Final Accepted Script Proposal
28-592: Siddhaṃ (also Siddhāṃ ), also known in its later evolved form as Siddhamātṛkā , is a medieval Brahmic abugida , derived from the Gupta script and ancestral to the Nāgarī , Eastern Nagari , Tirhuta , Odia and Nepalese scripts. The word Siddhaṃ means "accomplished" or "perfected" in Sanskrit . The script received its name from the practice of writing Siddhaṃ , or Siddhaṃ astu (may there be perfection), at
56-433: A brush, as with Chinese writing; it is also written with a bamboo pen. In Japan, a special brush called a bokuhitsu ( 朴筆 , Cantonese: pokbat ) is used for formal Siddhaṃ calligraphy. The informal style is known as "fude" ( 筆 , Cantonese: "moubat") . Siddhaṃ is still largely a hand written script. Some efforts have been made to create computer fonts, though to date none of these are capable of reproducing all of
84-455: A combination of a Türko-Mongolic ( āġā ) and a ( k͟hān ) honorific. The nuqta, and the phonological distinction it represents, is sometimes ignored in practice; e.g., क़िला qilā being simply spelled as किला kilā . In the text Dialect Accent Features for Establishing Speaker Identity , Manisha Kulshreshtha and Ramkumar Mathur write, "A few sounds, borrowed from the other languages like Persian and Arabic , are written with
112-437: A dot (bindu or nuqtā). Many people who speak Hindi as a second language, especially those who come from rural backgrounds and do not speak conventional Hindi (also called Khaṛībōlī ), or speak in one of its dialects, pronounce these sounds as their nearest equivalents." For example, these rural speakers will assimilate the sound ɣ ( Devanagari : ग़ ; Nastaliq : غ ) as ɡ ( Devanagari : ग ; Nastaliq : گ ). With
140-464: A nuqta-like diactric is often found on similar glyphs or glyphs that have undergone phonological shifts. There are two use cases found for it: Sindhi 's and Saraiki 's implosives are accommodated in Devanagari with a line attached below—a diacritical bar: ॻ [ɠə] , ॼ [ʄə] , ॾ [ɗə] , ॿ [ɓə] . In Tamil script , the special character ஃ ( ஆய்த எழுத்து , āyda eḻuttu )
168-570: A peaceful manner, Indianization , or the spread of Indian learning. The scripts spread naturally to Southeast Asia, at ports on trading routes. At these trading posts, ancient inscriptions have been found in Sanskrit, using scripts that originated in India. At first, inscriptions were made in Indian languages, but later the scripts were used to write the local Southeast Asian languages. Hereafter, local varieties of
196-669: A renewed Hindi–Urdu language contact, many Urdu writers now publish their works in Devanagari editions . Since the Perso-Arabic orthography is preserved in Nastaʿlīq script Urdu orthography, these writers use the nuqta in Devanagari when transcribing these consonants. Devanagari also includes coverage for the Dravidian consonants ऴ , ḻa /ɻ/; ऱ , ṟa /r/ and ऩ , ṉa /n/. (Respectively, these letters modify ळ , ḷa /ɭ/; र , ra /ɾ/ and न , na /n̪/). An example
224-773: Is तमिऴ् /t̪amiɻ/ ( Tamil : தமிழ் ) , tamiḻ . For example, the letters च़ and छ़ are used in Devanagari to write the Kashmiri alveolar affricates ژ /t͡s/ and ژھ /t͡sʰ/ respectively. To represent the Eastern Nagari letter য় representing / e̯ ɔ/, the consonant य़ , ẏa is used in Devanagari. In Maithili , there are four non-syllabic vowels: i̯, u̯, e̯, o̯ written in Devanagari as य़, व़, य़ॆ, व़ॊ. But colloquially, these are written without nuqta. The Bengali-Assamese script has ড় ঢ় য়, which are variations of ড ঢ য; however, ব and র are completely different in nature. In Old Nepali language texts,
252-631: The Siddhaṃ conjunct consonants. Notably, the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Texts Association has created a Siddhaṃ font for their electronic version of the Taisho Tripiṭaka , though this does not contain all possible conjuncts. The software Mojikyo also contains fonts for Siddhaṃ, but split Siddhaṃ in different blocks and requires multiple fonts to render a single document. A Siddhaṃ input system which relies on
