Linguistic history of India

Language families in the Indian subcontinent.

Originating over 5,000 years ago, records of the linguistic history of India began with early pictures that transformed into pictorial scripts and engravings and eventually to modern orthographies. Ancient documents and linguistic reconstruction also assist in the understanding of the evolution from early proto-languages to the modern Indian languages that belong to the Indo-Aryan languages, Tibeto-Burman languages and the oldest Tamil language comes under Dravidian languages.

Indo-Aryan languages

Main article: Indo-Aryan languages

Old-Indic (Vedic Sanskrit)

Main article: Vedic Sanskrit

See also: Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni

Devimahatmya manuscript on palm-leaf, in an early Bhujimol script, Bihar or Nepal, 11th century.

Sanskrit is a descendent of the Proto-Indo-European language. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan sub-family of the Indo-Iranian branch. Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, a large collection of hymns, incantations, and religio-philosophical discussions which form the earliest religious texts in India and the basis for much of the Hindu religion. Modern linguists consider the metrical hymns of the Rigveda Samhita to be the earliest, composed by many authors over centuries of oral tradition. The end of the Vedic period is marked by the composition of the Upanishads, which form the concluding part of the Vedic corpus in the traditional compilations, dated to roughly the middle of the first millennium BC. It is around this time that Sanskrit began the transition from a first language to a second language of religion and learning, marking the beginning of the Classical period.

Old-Indic (Classical Sanskrit)

Main article: Sanskrit

Further information: Pāṇini

The oldest surviving Sanskrit grammar is Pāṇini's Aṣtādhyāyī ("Eight-Chapter Grammar") dating to ca. the 5th century BC. It is essentially a prescriptive grammar, i.e., an authority that defines (rather than describes) correct Sanskrit, although it contains descriptive parts, mostly to account for Vedic forms that had already passed out of use in Pāṇini's time.

When the term arose in India, "Sanskrit" was not thought of as a specific language set apart from other languages (the people of the time regarded languages more as dialects), but rather as a particularly refined or perfected manner of speaking. Knowledge of Sanskrit was a marker of social class and educational attainment and was taught mainly to Brahmins through close analysis of Sanskrit grammarians such as Pāṇini.

Scholars often distinguish Vedic Sanskrit and Classical or "Paninian" Sanskrit as separate dialects. However, they are extremely similar in many ways and differ mostly in a few points of phonology, vocabulary, and grammar. Classical Sanskrit can therefore be considered a seamless evolution of the earlier Vedic language.

Middle Indic (Prakrits)

Main article: Prakrit

Prakrit (Sanskrit prākṛta प्राकृत (from pra-kṛti प्रकृति), "original, natural, artless, normal, ordinary, usual", i.e. "vernacular", in contrast to samskrta "excellently made", both adjectives elliptically referring to vak "speech") refers to the broad family of the Indic languages and dialects spoken in ancient India. Some modern scholars include all Middle Indo-Aryan languages under the rubric of "Prakrits", while others emphasise the independent development of these languages, often separated from the history of Sanskrit by wide divisions of caste, religion, and geography.

The Prakrits became literary languages, generally patronized by kings identified with the ksatriya caste. The earliest inscriptions in Prakrit are those of Asoka, emperor of Northern India, and while the various Prakrit languages are associated with different patron dynasties, with different religions and different literary traditions.

In Sanskrit drama, kings speak in Prakrit when addressing women or servants, in contrast to the Sanskrit used in reciting more formal poetic monologues.

The three Dramatic Prakrits - Sauraseni, Magadhi, Maharashtri, as well as Jain Prakrit each represent a distinct tradition of literature within the history of India. Other Prakrits are reported in historical sources, but have no extant corpus (e.g., Paisaci).

