Re: What is an Indic Script?

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham" <richard@...> wrote:

> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@>
> wrote:

...

> > Surely you don't consider Tibetan an Indic script, given the
> considerable change in orthographic principles?

> Are you referring to the splitting of aksharas into vowelless and
> vowelled aksharas, so that CCVC$CV ($ = syllable or even word
> division) may become C.CV.C'CV (. = akshara boundary, ' = tsheg)?
> The tsheg is similar to word separators, and they have arisen
> independently in many scripts. The splitting of aksharas at syllable
> boundaries is very common in non-Indo-European languages (e.g
> Dravidian languages), and is the norm for the spelling of monks' Pali
> names in Thai. (In Tibetan the syllable boundary is frequently a
> morpheme boundary, and it is argued that tsheg represents a morpheme
> boundary rather than a syllable boundary.)

Yes. Tibetan syllables are morphemes as every legal syllable in
Tibetan has a lexical meaning - and the meaning of longer
(mylti-syllable) words is related to the the meaning of the syllables
of which it is composed.

There is a good discussion on this in Stephan Beyer's book on
Classical Tibetan.

> The splitting of an onset is somewhat unusual, but again it relates
> to the widespread principle of making spelling morpheme-based rather
> than purely phonetic. The consonants that might be prefixes are
> therefore written in a separate akshara. The writing system for
> Tibetan is kept slightly simpler by making this rule a spelling rule
> that is independent of the actual morphemic structure of the word.
> There may be a similar reason for one consonant per akhsara rule for
> the consonants following the vowel. For example, the past tense form
> _bsgrubs_ is written <b.sgru.b.s'>, compared to the corresponding
> present tense form _sgrub_ <sgru.b'>.

If Tibetan were purely phonetic it would be almost unreadable. Almost
every Tibetan word has two or three homonyms - and frequently there
are as many as ten or twelve.

> I have no trouble considering Tibetan to be an Indic script.
> However, I was asking what others understood by the term.

The term generally refers to scripts derived from Brahmi. In some
places strokes became more curved than straight. - Allegedly this was
because when manuscripts were written on palm leaves straight lines
caused the palm leaves to split. In areas where manuscripts were
written on birch bark this wasn't necessary.


- Chris

> Which specific features of Tibetan makes you say it is not Indic?
> Are you using roughly a point-scoring scheme? Do you count Tamil
> and Malayalam as Indic alphabets? Burmese?

> Richard.