax.

Voynich manuscript Rohonc Codex Codex Seraphinianus Hamptonese Dorabella cipher

Other
Phonetic alphabets
This section lists alphabets used to transcribe phonetic or phonemic sound; not to be confused with spelling alphabets like the ICAO spelling alphabet.
1. International Phonetic Alphabet 2. Deseret alphabet 3. Unifon 4. Americanist phonetic notation

5. Uralic Phonetic Alphabet 6. Shavian alphabet

Special alphabets
Alphabets may exist in forms other than visible symbols on a surface. Some of these are: Tactile alphabets
1. Braille 2. Moon type 3. New York Point 4. night writing

Manual alphabets
1. Fingerspelling

For example:
1. American Sign Language 2. American manual alphabet 3. Korean manual alphabet 4. Cued Speech

Long-Distance Signaling
1. International maritime signal flags 2. Morse code 3. Flag semaphore 4. Optical telegraphy

Alternative alphabets
1. Gregg Shorthand 2. Initial Teaching Alphabet 3. Pitman Shorthand 4. Quikscript

Fictional writing systems

1. Ath (alphabet) 2. Aurebesh 3. Cirth 4. D'ni 5. Goa'uld 6. Hymmnos 7. Klingon 8. On Beyond Zebra!

9. Sarati 10. Tengwar

See also

Artificial script List of languages by first written accounts Grapheme Writing system Unicode List of languages by writing system List of inventors of writing systems List of ISO 15924 codes Omniglot: a guide to writing systems Ancient Scripts: Home:(Site with some introduction to different writing systems and group them into origins/types/families/regions/timeline/A to Z) Michael Everson's Alphabets of Europe Deseret Alphabet

References
1. ^ Smith, Mike (1997). The Aztecs. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 0-631-

23015-7. [show]v d eWriting systems O v e r History of writing History of the alphabet Graphemes Scripts in Unicode v i e w L i Writing systems Languages by writing system / by first written account Undeciphered s twriting systems Inventors of writing systems s T Featural alphabets Alphabets Abjads Alphasyllabaries / Abugidas Syllabaries Semiy syllabaries Ideogrammic Pictographic Logographic Numeral p

e s [show]v d eTypes of writing

systems
History of writing Grapheme Writing systems (undeciphered inventors) Languages by writing system / by first written accounts [hide] Types [show] Abjads Numerals Aramaic Arabic Pitman shorthand Hebrew Jawi Nabataean Pahlavi Pegon Phoenician Proto-Canaanite Psalter Samaritan South Arabian Sogdian Syriac Tifinagh Ugaritic [show] Abugidas Brahmic Ahom Balinese Batak Baybayin Brhm Buhid Burmese Chakma

Overview

Lists

Cham Devangar Dhives Akuru Eastern Nagari Grantha Gujarati Gupta Gurmukh Hanun'o Javanese Kadamba Kaithi Kalinga Kannada Khmer Lanna Lao Lepcha Limbu Lontara Malayalam Meitei Mayek Mithilakshar Modi Mon Ngar Nepal Old Kawi Old Sundanese Oriya Pallava 'Phags-pa Ranjana Rejang Rencong rad Saurashtra Sinhala Siddha Soyombo Sundanese Sylheti Nagari Tagbanwa Tai

Dam Tai Le Takri Tamil Telugu Thai Tibetan Tocharian Varang Kshiti Boyd's syllabic shorthand Canadian Aboriginal Ge'ez Japanese braille Kharoh Meroitic Pollard script Sorang Sompeng Tna Thomas Natural Shorthand [show] Alphabets Linear Armenian Avestan Beitha Kukju Borama Coptic Cyrillic Deseret Duployan shorthand Eclectic shorthand Elbasan Fraser Gabelsberger

Others

shorthand Georgian Glagolitic Gothic Gregg shorthand Greek GrecoIberian alphabet Euboean Hangul International Phonetic Kaddare Latin Manchu Mandaic Mongolian Neo-Tifinagh N'Ko Ogham Ol Chiki Old Hungarian Old Italic Old Permic Orkhon Osmanya Runic Shavian alphabet New Tai Lue Bassa Vah Visible Speech Non-linear Braille (Hebrew Korean) Maritime flags Morse code New York

Point Semaphore line Flag semaphore Moon type [show] Ideo/Pictograms Aztec Blissymbol DanceWriting Dongba Mkmaq New Epoch Notation Painting Nsibidi SignWriting [show] Logograms Traditional Simplified Ch Nm Hanja Kanji Jurchen Khitan large script Tangut Zhuang Anatolian Cuneiform Maya Yi Demotic Hieratic Hieroglyphs Hindu-Arabic Abjad Greek (Attic) Roman

Chinese

Chinese-based

Other logo-syllabic

Logo-consonantal

Numerals

[show] Semi-syllabaries Celtiberian Northeastern Iberian Southeastern Iberian Southwest Pahawh Hmong Zhyn fho Khitan small script [show] Syllabaries Afaka Cherokee Cypriot Geba Hiragana Katakana Kikakui Kpelle Linear B Man'ygana Nshu Old Persian Cuneiform Vai Woleai Yi Yugtun

Full

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Arabic alphabet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article contains Arabic text, written from right to left in a cursive style with some letters joined. Without proper rendering support, you may see unjoined Arabic letters written left-toright instead of right-to-left or other symbols instead of Arabic script.

Arabic abjad

Type Spoken languages Time period Parent systems

Abjad Arabic 400 AD to the present Egyptian hieroglyphs

Proto-Sinaitic

Phoenician

Aram aic

U+0600 to U+06FF U+0750 to U+077F U+FB50 to U+FDFF U+FE70 to U+FEFF

Arab (#160) ISO 15924 Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols. Arabic alphabet

Unicode range

History Transliteration Diacritics Hamza Numerals Numeration v d e

[show]History of the alphabet Proto-Sinaitic script? 19 c. BCE Ugaritic 15 c. BCE Proto-Canaanite 14 c. BCE Phoenician 12 c. BCE Greek 8 c. BCE Etruscan 8 c. BCE Latin 7 c. BCE Runic 2 c. CE Coptic 3 c. CE

 Gothic 3 c. CE Armenian 405 Georgian 3 c. BCE Glagolitic 862 Cyrillic ca. 940 Aramaic 8 c. BCE Kharoh 6 c. BCE Brhm & Indic 6 c. BCE Bhattiprolu Script Telugu Script Brahmic abugidas Oriya10 c. CE Bengali1 1 c. CE Devanag ari 13 c. CE Hebrew 3 c. BCE Thaana 4 c. BCE Pahlavi 3 c. BCE Avestan 4 c. CE Palmyrene 2 c. BCE Syriac 2 c. BCE Sogdian 2 c. BCE Orkhon (Old Turkic) 6 c. CE O l d H u

n g a r i a n c a. 6 5 0 Old Uyghur M o n g o li a n 1 2 0 4 h h Nabataean 2 c. BCE Arabic 4 c. CE Mandaic 2 c. CE Paleohispanic 7 c. BCE Paleo-Hebrew 10 c. BCE Samaritan 6 c. BCE Epigraphic South Arabian 9 c. BCE Geez 56 c. BCE Meroitic 3 c. BCE Ogham 4 c. CE

Hangul 1443 Zhuyin (Bopomofo) 1913 This box: view talk edit Arabic alphabet (Listen to an Egyptian Arabic speaker recite the alphabet in Arabic)
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

The Arabic alphabet (Arabic: abadiyyah arabiyyah) or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters. Because letters usually[1] stand for consonants, it is classified as an abjad.