Pali

Main article: Pāli language

Pali is a term used to describe the Middle Indo-Aryan language in which the Theravada Buddhist scriptures and commentarial texts are preserved. Pali is believed by the Theravada tradition to be the same language as Magadhi, but modern scholars believe this to be unlikely. Pali shows signs of development from several underlying prakrits as well as some Sanskritisation.

The prakrit of the North-western area of India known as Gāndhāra has come to be called Gāndhārī. A few documents written in the Kharoṣṭhi script survive including a version of the Dhammapada.

Late Middle Indic (Apabhramsa/Apasabda)

Main articles: Middle Indic and Apabhramsha

The Prakrits (which includes Pali) were gradually transformed into Apabhramshas which were used until about 13th century. The term Apabhramsha refers to the dialects of North India before the rise of modern North Indian languages. The term apabhramsha implies a corrupt or non-standard language. A significant amount of Apabhramsha literature has been found in Jain libraries. While Amir Khusro and Kabir were writing in a language quite similar to modern Urdu, Hindi, many poets, specially in regions that were still ruled by Hindu kings, continued to write in Apabhramsha. The Apabhramsha authors include Sarahapad of Kamarupa, Devasena of Dhar (9th c. AD), Pushpadanta of Manyakhet (9th c. AD), Dhanapal, Muni Ramsimha, Hemachandra of Patan, Raighu of Gwalior (15th AD). An early example of the use of Apabhramsha is in Vikramuurvashiiya of Kalidasa, when Pururava asks the animals in the forest about his beloved who had disappeared.

Emergence of modern Indo-Aryan languages

Further information: History of Hindi

Dravidian languages

Main article: Dravidian languages

Further information: Proto-Dravidian

The Dravidian family of languages includes approximately 73 languages that are mainly spoken in southern India and northeastern Sri Lanka, as well as certain areas in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and eastern and central India, as well as in parts of Afghanistan and Iran, and overseas in other countries such as the UK, US, Canada, Malaysia and Singapore.

The origins of the Dravidian languages, as well as their subsequent development and the period of their differentiation, are unclear, and the situation is not helped by the lack of comparative linguistic research into the Dravidian languages. Inconclusive attempts have also been made to link the family with the Japonic languages and with the extinct Elamite language (Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis).

Legends common to many Dravidian-speaking groups speak of their origin in a vast, now-sunken continent far to the south. Many linguists, however, tend to favour the theory that speakers of Dravidian languages spread southwards and eastwards through the Indian subcontinent, based on the fact that the southern Dravidian languages show some signs of contact with linguistic groups which the northern Dravidian languages do not. Proto-Dravidian is thought to have differentiated into Proto-North Dravidian, Proto-Central Dravidian and Proto-South Dravidian around 1500 BC, although some linguists have argued that the degree of differentiation between the sub-families points to an earlier split.

The existence of the Dravidian language family was first suggested in 1816 by Alexander D. Campbell in his Grammar of the Teloogoo Language, in which he and Francis W. Ellis argued that Tamil and Telugu were descended from a common, non-Indo-European ancestor. However, it was not until 1856 that Robert Caldwell published his Comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages, which considerably expanded the Dravidian umbrella and established it as one of the major language groups of the world. Caldwell coined the term "Dravidian" from the Sanskrit drāvida, evolved from the word ‘Tamil’ or ‘Tamilan’, which successively changed into ‘Dramila’, ‘Drami˜a’, ‘Dramida’ and ‘Dravida’ which was used in a 7th century text to refer to the languages of the south of India. The publication of the Dravidian etymological dictionary by T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau was a landmark event in Dravidian linguistics.

Origins

Telugu originated from a hypothesized Proto-Dravidian language. It is a highly Sanskritized language. As Telugu savant C.P Brown states in page 35 of his book "A Grammar of the Telugu language": "if we ever make any real progress in the language the student will require the aid of the Tamil Dictionary, and cannot even talk or write Telugu with any ease or precision, unless he masters the first principles Tamil orthography." Inscriptions containing Telugu words dated back to 400 BCE were discovered in Bhattiprolu in Guntur district. English translation of one inscription as reads: “Gift of the slab by venerable Midikilayakha".

