Abstract
Indic scripts are the writing systems descended from the third-century bce Brahmi script, which was used throughout the realm of Emperor Aśoka. They are used by nearly two billion people from Pakistan through India, Tibet, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia, and in former times parts of Indonesia and the Philippines and along the Silk Road; Indic scripts have influenced scripts as far away as the Horn of Africa. Most of them are characterized by the distinctive typological property of basic characters denoting consonants plus the unmarked vowel (usually /a/), with the other vowels denoted by marks attached to the base characters; and in many, consonant clusters (not respecting syllable boundaries) are denoted by ligatures of two (or more) consonant characters. This chapter describes the descent and distribution of the forms, the varying typologies over space and time, and the investigations by which their properties became known to linguistic scholarship.
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Notes
- 1.
The author is immensely grateful to David L. Share (University of Haifa) for the Prologue and Epilogue that situate the chapter within the context of this book.
- 2.
There is only one survey intended for a general audience (Hosking & Meredith-Owens, 1966). The two comprehensive albeit outdated English-language histories of writing include fairly sizable accounts describing the development of and relationships among the forms of Indic scripts (Diringer, 1968, pp. 1:237–239, 257–307. 310–351; Jensen, 1969, pp. 361–406).
- 3.
Planches, vol. 2, pt. 1, section “Caractères et alphabets,” pls. XV, XVII–XXII.
- 4.
- 5.
The account of Prinsep’s decipherment of Brahmi lightly adapted here was presented at the American Oriental Society’s 1987 annual meeting, in recognition of the sesquicentennial. As the last time his methods had been reviewed in detail was in Rudolf Hoernle’s Centenary Review (1884; neither Georg Bühler [1896, translated as Bühler, 1904] nor Ernst Windisch [1917] in their contributions to the Grundriss der Indo-Arischen Philologie has much to say about them)—over a hundred years earlier—I considered it appropriate to recall them.
- 6.
Before the late nineteenth century, there was no concept of “types” of writing system, and “alphabet” was used of all.
- 7.
It may be noted that Prinsep was not the only numismatist/decipherer. Jean-Jacques Barthélemy (Daniels, 1988) in the mid eighteenth century was the Keeper of the Royal Coin Collection in Paris, and was the very first scholar to decipher an unknown script—he is credited with no fewer than three decipherments. (And the archeologist narrator of James Michener’s novel The Source credits his career to having collected coins, rather than stamps, as a boy.) Unlike Barthélemy, however, Prinsep was never entirely forgotten by the discipline he brought into being; his name is usually mentioned in, for instance, books on the origin of Brahmi, but almost never with clear or accurate references to his publications.
- 8.
Despite its title, Thomas (1858) collects only Prinsep’s numismatic essays, and for the most part they are not reprinted verbatim. Thomas chose to omit most of the passages detailing the decipherments; he was focused on creating a reference work on Indian coins and had no scruples about silently deleting superseded passages by Prinsep and inserting his own observations (in brackets), incorporating two further decades of research: Thomas may well have written more than half the contents of the volumes himself.
- 9.
As is their unfortunate wont, Google Books did not unfold the plates, so the on-line version is unusable. Harington’s introduction notes that the unknown character of this inscription is also found on the Allahabad pillar, of which a specimen is included, and it is not possible to determine how many of the seven relevant plates depict the Delhi and how many the Allahabad inscription.
- 10.
The acute accent was often used, like the macron today (ā), to mark a long vowel.
- 11.
“We consider it a duty to insert this paper, just received, in the same volume with our version of the inscription, adding a note or two in defence of the latter where we consider it still capable of holding its ground against such superior odds!—Ed.” (Prinsep apud Turnour, 1837, p. 1049 n. *)
- 12.
We take this for granted today, with the photographer constantly in attendance, but in 1837 photography was just being invented.
- 13.
I do not know why the Delhi column text, available for nearly four decades, had not been an adequate stimulus. Perhaps it was because even then, as now, the Indian alphabets were taught as some number of basic signs to which vowel markers are added, rather than in a two-dimensional array such as is used for Ethiopic (Section “Ethiopic” below); and it simply never occurred to a learned Sanskritist to arrange all the letters into such a scheme.
- 14.
For completeness, these are: the existence of bilingual inscriptions, which contain proper names, with one-to-one correspondences of letters within them.
- 15.
On these and other Iranian scripts see Skjærvø, 1996.
- 16.
“Pali” is used nowadays for a Middle Indo-Aryan language associated particularly with Theravada Buddhism; it is first attested somewhat later than the considerable variety of Prakrits whose earliest records are from the time of Aśoka.
