Letters from the Seams of a Skull

Devanagari is one of the widely used scripts in the world

Devanagari is used for Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, and Nepali languages and so is used all over the Indian subcontinent and the surrounding areas.

Devanagari is an abugida alphabet or alphasyllabary, which means that there are distinct vowels and consonants, but that vowels are also used to modify the consonants, which unmodified have a certain syllable sound.

Devanagari is most easily recognized by the bar that runs across the top of the script, from which all the letter seem to descend.

Some consonants in Devanagari. (Wikimedia)

Devanagari has been used from about the 12th century CE. There are about 50 letters in the Devanagari script, not counting the numerous derivations caused by combining the consonants with vowels. Devanagari is read from left to right.

The Vedas, the Hindu scriptures are generally written in Devanagari and the word "Devanagari" derives from deva, deity, and nagari, city.

In Hindu myth, the Devanagari script comes from Brahma. When Brahma went to write down his teachings, he found that there was no system to record them with. In order to share his teachings, he invented writing, using the seams of the skull as a pattern for the letters.

In some forms of the myth, it is Sarasvati, Brahma's wife, who invents the letters. Sarasvati (sometimes Saraswati or Saraswathi) is the goddess of knowledge, music, and arts, so writing would fall within her purview.

Svarasvati, holding a string of crystals, a book of the Vedas, and playing the veena (Wikimedia)

For the first post in my Writing Systems series, see The Beginning of History.

The Beginning of History

While time may stretch forever, history has a very definite starting point: the invention of writing.

Think for a moment about what you are reading. Words made of 26 little characters that allow me to convey my thoughts to you, despite our distance in time and space.

Writing makes this possible. And that is why the start of "History" is also the start of writing, anything prior to writing is Prehistory.

Before writing, clear communication beyond the person standing in front of you was impossible. Once writing took off, communications could be read hundreds or thousands of years later with only minimal loss of meaning.

Historians rely on primary sources, those that come directly from the people who said them. Without writing, historians would need a time machine to talk to each person who was involved in or experienced an event. Without writing, there would be no history.

Writing has been invented in several places around the globe and every system is a little different.

Wikipedia in scripts around the world.  (Wikimedia Commons)

There are three main types of writing systems.

Alphabets are the most familiar to the readers of this blog, as that is what they are using to read it now. In an alphabet, each symbol stands for a sound. There are separate vowel and consonant symbols and they average between 12 and 50 letter symbols.

Syllabaries have symbols for a combination of a consonant and a vowel. So "ba" would be one symbol while "be" would be another. These systems average between 50 and 400 symbols. Ancient Mayan hieroglyphics are generally considered to be primarily a syllabary, as are the Hiragana and Katakana in the Japanese writing system and the Cherokee writing system.

A Stop Sign written using the Cherokee syllabary. (Wikimedia Commons)

Logographies use symbols to stand for words. Since each word has to have its own symbol, these systems can have hundreds or thousands of symbols. Chinese entirely uses and Japanese mainly uses a logographic writing system. Reading Chinese requires knowledge of 3 to 4 thousand characters.

Japanese uses all three of these systems, which makes it a great example.

In Japanese, the word for

(red)

in Romanji (alphabet): 

aka

in Hiragana (syllabary): 

あか

in Kanji (logography):　

赤