Stages

It is possible to broadly define four stages in the linguistic history of the Telugu language:

400 BC – 500 AD

Inscriptions containing Telugu words dated back to 400 BC were discovered in Bhattiprolu in Guntur district. English translation of one inscription reads: “Gift of the slab by venerable Midikilayakha.. The discovery of a Brahmi label inscription reading Thambhaya Dhaanam is engraved on the soapstone reliquary datable to 2nd century BC on Paleographical ground proves the fact that Telugu language predates the known conception in Andhra Pradesh. Primary sources are Prakrit/Sanskrit inscriptions found in the region, in which Telugu places and personal names are found. From this we know that the language of the people was Telugu, while the rulers, who were of the Satavahana dynasty, spoke Prakrit. Telugu words appear in the Maharashtri Prakrit anthology of poems (the Gathasaptashathi) collected by the first century BC Satavahana King Hala. Telugu speakers were probably the oldest peoples inhabiting the land between the Krishna and Godavari rivers.

500 AD – 1100 AD

The first inscription that is entirely in Telugu corresponds to the second phase of Telugu history. This inscription dated 575 AD was found in the Kadapa and Kurnool district region and is attributed to the Renati Cholas. They broke with the prevailing fashion of using Tamil and introduced the tradition of writing royal proclamations in the local language. During the next fifty years, Telugu inscriptions appeared in the neighboring Anantapuram and all the surrounding regions. The first available Telugu inscription in the coastal Andhra Pradesh comes from about 633 CE. Around the same time, the Chalukya kings of Telangana also started using Telugu for inscriptions. Telugu was most exposed to the influence of tamil, during this period.

1100 AD – 1400 AD

The third phase is marked by further stylization and sophistication of the literary language. Ketana (thirteenth century) in fact prohibited the use of spoken words in poetic works. This period also saw the beginning of Muslim rule in the Telangana region.

During this period the separation of Telugu script from the common Telugu-Kannada script took place. Tikkana wrote his works in this script.

1400 AD – 1900 AD

During the fourth phase, Telugu underwent a great deal of change (as did other Indian languages), progressing from medieval to modern. The language of the Telangana region started to split into a distinct dialect due to Muslim influence: Sultanate rule under the Tughlaq dynasty had been established earlier in the northern Deccan during the fourteenth century. South of the Godavari river (Rayalaseema region), however, the Vijayanagara empire gained dominance from 1336 till the late 1600s, reaching its peak during the rule of Krishnadevaraya in the sixteenth century, when Telugu literature experienced what is considered to be its golden age. Padakavithapithamaha, Annamayya, contributed many atcha (pristine) Telugu Padaalu to this great language. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, Muslim rule extended further south, culminating in the establishment of the princely state of Hyderabad by the Asaf Jah dynasty in 1724. This heralded an era of Persian/Arabic influence on the Telugu language, especially among the people of Hyderabad. The effect is also felt in the prose of the early 19th century, as in the Kaifiyats.

1900 AD to date

The period of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries saw the influence of the English language and modern communication/printing press as an effect of the British rule, especially in the areas that were part of the Madras Presidency. Literature from this time had a mix of classical and modern traditions and included works by scholars like Kandukuri Viresalingam and Panuganti Lakshminarasimha Rao.

Since the 1930s, what was considered an elite literary form of the Telugu language has now spread to the common people with the introduction of mass media like movies, television, radio and newspapers. This form of the language is also taught in schools as a standard. In the current decade the Telugu language, like other Indian languages, has undergone globalization due to the increasing settlement of Telugu-speaking people abroad. Modern Telugu movies, although still retaining their dramatic quality, are linguistically separate from post-Independence films.

At present, a committee of scholars have approved a classical language tag for Telugu based on its antiquity. The Indian government has also officially designated it as a classical language.

