India has a lot of… everything, really; people, languages, religions, old kingdoms,
and so on.
So in a sense it’s not all too surprising that India also has a fair collection of different
writing systems, but considering how Europe is also diverse in languages yet these languages
only use 4 different scripts (5 if you count Armenian), why does almost every language
in India (and furthermore in Southeast Asia) seem have its own writing system?
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Well first, as always, it’s best to familiarize ourselves with what exactly we’re talking
about.
Now I might have specified “India” in the title, but it would be better to look
at the Indian Subcontinent as a whole.
The most widely used script in this region, and fourth most widely in the world, is Devanagari
(you know, that script with the continuous line through it), used by 600 million people
speaking over 120 different languages, including most notably Hindi and Marathi.
Next are the Bengali-Assamese scripts, used by…
Bengali and Assamese, then Telugu, then Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Gurmukhi (used
by Punjabi), Odia, Sinhala, and Thaana in the Maldives.
That’s nearly a dozen different writing systems, without even including the modified
Arabic script that Pakistan uses, or the Latin alphabet, or indeed many other smaller scripts.
Probably the biggest thing to understand about all these scripts is that they’re all closely
related.
These and many other scripts in Southeast Asia all form a family known as the Brahmic
scripts.
This family of scripts all shares a common ancestor in the form of the Brahmi script,
a now extinct abugida used from the 3rd century BC to the 5th century AD.
In fact, the Europe comparison I made in the intro is somewhat apt, as the Brahmi script
itself shares a common ancestor with Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic, as well as Hebrew and
Arabic: Phoenician.
Actually you can sort of consider this an informal part two to my History of the Latin
Alphabet video (don’t watch it now, watch it later, I’ll put it in the end screen).
The Phoenician script was an abjad used by… well the Phoenicians, not exactly a mystery.
The Phoenicians were widely known as major seafaring traders, setting up colonies and
trading ports all across the Mediterranean.
Compared to the other logographic or syllabic scripts of the time, Phoenician was quite
a flexible script.
Since every letter corresponded directly to a single sound, the script was easy to use
and tailor to other languages, with modification.
The Greeks did this, from which spawned all the European writing systems I mentioned earlier,
but by far the most prolific descendant of Phoenician was the Aramaic abjad.
Phoenicia: Hey kid, wanna buy some consonants?
Arameans: Uh… consonants?
Phoenicia: Yeah man, each of these markings represent sounds, put them together and you
can make words!
It’s like what they’ve been doing in Egypt and Babylon but far easier to learn!
Arameans: Eh I don’t know, didn’t Athens say that stuff will mess with your memory?
Phoenicia: Oh you’ve clearly been listening to too much Socrates lately.
No, this can be shaped to fit basically any language.
Seriously this stuff will make you immortal!
Whadda you say?
Arameans: Eh… okay sure I’ll give it a try.
Phoenicia: Excellent, you won’t regret it!
Arameans: Yeah, I might maybe modify this a bit, but I could see other peoples using
this.
Phoenicia: Yeah exactly!
Alright nice talking with you, gotta hit up the Athenians on that stuff now!
And soon a writing craze spread throughout the region.
The Aramaic script was used for well over 1,000 years in the Middle East, with the Aramaic
language becoming the lingua franca of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires, and
particularly the Persian Achaemenid Empire, which just so happened to stretch all the
way east to the Indus River.
Of course the Empire used Old Persian (which used a cuneiform script) as its official language,
but after conquering Mesopotamia they started to use Aramaic as a common tongue between
all the vast groups within the Empire, and thus also came Aramaic’s remix of the Phoenician
script.
Persians: Hey, Nabateans, have this writing system.
Hey, Israelites, I’m letting you all go back to Jerusalem, here have this writing
system as well.
Oh hey, Arameans, thanks for the writing system by the way!
Arameans: Oh yeah no problem!
I’m gonna go to Central Asia now.
Persians: Okay, tell the Sogdians, the Uyghurs, and the Mongols I said hi!
Hey, Northwest Indians, I know you’re gonna have a blast with this.
Hey, Macedonians… [punch] Oh no I’m being conquered at an alarming rate!
