All over India and Southeast Asia they write with these squiggly, loopy, hangy, sprouty scripts.
But perhaps the only thing cooler than the way they look is the way they work!
A spice market in India. The hooded figure in front of you apologizes for the kidnapping.
He needs your help. He explains that his land has taken part in history’s most elaborate
and rigorous memorization exercises. Instead of scribes, they had recitations. These weren’t
retellings of campfire stories, these were whole libraries of knowledge handed down for
generations. He says his name is Ashoka. This is his land, and he’s king. After a bloody
and violent war, he had a change of heart, and now has but one singular focus: to spread
his message - a law of tolerance and compassion - throughout the land.
But he doesn’t want to use the mouth-to-ear memorization ways of the oral tradition. That’s
for old texts and old ideas! No, his vision is to install massive pillars around his empire,
each one engraved with his list of edicts. This, he explains, is where you come in. See,
he’s been keeping tabs on you as you roamed the land of the Semitic abjads, and he really
likes this crazy consonant alphabet idea. He’ll take it.
But he also appreciates the whimsical simplicity of accenting consonants with vowel marks.
Oh, and he doesn’t want to have to write the vowel if it’s just a short “uh”.
His language is full of those. So he’ll write “funnel” something like this, with
these built in syllables. But wait, it’s not “funnel-uh”. That final “l” isn’t
a separate syllable. He needs a way to write just bare consonants, to tell his past apart
from his pasta. How? With a simple “hush” stroke below the letter. Now, he brags to
you, his system is complete.
Make sure you don’t miss the step he’s taking here. It’s a “Major Moments in
the History of Writing”! Each of the character units fundamentally represents a syllable.
It just so happens that, unless the vowel in that syllable is a short “a”, the vowel
gets added onto (or below or beside) the consonant character. On their own, the base characters
contain that dummy vowel “uh”, like “puh”, but you can take that “puh” and modify
it with any vowel you like. Certain vowels go in certain places - like “ee” to the
side or “oo” below. So in India, characters are syllables, but, unlike a full syllabary,
you don’t need a completely separate character for each separate syllable. And all characters
give consonant plus vowel information, but, unlike a full alphabet, you don’t line up
sequences of consonants plus vowels, consonants plus vowels. The hybrid combination nature
of this system earns it the name “alphasyllabary”.
Combos are built into this system, paving the way for over a thousand ligatures - commonly
linked characters - in the alphasyllabary. Sure, other writing systems develop ligatures
in their calligraphy. But the Indic alphasyllabary welcomes them naturally.
As it’s passed all around this entire slice of the world, up to Nepal and Tibet, down
the coast to Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and beyond, this script keeps updating its
look but continues to capture consonants and vowels accurately, like an alphabet, and to
write those voweled consonants in syllable units, like a syllabary.
Even completely unrelated alphasyllabaries seize on this same idea. This is the Ethiopic
symbol for “ma”. This one reads “me”. And this is “mu”. This is “la”, “le”
and “lu”. Now that you understand alphasyllabaries, you must answer this next question: if this
symbol sounds like “ba”, how do you write “be” and “bu” in Ethiopia? This is
your Ge’ez abcd’s, the abugida - looks different, but works much the same way.
Your characters have never looked so different, even after the Greeks and Romans took them
over. Maybe it’s this dizzying variety of writing systems. Or maybe Thoth’s pill is
starting to wear off.