Contents
[hide]

1 Consonants

1.1 Alphabetical order 1.2 Letter forms

1.2.1 Table of basic letters 1.2.2 Further notes 1.2.3 Modified letters 1.2.4 Ligatures 1.2.5 Gemination 1.2.6 Nunation

2 Vowels

2.1 Short vowels 2.2 Long vowels 2.3 Diphthongs 2.4 Vowel omission 3.1 Regional variations 3.2 Sometimes used for writing names and loanwords 3.3 Used in languages other than Arabic

3 Additional letters

4 Numerals

4.1 Letters as numerals 5.1 Arabic printing presses 6.1 Unicode 6.2 Keyboards 6.3 Handwriting recognition

5 History 6 Computers and the Arabic alphabet

7 See also 8 References 9 External links

[edit] Consonants
The Arabic alphabet has 28 basic letters. Adaptations of the Arabic script for other languages, such as Persian, Ottoman, Sindhi, Urdu, Malay or Pashto, Arabi Malayalam, have additional letters, on which see below. There are no distinct upper and lower case letter forms. Many letters look similar but are distinguished from one another by dots (im) above or below their central part, called rasm. These dots are an integral part of a letter, since they distinguish between letters that represent different sounds. For example, the Arabic letters transliterated as b and t have the same basic shape, but b has one dot below, ,and t has two dots above, . Both printed and written Arabic are cursive, with most of the letters within a word directly connected to the adjacent letters.

[edit] Alphabetical order

There are two main collating sequences for the Arabic alphabet:

The original abad order ( ,)used for lettering, derives from the order of the Phoenician alphabet, and is therefore similar to the order of other Phoenician-derived alphabets, such as the Hebrew alphabet. In this order letters are also used as numbers. The hi ( )or alifb ( )order shown in the table below, used where lists of names and words are sorted, as in phonebooks, classroom lists, and dictionaries, groups letters by similarity of shape.

The abad order is not a simple historical continuation of the earlier north Semitic alphabetic order, since it has a position corresponding to the Aramaic letter same/semkat ,yet no letter of the Arabic alphabet historically derives from that letter. Loss of same was compensated for by the split of shin into two independent Arabic letters, ( shn) and ( sn) which moved up to take the place of same. The most common abad sequence is: bdhwzyklmnsfqrt This is commonly vocalized as follows:

abad hawwaz u kalaman safa qaraat aa aa. Another vocalization is: abuadin hawazin uiya kalman safa quriat au au Another abad sequence (probably older, now mainly confined to the Maghreb), is:[2] bdhwzyklmnfqrst which can be vocalized as: abuadin hawazin uiya kalman afa qurisat au au Modern dictionaries and other reference books do not use the abad order to sort alphabetically; instead, the newer hi order (with letters partially grouped together by similarity of shape) is used: btdrzsfqklmnhwy Another kind of hi order used to be widely used in the Maghreb until recently when it was replaced by the Mashriqi order:[2] This section relies on references to primary sources or sources affiliated with the subject. Please add more appropriate citations from reliable sources. (July 2011) Also another new sequence of the Arabic alphabet was put forward by a Saudi Arabian citizen, named Waleed Ahmad J. Addas who managed to combine all the Arabic letters of the alphabet into one single meaningful couplet and without repeating a single letter. This invention was endorsed by a number of local, regional and international language complexes. It reads as follows:

[edit] Letter forms

Unlike cursive writing based on the Latin alphabet, the standard Arabic style is to have a substantially different shape depending on whether it will be connecting with a preceding and/or a succeeding letter, thus all primary letters have conditional forms (allographs), depending on whether they are at the beginning, middle or end of a word, so they may exhibit four distinct forms (initial, medial, final or isolated). However, six letters ( ) have only isolated or final form, and so force the following letter (if any) to take an initial or isolated form, as if there were a word break. For example, ( Ararat) has only isolated forms, because each letter cannot be connected to its adjacent one. Some letters look almost the same in all four forms, while others show considerable variation. Generally, the initial and middle forms look similar except that in some letters the middle form starts with a short horizontal line on the right to ensure that it will connect with its preceding letter. The final and isolated forms, are also similar in appearance but the final form will also have a horizontal stroke on the right and, for some letters, a loop or longer line on the left with which to finish the word with a subtle ornamental flourish. In addition, some letter combinations are written as ligatures (special shapes), including lm-alif.[3] [edit] Table of basic letters

Notes

The transliteration given is the widespread DIN 31635 standard, with some common alternatives. See the article Romanization of Arabic for details and various other transliteration schemes, however Arabic language speakers don't follow a standardized scheme when transcribing names. Also names are regularly transcribed as pronounced locally, not as pronounced in Literary Arabic (if they were of Arabic origin). Regarding pronunciation, the phonemic values given are those of the pronunciation of Literary Arabic, the standard which is taught in universities. In practice, pronunciation may vary considerably from region to region, because Literary Arabic isn't anyone's native language. For more details concerning the pronunciation of Arabic, consult the articles Arabic phonology and varieties of Arabic. The names of the Arabic letters can be thought of as abstractions of an older version where they were meaningful words in the Proto-Semitic language. Names of Arabic letters may have quite different names popularly, but they are not provided in the article. For example: is most commonly known in Egypt as: IPA: []; in Lebanon: IPA: [e]. has two Literary Arabic names: zayn/zy and called by Egyptians: IPA: [zen].

Six letters ( ) don't have a distinct medial form and have to be written with their final form without being connected to the next letter. Their initial form matches the isolated form. Arabic letters usage in Literary Arabic Middle Beginning various, including /a/ [e] /b/ (sometimes /p/ in loanwords)[b] /t/ // [d] ~ [] ~ [] [a] // /x/ /d/ //

End alif b t m dl l

/
b t (also th) (also j, g) (also kh) d (also dh)

r zayn / zy sn n d d ayn ayn f qf kf lm mm nn h ww

r z s (also sh)

/r/ /z/ /s/ // /s/ /d/ /t/ [] ~ [z] // // (sometimes // in loanwords)[a] /f/ (sometimes /v/ in loanwords)[b] /q/ (sometimes // in loanwords)[a] /k/ (sometimes // in loanwords)[a] /l/ /m/ /n/ /h/ /w/, /u/, /aw/, sometimes /u/, /o/, and /o/ in

[ c] [ c]

(also gh) f q k l m n h w / / aw

loanwords y

y / / ay

/j/, /i/, /aj/, sometimes /i/, /e/, and /e/ in loanwords

[ d]

^a For Arabic language speakers, the phoneme // can be represented using different letters, depending on local dialects. is normally used in Egypt, also sometimes Yemen and Oman. is used where it represents the [] in local dialects. or are used where // doesn't exist in local dialects. Other letters such as ,or may also be used, but are not regarded as standard Arabic letters. Likewise, where represents [], it can be also used for //~/d/, or the letter can be used in Egypt. ^b /p/ and /v/ can be represented by and /or if unavailable, and /are used, respectively. ^c F and qf are traditionally written in North Eastern Africa as and respectively, while the latter's dot is only added initially or medially.

^d Y in the isolated and the final forms in handwriting and print in Egypt, Sudan and sometimes other places, is always undotted ,making it only contextually distinguishable from alif maqrah. ^e Alif can represent many phonemes in Literary Arabic:
1. Without diacritics:

initially: a, i /a, i/ or sometimes silent in the definitive article ( a)lmedially or finally: /a/.

2. Alif with hamzah above:

initially: a, u /a, u/ medially or finally: a /a/.

3. Alif with hamzah under:

initially: i /i/; doesn't appear medially or finally (see hamza).

4. Alif with maddah:

initially, medially or finally: /a/.

