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The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas used in South Asia and Southeast Asia.
The individuals abugidas may be called Brahmic scripts or Indic scripts.
The term Nagari is also used for those Brahmic scripts that are used to write Indic languages.
History
Brahmic scripts are descended from the Brahmi script for ancient Sanskrit, which in turn is believed to be descended from a Semitic script, thus they probably have a common ancestor with the European scripts.
The most prominent member of the family is Devanagari, which is used to write several languages in India, as well as Nepal, including both Indo-Aryan languages and Dravidian languages.
Burmese, Cambodian, Thai, and Tibetan are also written in Brahmic scripts, though with considerable modification to suit their phonology. The Siddham script was especially important in Buddhism because many sutras were written in it, and the art of Siddham calligraphy survives today in Japan.
Characteristics include:
- The inherent vowel is short 'a' (in Bengali, it is short 'o', which comes from Sanskrit short 'a'). Other vowels are written by adding to the character.
- 'u' is written below, short 'i' is written to the left if distinct from long 'i'.
- In some of the scripts, some vowels consist of two symbols, one placed on each side of the consonant. With this concept, the English word 'boat' would be written "obat".
- Consonants can be combined in ligatures. Special marks are added to denote the combination of 'r' with another consonant.
- Nasalization is written with a dot above the letter.
Many languages using Brahmic scripts are sometimes written in Latin script, primarily for the benefit of non-native speakers, but this practice has made little headway in India itself.
Urdu, a language native to India, uses the Arabic alphabet, which is not an Indic script. However, it should be noted that there is a practice in India (as opposed to Pakistan) in which Urdu is also written in Devanagari script.
List of Brahmic Scripts encoded in Unicode
Other Brahmic Scripts
See also
- ISCII — the coding scheme specifically designed to represent Indic scripts.
External links
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