Quotes on Telugu

• "...Among these five languages, the Telinga appears to be most polished, and though confessedly a difficult language, it must be numbered among those which are the most worthy of cultivation; its varierty of inflection being such as to give it a capacity of expressing ideas with high degree of facilty, justness and elegance..." — by Rev. W.Carey (April 9, 1814).

• "...But those who may at first question the utility of so many letters in the Teloogoo, will perhaps relinquish most of their objections, when they find that the variety of sound in this language is greater, and better represented than English..." — A.D Campbell (1949)

• "Desa bhashalandu Telugu Lessa" ("Among the nation's languages, Telugu is the best") - Sri Krishnadeva Raya

• "...Tamil has usually been considered to be the Dravidian language which has preserved the most traces of the original form of speech from which all other Dravidian dialects are derived. Some points will be drawn to attention to in the ensuing pages where this does not appear to be the case, and in many peculiarities the other Dravidian languages such as Telugu have preserved older forms and represent a more ancient state of development. " - George Abraham Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India [1]

Carnatic music

Though Carnatic music (Karnataka sangitha) has a profound cultural influence on all of the South Indian States and their respective languages, most of the songs (Kirtanas) are in the Telugu language. This is because the existing tradition is to a great extent an outgrowth of the musical life of the principality of Thanjavur in the Kaveri delta. Thanjavur was the heart of the Chola dynasty (from the 9th century to the 13th), but in the second quarter of the sixteenth century a Telugu Nayak viceroy (Raghunatha Nayaka) was appointed by the emperor of Vijayanagara, thus establishing a court whose language was Telugu. Telugu Nayaka rulers acted as the governors in the present day Tamil Nadu area with headquarters at Thanjavur (1530-1674 CE) and Madurai(1530-1781 CE). After the collapse of Vijayanagar, Thanjavur and Madurai Nayaks became independent and ruled for the next 150 years until they were replaced by Marathas. This was the period when several Telugu families migrated from Andhra and settled down in Thanjavur and Madurai. Most of the great composers of Carnatic music belonged to these families. Telugu, a language ending with vowels, giving it a mellifluous quality, was also considered suitable for musical expression. Of the trinity of Carnatic music composers, Tyagaraja's and Syama Sastri's compositions were largely in Telugu, while Muttuswami Dikshitar is noted for his Sanskrit texts. Tyagaraja is remembered both for his devotion and the bhava of his krithi, a song form consisting of pallavi, (the first section of a song) anupallavi (a rhyming section that follows the pallavi) and charanam (a sung stanza which serves as a refrain for several passages in the composition). The texts of his kritis are almost all in Sanskrit, in Telugu (the contemporary language of the court). This use of a living language, as opposed to Sanskrit, the language of ritual, is in keeping with the bhakti ideal of the immediacy of devotion. Sri Syama Sastri, the oldest of the trinity, was taught Telugu and Sanskrit by his father, who was the pujari (Hindu priest) at the Meenakshi temple in Madurai. Syama Sastri's texts were largely composed in Telugu, widening their popular appeal. Some of his most famous compositions include the nine krithis, Navaratnamaalikā, in praise of the goddess Meenakshi at Madurai, and his eighteen krithi in praise of Kamakshi. As well as composing krithi, he is credited with turning the svarajati, originally used for dance, into a purely musical form.

History of Kannada

Kannada is one of the oldest Dravidian languages with an antiquity of at least 2000 years. The spoken language is said to have separated from its proto-Dravidian source earlier than Tamil and about the same time as Tulu. However, the archaeological evidence would indicate a written tradition for this language of around 1500-1600 years. The initial development of the Kannada language is similar to that of other Dravidian languages and independent of Sanskrit. During later centuries, Kannada, along with other Dravidian languages like Telugu, Malayalam, etc., has been greatly influenced by Tamil in terms of vocabulary, grammar and literary styles.

