Showing papers on "Devanagari published in 1953"

Script Reform in Modern India, Pakistan, and Ceylon

Abstract: IN INDS:A, Pakistan and Ceylon today it is possible to see script reform in progress. We can identify forces leading toward change and factors that retard or shape it. Though the principal scripts of those countries have in the past usually been successful means of writing the languages that use them, they now need to be adapted to new cond.itions. All the scripts of the area used in priilting are so affected, but the pressure is greatest upon those used where modernization of the national life is proceeding most rapidly. The scripts involved belong to two dif3Serent families. One is the Indic script family, the modern members of which are all descended from the Brahml script known first in inscriptions of the 3rd century B. C.1 They employ certain eommon principles, though in their more than two millennia of development the separate scripts have often acquired widely diSering shapes of corresponding characters. Prominent contemporary members of this family now subject to reform are Devanagari or Nagari (used for ELindi, Marathi, Bihari, Rajasthani, and more frequently than any other script for Sanskrit), Bengali (also used for Assamese), Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Kanara, Malayalam, Sinhalese. Other members of the family likely at any time to become subject to reform are Oriya and Gurmukhi (used by Sikhs for Punjabi). These all read from left to right. Features which suggest a need for reform are the following. First, these scripts consider that the basic form of each consonant has the vowel short a as an inherent element which does not need to be otherwise indicated when it occurs after the consonant in pronunciation. All other vowels have