See also Additional letters below. [edit] Further notes

The letter alif originated in the Phoenician alphabet as a consonant-sign indicating the glottal stop []. Today it has lost its function as a consonant, and, together with ya and ww, is a mater lectionis, a consonant sign standing in for a long vowel (see below), or as support for certain diacritics (maddah and hamzah). The shape of the final y is always undotted in both print and handwriting in Egypt and Sudan, mainly. Arabic currently uses a diacritic sign, ,called hamzah, to denote the glottal stop, written alone or with a carrier:

alone: ; with a carrier: ( above or under a alif), ( above a ww), ( above a dotless y or y hamzah).

Letters lacking an initial or medial version are never linked to the letter that follows, even within a word. The hamzah has a single form, since it is never linked to a preceding or following letter. However, it is sometimes combined with a ww, y, or alif, and in that case the carrier behaves like an ordinary ww, y, or alif.

In academic work, the glottal stop [] is transliterated with the right half ring sign (), while the left half ring sign () represents a different letter, with a different pronunciation, called ayin, corresponding to ayn in Arabic letters. [edit] Modified letters The following are not individual letters, but rather different contextual variants of some of the Arabic letters. Conditional forms Isolated Final Medial Initial Name alif maddah t marbah alif maqrah Translit. Phonemic Value (IPA) h or t/h/ / /a/ /a/, /at/ /a/

[edit] Ligatures Unicode primary range for basic Arabic language alphabet is the U+06xx range. Other ranges are for compatibility to older standards and do contain some ligatures. The only compulsory ligature for fonts and text processing in the basic Arabic language alphabet range U+06xx are ones for lm + alif. All other ligatures (y + mm, etc.) are optional. Example to illustrate it is below. The exact outcome may depend on your browser and font configuration.

lm + alif

Note: Unicode also has in its Presentation Form B FExx range a code for this ligature. If your browser and font are configured correctly for Arabic, the ligature displayed above should be identical to this one, U+FEFB ARABIC LIGATURE LAM WITH ALEF ISOLATED FORM:

U+0640

ARABIC TATWEEL + lm + alif

Note: Unicode also has in its Presentation Form B U+FExx range a code for this ligature. If your browser and font are configured correctly for Arabic, the ligature displayed above should be identical to this one:

U+FEFC

ARABIC LIGATURE LAM WITH ALEF FINAL FORM

Another interesting ligature in the Unicode Presentation Form A range U+FB50 to U+FDxx is the special code for glyph for the ligature Allh (God), U+FDF2 ARABIC LIGATURE ALLAH ISOLATED FORM:

This latter ligature code again is a work-around for the shortcomings of most text processors, which are incapable of displaying the correct vowel marks for the word Allh in Koran. Because Arabic script is used to write other texts rather than Koran only, rendering lm + lm + h as the previous ligature is considered faulty:[4] So, if one of those fonts are installed on your computer (mry_KacstQurn, DejaVu Sans, Scheherazade, Lateef) the right would appear without automatically adding gemination mark and superscript Alef.

lm + lm + h

or

alif + lm + lm + h

or

alif + lm + U+0651 ARABIC SHADDA + U+0670 ARABIC LETTER SUPERSCRIPT ALEF + h

(DejaVu Sans doesn't show the added superscript Alef)

An attempt to show them on the faulty fonts without automatically adding the gemination mark and the superscript Alef, is by adding the U+200d (Zero width joiner) after the first or second lm

(alif +) lm + lm + U+200d ZERO WIDTH JOINER + h

[edit] Gemination Further information: Shadda Gemination is the doubling of a consonant. Instead of writing the letter twice, Arabic places a Wshaped sign called addah, above it. (The generic term for such diacritical signs is arakt). General Name Unicode
0651

Transliteration

addah (consonant doubled)

[edit] Nunation Main article: Nunation Nunation (Arabic: tanwn) is the addition of a final -n to a noun or adjective. The vowel before it indicates grammatical case. In written Arabic nunation is indicated by doubling the vowel diacritic at the end of the word.

[edit] Vowels
Users of Arabic usually write long vowels but omit short ones, so readers must utilize their knowledge of the language in order to supply the missing vowels. However, in the education system and particularly in classes on Arabic grammar these vowels are used since they are crucial to the grammar. An Arabic sentence can have a completely different meaning by a subtle change of the vowels. This is why in an important text such as the Qurn the vowels are mandated.

[edit] Short vowels

Further information: Arabic diacritics In the Arabic handwriting of everyday use, in general publications, and on street signs, short vowels are typically not written. On the other hand, copies of the Qurn cannot be endorsed by the religious institutes that review them unless the diacritics are included. Children's books, elementary-school texts, and Arabic-language grammars in general will include diacritics to some degree. These are known as "vocalized" texts. Short vowels may be written with diacritics placed above or below the consonant that precedes them in the syllable, called arakt. All Arabic vowels, long and short, follow a consonant; in Arabic, words like "Ali" or "alif", for example, start with a consonant: Aliyy, alif. Short vowels Name Trans. Value (fully vocalized text)

064E

fatah

/a/

064F

ammah

/u/

0650

kasrah

/i/

[edit] Long vowels

In the fully vocalized Arabic text found in texts such as Koran, a long following a consonant other than a hamzah is written with a short a sign (fatah) on the consonant plus an alif after it; long is written as a sign for short i (kasrah) plus a y ; and long as a sign for short u (ammah) plus a ww. Briefly, a = , y = and w = . Long following a hamzah may be represented by an alif maddah or by a free hamzah followed by an alif. The table below shows vowels placed above or below a dotted circle replacing a primary consonant letter or a addah sign. For clarity in the table, the primary letters on the left used to mark these long vowels are shown only in their isolated form. Please note that most consonants do connect to the left with alif, ww and y written then with their medial or final form. Additionally, the letter y in the last row may connect to the letter on its left, and then will use a medial or initial form. Use the table of primary letters to look at their actual glyph and joining types. Long vowels (fully vocalised text)
064E 0627

Name

Trans. Value

fatah alif

/a/

064E 0649

fatah alif maqrah

/a/

064F 0648

ammah ww

/u/

0650 064A

kasrah y

/i/

In unvocalized text (one in which the short vowels are not marked), the long vowels are represented by the vowel in question: alif, alif maqrah (or ya), ww, or y. Long vowels written in the middle of a word of unvocalized text are treated like consonants with a sukn (see below) in a text that has full diacritics. Here also, the table shows long vowel letters only in isolated form for clarity. Combinations and are always pronounced w and y respectively, the exception is when is the verb ending, where alif is silent, resulting in . Long vowels (unvocalized text)
0627

Name

Trans. Value

0649

(implied fatah) alif

/a/

0648

(implied fatah) alif maqrah / a

/a/

064A

(implied ammah) ww

/ uw

/u/

(implied kasrah) y

/ iy

/i/

In addition, when transliterating names and loanwords, Arabic language speakers write out most or all the vowels as long ( with alif, and with ya, and and with ww), meaning it approaches a true alphabet.

