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The Brahmic family is a family of Abugida s (writing systems) used in South Asia , Southeast Asia , Tibet , Mongolia , Manchuria , descended from the Brāhmī Script of Mauryan India .

The individual abugidas may be called Brahmic scripts or '''Indic scripts'''.


HISTORY


Brahmic scripts are descended from the .

The most prominent member of the family is or Voiced consonants. Later under the influence of Granta vetteluthu evolved which looks similar to present day malayalam script. Still further changes were made in 19th and 20th centuries to make use of printing and typewriting needs before we have the present script.

because many Sutra s were written in it, and the art of Siddham Calligraphy survives today in Japan .

Some characteristics, which may not be present in all the scripts are:
  • Each Consonant has an inherent vowel which is usually short 'a' (in Bengali , Oriya , and Assamese , it is short 'ô' due to sound shifts). Other vowels are written by adding to the character. A Mark , known in Sanskrit as a Virama / Halant can be used to indicate the absence of an inherent vowel.

  • Each vowel has two forms, an independent form when not part of a consonant, and a dependent form, when attached to a consonant. Depending on the script, the dependent forms can be either placed to the left of, to the right of, above, below, or on both the left and the right sides of the base consonant.

  • Consonants (up to 5 in Devanagari) can be combined in Ligature s. Special marks are added to denote the combination of 'r' with another consonant.

  • Nasalization and Aspiration of a consonant's dependent vowel is also noted by separate signs.

  • The traditional ordering can be summarized as follows: Vowels , Velar Consonant s, Palatal Consonants , Retroflex Consonant s, Dental Consonant s, Bilabial Consonant s, Approximants , Sibilants , and other consonants. Each consonant grouping had four consonants (with all four possible values of voicing and aspiration), and a nasalised consonant.


Many languages using Brahmic scripts are sometimes written in Latin Script , primarily for the benefit of non-native speakers or for use in computer software without support for said scripts, but these practices have made little headway in South Asia itself.

Professor Gari Ledyard has hypothesized that the Hangul script used to write Korean is based on the Mongol Phagspa Script , a descendant of the Brahmic family via Tibetan.


COMPARISON

Below are comparison charts of several of the major Indic scripts; pronunciation is indicated in National Library At Calcutta Romanization and IPA . Pronunciation is taken from Sanskrit where possible, but other languages where necessary. These lists are not comprehensive; some glyphs are unrepresented.



Consonants



Vowels

Vowels are presented in their independent form on the left of each column, and combined with the corresponding consonant ''ka'' on the right.


Numerals



LIST OF BRAHMIC SCRIPTS ENCODED IN UNICODE

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OTHER BRAHMIC SCRIPTS



BRAHMIC-LIKE SCRIPTS





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