Stone inscriptions

The first written record in the Kannada language is traced to Emperor Ashoka's Brahmagiri edict dated 230 BC. The first example of a full-length Kannada language stone inscription (shilashaasana) containing Brahmi characters with characteristics resembling those of Tamil in Hale Kannada (Old Kannada) script can be found in the Halmidi inscription, dated c. 450, indicating that Kannada had become an administrative language by this time. Over 30,000 inscriptions written in the Kannada language have been discovered so far. The Chikkamagaluru inscription of 500 AD is another example. Prior to the Halmidi inscription, there is an abundance of inscriptions containing Kannada words, phrases and sentences, proving its antiquity. The 543 AD Badami cliff shilashaasana of Pulakesi I is an example of a Sanskrit inscription in Hale Kannada script.

Copper plates and manuscripts

Badami Chalukya inscription in Old Kannada, Virupaksha Temple, 745 Pattadakal

Examples of early Sanskrit-Kannada bilingual copper plate inscriptions (tamarashaasana) are the Tumbula inscriptions of the Western Ganga Dynasty dated 444 A.D. The earliest full-length Kannada tamarashaasana in Old Kannada script (early eighth century) belongs to Alupa King Aluvarasa II from Belmannu, South Kanara district and displays the double crested fish, his royal emblem. The oldest well-preserved palm leaf manuscript is in Old Kannada and is that of Dhavala, dated to around the ninth century, preserved in the Jain Bhandar, Mudbidri, Dakshina Kannada district. The manuscript contains 1478 leaves written in ink.

History of Tamil

Further information: Sangam literature

A set of palm leaf manuscripts from the fifteenth or the sixteenth century, containing Christian prayers in Tamil

Tamil has the oldest literature amongst the other world languages , with epigraphic attestation dating to the 10000 BC.

Literary works in India or Sri Lanka were preserved either in palm leaf manuscripts (implying repeated copying and recopying) or through oral transmission, making direct dating impossible. External chronological records and internal linguistic evidence, however, indicates that the oldest extant works were probably composed sometime between the 3rd century BC and the 2nd century AD.

The earliest extant text in Tamil is the Tolkāppiyam, a work on poetics and grammar which describes the language of the classical period, the oldest portions of this book may date back to around 10000 BC . Preliminary results from archaeological excavations in 2005 suggest that the oldest inscriptions in Tamil may date at least to around 10000 BC[2]. Apart from these, the earliest examples of Tamil writing we have today are rock inscriptions from the 3rd century BC, which are written in an adapted form of the Brahmi script (Mahadevan, 2003). Many Tamils argue in favour of a much earlier date for the literature by referring to Tamil legends of a lost continent, or by positing links to the Indus valley civilisation, the Sumerian Tammuz, and the Australian Kamilaroi, but none of these theories have been recognised by the mainstream scholarly community.

Linguists categorise Tamil literature and language into four periods:stoneage period(10000 BC to 500 BC), ancient (500 BC to 700 AD), medieval (700 to 1500) and modern (1500 to the present). During the medieval period, a number of Sanskrit loan words were absorbed by Tamil, which many 20th century purists, notably Parithimaar Kalaignar and Maraimalai Adigal, later sought to remove. This movement was called thanith thamizh iyakkam (meaning pure Tamil movement). As a result of this, Tamil in formal documents, public speeches and scientific discourses is largely free of Sanskrit loan words. Between 800 and 1300, Malayalam is believed to have evolved from Tamil into a distinct language.

Languages of other families in India

Tibeto-Burman languages

Main article: Tibeto-Burman languages

Meitei language, Bodo language, Naga language, Garo language

Austro-Asiatic languages

Main article: Austro-Asiatic languages

The Austroasiatic family of languages includes the Santal and Munda languages of eastern India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, along with the Mon-Khmer languages spoken by the Khasi and Nicobarese in India and in Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and southern China. The Austroasiatic languages are thought to have been spoken throughout the Indian subcontinent by hunter-gatherers who were later assimilated first by the agriculturalist Dravidian settlers and later by the Indo-Aryan peoples arriving from northwestern India.