- 17.
Meerut Universal Magazine was a satirical publication that brought out at least four volumes beginning in 1835. It has not been possible to discover how it dealt with Prinsep’s work.
- 18.
Thomas (1858, p. 2: 127), on the grounds of the immediately corrected misreading, omits both of Prinsep’s arguments save for Eucratides’ non-royal parentage, thus offering no account at all of Prinsep’s insight that the Bactrian inscriptions ought to be interpreted in terms of Prakrit. Prinsep’s was a far from unique example of a correct conclusion arrived at by way of a mistaken assumption.
It may further be noted that where Prinsep was able to use accurate Bactrian type in Calcutta, Thomas in England admittedly had to make do with approximations, thus further distorting Prinsep’s work.
- 19.
The ancient names “Brahmi” and “Kharoṣṭhi” were properly assigned to the scripts only some decades later (Bühler, 1898, pp. 23–24; 1904, p. 2). I use the modern terms here so as to avoid having to list the multitude of designations employed by the various nineteenth-century authors.
- 20.
The existence of these documents shows that an argument by Harry Falk (1993) for the very late invention of Kharoṣṭhi, as summarized by Salomon (1995, p. 275b), does not hold: “Kharoṣṭhi, according to Falk, must have been created at one stroke at some time later, not before 325 B.C. (p. 104). The argument for this date is based on the theory that the new script could only have originated when the professional monopoly of the Aramaic scribe-bureaucrats of the Achaemenid empire (cf. pp. 78–81) had broken down in the wake of the Greek conquest.”
- 21.
“Mr. Stirling has suggested as a remarkable circumstance that many letters of the No. 1 type resemble Greek characters, and he instances the ‘ou, sigma, lambda, chi, delta, epsilon, and a something closely resembling the figure of the digamma.’ This resemblance is, however, entirely accidental, and the genus of the alphabet can I think be satisfactorily shewn to have no connection whatever with the Greek” (1834a, p. 117).
- 22.
In some ways Taylor’s account of Indian writing has still not been superseded, but the attitude of many of his successors can be seen from a remark in a popular book from the turn of the last century: “Those who care to pursue a subject yielding to few in dryness will find it summarised in the tenth chapter” of Taylor’s Alphabet (Clodd, 1900, p. 192).
- 23.
How different the conclusion might have been had those scholars known of the Iranian language Bactrian, which was written with the Greek alphabet (Sims-Williams, 2000–2007)!
- 24.
In fact Benfey’s “conjecture” was a mere throw-away line that can be rendered “The Phoenicians were certainly long before [Solomon’s reign] intermediaries in the trade between India and the West, and as they, most probably, brought writing to India, they and perhaps Egypt itself moved various other cultural traits to and fro.” (Benfey, 1864, p. 170).
- 25.
“The great difficulty is to show that the people of S. W. Arabia were in a position to furnish India with the elements of an alphabet so early as the fourth century B.C. … It must also be recollected that the Himyaritic alphabet did not mark the vowels, as its derivative, the Æthiopic alphabet does” (Burnell, 1878, p. 8). The first reliable synthesis of South Arabian materials was still well in the future (Hommel, 1893). A recent review of archeological work on Arabian–Indian contacts shows virtually no evidence of inscriptional interchange (Seland, 2014).
- 26.
To wit: “(1) The comparison must be based on the oldest forms of the Indian alphabet and actually occurring Semitic signs of one and the same period. (2) The comparison may include only such irregular equations, as can be supported by analogues from other cases, where nations have borrowed foreign alphabets. (3) The comparisons must show that there are fixed principles of derivation” (Bühler, 1898, p. 55).
- 27.
To my way of thinking, writing was not independently invented in Egypt (Daniels, 2018, pp. 141–142).
- 28.
The Indus Valley signs were not yet known, except for a single seal that had been found at Harappa (see Fig. 3 herein, lower right corner), but had they been, the complete absence of intermediate forms would have been a powerful argument against them as a possible origin of Kharoṣṭhi or Brahmi.
- 29.
- 30.
The distinction between “sound” and “letter” was not consistently made until comparatively recent times (Abercrombie, 1949).
- 31.
The borrowing is undoubted, not least because there are no retroflexes in the intimately related Iranian languages (except those in direct contact with Indo-Aryan ones). An overly clever argument has been made that the retroflexes are an inner-Indo-Aryan development (Hamp, 1996).
- 32.
