Ol Chiki script

The Ol Chiki (ᱚᱞ ᱪᱤᱠᱤ) script, also known as Ol Chemetʼ (Santhali: ol 'writing', chemetʼ 'learning'), Ol Ciki, Ol, and sometimes as the Santhali alphabet invented by Pandit Raghunath Murmu in 1925, is the official writing system for Santhali, an Austroasiatic language recognized as an official regional language in India. It is one of the official scripts of the Indian Republic. It has 30 letters, the design of which is intended to evoke natural shapes. The script is written from left to right, and has two styles (the print Chapa style and cursive Usara style). Unicode does not maintain a distinction between these two, as is typical for print and cursive variants of a script. In both styles, the script is unicameral (that is, it does not have separate sets of uppercase and lowercase letters).

"The shapes of the letters are not arbitrary, but reflect the names for the letters, which are words, usually the names of objects or actions representing conventionalized form in the pictorial shape of the characters."

History
The Ol Chiki script was created in 1925 by Raghunath Murmu for the Santhali language, and publicized first in 1939 at a Mayurbhanj State exhibition. Unlike most Indic scripts, Ol Chiki is not an abugida, but is a true alphabet: giving the vowels equal representation with the consonants.



Before the invention of Ol Chiki script, Santhali was written in Bangla, Devanagari, Kalinga and Latin script. However, Santhali is not an Indo-Aryan language and Indic scripts did not have letters for all of Santhali's phonemes, especially its stop consonants and vowels, which make it difficult to write the language accurately in an unmodified Indic script.

For example, when missionary and linguist Paul Olaf Bodding, a Norwegian, studied the Santhali language and needed to decide how to transcribe it (in producing his widely followed and widely respected reference books such as A Santhal Dictionary), he decided to transcribe Santhali in the Roman alphabet: despite his observation that Roman script lacks many of the advantages of the Indic scripts, he concluded that the Indic scripts could not adequately serve the Santhali language because the Indic scripts lack a way to indicate important features of Santhali pronunciation (such as glottalization, combined glottalization and nasalization, and check stops) which can be more easily represented in the Roman alphabet through the use of diacritics.

The phonology of the Santhali language had also been similarly analyzed by various other authors, including Byomkes Chakrabarti in Comparative Study of Santhali and Bengali and Baghrai Charan Hembram in A Glimpse of Santhali Grammar. However, the Ol Chiki alphabet is considered (by many Santhali) to be even more appropriate for the language, because its letter-shapes are derived from the sounds of common Santhali words and other frequent Santhali morphemes: nouns, demonstratives, adjectives, and verb roots in the Santhali language. In other words, each Santhali letter’s name is, or is derived from, a common word or other element of the Santhali language, and each letter’s shape is derive from a simple drawing of the meaning of that word or other element. For example, the Santhali letter “ol” (representing the sound /l/) is written with a shape originally derived from a simplified outline drawing of a hand holding a pen, because the name of this letter is also the Santhali word for “writing.”

Print and cursive styles
The existence of these two styles of Ol Chiki was mentioned by the script’s creator: Guru Gonke Pandit Raghunath Murmu (also known as Pandit Murmu) in his book Ol Chemed which explains and teaches the Ol Chiki script. Chhapa (Santhali for 'print') is used for publication, while usaraà (Santhali for 'quick') is used for handwriting.

Chhapa hand
Ol Chiki chhapa, or print style, is the more common style for digital fonts, and is used in the printing of books and newspapers.

Usaraà hand
Usaraà or usaraà ol is the cursive style, and is largely limited to pen and paper, though there are digital usaraà typefaces. Differences include the diacritic ahad, which in print style is used with ᱜ, ᱡ, ᱦ, ᱫ, and ᱵ, all of which can form ligatures with ᱽ in cursive. Further, cursive usaraà seldom uses several letter-shapes which are formed by combining the letter ᱦ and the four semi-consonants ᱜ, ᱡ, ᱫ, and ᱵ with ahad; instead, these are generally written in a shorter form, as ᱷ.

Letters
The values of the Ol Chiki letters are as follows:

Aspirated consonants are written as digraphs with the letter ᱷ: ᱛᱷ /tʰ/, ᱜᱷ /gʱ/, ᱠᱷ /kʰ/, ᱡᱷ /jʱ/, ᱪᱷ /cʰ/, ᱫᱷ /dʱ/, ᱯᱷ /pʰ/, ᱰᱷ /ɖʱ/, ᱲᱷ /ɽʱ/, ᱴᱷ /ʈʰ/, and ᱵᱷ /bʱ/.

Other marks
Ol Chiki employs several marks which are placed after the letter they modify (there are no combining characters):

Digits
Ol Chiki has its own set of digits:

Punctuation
Some Western-style punctuation marks are used with Ol Chiki: the comma, exclamation mark (!), question mark (?), and quotation marks (“ and ”).

The period/fullstop (.) is not used, because it is visually confusible with the găhlă ṭuḍăg mark (ᱹ).; therefore, instead of periods, the script uses single or two Ol Chiki short dandas:
 * ᱾ (mucăd) marks a minor break
 * ᱿ (double mucăd) marks a major break

Unicode
Ol Chiki script was added to the Unicode Standard in April, 2008 with the release of version 5.1.

The Unicode block for Ol Chiki is U+1C50–U+1C7F:

Fonts

 * Google's Noto Sans Ol Chiki.
 * Microsoft's font family Nirmala UI.

Mixing the two letter styles
Although Ol Chiki (Chapa) and Ol Chiki (Usara) are normally never mixed, and the original inventor never mentioned mixing these letter styles, there have been some works that mix both forms, using them like English capital and small letters. However, this innovation is yet to be accepted officially.

The invention of a lower case for Ol Chiki
Since 2017, Santali graphic designer, typographer, and film producer Sudip Iglesias Murmu has been working on design principles to provide a lowercase alphabet form for Ol Chiki, which would permit Ol Chiki writing and keyboarding to use a two-case, or bicameral, format (Using both uppercase and lowercase), as is done in many other written languages, including the Roman-alphabet languages such as English (all of which were once unicameral scripts, but evolved into a bicameral stage over time). As the development of a lowercase form is contributed to developing a standardized cursive form (in those writing systems which use one), the evolution of lowercase is likely to allow standardizing cursive to the point of making it type able alongside more rigid "block" printed letterforms forms So far, only Ol Chiki (Chapa) letters are used in keyboarding, typesetting, and publishing (in effect, producing capitals-only text for the entirety of all printed or keyboarded documents). In writing quickly by hand, Ol Chiki (Usara) is used: but, despite Ol Usara’s potential for reaching high speed, the circulation of Ol Usara documents is negligible, and Ol Usara is yet to receive Unicode standardization, thus leaving it still neglected.

In hopes to remedy this situation and to harmonize the two scripts, Sudip Iglesias Murmu has innovated by creating a series of lowercase letters, which he has integrated with the already existing font of Ol Chiki. According to him, providing lowercase letters increases the efficiency of keyboarding, both for Ol Chiki (Chapa) and for Ol Chiki (Usara), and allows keyboarding to reach the same speed that can be obtained when typing Santali in Roman-alphabet letters, which are likewise case-sensitive. However, his work is yet to be accepted officially.