280-661: The Arabic script ; for example, there are some letters in Urdu that share the same basic shape but differ in the placement of dots(s) or nuqta(s) in the Perso-Arabic script : the letter ع ayn , with the addition of a nuqta on top, becomes the letter غ g͟hayn. The term nuqtā ( नुक़्ता ) is itself an example of the use of the nuqta (making it autological .) Other examples include क़िला ( Urdu : قلعہ ) , qilā , 'fortress'; and आग़ा ख़ान ( Urdu : آغا خان ) , Āġā K͟hān ,
308-542: The Brahmi script . Brahmi is clearly attested from the 3rd century BCE during the reign of Ashoka , who used the script for imperial edicts . Northern Brahmi gave rise to the Gupta script during the Gupta period , which in turn diversified into a number of cursives during the medieval period . Notable examples of such medieval scripts, developed by the 7th or 8th century, include Nagari , Siddham and Sharada . The Siddhaṃ script
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#1732863340403336-492: The Chinese Buddhist canon preserves the Siddhaṃ characters for most mantras, and Korean Buddhists still write bījas in a modified form of Siddhaṃ . A recent innovation is the writing of Japanese language slogans on T-shirts using Bonji. Japanese Siddhaṃ has evolved from the original script used to write sūtras and is now somewhat different from the ancient script. It is typical to see Siddhaṃ written with
364-621: The Eastern Nagari , Tirhuta , Odia and also the Nepalese scripts in the eastern and northeastern regions of South Asia , leaving East Asia as the only region where Siddhaṃ is still used. There were special forms of Siddhaṃ used in Korea that varied significantly from those used in China and Japan, and there is evidence that Siddhaṃ was written in Central Asia , as well, by the early 7th century. As
392-554: The Indian subcontinent , Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia . They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India and are used by various languages in several language families in South , East and Southeast Asia : Indo-Aryan , Dravidian , Tibeto-Burman , Mongolic , Austroasiatic , Austronesian , and Tai . They were also the source of the dictionary order ( gojūon ) of Japanese kana . Brahmic scripts descended from
420-625: The Brahmi script began to diversify further from around the 5th century AD and continued to give rise to new scripts throughout the Middle Ages. The main division in antiquity was between northern and southern Brahmi . In the northern group, the Gupta script was very influential, and in the southern group the Vatteluttu and Kadamba / Pallava scripts with the spread of Buddhism sent Brahmic scripts throughout Southeast Asia. As of Unicode version 16.0,
448-629: The CBETA font Siddhamkey 3.0 has been produced. Siddhaṃ script was added to the Unicode Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0. The Unicode block for Siddhaṃ is U+11580–U+115FF: This is a gallery of example usages of the Siddham script. Brahmic abugida The Brahmic scripts , also known as Indic scripts , are a family of abugida writing systems . They are used throughout
476-480: The Japanese had adopted. This led to multiple variants of the same characters. Siddhaṃ is an abugida rather than an alphabet , as each character indicates a syllable, including a consonant and (possibly) a vowel. If the vowel sound is not explicitly indicated, the short 'a' is assumed. Diacritic marks are used to indicate other vowels, as well as the anusvara and visarga . A virama can be used to indicate that
504-490: The Japanese is written from top to bottom, as is typical of Japanese, and then the manuscript is turned back again, and the Siddhaṃ writing is continued from left to right (the resulting Japanese characters appear sideways). Over time, additional markings were developed, including punctuation marks, head marks, repetition marks, end marks, special ligatures to combine conjuncts and rarely to combine syllables, and several ornaments of
532-402: The consonant letter stands alone with no vowel, which sometimes happens at the end of Sanskrit words. Siddhaṃ texts were usually written from left to right then top to bottom, as with other Brahmic scripts, but occasionally they were written in the traditional Chinese style, from top to bottom then right to left. Bilingual Siddhaṃ-Japanese texts show the manuscript turned 90 degrees clockwise and