[edit] Diphthongs
The diphthongs /aj/ and /aw/ are represented in vocalized text as follows: Diphthongs (fully vocalized text)
064E 064A

Name fatah y

Trans. Value ay /aj/

064E 0648

fatah ww

aw

/aw/

[edit] Vowel omission

An Arabic syllable can be open (ending with a vowel) or closed (ending with a consonant): open: CV [consonant-vowel] (long or short vowel) closed: CVC (short vowel only)

In closed syllables, we can indicate that the closing consonant does not carry a vowel by marking it with a diacritic called sukn ( ) to remove any ambiguity, especially when the text is not vocalized. A normal text is composed only of series of consonants; thus, the word qalb, "heart", is written qlb. The sukn indicates where not to place a vowel: qlb could, in effect, be read qalab (meaning "he turned around"), but written with a sukn over the l and the b ( ,)it can only have the form qVlb. This is one step down from full vocalization, where the vowel a would also be indicated by a fatah: . The Qurn is traditionally written in full vocalization. Outside of the Qurn, putting a sukn above a y (representing /i/), or above a ww (representing /u/) is extremely rare, to the point that y with sukn will be unambiguously read as the diphthong /aj/, and ww with sukn will be read /aw/. For example, the letters m-w-s-y-q- ( with an alif maqrah at the end of the word) will be read most naturally as the word msq ("music"). If one were to write a sukn above the ww, the y and the alif, one would get ,which would be read as *mawsayqy (note however that the final alif maqrah, because it is an alif, never takes a sukn). The word, entirely vocalized, would be written as .The Koranic spelling would have no sukn sign above the final alif maqrah, but instead a miniature alif above the preceding qf consonant, which is a valid Unicode character but most Arabic computer fonts cannot in fact display this miniature alif as of 2006. No sukn is placed on word-final consonants, even if no vowel is pronounced, because fully vocalized texts are always written as if the Irb vowels were in fact pronounced. For example, Amad zaw arrr, meaning Ahmed is a wicked husband, for the purposes of Arabic grammar and orthography, is treated as if still pronounced with full Irb, i.e. Amadu zawun arrirun with the complete desinences. General Unicode
0652

Name

Translit. (no vowel with this consonant letter or diphthong with this long vowel letter)

Phonemic Value (IPA)

sukn

0670

alif above

/a/

The sukn is also used for transliterating words into the Arabic script. The Persian word (msk, from the English word "mask"), for example, might be written with a sukn above the to signify that there is no vowel sound between that letter and the .

[edit] Additional letters

[edit] Regional variations

final positions and dotted in the initial and medial forms

a Maghrebi variation of the letter f . and a Maghrebi variation of standard letter ( as a rule, dotless in isolated and
.)

Additional modified letters, used in non-Arabic languages, or in Arabic for transliterating names, loanwords, spoken dialects only, include:

[edit] Sometimes used for writing names and loanwords

Ve, (not to be confused with )used in Kurdish language when written in Arabic
script and sometimes used in Arabic language to represent the sound /v/ when transliterating names and loanwords in Arabic. Also used in writing dialects with that sound.[5] Usually the letter f is used to transliterate /v/. Also used as pa in the Jawi script. The phoneme /v/ in Tunisia and some other regions of Maghreb is rendered using .

Pe, used to represent the phoneme /p/ in Persian, Urdu, and Kurdish; sometimes used in Arabic language when transliterating names and loanwords, although Arabic mostly substitutes /b/ for /p/ in the transliteration of names and loanwords. So, "7up" can be transcribed as or . Che, used to represent /t/ ("ch"). It is used in Persian, Urdu, and Kurdish and sometimes used when transliterating names and loanwords in Arabic. In the Iraqi spoken dialect it may be used, especially when referring in the feminine, although it is rarely written, as well as rarely used in the Maghrebi spelling. Nevertheless, Arabic usually substitutes other letters in the transliteration of names and loanwords: normally the combination t and n is used to transliterate the /t/, as in "Chad". In Egypt is used for // (or /d/, which is approximated to []). In Israel, it's used to render // in Arabic language, for example on roadsigns.

Ca in the Jawi script.

Gf, used to represent //. Normally used in Persian, Kurdish, and Urdu.[5] Often names and loanwords with // are transliterated in Arabic with ( kf), ( qf), ( ayn) or ( m), which may or may not change the original sound. In Egypt is normally

pronounced [].

Gaf, represents a voiced velar plosive [] in informal Moroccan Arabic, as well as

officially to transliterate [] in many city names such as Agadir ( ,)and family names such as El Guerrouj (.)

a Maghrebi letter, sometimes used for [] (not to be confused with .)In Tunisia it is sometimes used to represent the phoneme //. In final and isolate form it has the form which resembles the letter qf whence it is derived. a Maghrebi letter for [t].
e/zhe, used to represent the voiced postalveolar fricative // in, Persian, Kurdish,

[edit] Used in languages other than Arabic

Urdu and Uyghur.

Ng, used to represent the [] phone in Ottoman Turkish, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and
Uyghur.
used in Saraiki to represent a voiced retroflex implosive []. used to represent the equivalent of the Latin letter (palatalized glottal stop []) in

some African languages such as Fulfulde.

used in Ormuri to represent a voiced alveolo-palatal fricative [], as well as in

Torwali.

used in Kalami to represent a voiceless retroflex fricative [], and in Ormuri to

represent a voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative.

used in Shina to represent a voiceless retroflex fricative []. used in Marwari to represent a retroflex lateral flap [], and in Kalami to represent a

voiceless lateral fricative [].

B, used to represent a voiced bilabial implosive [] in Hausa, Sindhi and Saraiki. h, represents the aspirated voiceless retroflex plosive [] in Sindhi. Kh, represents [k] in Sindhi. e, used to represent (a voiceless retroflex plosive []) in Urdu. represents a voiced velar implosive // in Sindhi and Saraiki represents the Velar nasal // phoneme in Sindhi. represents the retroflex nasal // phoneme in Sindhi.
used in Saraiki .

represents an aspirated voiced bilabial plosive [b] in Sindhi.

Zhe, represents a voiced postalveolar fricative [] in Persian, Urdu, Kurdish, and Uyghur.

A, represents a retroflex flap [] in Urdu. used in Kurdish to represent rr [r] in Yekgirt spelling.
Gaf, represents a voiced velar plosive [] in Iraqi Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Kurdish, Uyghur, and Ottoman Turkish.

French eu and u [] sound

or Gaf, represents a voiced velar plosive [] in the Jawi script of Malay. Bari ye, represents "ai" or "e" in Urdu [, e] and Punjabi. represents or [e] in Kurdish. represents O [o] in Kurdish, and in Uyghur it represents the sound similar to the represents a voiced labiodental fricative [v] in Kyrgyz, Uyghur, and Old Tatar; Nya in the Jawi script. Nga in the Jawi script. Va in the Jawi script. [] in Urdu.

and /w, w, w/ in Kazakh; also formerly used in Nogai.

[edit] Numerals
Western Central Eastern/Indian (Maghreb, Europe) (Mideast) (Persian, Urdu) 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Main articles: Western Arabic numerals and Eastern Arabic numerals There are two kinds of numerals used along with Arabic text; Western Arabic numerals and Eastern Arabic numerals. In most of present-day North Africa, the usual Western Arabic numerals are used. Like Western Arabic numerals, in Eastern Arabic numerals, the units are always right-most, and the highest value left-most.

[edit] Letters as numerals

Main article: Abjad numerals

In addition, the Arabic alphabet can be used to represent numbers (Abjad numerals). This usage is based on the abad order of the alphabet. alif is 1, b is 2, m is 3, and so on until y = 10, kf = 20, lm = 30, , r = 200, , ayn = 1000. This is sometimes used to produce chronograms.

