Academic literature on the topic 'Brahmi alphabet'

AbstractAt the time of its decipherment by Griffith (1911), the Meroitic writing system was considered an alphabet. This alphabet was found to have a rather limited vowel notation. It was not until 1970 that the system was understood to have a more complex vowel notation. This system of vowel notation is comparable to what is found in an alpha-syllabary, a term used to describe the scripts of the Indian sub-continent, such as Brahmi and Devanagari. Since alpha-syllabaries were rare when the Meroitic writing system was in use (c. 200 bce–c. 500 ad), it is tempting to suggest a possible historical connection between the Meroitic kingdom in Sudan and the then existent scripts in India. A systematic analysis, as opposed to a description of alpha-syllabic writing, indicates that the structure of this type of script is less regionally confined. Rather, it places Meroitic writing among scripts that were created in the presence of alphabetic writing both in modern and in ancient times.

Current research exploits the orthographic design of Brahmi-derived scripts (also called Indic scripts), particularly the Devanagari script. Earlier works on orthographic nature of Brahmi-derived scripts fail to create a consensus among epigraphists, historians or linguists, and thus have been identified by various names, like semi-syllabic, subsyllabic, semi-alphabetic, alphasyllabary or abugida. On the contrary, this paper argues that Brahmi-derived scripts should not be categorized as scripts with overlapping features of alphabetic and syllabic properties as these scripts are neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Historical evolution and linguistic properties of Indic scripts, particularly Devanagari, ascertain the need for a new categorization of its own and, thus preferably merit a unique descriptor. This paper investigates orthographic characteristics of the Brahmi-derived Devanagari script, current trends in research pertaining to the Devanagari script along with other Indic scripts and the implications of these findings for literacy development in Indic writing systems.

In earlier work (Sproat 2000), I characterized the layout of symbols in a script in terms of a calculus involving two dimensional catenation operators: I claimed that leftwards, rightwards, upwards, downwards and surrounding catenation are sufficient to describe the layout of any script. In the first half of this paper I analyze four Indic alphasyllabaries — Devanagari, Oriya, Kannada and Tamil — in terms of this model. A crucial claim is that despite the complexities of layout in alphasyllabic scripts, they are essentially no different in nature than alphabetic scripts, such as Latin. The second part of the paper explores implications of this view for theories of phonology and human processing of orthography. Apparently problematic is evidence that “phonemic awareness” — the ability for literate speakers to manipulate sounds consciously at the phoneme level — is much stronger with alphabetic scripts, than with alphasyllabaries. But phonemic awareness is not categorically absent for readers of Indic scripts; in general, how aware a reader is of a particular phoneme is related to how that phoneme is rendered in the script. Relevant factors appear to include whether the symbol is written inline, whether it is a diacritic, and whether it is ligatured with another symbol.

Editor's note: Although the general policy of this journal is to publish only new research, an exception is being made in the present case, in order to publish a work of unusual value which has been inaccessible to most scholars for a century or more, and which has now been translated into English for the first time. In 1877, K. F. Holle published his Tabel van oud en nieuw-indische alphabetten, with the support of the Batavia Society of Arts and Letters (the Batavia of that period is the Jakarta of today); it was printed by C. Lang at Buitenzorg, Java. Hoik's "Table" is spread over 49 pages followed by four pages of appendices). In 81 rows, arranged in the Indic canonical order, it displays the symbols of 198 scripts, one per column, which are native to areas reaching from the Indian subcontinent to insular Southeast Asia. These are the writing systems of the Indic tradition that begins with the Brahmi script, used in the Buddhist inscriptions of the Emperor Asoka, in the 3rd century BCE. From that starting point, Holle's display moves forward in time and eastward from India, following the Brahmi-descended scripts through Tibet and Southeast Asia, then extending over the length of the Netherlands Indies, and finally ending with a sample from the Philippines. Neither before Hoik's time nor since has a comparable display been published, showing the multiple historical developments of a script over such an extension of time and space. For scholars interested in the myriad ways that scripts can change through history, Holle's "Table" is a unique source of data. It is reprinted here unchanged; readers will find that they need only know something of the Sanskrit phonological system in order to grasp the organization by rows, and a minimum of Dutch in order to understand the labeling of the columns. In 1882, Holle published a commentary on his "Table", with the added subtitle Bijdrage tot de palaeographie van Nederlandsch-Indie 'Contribution to the paleography of the Netherlands Indies'. This work, of just 20 pages, was again published by the Batavia Society of Arts and Letters; it was distributed by W. Bruining & Co., Batavia, and by M. Njhoff in The Hague. It is published here, preceding the "Table" proper, in an English translation by Carol Molony and Henk Pechler. A unified bibliographical listing, giving fuller citations than those provided by Holle, is a great desideratum; unfortunately, resources were not available for preparing such a listing. Also to be desired is a reconsideration and evaluation of Holle's materials in terms of scholarship since his time; I hope that the publication of this reprint will stimulate scholars to undertake such work. The editor is indebted to Elly Amade — a linguist, speaker of Dutch, and native of Indonesia —for help in preparing the translation for publication.

