Analysis of Scripts

Scripts ___ Surface structure and deep structure ___ Extended scripts

1. Scripts ____(Contents)

Indic scripts originated from the ancient Brahmi alphabet. They have many common structural features. This is a fascinating study which will not be pursued here. One result, however, is that these scripts lend themselves to a uniform scheme of transliteration.
The main scripts involved are Devanagari and its extensions, in the forms used for Sanskrit, Hindi and Marathi (and the Devanagari transcription of English words), and the Vedic language, Gurmukhi (used for Panjabi), and the scripts of Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada (used also for Tulu), Malayalam, Oriya, Sinhala, Tamil, and Telugu. Tamil Grantha, used for Sanskrit, will automatically be covered.
Names of script will now be abbreviated to the first three letters, written in capitals.
Some of the similarities allow the scripts to be grouped into:

• ASS, BEN, ORI [having two 'y' letters] - the Eastern scripts,
• GUR, Hindi DEV, extended BEN [using diacritics for Urdu words]
• KAN, MAL, TAM, TEL [having additional consonants] - the Dravidian scripts,

although these are not the only cross-similarities. ASS and BEN are very similar, but I am one who thinks of them as separate scripts.
It is very important to bear in mind that 'transliteration' is a representation of the script, whereas 'transcription' is a representation of the sounds.

2. Surface structure and deep structure ____(Contents)

Indic scripts are much more complicated than the plain Latin alphabet. They have both an elaborate surface structure and a deep structure. Let V mean any vowel, C any consonant, Y one of the semivowels y, l, v; and N a nasalisation (not a nasal consonant). Then the surface structure is basically just the script as seen. In other words, it consists of various graphic forms representing such combinations as V, C, CV, CCCV, CCCCV, VN, NY, as well as the digits and punctuation. (This may not be a complete list.)
The deep structure of a script is just its analysis into V, CV, etc, using a minimal list of elements. Here the word 'element' has become a technical term.

There are two complementary features of the surface structure of scripts which it will be helpful to think about: things having different significance according to context and different things having the same significance. Let me explain by examples.
In DEV the sign after a consonant represents long a. Elsewhere this sign has a meaning only when combined with other forms to make a vowel or consonant; i.e. in these situations it has no meaning of its own.
The SIN Saññaka, resembling a curved opening bracket attached to the left of a character, has various effects. Thus, attached to dha it makes ddha; attached to ja it indicates a nasalisation [details omitted].

Such graphical forms will be called 'scriptemes'.
For completeness, a feature of the surface structure which has only one meaning (or none) will also be called a scripteme. The important scriptemes are those with more than one meaning.

On the other hand, even in printed DEV there is an older form of the vowel a (square instead of round). These two forms have exactly the same meaning, and are called 'allographs'. There are also, for example, allographs of DEV jha, .na, BEN t.

   A scripteme is a particular graphic form.
   It may have different meanings in different contexts
   (including having no meaning), or it may have the
   same meaning (or none) in all contexts.

   Allographs have different graphic forms but
   the same meaning.

3. Extended scripts ___ (Contents)

Devanagari
In recent years DEV has been extended to write South Indian languages by putting a dot (nukta) under the letters n, r, l_dot-b, and with new forms for the short e, o vowels (e.g. ISCII:1991).
There are also forms for writing two English vowels. Urdu words in Hindi are written with other nukta letters.

Oriya
In a lexicon published in 1931 one finds English and Urdu words containing the phoneme /w/ written with a new letter, , wa. This occurs (in a variant form) in the place of va in ISCII:1991, but it is not used for Oriya words.

General
Most Indic scripts have been extended to cover the rare Sanskrit vowels l_ring-b, l_ring-b_matra. These occur in the root kl_ring-b p and as proper names.

Sinhala
The SIN letter fa is an extension of the script.

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