[edit] History
Main article: History of the Arabic alphabet

Evolution of early Arabic calligraphy (9th11th century). The Basmalah was taken as an example, from kufic Qurn manuscripts. (1) Early 9th century. script with no dots or diacritic marks;[6] (2) and (3) 9th10th century under Abbasid dynasty, the Abu al-Aswad's system establish red dots with each arrangement or position indicating a different short vowel. Later, a second black dots system was used to differentiate between letters like f and qf;[7][7] (4) 11th century, In Al Farhdi's system (system we know today) dots were changed into shapes resembling the letters to transcribe the corresponding long vowels.[8] The Arabic alphabet can be traced back to the Nabataean alphabet used to write the Nabataean dialect of Aramaic. The first known text in the Arabic alphabet is a late fourth-century inscription from abal Ramm (50 km east of Aqabah), but the first dated one is a trilingual inscription at Zebed in Syria from 512. However, the epigraphic record is extremely sparse, with only five certainly pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions surviving, though some others may be preIslamic. Later, dots were added above and below the letters to differentiate them. (The Aramaic language had fewer phonemes than the Arabic, and some originally distinct Aramaic letters had become indistinguishable in shape, so that in the early writings 15 distinct letter-shapes had to do duty for 28 sounds; cf. the similarly ambiguous Pahlavi alphabet.) The first surviving document that definitely uses these dots is also the first surviving Arabic papyrus (PERF 558), dated April 643, although they did not become obligatory until much later. Important texts like the Qurn were and still are frequently memorized, especially in Qur'an memorization, a practice which probably arose partially from a desire to avoid the great ambiguity of the script. Later still, vowel marks and the hamzah were introduced, beginning some time in the latter half of the seventh century, preceding the first invention of Syriac and Hebrew vocalization. Initially,

this was done by a system of red dots, said to have been commissioned by an Umayyad governor of Iraq, aa ibn Ysuf: a dot above = a, a dot below = i, a dot on the line = u, and doubled dots indicated nunation. However, this was cumbersome and easily confusable with the letterdistinguishing dots, so about 100 years later, the modern system was adopted. The system was finalized around 786 by al-Farhd.

[edit] Arabic printing presses

Although Napoleon Bonaparte generally is given the credit with introducing the printing press to Egypt, upon invading it in 1798, and he did indeed bring printing presses and Arabic script presses, to print the French occupation's official newspaper Al-Tanbiyyah (The Courier), the process was started several centuries earlier. Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1450 was followed up by Gregorio de Gregorii, a Venetian, who in 1514 published an entire prayer book in Arabic script entitled Kitab Salat alSawa'i intended for the eastern Christian communities. The script was said to be crude and almost unreadable.[citation needed] Famed type designer Robert Granjon working for Cardinal Ferdinando de Medici succeeded in designing elegant Arabic typefaces and the Medici press published many Christian prayer and scholarly Arabic texts in the late sixteenth century. The first Arabic books published using movable type in the Middle East were by the Maronite monks at the Maar Quzhayy Monastery in Mount Lebanon. They transliterated the Arabic language using Syriac script. It took a fellow goldsmith like Gutenberg to design and implement the first true Arabic script movable type printing press in the Middle East. The Greek Orthodox monk Abd Allah Zakhir set up an Arabic language printing press using movable type at the monastery of Saint John at the town of Dhour El Shuwayr in Mount Lebanon, the first homemade press in Lebanon using true Arabic script. He personally cut the type molds and did the founding of the elegant typeface. He created the first true Arabic script type in the Middle East. The first book off the press was in 1734; this press continued to be used until 1899.[9]

[edit] Computers and the Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet can be encoded using several character sets, including ISO-8859-6, Windows-1256 and Unicode (see links in Infobox, above), in the latter thanks to the "Arabic segment", entries U+0600 to U+06FF. However, neither of these sets indicate the form each character should take in context. It is left to the rendering engine to select the proper glyph to display for each character. For compatibility with previous standards, initial, medial, final and isolated forms can be encoded separately in Unicode; however, they can also be inferred from their joining context, using the same encoding. The following table shows this common encoding, in addition to the compatibility encodings for their normally contextual forms (Arabic texts should be encoded today using only the common encoding, but the rendering must then infer the joining types to determine the correct glyph forms, with or without ligation).

[edit] Unicode
Main article: Arabic characters in Unicode As of Unicode 6.0, the following ranges encode Arabic characters:

Arabic (0600-06FF) Arabic Supplement (0750-077F)

Arabic Presentation Forms-A (FB50-FDFF) Arabic Presentation Forms-B (FE70-FEFF)

The basic Arabic range encodes the standard letters and diacritics, but does not encode contextual forms (U+0621-U+0652 being directly based on ISO 8859-6); and also includes the most common diacritics and Arabic-Indic digits. U+06D6 to U+06ED encode Qur'anic annotation signs such as "end of ayah" and "start of rub el hizb" . The Arabic Supplement range encodes letter variants mostly used for writing African (non-Arabic) languages. The Arabic Presentation Forms-A range encodes contextual forms and ligatures of letter variants needed for Persian, Urdu, Sindhi and Central Asian languages. The Arabic Presentation Forms-B range encodes spacing forms of Arabic diacritics, and more contextual letter forms. See also the notes of the section on modified letters.

[edit] Keyboards

Arabic Mac keyboard layout

Arabic Windows keyboard layout

Intellark imposed on a QWERTY keyboard layout.

Keyboards designed for different nations have different layouts so that proficiency in one style of keyboard such as Iraq's does not transfer to proficiency in another keyboard such as Saudi Arabia's. Differences can include the location of non-alphabetic characters such as ' All Arabic keyboards allow typing Roman characters, e.g., for the URL in a web browser. Thus, each Arabic keyboard has both Arabic and Roman characters marked on the keys. Usually the Roman characters of an Arabic keyboard conform to the QWERTY layout, but in North Africa, where French is the most common language typed using the Roman characters, the Arabic keyboards are AZERTY. When one wants to encode a particular written form of a character, there are extra code points provided in Unicode which can be used to express the exact written form desired. The range Arabic presentation forms A (U+FB50 to U+FDFF) contain ligatures while the range Arabic presentation forms B (U+FE70 to U+FEFF) contains the positional variants. These effects are better achieved in Unicode by using the zero-width joiner and non-joiner, as these presentation forms are deprecated in Unicode, and should generally only be used within the internals of textrendering software, when using Unicode as an intermediate form for conversion between character encodings, or for backwards compatibility with implementations that rely on the hardcoding of glyph forms. Finally, the Unicode encoding of Arabic is in logical order, that is, the characters are entered, and stored in computer memory, in the order that they are written and pronounced without worrying about the direction in which they will be displayed on paper or on the screen. Again, it is left to the rendering engine to present the characters in the correct direction, using Unicode's bi-directional text features. In this regard, if the Arabic words on this page are written left to right, it is an indication that the Unicode rendering engine used to display them is out-of-date.[10]
[11]

There are competing online tools, e.g. Yamli editor, allowing to enter Arabic letters without having Arabic support installed on a PC and without the knowledge of the layout of the Arabic keyboard.[12]

[edit] Handwriting recognition

The first software program of its kind in the world that identifies Arabic handwriting in real time has been developed by researchers at Ben-Gurion University. The prototype enables the user to write Arabic words by hand on an electronic screen, which then analyzes the text and translates it into printed Arabic letters in a thousandth of a second. The error rate is less than three percent, according to Dr. Jihad El-Sana, from BGU's department of computer sciences, who developed the system along with master's degree student Fadi Biadsy.[13]

[edit] See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Arabic alphabet

Arabic calligraphy Arabic diacritics (pointed vowels and consonants) Arabic numerals Arabic Unicode

Arabic Chat Alphabet ArabTeX provides Arabic support for TeX and LaTeX Rasm (unpointed consonants) Romanization of Arabic South Arabian alphabet Perso-Arabic script Additional Arabic Letters Category: Arabic-derived alphabets Arabic language

[edit] References
1. ^ While there are ways to mark vowels, these are not always employed. Because of this,

it is more exactly called an "impure abjad". See Abjad#Impure abjads for a discussion of this nomenclature.
2. ^ a b (Arabic) Alyaseer.net Ordering entries

and cards in subject indexes Discussion thread (Accessed 2009-Oct-06)

3. ^ Rogers, Henry (2005). Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach. Blackwell Publishing.

p. 135.
4. ^ SIL International: This simplified style is often preferred for clarity, especially in non-

Arabic languages
5. ^ a b Arabic Dialect Tutorial 6. ^ File:Basmala kufi.svg - Wikimedia Commons 7. ^ a b File:Kufi.jpg - Wikimedia Commons 8. ^ File:Qur'an folio 11th century kufic.jpg - Wikimedia Commons 9. ^ Arabic and the Art of Printing A Special Section, by Paul Lunde 10. ^ For more information about encoding Arabic, consult the Unicode manual available at

The Unicode website

11. ^ See also MULTILINGUAL COMPUTING WITH ARABIC AND ARABIC

TRANSLITERATION Arabicizing Windows Applications to Read and Write Arabic & Solutions for the Transliteration Quagmire Faced by Arabic-Script Languages and A PowerPoint Tutorial (with screen shots and an English voice-over) on how to add Arabic to the Windows Operating System.
12. ^ Yamli in the News 13. ^ Israel 21c

Arabic alphabet coloring pages for kids, find the letters and color.