Dani (1986, p. 9) remarks: “Efforts have been made to trace the evolution of the regional scripts and bring them down to modern times. An elaborate application of this principle is seen in [Sivaramamurti, 1948], in which he has tried to put on different pages the changing forms of every letter and then reduce them into abstract shapes apart from the context in which they appear. This method is no doubt suitable for showing the development of the forms in a museum gallery, and the book is at best a faithful record of that method.” Cf. n. 34.
- 33.
Though an incipient distinction between North and South can be identified, in that southern inscriptions show that for the distinctive Old Tamil sounds ṉa ṟa ḻa, three extra letters were derived from Aśokan Brahmi letters.
- 34.
Each of Dani’s plates occupies four octavo pages, displaying a dozen or so complete alphabets from a specific chronological and geographic range. His remit extends to the eighth century and as far as the Sanskrit and earliest native inscriptions of insular and mainland Southeast Asia.
- 35.
The examples are ke and ka¯ taken from, in order left to right, Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Bengali, Oriya, Tamil, Malayalam, Sinhala, Telugu, and Kannada.
- 36.
This sequence shows how the preposing of certain vowel marks, which exercises some psychologists of reading (Kandhadai & Sproat, 2010), came about.
- 37.
Tumshuqese (attested until the fourteenth century) and Khotanese are the (Iranian) Saka languages.
- 38.
This style is known as Siddham to the Chinese and to modern calligraphers (Stevens, 1988).
- 39.
hPags pa letters probably inspired the shapes of the letters of the Korean alphabet devised in 1446 (Ledyard, 1997).
- 40.
Taylor (1883, pp. 2: 340–341, 359–361) already had available the vast array of alphabets collected by Holle in 1877 (1999) and made a valiant, though largely wrong, attempt to organize them historically.
- 41.
Reflected also in Daniels, 2018, p. 193, Map 5.
- 42.
Christopher Miller (pers. comm.) detects some similarity between some of the vowel markings in Ethiopic and some in (Middle) Brahmi.
- 43.
- 44.
The term “ideogram” was often seen in place of logogram, but the incorporation of the morpheme “ideo-” wrongly suggests that such characters denote “ideas” rather than elements of language.
- 45.
“Words” is a pretheoretic term; what logograms denote are morphemes, and careful writers use morphogram rather than logogram.
- 46.
Cf. n. 22.
- 47.
If the orders originally used for Kharoṣṭhi consonants and vowels (Salomon, 2006) had been known in 1988, this type might have been called the arepiconu accordingly.
- 48.
From time to time, scholars, particularly of Indian languages, noticed that the Indic scripts differed from other syllabaries and devised a number of terms for the type: neosyllabary, semisyllabary, pseudo-alphabet, and, most popularly, alphasyllabary. I reject all these terms because they suggest that the abugida is somehow an intermediate type standing between alphabet and syllabary. It is not.
- 49.
Vowel length may have been lost in Gandhari before Kharoṣṭhi was devised. A possible indication that there was no such distinction is that when, eventually, a mark was added for *ā, there was none for the other long vowels, suggesting that what was recognized was a distinction in quality ([ʌ] or [ɔ], perhaps, vs. [a]) rather than a distinction in length (R. G. Salomon, pers. comm., 30 December 2016).
- 50.
Cf. n. 53.
- 51.
sa has a vertical stroke at the top, 
has a slanted stroke at the top. 
has rounded shoulders, 
la has sloped shoulders. - 52.
It is this property of hPags pa that brought to light a significant difference between alphasyllabary and abugida, namely, that the former is a formal category, the latter a functional category (Daniels apud Daniels & Bright, 1996, p. 4 n. *). The putative inventor of the term alphasyllabary explained that it does not apply to hPags pa because the vowels are not indicated by appendages to the consonant letters (Bright, 2000). The inventor of the term abugida explains that it applies to hPags pa because the consonant letters carry an inherent vowel.
- 53.
In most modern Indian scripts, cluster-initial r is written with a hook above the top right corner of the following consonant(s), cluster-final r with a stroke beneath: Devanagari
-rnta, 
-ntra. The character 
ra is the narrowest in the set. - 54.
Few of the older forms have been included in contemporary Unicode-compliant Malayalam fonts, and so cannot be shown here, but a number of them can be seen in (pre-Unicode) Mohanan, 1996.
sa has a vertical stroke at the top, 
has a slanted stroke at the top. 
has rounded shoulders, 
la has sloped shoulders.
-rnta, 
-ntra. The character 
ra is the narrowest in the set.References
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Daniels, P.T. (2019). Indic Scripts: History, Typology, Study. In: Joshi, R.M., McBride, C. (eds) Handbook of Literacy in Akshara Orthography. Literacy Studies, vol 17. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05977-4_2
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