Marco Cimarosti wrote:

>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > [...]
> > suzmccarth wrote:
> > [...]
> > > I read recently that for devnagri the half-form is the dead
> > > consonant because the full form is considered to be a
> > > representation of the consonant on the left *plus* a residual or
> > > historic representation of the short a on the right, for some
> > > letters. That is, the right hand side of some consonants is
> > > actually the short a. This rationalizes the use of the half form as
> > > the bare consonant.
> >
> > I must have been lucky enough to miss this.
> >
> > Where are you _getting_ these fantasies??????
> >
> > Have you _ever_ looked at Brahmi letters????????
> >
> > Have you _ever_ looked at Devanagari????????
>
> I think that the fault for spreading bullshit is with the people who *write*
> about it, rather that with those bona fide *readers* who step in these
> writings. I'd suggest that your rows of question marks should be reserved to
> the people who wrote what Suzanne read, rather than to her.
>
> Anyway, I am not 100% that this is *totally* a myth.
>
> Comparing modern Devanagari with the old Brahmi script (as seen, e.g., in
> Ashoka's stones), I noticed that the 20 Devanagari letters which have a
> so-called "danda" (the vertical stroke on the right-hand side of a letter)
> fall in these three categories:
>
> A) In 7 letters (a, kha, ga, ca, ta, na, la), Devanagari's "danda"
> corresponds to a more or less vertical stroke in Brahmi in the right-hand of
> the corresponding Brahmi letter.
>
> B) In 6 letters (gha, ja, na, tha, pa, ma), Devanagari's "danda" does NOT
> correspond to a stroke in Brahmi. The form of the modern letter looks like
> the original shape PLUS a vertical stroke on the right hand.
>
> C) In 7 letters (jha, dha, ba, bha, ya, wa, sa), the shape of Devanagari
> changed too much from the Brahmi model allow this naive compare.
>
> This brought me to imagine the following scenario: the "danda" of letters in
> category (A) is apparently "etymological" (pass me the term), i.e. it arose
> from the natural calligraphic evolution of Brahmi letters. In forming
> conjuncts beginning with a letter in category (A), the "danda" in this
> letters normally disappeared, leading to the so-called "half consonants".
>
> Of course, the fact that this right-hand stroke looks exactly like the "aa"
> vowel mark is absolutely coincidental but, at a certain age, this
> coincidence could have been re-interpreted as a systematic feature of the
> script.
>
> The fact that removing "danda" from the shape of letters apparently
> corresponded with removing the inherent vowel /a/ from the pronunciation
> (joined with the fact that "danda" was so similar to the sign for the
> phonetically similar vowel /a:/) could have resulted in the popular idea
> that the "danda" is in fact the representation of the inherent vowel.
>
> And this idea might have led to adding an "analogical danda" (pass me the
> term) also to letters which originally did not have one, namely those in
> category (B), and perhaps some of those in category (C).
>
> *If* this scenario is true, it would result that the "myth" mentioned by
> Suzanne was a myth only in origin. It would be, let's say, a "diachronic
> myth" which drove the evolution of the script in a direction where it
> partially become a "synchronic reality".
>
> This would not be the only instance I know of wrong interpretations of some
> graphical elements which somehow were accepted in the course of time. E.g.,
> the final "x" in French "chevaux", which was originally an "s" with a final
> flourish, wrongly reinterpreted as an "x"; anyway, in modern French spelling
> it is an "x".

It would be easy to check on these suppositions. Look at Bühler's
*Indian Paleography* (1892, English trans. 1904) or, for the earlier
centuries, Ahmed Hasan Dani's *Indian Palaeography* (1963, 2nd ed. 1986
or so).
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...