[edit] External links

Named Entity Recognition for a discussion of inconsistencies and variations of Arabic written text.

Arabetics for a discussion of consistency and uniformization of Arabic written text. The Arabic alphabet (writing letters) Arabic at the Open Directory Project

This article contains major sections of text from the very detailed article Arabic alphabet from the French Wikipedia, which has been partially translated into English. Further translation of that page, and its incorporation into the text here, are welcomed. [show]v d eArabic O v e r Language Alphabet History Transliteration Numerology Influence on other v i languages e w s A l p h a Arabic numerals Eastern numerals Diacritics Hamza T marbah b e t L e t Alif B T m Dl l R Zayn Sn n d d t e Ayn ayn F Qf Kf Lm Mm Nn H Ww Y r s E r a Ancient North Arabian Classical Modern s N Standardized: Modern Standard Arabic, Regional: Egyptian Iraqi Levantine Maghrebi o Sudanese Arabian Judeo-Arabic

t a b l e v a r i e t i e s A c a d e Literature Names m i c C Naskh Kufic Thuluth Ruqah Diwani Muhaqqaq Maghrebi Hejazi Mashq a Nastalq Jawi Pegon Sini Xiao'erjing l l i g r a p h y a n d s c r i p

t s L i n g u Phonology Sun and moon letters Irb (inflection) Grammar Triliteral root Mater i s lectionis IPA Quranic Arabic Corpus t i c s [show]v d eTypes of writing

systems
History of writing Grapheme Writing systems (undeciphered inventors) Languages by writing system / by first written accounts [hide] Types [show] Abjads Numerals Aramaic Arabic Pitman shorthand Hebrew Jawi Nabataean Pahlavi Pegon Phoenician Proto-Canaanite Psalter Samaritan South Arabian Sogdian Syriac Tifinagh Ugaritic

Overview

Lists

[show] Abugidas Brahmic Ahom Balinese Batak Baybayin Brhm Buhid Burmese Chakma Cham Devangar Dhives Akuru Eastern Nagari Grantha Gujarati Gupta Gurmukh Hanun'o Javanese Kadamba Kaithi Kalinga Kannada Khmer Lanna Lao Lepcha Limbu Lontara Malayalam Meitei Mayek Mithilakshar Modi Mon Ngar Nepal Old Kawi Old Sundanese Oriya Pallava 'Phags-pa Ranjana

Rejang Rencong rad Saurashtra Sinhala Siddha Soyombo Sundanese Sylheti Nagari Tagbanwa Tai Dam Tai Le Takri Tamil Telugu Thai Tibetan Tocharian Varang Kshiti Boyd's syllabic shorthand Canadian Aboriginal Ge'ez Japanese braille Kharoh Meroitic Pollard script Sorang Sompeng Tna Thomas Natural Shorthand [show] Alphabets Linear Armenian Avestan Beitha Kukju Borama

Others

Coptic Cyrillic Deseret Duployan shorthand Eclectic shorthand Elbasan Fraser Gabelsberger shorthand Georgian Glagolitic Gothic Gregg shorthand Greek GrecoIberian alphabet Euboean Hangul International Phonetic Kaddare Latin Manchu Mandaic Mongolian Neo-Tifinagh N'Ko Ogham Ol Chiki Old Hungarian Old Italic Old Permic Orkhon Osmanya Runic Shavian alphabet New Tai Lue Bassa

Vah Visible Speech Braille (Hebrew Korean) Maritime flags Morse code New York Point Semaphore line Flag semaphore Moon type

Non-linear

[show] Ideo/Pictograms Aztec Blissymbol DanceWriting Dongba Mkmaq New Epoch Notation Painting Nsibidi SignWriting [show] Logograms Traditional Simplified Ch Nm Hanja Kanji Jurchen Khitan large script Tangut Zhuang Anatolian Cuneiform Maya Yi

Chinese

Chinese-based

Other logo-syllabic

Logo-consonantal

Demotic Hieratic Hieroglyphs Hindu-Arabic Abjad Greek (Attic) Roman

Numerals

[show] Semi-syllabaries Celtiberian Northeastern Iberian Southeastern Iberian Southwest Pahawh Hmong Zhyn fho Khitan small script [show] Syllabaries Afaka Cherokee Cypriot Geba Hiragana Katakana Kikakui Kpelle Linear B Man'ygana Nshu Old Persian Cuneiform Vai Woleai Yi Yugtun

Full

Redundant

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Lakshadweep
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
(October 2010)

Lakshadweep Islands

union territory

Seal

Kavaratti
Location of Lakshadweep Islands

1034N 7237E / 10.57N 72.62E / 10.57; Coordinates 72.62Coordinates: 1034N 7237E / 10.57N 72.62E / 10.57; 72.62 India 1 1956-11-10 Kavaratti Andrott J. K. Dadoo
64,429

Country District(s) Established Capital Largest city Administrator Population Density HDI (2005)

2,013 /km2 (5,214 /sq mi) 0.796 (medium) 84.33% Malayali

Official languages Malayalam, English[1] Ethnic groups

15.67% Mahls Time zone Area ISO 3166-2 Website IST (UTC+05:30)
32 km2 (12 sq mi)

IN-LD
www.lakshadweep.gov.in

Lakshadweep ( listen (helpinfo); Malayalam: Lakadvp), also known as the Laccadive Islands, is a group of islands in the Laccadive Sea, 200 to 440 km off the coast of the South West Indian state of Kerala. The islands form the smallest Union Territory of India. The total land area is 11 sq mi or 32 km. Ten of the islands are inhabited. Lakshadweep is the northern part of the erstwhile Lakshadweepa. The islands are the northernmost among the Lakshadweep-Maldives-Chagos group of islands, which are actually the tops of a vast undersea mountain range, in the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea.[2] The land area is 32 km2; the lagoon area is about 4200 km2, the territorial waters area is 20,000 km2 and the economic zone area is 400,000 km2.

