On 01/25/2001 06:38:44 PM "Peter T. Daniels" wrote:

>These guesses about Indic scripts are all very nice, but do any of them
>result in actual words of some Indic language (let alone a coherent
>phrase)? The absence of any vowel but /a/ (and a single stray /u/) would
>seem to render this highly improbable!

You're quite right. It was the very lack of vowels that made me first think
that this was not likely Indic, in spite of the original source of the
query indicating that it was. But so far every other suggestion has seemed
to be at least as improbable. Having seen that every character shows a
close resemblance to characters in one or the other of two north Indic
scripts, Devanagari and Gujarati, that suggests to me that there's some
validity in a north Indic hypothesis. At this point, it seems to be the
best hypothesis, in spite of the lack of vowels.


- Peter


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Peter Constable

Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@...>