The Austroasiatic family is thought to be the first to be spoken in ancient India. Some believe the family to be a part of an Austric superstock of languages, along with the Austronesian language family.

Indo-Pacific languages

Main article: Indo-Pacific languages

According to Joseph Greenberg, the Andamanese languages of the Andaman Islands and the Nihali language of central India are thought to be Indo-Pacific languages related to the Papuan languages of New Guinea, Timor, Halmahera, New Britain,etc. Nihali has been shown to be related to Kusunda of central Nepal. However, the proposed Indo-Pacific relationship has not been established through the comparative method, and has been dismissed as speculation by most comparative linguists.

Nihali and Kusunda are spoken by hunting people living in forests. Both languages have accepted many loan words from other languages, Nihali having loans from Munda (Korku), Dravidian and Indic languages.

Evolution of scripts

Indus script

Spread of scripts in Asia.

Main article: Indus script

The term Indus script refers to short strings of symbols associated with the Harappan civilization of ancient India (most of the Indus sites are distributed in present-day Pakistan and northwest India) used between 2600–1900 BC, which evolved from an early Indus script attested from around 3500–3300 BC. They are most commonly associated with flat, rectangular stone tablets called seals, but they are also found on at least a dozen other materials. The first publication of a Harappan seal dates to 1875, in the form of a drawing by Alexander Cunningham. Since then, well over 4000 symbol-bearing objects have been discovered, some as far afield as Mesopotamia. After 1500 BC, use of the symbols ends, together with the final stage of Harappan civilization. There are over 400 different signs, but many are thought to be slight modifications or combinations of perhaps 200 'basic' signs. The symbols remain undeciphered (in spite of numerous attempts that did not find favour with the academic community), and most scholars tend to classify then as proto-writing rather than writing proper.

Brahmi script

Main articles: Brāhmī and Brahmic family

The best known inscriptions in Brāhmī are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka, dating to the 3rd century BC. These were long considered the earliest examples of Brahmi writing, but recent archeological evidence in Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu suggest the dates for the earliest use of Brahmi to be around the 6th century BC, dated using radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dating methods.

This script is ancestral to most of the scripts of South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria, and perhaps even Korean Hangul. The Brāhmī numeral system is the ancestor of the Hindu-Arabic numerals, which are now used worldwide.

Brāhmī is generally believed to be derived from a Semitic script such as the Imperial Aramaic alphabet, as was clearly the case for the contemporary Kharosthi alphabet that arose in a part of northwest Indian under the control of the Achaemenid Empire. Rhys Davids suggests that writing may have been introduced to India from the Middle East by traders. Another possibility is with the Achaemenid conquest in the late 6th century BC. It was often assumed that it was a planned invention under Ashoka as a prerequiste for the his edicts. Compare the much better documented parallel of the Hangul script.

Older examples of the Brahmi script appear to be on fragments of pottery from the trading town of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, which have been dated to the early 5th century BC. Even earlier evidence of the Brahmi script has been discovered on pieces of pottery in Adichanallur, Tamil Nadu. Radio-carbon dating has established that they belonged to the 6th century BC. [3]

A minority position holds that Brāhmī was a purely indigenous development, perhaps with the Indus script as its predecessor; these include the English scholars G.R. Hunter and F. Raymond Allchin.

Kharosthi script

Main article: Kharoṣṭhī

Paper strip with writing in Kharoshthi. 2-5th century AD, Yingpan, Eastern Tarim Basin, Xinjiang Museum.

The Kharoṣṭhī script, also known as the Gāndhārī script, is an ancient abugida (a kind of alphabetic script) used by the Gandhara culture of historic northwest India to write the Gāndhārī and Sanskrit languages. It was in use from the 4th century BC until it died out in its homeland around the 3rd century AD. It was also in use along the Silk Road where there is some evidence it may have survived until the 7th century in the remote way stations of Khotan and Niya.

