Brahmic scripts

• 1. Introduction

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  Brahmic scripts are a family of abugida writing systems, and they reach across a stretch of the world that few single ideas ever touch. They are used today by languages from eight different language families. Those families include Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Turkic, Mongolic, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, and Tai. Speakers across South, East, Central and Southeast Asia all write with descendants of one ancient parent. That parent is the Brahmi script of ancient India, also the root behind the names Indic scripts. How did one writing system in India seed the alphabets of Tibet, Thailand, Java and the Philippines? And how far did its influence travel before it stopped looking like writing at all and became, of all things, the dictionary order of Japanese kana?

• 2. From Ashoka's Edicts

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  Brahmi is clearly attested from the 3rd century BCE, during the reign of Ashoka, who used the script for imperial edicts. From that imperial root the family split early. By the time of the earliest surviving epigraphy, around the 3rd century BC, the Brahmi script had already divided into regional variants. The main division in antiquity was between northern and southern Brahmi. Northern Brahmi gave rise to the Gupta script during the Gupta period, a script the source calls very influential in the northern group. Cursives of the Brahmi script began to diversify further from around the 5th century AD. They continued to give rise to new scripts throughout the Middle Ages. Notable medieval examples, developed by the 7th or 8th century, include Nagari, Siddham and Sharada. That Gupta line would branch into Tibetan, Tirhuta, Kaithi and many more, each carrying the same skeleton forward.

• 3. The Buddhist Road East

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  The Siddhaṃ script was especially important in Buddhism, since many sutras were written in it. Its reach is easiest to see in one surprising place. The art of Siddham calligraphy survives today in Japan. Japan owes Brahmi an even stranger debt than calligraphy. The tabular presentation and dictionary order of the modern kana system of Japanese writing is believed to descend from the Indic scripts, most likely through the spread of Buddhism. Southern Brahmi sent its own line eastward by a different path. The Vatteluttu and Kadamba and Pallava scripts spread Brahmic scripts throughout Southeast Asia along with Buddhism. The spread was peaceful, a process the source names Indianization, or the spread of Indian learning. It moved through ports on trading routes. At those trading posts, ancient inscriptions have been found in Sanskrit, written in scripts that originated in India. At first inscriptions were made in Indian languages. Later the same scripts were turned to writing the local Southeast Asian languages, and local varieties developed. By the 8th century the scripts had diverged and separated into regional scripts, a divergence that would eventually produce systems as far-flung as Baybayin in the Philippines.

• 4. The Inherent Vowel

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  Each consonant in these scripts carries an inherent vowel, usually a short schwa. In Bengali, Assamese and Odia that phoneme is instead an open o sound, the result of sound shifts. This single design choice is what makes a Brahmic script an abugida rather than an alphabet. Other vowels are written by adding marks to the consonant character. A mark known in Sanskrit as a virama, or halanta, or hasanta, can signal the absence of the inherent vowel, though it is rarely used. Each vowel has two forms that work in tandem. There is an independent form, used when the vowel stands alone, and a dependent form, used when it attaches to a consonant. Depending on the script, that dependent sign can sit to the left, to the right, above, below, or on both sides of the base consonant at once. Consonants can join too, combining in ligatures, with up to four stacked together in Devanagari. Special marks handle the combination of r with another consonant, and separate signs note nasalization and aspiration of a consonant's dependent vowel. All of this rests on an order so old it shaped how Japan alphabetizes.

• 5. Order By Sound

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  Vowels come first, then the consonants march through the mouth from back to front. The alphabetical order runs through velar consonants, palatal consonants, retroflex consonants, dental consonants, bilabial consonants, then approximants, sibilants, and other consonants. Each consonant grouping held four stops, covering all four possible values of voicing and aspiration, plus one nasal consonant. This phonetic logic is why comparison charts of the major Indic scripts can be lined up column by column. Glyphs in the same column all derive from the same Brahmi glyph. The charts are not comprehensive, since some glyphs are later inventions not derived from any Brahmi character. Pronunciations within a single column may not be identical either, which is why the source gives Sanskrit IPA where possible and another language only where necessary, with transliteration in ISO 15919. That same grid logic extends to numerals, where Brahmi numbers and digits sit at the head of rows running through Devanagari, Tibetan, Khmer, Thai and beyond.

• 6. A Living Census

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  As of the cited Unicode version, dozens of Brahmic scripts have been encoded, each with its own derivation, period, and usage. Some are very much alive. Devanagari, derived from Nagari in the 13th century, writes Konkani, Marathi, Hindi, Sanskrit, Nepali, Bhili, Sindhi, Gujarati and Sino-Tibetan languages such as Bodo and Sherpa. Tamil, derived from Pallava in the 2nd century, still writes the Tamil language. Others survive only in the record. Ahom, derived from Burmese in the 13th century, served the now-extinct Ahom language. Marchen, derived from Tibetan in the 7th century, was used in the Tibetan Bon tradition to write the extinct Zhang-Zhung language. Dhives Akuru, from Gupta, wrote the Maldivian language up until the 20th century. The encoded list captures how varied the family's roles have been, from the legal and administrative records once kept in Kaithi to the Muslim religious literature once written in Khojki by the Khoja community. Makasar, derived from Kawi in the 17th century and used in South Sulawesi, even carries an English nickname in scholarly works: Makassarese bird script.