Contents
[hide]

1 Etymology 2 History

2.1 Independent India 3.1 India`s Coral Islands

3 Geography 4 Politics 5 Demographics

5.1 Languages 5.2 Ethnicity 6.1 Tourism 6.2 Fisheries 6.3 Other products 6.4 Agriculture

6 Economy

7 Transport 8 References 9 External links

[edit] Etymology

Lakshadweep, comes from Lakshadweepa, which literally means one hundred thousand ( laksha) islands ( dweepa) in Sanskrit. It is the least populous Union Territory of India

[edit] History
The earliest references to the islands is made in Puranuru as part of the ancient (Dravidian) country,. Little else is known about the early history of the Lakshadweep islands. There are references to the control of the islands by the Cheras in the Sangam literature Pathitruppaththu. A Pallava inscription of 7th century AD refers to the islands as Dveepa Laksham and lists them as part of the Pallava domain. Local traditions and legends attribute the first settlement on these islands to the period of Cheraman Perumal, the last Chera king of Kerala.[3] The oldest inhabited islands in the group are Amini, Kalpeni Andrott, Kavaratti and Agatti. Lakshadweep islanders were originally Hindus who later converted to Islam in the 14th century. However, recent archaeological evidence has established that Buddhist settlements also had existed in the islands as early as the 6th or 7th century. According to popular tradition, Islam was brought to Lakshadweep by an Arab named Ubaidulla in 41 (661 AD). His grave is located in the island of Andrott. Muslim grave stones dated to 139 (756 AD) have also been discovered here. During the 11th century, the islands came under the rule of the Late Cholas. In the 17th century, the islands came under the rule of Ali Rajahs/Arakkal Bheevi of Kannur, who received them as a gift from the Kolathiris. The Portuguese took control to exploit coir production until the islanders expelled the Portuguese. The islands are also mentioned in great detail in the stories of the Arab traveller Ibn Batuta. The Amindivi group of islands (Amini, Kadmat, Kiltan, Chetlat and Bitra) came under the rule of Tipu Sultan in 1787. They passed to British control after the Third Anglo-Mysore War and were attached to South Canara. The rest of the islands came under the suzerainty of the Arakkal family of Cannanore in return for a payment of annual tribute. The British took over the administration of those islands for non-payment of arrears. These islands were attached to the Malabar district of the Madras Presidency during the British Raj.

[edit] Independent India

Sardar Patel is the man behind the integration of Lakshadweep Islands with the Republic of India. The inhabitants of these islands were cut off from the mainstream of the country and learnt about Indian Independence days after 15 August 1947. It was Patel who realised that Pakistan could lay claim to these islands on the grounds of Muslim majority, though the islands were nowhere near the new state of Pakistan. An Indian Navy ship was sent to Lakshadweep to hoist the national flag by Patel to thwart any attempt by Pakistan to grab the islands. Hours later, vessels belonging to the Pakistan Navy were spotted near the islands.These vessels however retreated to Karachi after seeing the Indian flag flying over the Lakshadweep.[4] In 1956, despite the fact that most of the Islanders were Malayalis, the States Reorganisation Act separated these islands from the mainland administrative units, forming a new union territory by combining all the islands.

[edit] Geography

Lakshadweep Islands map

One of the uninhabited islands in Lakshadweep

Worms-eye view of the lighthouse in Minicoy Island Lakshadweep is an archipelago of twelve atolls, three reefs and five submerged banks, with a total of about thirty-nine islands and islets. The reefs are in fact also atolls, although mostly submerged, with only small unvegetated sand cays above the high water mark. The submerged banks are sunken atolls. Almost all the atolls have a northeast-southwest orientation with the islands lying on the eastern rim, and a mostly submerged reef on the western rim, enclosing a lagoon.It has 10 inhabited islands, 17 uninhabited islands, attached islets, 4 newly formed islets and 5 submerged reefs. The main islands are Kavaratti (where the capital city, Kavaratti, is located), Agatti, Minicoy, and Amini. The total population of the territory was 60,595 according to the 2001 census. Agatti has an airport where there are direct flights from Kochi, Kerala or Ernakulam (Cochin). Tourists need a permit to visit the islands; foreign nationals are not permitted to visit certain islands. Consumption of alcohol is not permitted in the islands except on Bangaram Island.

[edit] India`s Coral Islands

The Amindivi group islands (consisting of Amini, Keltan, Chetlat, Kadamat, Bitra and Peremul Par) and the Lakshadweep group islands (comprising mainly Androth, Kalpeni, Kavaratti, Pitti and Suheli Par), both have a submarine connection between them, together with the Minicoy Island form the Coral Islands of India in the Arabian Sea. All these islands have been built up by corals and have fringing coral reefs very close to their shores.[5] Two banks further north are not considered part of the group:

Angria Bank Adas Bank Land Lagoon No. Pop. type Area Area of Census (km) (km) islets 2001

The atolls, reefs and banks are listed from north to south in the table: Atoll/Reef/Bank (alternate name) Location

Amindivi Islands Cora Divh bank - 339.45 1342N 7211E / 13.7N - 72.183E / 13.7; 72.183 (Cora Divh) Sesostris Bank Bassas de Pedro (Munyal Par, Padua Bank) Cherbaniani Reef (Beleapani Reef) Byramgore Reef (Chereapani) bank - 388.53 1308N 7200E / 13.133N 72E / 13.133; 72 (Sesostris Bank)

bank

- 2474.33

1307N 7225E / 13.117N - 72.417E / 13.117; 72.417 (Bassas de Pedro) 1218N 7153E / 12.3N 71.883E / 12.3; 71.883 (Cherbaniani Reef)

reef

0.01 172.59

reef

0.01

57.46

1154N 7149E / 11.9N - 71.817E / 11.9; 71.817 (Byramgore Reef) 1142N 7242E / 11.7N 72.7E / 11.7; 72.7 (Chetlat Island)

Chetlat Island

atoll

1.14

1.60

2289

Bitr Island

atoll

0.10

45.61

1133N 7209E / 11.55N 264 72.15E / 11.55; 72.15 (Bitr Island) 1129N 7300E / 11.483N 73E / 11.483; 73 (Kiltn Island)

Kiltn Island

atoll

2.20

1.76

3664

Kadmat Island (Cardamum)

atoll

3.20

37.50

1114N 7247E / 11.233N 5319 72.783E / 11.233; 72.783 (Kadmat Island) 1112N 7358E / 11.2N 73.967E / 11.2; 73.967 (Elikalpeni Bank)

Elikalpeni Bank

bank

95.91

Peremul Par Amini Island

1)

reef atoll

0.01

83.02
1)

1 1

1110N 7204E / 11.167N - 72.067E / 11.167; 72.067 (Peremul Par) 7340 1106N 7245E / 11.1N 72.75E / 11.1; 72.75 (Amini

2.59 155.09

Island) Laccadive Islands Bangaram Island (Bangaram) 2) atoll 2.30 46.25 4 1056N 7217E / 10.933N - 3) 72.283E / 10.933; 72.283 (Bingaram Island) atoll 3.84 17.50 4 7072 1050N 7212E / 10.833N 72.2E / 10.833; 72.2 (Agatti Island)

Agatti Island 2)

Pitti Island 1)

island
1)

0.01 155.09 1)

1050N 7238E / 10.833N - 72.633E / 10.833; 72.633 (Pitti Island) 1050N 7341E / 10.833N 73.683E / 10.833; 73.683 (Androth Island)

Androth Island (Andrott) atoll

4.90

4.84

1 10720

Kavaratti Island

atoll

4.22

4.96

1033N 7238E / 10.55N 1 10113 72.633E / 10.55; 72.633 (Kavaratti Island) 7 4319 1005N 7338E / 10.083N 73.633E / 10.083; 73.633 (Kalpeni Island)

Kalpeni Island

atoll

2.79

25.60

Suheli Par

atoll

0.57

78.76 Minicoy

1005N 7217E / 10.083N - 72.283E / 10.083; 72.283 (Suheli Par) 0832N 7317E / 8.533N 73.283E / 8.533; 73.283 (Investigator Bank)

Investigator Bank

bank

- 141.78

Minicoy Island Lakshadweep

1)

atoll

4.80

30.60

0817N 7302E / 8.283N 9495 73.033E / 8.283; 73.033

32.69 4203.14

(Minicoy Island) 0816'-1358'N, 32 60595 7144-7424'E

Amini Island and Pitti Island are both on Pitti Bank, a largely sunken atoll with a lagoon area of 155.09 km 2) Bingaram and Agatti Islands are connected by a shallow submarine ridge 3) new international tourist resort, otherwise uninhabited, but with a population 61 at the 1990 census

[edit] Politics
Lakshadweep forms a single Indian district and is governed by an administrator appointed by the central government of India. The union territory comes under the jurisdiction of the Kerala High Court at Kochi. The territory elects one member to the Lok Sabha (lower house of the Parliament of India). There is no local government at the moment but the administration plans to introduce a two-tiered system based on the Panchayati raj. There will be ten island councils for the inhabited islands (with a total of 79 members).