Scholars are not in agreement as to whether the Kharoṣṭhī script evolved gradually, or was the work of a mindful inventor. An analysis of the script forms shows a clear dependency on the Aramaic alphabet but with extensive modifications to support the sounds found in Indic languages. One model is that the Aramaic script arrived with the Achaemenid conquest of the region in 500 BC and evolved over the next 200+ years to reach its final form by the 3rd century BC. However, no Aramaic documents of any kin have survived from this period. Also intermediate forms have yet been found to confirm this evolutionary model, and rock and coins inscriptions from the 3rd century BC onward show a unified and mature form.

The study of the Kharoṣṭhī script was recently invigorated by the discovery of the Gandharan Buddhist Texts, a set of birch-bark manuscripts written in Kharoṣṭhī, discovered near the Afghanistan city of Hadda just west of the Khyber Pass. The manuscripts were donated to the British Library in 1994. The entire set of manuscripts are dated to the 1st century AD making them the oldest Buddhist manuscripts in existence.

Gupta script

Main article: Gupta script

The Gupta script was used for writing Sanskrit and is associated with the Gupta Empire of India which was a period of material prosperity and great religious and scientific developments. The Gupta script was descended from Brahmi and gave rise to the Siddham script.

Siddhaṃ script

Main article: Siddham

The word Siddhaṃ in the Siddhaṃ script

Siddhaṃ (Sanskrit, accomplished or perfected), descended from the Brahmi script via the Gupta script, which also gave rise to the Devanāgarī script as well as a number of other Asian scripts such as Tibetan script.

Siddhaṃ is an abugida or alphasyllabary rather than an alphabet because each character indicates a syllable. If no other mark occurs then the short 'a' is assumed. Diacritic marks indicate the other vowels, the pure nasal (anusvara), and the aspirated vowel (visarga). A special mark (virama), can be used to indicate that the letter stands alone with no vowel which sometimes happens at the end of Sanskrit words. See links below for examples.

The writing of mantras and copying of Sutras using the Siddhaṃ script is still practiced in Shingon Buddhism in Japan but has died out in other places. It was Kūkai who introduced the Siddham script to Japan when he returned from China in 806, where he studied Sanskrit with Nalanda trained monks including one known as Prajñā. Sutras that were taken to China from India were written in a variety of scripts, but Siddham was one of the most important. By the time Kūkai learned this script the trading and pilgrimage routes over land to India, part of the Silk Road, were closed by the expanding Islamic empire of the Abbasids. Then in the middle of the 9th century there were a series of purges of "foreign religions" in China. This meant that Japan was cut off from the sources of Siddham texts. In time other scripts, particularly Devanagari replaced it in India, and so Japan was left as the only place where Siddham was preserved, although it was, and is only used for writing mantras and copying sutras.

Siddhaṃ was influential in the development of the Kana writing system, which is also associated with Kūkai– while the Kana shapes derive from Chinese characters, the princlple of a syllable-based script and their systematic ordering was taken over from Siddham.

Nagari script

Further information: Devanāgarī

Descended from the Siddham script around eleventh century.

See also

• Indo-Aryan loanwords in Tamil

References

• Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel, The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization, EVJS, vol. 11 (2004), issue 2 (Dec) [4] (PDF)
• Scharfe, Harmut. Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī. Journal of the American Oriental Society. 122 (2) 2002, p. 391-3.
• Stevens, John. Sacred Calligraphy of the East. [3rd ed. Rev.] (Boston : Shambala, 1995)

External links

• Omniglot alphabets for Kharoṣṭhī, Brahmi, Siddham, Devanāgarī.
• Indian Scripts and Languages
• Siddham Calligraphy
• [5]Indian sprachbund --language union