User:Olivia Luttinger/Indo-Aryan Languages

Indo-Aryan Scripts/Writing Systems

Indo-Aryan Languages were written in two main scripts in Ancient India. Kharosti, of Aramaic origin, is written from right to left while Brāhmī, of North Semitic origin is written from left to right. Most of the scripts of the modern Indo-Aryan languages are developed from the Brāhmī script. Devanāgarī is used as the script for Hindī, Marāthī, and Nepālī. Devanāgarī is also used to write Sanskrit texts in North Africa and is used by Hindus to write Kashmirī. The Person-Arabic scripts used to write Urdū and Sindhī, as well as being used as a modern replacement for the traditional Kashmirī script Sarada.

The scripts used for Bengali, Assamese, Oriyā, and Sinhalese have traditional alphabets that are combination or over-explicit and not clear when it comes to the written language being an accurate representation of the way the words are actually spoken, and they require previous knowledge for correct pronunciation. An example of this is that a consonant symbol with no other accessory symbol is used to represent that consonant followed by a short a. So, when the Hindī word Kerta is written in Devanāgarī as ka-ra-tā, one must have the previous knowledge that the word has only two syllables, not three, in order to pronounce it correctly. Reform to the Indo-Aryan scripts has been suggested to resolve these issues, and one suggestion is that all Indo-Aryan languages switch to the Latin alphabet with diacritics, but this is unlikely to happen.

It is important to note that the Brāhmī-derived script family is divided along geographical lines rather than by language families, which is why Sinhalese and Oriya are more formally similar to South Indian scripts of the Dravidian languages. Therefore, the category "Indo-Aryan Scripts" is more of an artificial category of Brāhmī-derived scripts, and a more natural system of categorization would be along geographical lines.