[edit] Demographics
[show]Population Growth
Ce ns us 19 51 19 61 19 71 19 81 19 91 20 01 Pop. %

21,000 24,000 32,000 40,000 52,000 61,000

14.3% 33.3% 25.0% 30.0% 17.3%

Source:Census of India[6]

[edit] Languages
The principal languages of Lakshadweep are Malayalam, Jeseri (Dweep Bhasha) and Mahl.[7] The people of all the northern islands speak a dialect of Malayalam with Tamil and Arabic influences, due to extensive trade activities of these people. The people of Minicoy, the southernmost atoll, speak Mahl, a variant of Divehi language spoken in the Maldives. Malayalam with Malayalam script was introduced as the official language of Lakshadweep during the British raj. Previously a type of Arabic script was used for the language. The policy was continued by the Indian government. Malayalam serves as a link language on the islands including on the Mahl dominated Minicoy Island.[8]

[edit] Ethnicity
The islanders are ethnically similar to coastal Kerala's Malayali people, and were influenced by Arab traders. Inhabitants of Minicoy, the southernmost and second largest island, are ethnically Dhivehis native to the Maldives. This group of Dhivehis form a subgroup of Dhivehis, sometimes referred by the name Mahls. Most of the indigenous population is Sunni-Muslim. The locals of all the islands except Minicoy call themselves the Div-i or the Aminidivi ("from the mother island"). Lakshadweep's ethnic groups can be classified as 84.33% Malayali, and 15.67% Dhivehi.

[edit] Economy

A beach side resort at Kadmat Island, Lakshadweep

A beach at Kavaratti Lakshadweep's gross state domestic product for 2004 is estimated at US$60 million at current prices. Coconut fibre extraction and production of fibre products is Lakshadweep's main industry. There are five coir fibre factories, five production demonstration centres and seven fibre curling units run by the government of India. These units produce coir fibre, coir yarn, curled fibre and corridor mattings.

[edit] Tourism
Due to its isolation and scenic appeal, Lakshadweep is emerging as a major tourist attraction for Indians. This brings in significant revenue, which is likely to increase. Since such a small region cannot support industries, the government is actively promoting tourism as a means of income. Water sports activities such as scuba diving, wind surfing, snorkelling, surfing, kayaking, canoeing, water skiing, yachting and night-voyage into sea are adventurous as well as quite popular among tourists. Hundreds of varieties of living corals, dolphins, sea turtles, sea urchins, seabirds, seaweeds, sea cucumbers, starfish, cowry, clams, eels, swordfish, octopus and innumerable types of lagoon triggerfish, etc. are a real delightful treat to the eyes of a naturalist. Tourists flock these islands throughout the year except during the South-west monsoon months when sea is extremely rough.

[edit] Fisheries
Being rich in marine life and mineral resources, fishing is naturally the main livelihood of the islanders. Though all varieties of fish available in the lagoons, Tuna fish variety is available in abundance around the Lakshadeep sea. Fresh tuna caught is processed by drying it in the Sun

after cooking and smoking.The resultant product, known as `Mas`, as well as Tuna-pickle are popular products exported from these islands worldwide. Sharks, crabs, shrimp, lobsters, etc. are also available in plenty.

[edit] Other products

The worlds first ever low temperature thermal desalination plant (LTTD) was opened in Kavaratti, one of the Indian Lakshadweep islands. The plant cost about 50 million (922,000) and will produce 100,000 litres/day of potable water from sea water. Production costs, currently 220-250/m (4.1-4.6/m), are expected to go do down to 30-60/m (0.55-1.11/m) as the capacity is increased. LTTD technology involves flashing relatively warm sea water (28-30 deg Celsius) inside a vacuum flash chamber and condensing the resultant vapour using deep sea cold water (7-15 C). The cold water for the Kavaratti plant is drawn at a depth of 350m some 400m from the shore. The technology was developed by the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT). It can be used not only to produce drinking water but also for power generation and air conditioning. In addition, the deep sea water contains extra nutrients for fish, an important source of food and income for the local population. The government plans to set up desalination plants with a capacity of 10 million litres/per day on all islands and coastal areas. Source: Gov of India Press Information Bureau, 23 May 2005

[edit] Agriculture
Coconut alankar main crop cultivated in the islands. Lakshadweep is India's largest producer of coconuts. About 2,598 hectares are under coconut cultivation and the productivity per hectare is 22,310. Coconuts cultivated in the Lakshadweep are also rich in coconut oil.

[edit] Transport

Passenger ship M.V. Amindivi of the Lakshadweep Islands administration docked at Old Mangalore port Agatti Aerodrome on Agatti Island is currently the only airport in Lakshadweep. Indian Airlines, the state-owned carrier, serves Agatti and flies to Kochi on the mainland. Also, from April 2007, a private carrier, Kingfisher Airlines, has commenced flights to and from Agatti. Kingfisher connects Kochi and Bangalore to Agatti. The other islands are linked by the Pawan Hans helicopter or boat service.

Ships are the major means of transportation for the islanders. Ships are operated from either Kochi, Mangalore or Beypore (Calicut). There are around 5 passenger ships, but generally only two at a time operate. Advance bookings are required. Sailing schedules are arranged so that each island gets priority at some time of the year. There are vessels operating between some of the larger islands like Kavaratti, Androth, Kalpeni etc., but sailings are affected by weather conditions.

[edit] References
1. ^ http://books.google.com/books?

id=vpZv2GHM7VQC&pg=PA134&dq=Lakshadweep+malayalam&hl=en&ei=YeJ4TZS 4F4rMswbl7vjZBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEgQ6AEwB jgy#v=onepage&q=Lakshadweep%20malayalam&f=false

2. ^ http://www.nationalgeographic.com/wildworld/profiles/terrestrial/im/im0125.html 3. ^ `Lakshadweep & It`s People 1992-1993`Planning Department,Govt.

Secretariat,Lakshadweep Administration,Kavaratti. page:12

4. ^ Gopal K. Bhargava, S. C. Bhatt (2006). Land and people of Indian states and union

territories: in 36 volumes. Lakshadweep. Gyan Publishing House. pp. 232. ISBN 8178353911. http://books.google.co.in/books?id=eLSqp6EMxWAC&dq=. Page 29
5. ^ `INDIA: A Physical Geography`(ISBN 81-230-0656-X),1968,Publications Dn,

Ministry of I&B, Govt. of India. page:74.

6. ^ "Census Population" (PDF). Census of India. Ministry of Finance India.

http://indiabudget.nic.in/es2006-07/chapt2007/tab97.pdf. Retrieved 2008-12-18.

7. ^ About Lakshadweep on india.gov.in 8. ^ http://books.google.com/books?

id=b_a4G_Tw2ycC&pg=PA13&dq=Lakshadweep+malayalam&hl=en&ei=KuV4TeqwIs zHsgb53oTlBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAQ#v =onepage&q=Lakshadweep%20malayalam&f=false

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