After the fall of the Achaemenids though, the Aramaic script no longer had a central
authority behind it, allowing for different cursives and variations to become more popular
in different areas, as happened with Hebrew, Arabic, Old Uyghur, Mongolian, Manchu, and
in Northern India with Kharosthi, Pahlavi, and particularly Brahmi.
While Kharosthi and Pahlavi didn’t really go anywhere, the Brahmi script was used for
languages all across the Indian subcontinent, including Sanskrit, Tocharian, and older versions
of Kannada, Telugu, and Tamil, with some of the earliest known inscriptions being in an
older Indo-Aryan language known as Prakrit, one of the earliest notable examples being
the Edicts of Ashoka.
Brahmi was, like most of its descendants, an abugida, as opposed to its abjad ancestors.
However, Phoenician and Aramaic were Afro-Asiatic Semitic languages whereas the languages of
Northern India were Indo-European Indo-Aryan languages, which of course meant they were…
quite different.
This was especially true in phonology, with Aramaic having letters for certain sounds
found in Semitic languages but no letters for the myriad of different sounds found in
South Asia, such as aspirated sounds.
Thus, like how the Greeks repurposed certain Phoenician letters to become vowels (thereby
creating an alphabet), certain Aramaic letters were repurposed to make sounds that no Semitic
language ever had (though exactly how is still up for debate).
Socrates: Hey!
We’re on the case for someone spreading writing around here.
You see any of those types?
Cholas: Uh… no.
Socrates: Alright, well let us know if you do.
We set up some wanted posters to remind you all.
Cholas: Uh okay… why’s it blank?
Socrates: Well we can’t have any writing about here... oh right…
The script eventually started to split into two different variations, one used in the
north with its primarily Indo-European languages and one in the south with its primarily Dravidian
languages (well Sinhala is actually Indo-European but you know, proximity).
Over time, through steady contact with these regions, Northern Brahmi would spread north
into Tibet and Central Asia and Southern Brahmi would spread east from South Asia into Southeast
Asia.
Hey oh my god that’s like math or something like that!
In the north the script steadily evolved into the Gupta script, used by the Gupta Empire.
The script then split into three groups; Siddham, Sharada, and Tibetan.
Siddham split off into Bengali, Assamese, and Nagari (and thus Devanagari), Sharada
eventually gave us Gurmukhi, and Tibetan split off into a few smaller scripts as well.
Brahmi however has even more descendants outside the Indian subcontinent, particularly arising
from the south.
The Pallava script first showed up in around the 4th century AD, when most of southern
India was ruled by the Pallava dynasty (yeah they cut straight to the point with these
names).
Within India the script then split into Tamil and Grantha, the latter branching off into
Malayalam (and a few others).
Sri Lanka’s Sinhala also developed directly from Brahmi.
Meanwhile, Pallava had been exported to Southeast Asia through the Pallavas’ sick trading
skills and branched off into Old Mon, Khmer, Cham, and Kawi.
From these scripts we eventually get Burmese, Thai and Lao, and via Kawi we get a whole
host of scripts across the Nusantara Archipelago, including Javanese, Balinese, Batak, and Baybayin.
Or at least… [scream] wait, okay relax!
If you follow me on Instagram you’d know what’s going on.
Or at least… sort of, something like that.
You see, while researching how these scripts developed and split from one another, I found
a lot of my sources disagreed with one another on the specifics… like a lot.
However I think that kind of makes sense, after all if we just say “this script split
up and evolved into these scripts which gave us these scripts” like some sort of rigid
family tree, that kind of discredits the fact that these cultures still intermingled regularly.
But unfortunately I was too lazy to research this properly…
I mean I couldn’t fit it into the video.
Crap did I leave the brutal honesty filter on again?
India has been united before (or at least mostly united) by empires spreading their
influence across the subcontinent– the Mauryas, the Guptas, the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals–
but never for as long as Rome over Europe or China’s dynasties over…
China, which might explain why these places have so relatively few writing systems as
compared to India.
Ultimately these scripts not only withstood the test of time and foreign conquest, but
remained in common use to this day within their respective regions.
Socrates: [sniffs] I’m getting close…
I’ll get you one of these days, Phoenicia!
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