560-466: The following Brahmic scripts have been encoded: Nuqta The nuqta ( Hindi : नुक़्ता , Urdu : نقطہ , romanized : nuqtā ; sometimes also spelled nukta ), is a diacritic mark that was introduced in Devanagari and some other Indic scripts to represent sounds not present in the original scripts. It takes the form of a dot placed below a character . This idea is inspired from
588-631: The head of documents. Other names for the script include bonji ( Japanese : 梵字 ) " Brahma 's characters" and "Sanskrit script" and Chinese : 悉曇文字 ; pinyin : Xītán wénzi "Siddhaṃ script". The Siddham script evolved from the Gupta Brahmi script in the late 6th century CE. Many Buddhist texts taken to China along the Silk Road were written using a version of the Siddhaṃ script. This continued to evolve, and minor variations are seen across time, and in different regions. Importantly, it
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#1732863340403616-413: The left of each column, and in their corresponding dependent form (vowel sign) combined with the consonant k on the right. A glyph for ka is an independent consonant letter itself without any vowel sign, where the vowel a is inherent . Notes Notes The Brahmi script was already divided into regional variants at the time of the earliest surviving epigraphy around the 3rd century BC. Cursives of
644-457: The scribe's choice, which are not currently encoded. The nuqta is also used in some modern Siddhaṃ texts. In Japan , the writing of mantras and copying/reading of sutras using the Siddhaṃ script is still practiced in the esoteric schools of Shingon Buddhism and Tendai as well as in the syncretic sect of Shugendō . The characters are known as Bonji ( 梵字 , Chinese: Fànzì ) or shittan ( 悉曇 ) . The Taishō Tripiṭaka version of
672-518: The scripts were developed. By the 8th century, the scripts had diverged and separated into regional scripts. Some characteristics, which are present in most but not all the scripts, are: Below are comparison charts of several of the major Indic scripts, organised on the principle that glyphs in the same column all derive from the same Brahmi glyph. Accordingly: The transliteration is indicated in ISO 15919 . Vowels are presented in their independent form on
700-465: The time Kūkai learned this script, the trading and pilgrimage routes over land to India had been closed by the expanding Abbasid Caliphate . In the middle of the 9th century, China experienced a series of purges of "foreign religions", thus cutting Japan off from the sources of Siddhaṃ texts. In time, other scripts, particularly Devanagari , replaced Siddhaṃ in India, while Siddhaṃ 's northeastern derivative called Gaudi evolved to become
728-459: Was done with Chinese characters, Japanese Buddhist scholars sometimes created multiple characters with the same phonological value to add meaning to Siddhaṃ characters. This practice, in effect, represents a 'blend' of the Chinese style of writing and the Indian style of writing and allows Sanskrit texts in Siddhaṃ to be differentially interpreted as they are read, as was done with Chinese characters that
756-715: Was especially important in Buddhism , as many sutras were written in it. The art of Siddham calligraphy survives today in Japan . The tabular presentation and dictionary order of the modern kana system of Japanese writing is believed to be descended from the Indic scripts, most likely through the spread of Buddhism . Southern Brahmi evolved into the Kadamba , Pallava and Vatteluttu scripts, which in turn diversified into other scripts of South India and Southeast Asia. Brahmic scripts spread in
784-729: Was used for transmitting the Buddhist tantra texts. At the time it was considered important to preserve the pronunciation of mantras, and Chinese was not suitable for writing the sounds of Sanskrit. This led to the retention of the Siddhaṃ script in East Asia. The practice of writing using Siddhaṃ survived in East Asia where Tantric Buddhism persisted. Kūkai introduced the Siddhaṃ script to Japan when he returned from China in 806, where he studied Sanskrit with Nalanda -trained monks including one known as Prajñā ( Chinese : 般若三藏 ; pinyin : Bōrě Sāncáng ; 734– c. 810 ). By
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