The Ranjana script, which is also known as Kutila or Lantsa, is one of the many alphabets derived from the Brahmi script. This numesmetic inscription was developed 2216 years ago, so its time period was along the 199 BC and it was popular from 11th century AD and was used until the mid-20th century in Nepal and India. It is popularly used by Nepali in the Newari language. This script also known as Lantsa, for writing the Sanskrit titles of books which have been translated from Sanskrit to Tibetan for decoration in temples and mandalas. There were few texts printed with alternating lines in Sanskrit in the Lantsa script followed by a Tibetan translation. There were many original Sanskrit manuscripts written in Lantsa preserved in Newar community in Nepal. Others were destroyed lack of its preservation. In addition, the Ranjana script was used mainly for decoration by Buddhists.Journal of the Institute of Engineering, 2017, 13(1): 221-224

In the mids of cold northern winds and landscape covered with snow we are pleased to announce the first ALA issue of the year 2019, which contains six research articles. Warm congratulation goes to all the authors, and words of appreciation to the Editorial team and recently enlarged proofreading team that have been working very hard in order to offer state-of-the-art contemporary linguistic research in this journal.
 The present issue is opened up by Mayuri J. DILIP and Rajesh KUMAR, who present a unified account of licensing conditions of Negative Polarity Items (NPI) in Telugu. In their work “Negative Polarity Items in Telugu” they analyze the distribution of NPIs in complex sentences with embedded clauses, and conclude that negation c-commanding NPI be conducted at the base-generated position.
 Kun SUN with his article “The Integration Functions of Topic Chains in Chinese Discourse” thoroughly presents the long and extensive Chinese research tradition on topic chains, and re-examines their core characteristics with the help of the so-called “integration functions”.
 The following paper “Tracing the Identity and Ascertaining the Nature of Brahmi-derived Devanagari Script” by Krishna Kumar PANDEY and Smita JHA exploits the orthographic design of Brahmi-derived scripts. Authors argue that such scripts should not be described with the existing linguistic properties of alphabetic and syllabic scripts but should instead gains its own categorization with a unique descriptor.
 Chikako SHIGEMORI BUČAR successfully submitted the article “Image of Japan among Slovenes” in which she represents the process and mechanism of borrowing from Japanese into Slovene. Conclusions briefly touch the image of Japan seen through the borrowing process and consolidated loanwords, and predict possible development of borrowing in the near future.
 Another interesting paper “Understanding Sarcastic Metaphorical Expression in Hindi through Conceptual Integration Theory” was authored by Sandeep Kumar SHARMA and Sweta SINHA. Based on a corpus of five thousand sentences, authors examine the abstract notion of sarcasm within the framework of conceptual integration theory, and with special reference to Hindi language. Findings aim to provide a theoretical understanding on how Hindi sarcasm is perceived among the native speakers.
 And last but not least, Điệp Thi Nhu NGUYỄN, An-Vinh LƯƠNG, and Điền ĐINH humbly observe research backlog in the area of Vietnamese text readability and write their paper “Affection of the part of speech elements in Vietnamese text readability” to encourage researchers to further explore the field and put Vietnamese findings on the world’s map.
 Editors and Editorial Board wish the regular and new readers of the ALA journal a pleasant read full of inspiration.

Abstract Grapheme–color synesthetes experience graphemes (e.g., letters of the alphabet) as having a specific, consistent color. Most studies of grapheme–color synesthesia have only examined synesthetes in English, leaving underexplored the question of how synesthetic phenomenology might differ in languages that do not use alphabets. In particular, grapheme–color synesthesia in an abugida (a segmental writing system in which vowels are added to consonant graphemes using ‘accent’-like diacritical marks) has never been studied. Here, we present a case study of a Bengali synesthete, MJ, the first report of a grapheme–color synesthete in an abugida. First, we show that for MJ, diacritics influence the overall color of the consonant grapheme they modify, ‘pulling’ it toward the color she experiences for the vowel. Second, we describe and analyze the complex synesthetic experiences reported by MJ for conjunct graphemes, a unique orthographic feature of Brahmi-derived scripts (such as Bengali) in which multiple graphemes are visually combined into a single ‘merged’ grapheme. Finally, we show that in addition to these language-specific features, MJ’s synesthetic associations are influenced by some of the same linguistic properties (such as orthography and phonology) that influence synesthetic associations in other languages. We conclude that the idiosyncratic features of MJ’s synesthesia reflect unique properties of the Bengali writing system, that more studies of synesthesia in non-alphabetic scripts are needed, and that synesthetic phenomenology can offer insights into how linguistic properties shape grapheme representation in the brain.

We propose a novel approach for analyzing scribal behavior quantitatively using information about the handwriting of characters. To implement this approach, we develop a computational framework that recovers this information and decomposes the characters into primitives (called strokes) to create a hierarchically structured representation. We then propose a number of intuitive metrics quantifying various facets of scribal behavior, which are derived from the recovered information and character structure. We further propose the use of techniques modeling the generation of handwriting to directly study the changes in writing behavior. We then present a case study in which we use our framework and metrics to analyze the development of four major Indic scripts. We show that our framework and metrics coupled with appropriate statistical methods can provide great insight into scribal behavior by discovering specific trends and phenomena with quantitative methods. We also illustrate the use of handwriting modeling techniques in this context to study the divergence of the Brahmi script into two daughter scripts. We conduct a user study with domain experts to evaluate our framework and salient results from the case study, and we elaborate on the results of this evaluation. Finally, we present our conclusions and discuss the limitations of our research along with future work that needs to be done.