Re: Indian Linguistics

For eg., look at the way the alphabet is created in a systematic way.Similar phonetic  Letters are not only grouped together  according to the way they are pronounced, but in accordance with the places of articulation. This is surprising since it was not recognized by western scholars till 1800 or 1900's.

I  quote:

 

" Indians scribes have consciously redesigned the Semitic writing they 'borrowed' according to well-understood phono-logical principles. The Indians were antiquity's finest linguistics; the West did not begin to approach their level of linguistic sophistication until the early 1800s- in some cases the early 1900s. Ancient Indian scribes classified their letters according to places of articulation( a surprisingly 'modern' practice); first vowels and diphthongs, then consonants (with default /a/'(such as ka and not merely K-Kishore)), in exact back to front order as in the human moth-gutturals, palatals, cerebral palatals, dentals, labials, semi vowels and spirants. Indians, possessing such linguistic insight, did not abandon their 'cumbersome' system for a streamlined alphabet once they encountered Greek writing (since, their system) best conveyed the full repertoire of Indic sounds. The graphic syllables of their abudiga system of system of consonant + diacritic seemed, at least to Indian scribes, to yield more salient phonetic information than a mere letter. So in all derivative scripts, Indic writing remained consonantal alphabetic. "

 From A History of Writing  By Steven Roger Fischer

Have you read Fischer's other gem, Glyphbreaker? It is an unintentional classic, a true farce written by a megalomaniac, who makes the crackpots we run into look like run of the mill pedestrian scholars