Languages of India: Encyclopedia II - Languages of India - Alphabets of Indian languages

Languages of India - Alphabets of Indian languages

Indian languages have corresponding distinct alphabets. The two major families are those of the Dravidian languages and those of the Indo-Aryan languages, the former largely confined to the south and the latter to the north. With the exception of Urdu the alphabets of all these languages are native to India. There are those scholars who believe the scripts of the Northern languages (like Sanskrit, Bengali, Hindi and Punjabi) to be distant derivations of the Aramaic alphabet, though this is a disputed theory primarily because the number and grouping of sounds and letters are so radically different.

Languages of India - Phonetic alphabet

A remarkable feature of the alphabets of India is the manner in which they are organised. It is organised according to phonetic principle, unlike the Roman alphabet, which has a random sequence of letters.

The classification is as follows

This classification is observed in all the languages under discussion. Additionally each language has a few special letters signifying sounds specific to that language, as also a few symbols representing composite sounds.

Finally, the list of vowels is separately specified, as follows

Additionally in Vedic Sanskrit: rr, rrr, lrr, lrrr

Note that the list read as pairs represents shorter and longer versions of same vowel. Here the first a is like u in bus. (a)h is special to Sanskritised words, occurring in word endings as in duhkh(a)h, meaning pain or suffering. It is impossible to say any of the consonants without the associated vowel and the default way of saying a consonant attaches the neutral a sound to it.

In languages of Eastern India like Bangla, Oriya and Assamese, a is spoken almost o.

The classification of these sounds is universal. Every language in India has a corresponding symbol, and also, with some modifications, the corresponding sound. In fact we may be tempted to think that all languages at least of the Indo-European family have the corresponding alphabets, give or take a few, and sometimes give or take a row or column.

For instance, English has morphemes similar to the t, th, d, and dh of the third row, but they manifest as only two phonemes, t and d. In French on the other hand, the third row is absent, but morphemes similar t and d of the fourth row are used.

For nasals, Sanskrit imposes considerable systematics. The above scheme records that the nasal occurring in conjunction with any given row has a sound characteristic that row. For instance the nasalisation occurring in the word "Ganga" is that of the first row, while the nasalisation occurring in the words "India" or "integral" are character- istically front palatals. Speakers of any language have to necessarily speak in this manner though they never realise it.

The classification of the "vowel generated" may seem rather curious. The belief here is that y sound arises from conjunction of ii with a, w sound arises from trying to say u (as in put) or uu in conjunction with a. Old Sanskrit of the Hindu Rig Veda has two more vowels, rr and lrr, as also their corresponding longer versions. It is likely that the rr was guttural like the French r, more akin to a vowel than a consonant. The lrr remains a mystery for being classified a vowel. But this classification then explains r (as in run) and l (as in long) simply as conjunction of these vowels with the a sound.

The economy of this classification in the fact that effectively each of the five main rows is generated by one letter, the others are systmeatic modifications of the same. In Tamil, a great simplification of alphabet has been achieved by having only one symbol for each of the five consonants, the specific hardening and aspiration understood from context while reading. Tamil script indeed spells kathai (story) and gadhai (weapon of Bhima) the same.

Languages of India - Urdu alphabet

Urdu is unique among Indian languages. It is derived from Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and some Sanksrit. Most of Urdu's grammar, however, is 'genetically' linked to that of older Prakrit, in that it's base grammatical structure is, in fact, Panini-ian. Much of Urdu's vocabulary derives its sources from Persian and Arabic. The word Urdu, in Turkish, means "camp", "tent", or "military encampment". Presumably these cantonments were where Mughal armies, mostly Muslim speakers of Persian (and hence intimately aware of Arabic), and natives interacted, soon forming a new mixed language. For this reason, the Persian script, in turn derived from Arabic script, was adopted and molded to fit with the Indian sound-system. For this reason, while the Urdu language itself has only six additional letters with unique sounds different from that of Hindi, its script has no connection to native Indian alphabets.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Alphabets of Indian languages", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki