Proto-Sinaitic script
Proto-Sinaitic referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite, is a term for both a Middle Bronze Age script attested in a small corpus of inscriptions found at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula and the reconstructed common ancestor of the Paleo-Hebrew and South Arabian scripts. The earliest "Proto-Sinaitic" inscriptions are dated to between the mid-19th and the mid-16th century BC. "The principal debate is between an early date, around 1850 BC, a late date, around 1550 BC. The choice of one or the other date decides whether it is proto-Sinaitic or proto-Canaanite, by extension locates the invention of the alphabet in Egypt or Canaan respectively." However the discovery of the Wadi El-Hol inscriptions near the Nile River shows that the script originated in Egypt. The evolution of "Proto-Sinaitic" and the various "Proto-Canaanite" scripts during the Bronze Age is based on rather scant epigraphic evidence; the "Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions" were discovered in the winter of 1904–1905 in Sinai by Hilda and Flinders Petrie.
To this may be added a number of short "Proto-Canaanite" inscriptions found in Canaan and dated to between the 17th and 15th centuries BC, more the discovery in 1999 of the "Wadi El-Hol inscriptions", found in Middle Egypt by John and Deborah Darnell. The Wadi El-Hol inscriptions suggest a date of development of Proto-Sinaitic writing from the mid-19th to 18th centuries BC; the Sinai inscriptions are best known from carved graffiti and votive texts from a mountain in the Sinai called Serabit el-Khadim and its temple to the Egyptian goddess Hathor. The mountain contained turquoise mines. Many of the workers and officials were from the Nile Delta, included large numbers of Canaanites, allowed to settle the eastern Delta. Most of the forty or so inscriptions have been found among much more numerous hieratic and hieroglyphic inscriptions, scratched on rocks near and in the turquoise mines and along the roads leading to the temple; the date of the inscriptions is placed in the 17th or 16th century BC.
Four inscriptions have been found in the temple, on two small human statues and on either side of a small stone sphinx. They are crudely done, suggesting that the workers who made them were illiterate apart from this script. In 1916, Alan Gardiner, using sound values derived from the alphabet hypothesis, translated a collection of signs as לבעלת lbʿlt Only a few inscriptions have been found in Canaan itself, dated to between the 17th and 15th centuries BC, they are all short, most consisting of only a couple of letters, may have been written by Canaanite caravaners, soldiers from Egypt or early Israelites. They sometimes go by the name Proto-Canaanite, although the term "Proto-Canaanite" is applied to early Phoenician or Hebrew inscriptions, respectively; the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions were carved on the stone sides of an ancient high-desert military and trade road linking Thebes and Abydos, in the heart of literate Egypt. They are at approx. 25°57′N 32°25′E, among dozens of hieratic and hieroglyphic inscriptions.
The inscriptions are graphically similar to the Serabit inscriptions, but show a greater hieroglyphic influence, such as a glyph for a man, not read alphabetically: The first of these is a figure of celebration, whereas the second is either that of a child or of dancing. If the latter, h1 and h2 may be graphic variants rather than different consonants; some scholars think that the רב rb at the beginning of Inscription 1 is rebbe. Brian Colless has published a translation of the text, in which some of the signs are treated as logograms or rebuses "Excellent banquet of the celebration of ʿAnat. ʾEl will provide plenty of wine and victuals for the celebration. We will sacrifice to her an ox and a prime fatling." This interpretation fits into the pattern in some of the surrounding Egyptian inscriptions, with celebrations for the goddess Hathor involving inebriation. Proto-Canaanite referred to as Proto-Canaan, Old Canaanite, or Canaanite, is the name given to the Proto-Sinaitic script, when found in Canaan.
The term Proto-Canaanite is used when referring to the ancestor of the Phoenician or Paleo-Hebrew script before some cut-off date 1050 BC, with an undefined affinity to Proto-Sinaitic. While no extant inscription in the Phoenician alphabet is older than c. 1050 BC, "Proto-Canaanite" is a term used for the early alphabets as used during the 13th and 12th centuries BC in Phoenicia. However, the Phoenician and other Canaanite dialects were indistinguishable before the 11th century BC. A possible example of "Proto-Canaanite" was found in 2012, the Ophel inscription, when during the excavations of the south w
Laos
Laos the Lao People's Democratic Republic referred to by its colloquial name of Muang Lao, is a socialist state and the only landlocked country in Southeast Asia. Located at the heart of the Indochinese peninsula, Laos is bordered by Myanmar and China to the northwest, Vietnam to the east, Cambodia to the southwest, Thailand to the west and southwest. Present-day Laos traces its historic and cultural identity to the kingdom of Lan Xang Hom Khao, which existed for four centuries as one of the largest kingdoms in Southeast Asia. Due to Lan Xang's central geographical location in Southeast Asia, the kingdom became a popular hub for overland trade, becoming wealthy economically as well as culturally. After a period of internal conflict, Lan Xang broke off into three separate kingdoms—Luang Phrabang and Champasak. In 1893, it became a French protectorate, with the three territories uniting to form what is now known as the country of Laos, it gained independence in 1945 after Japanese occupation, but was recolonised by France until it won autonomy in 1949.
Laos became independent with a constitutional monarchy under Sisavang Vong. Shortly after independence, a long civil war began, which saw the communist resistance, supported by the Soviet Union, fight against, the monarchy and a number of military dictatorships, supported by the United States. After the Vietnam War ended in 1975, the Communist Pathet Lao movement came to power, seeing the end to the civil war. During the first years of Communist rule, Laos was dependent on military and economic aid supported by the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. In 2018, the country had the fourth highest GDP per capita in Indochina, after Singapore and Thailand. In the same year, the country ranked 139th on the Human Development Index, indicating medium development. Laos is a member of the Asia-Pacific Trade Agreement, Association of Southeast Asian Nations, East Asia Summit and La Francophonie. Laos applied for membership of the World Trade Organization in 1997, it is a one-party socialist republic espousing Marxism–Leninism governed by the Lao People's Revolutionary Party.
The capital and largest city is Vientiane. Other major cities include Luang Prabang and Pakse; the official language is Lao. Laos is a multi-ethnic country, with the politically and culturally dominant Lao people making up about 55 percent of the population in the lowlands. Mon-Khmer groups, the Hmong and other indigenous hill tribes, accounting for 45 percent of the population, live in the foothills and mountains. Laos's strategies for development are based on generating electricity from its rivers and selling the power to its neighbours, namely Thailand and Vietnam, as well as its initiative to become a "land-linked" nation, shown by the construction of four new railways connecting Laos to its neighbours. Laos has been referred to as one of East Asia and Pacific's Fastest Growing Economies by the World Bank, with annual GDP growth averaging 7.8% for the past decade. The English word Laos was coined by the French, who united the three Lao kingdoms in French Indochina in 1893 and named the country as the plural of the dominant and most common ethnic group, which are the Lao people.
In the Lao language, the country's name is "Muang Lao" or "Pathet Lao", both mean "Lao Country". An ancient human skull was recovered from the Tam Pa Ling Cave in the Annamite Mountains in northern Laos. Stone artifacts including Hoabinhian types have been found at sites dating to the Late Pleistocene in northern Laos. Archaeological evidence suggests agriculturist society developed during the 4th millennium BC. Burial jars and other kinds of sepulchers suggest a complex society in which bronze objects appeared around 1500 BC, iron tools were known from 700 BC; the proto-historic period is characterised by contact with Indian civilisations. According to linguistic and other historical evidence, Tai-speaking tribes migrated southwestward to the modern territories of Laos and Thailand from Guangxi sometime between the 8th–10th centuries. Laos traces its history to the kingdom of Lan Xang, founded in the 14th century by a Lao prince Fa Ngum, with 10,000 Khmer troops, took over Vientiane. Ngum was descended from a long line of Lao kings.
He made Theravada Buddhism Lan Xang prospered. Within 20 years of its formation, the kingdom expanded eastward to Champa and along the Annamite mountains in Vietnam, his ministers, unable to tolerate his ruthlessness, forced him into exile to the present-day Thai province of Nan in 1373, where he died. Fa Ngum's eldest son, Oun Heuan, ascended to the throne under the name Samsenthai and reigned for 43 years. Lan Xang became an important trade centre during Samsenthai's reign, but after his death in 1421 it collapsed into warring factions for 100 years. In 1520, Photisarath came to the throne and moved the capital from Luang Prabang to Vientiane to avoid a Burmese invasion. Setthathirat became king in 1548, after his father was killed, ordered the construction of what became the symbol of Laos, That Luang. Setthathirat disappeared in the mountains on his way back from a military expedition into Cambodia and Lan Xang began to decline, it was not until 1637, when Sou
Palm-leaf manuscript
Palm-leaf manuscripts are manuscripts made out of dried palm leaves. Palm leaves were used as writing materials in the Indian subcontinent and in Southeast Asia dating back to the 5th century BCE and much earlier, their use began in South Asia and spread elsewhere, as texts on dried and smoke treated palm leaves of Borassus species or the Ola leaf. One of the oldest surviving palm leaf manuscript is a Sanskrit Shaivism text from the 9th-century, discovered in Nepal, now preserved at the Cambridge University Library. Palm leaf manuscripts were cured palm leaf sheet; each sheet had a hole through which a string could pass through, with these the sheets were tied together with a string to bind like a book. A palm leaf text thus created would last between a few decades and about 600 years before it decayed due to dampness, insect activity and fragility, thus the document had to be copied onto new sets of dried palm leaves. The oldest surviving palm leaf Indian manuscripts have been found in colder, drier climates such as in parts of Nepal and central Asia, the source of 1st-millennium CE manuscripts.
The individual sheets of palm leaves were called Patra or Parna in Sanskrit, the medium when ready to write was called Tada-patra. The famous 5th-century CE Indian manuscript called the Bower Manuscript discovered in Chinese Turkestan, was written on birch-bark sheets shaped in the form of treated palm leaves. Hindu temples served as centers where ancient manuscripts were used for learning and where the texts were copied when they wore out. In South India and associated mutts served custodial functions, a large number of manuscripts on Hindu philosophy, poetry and other subjects were written and preserved inside the temples. Archaeological and epigraphical evidence indicates existence of libraries called Sarasvati-bhandara, dated to early 12th-century and employing librarians, attached to Hindu temples. Palm leaf manuscripts were preserved inside Jain temples and in Buddhist monasteries. With the spread of Indian culture to Southeast Asian countries like as Indonesia, Cambodia and the Philippines, these nations became home to large collections.
Palm-leaf manuscripts called Lontar in dedicated stone libraries have been discovered by archaeologists at Hindu temples in Bali Indonesia and in 10th century Cambodian temples such as Angkor Wat and Banteay Srei. One of the oldest surviving Sanskrit manuscripts on palm leaves is of the Parameshvaratantra, a Shaiva Siddhanta text of Hinduism, it is from the 9th-century, dated to about 828 CE. The discovered palm-leaf collection includes a few parts of another text, the Jñānārṇavamahātantra and held by the University of Cambridge. With the introduction of printing presses in the early 19th century, the cycle of copying from palm leaves came to an end. Many governments are making efforts to preserve; the rounded or diagonal shapes of the letters of many of the scripts of South India and Southeast Asia, such as Devanagari, Telugu script, the Javanese script, the Balinese alphabet, the Odia alphabet, the Burmese alphabet, the Tamil script and others may have developed as adaptations to writing Indic scripts on palm leaves, as angular letters tend to split the leaf.
Palm leaf manuscripts of Odisha include scriptures, pictures of Devadasi and various mudras of the Kama Sutra. Some of the early discoveries of Odia palm leaf manuscripts include writings like Smaradipika, Ratimanjari and Anangaranga in both Odia and Sanskrit. State Museum of Odisha at Bhubaneswar houses 40,000 palm leaf manuscripts. Most of them are written in the Odia script; the oldest manuscript here belongs to the 14th century but the text can be dated to the 2nd century. In 1997 The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation recognised the Tamil Medical Manuscript Collection as part of the Memory of the World Register. A good example of usage of palm leaf manuscripts to store the history is a Tamil grammar book named Tolkāppiyam, written around 3rd century BCE. A global digitalization project led by the Tamil Heritage Foundation collects, preserves and makes ancient palm-leaf manuscript documents available to users via the internet. In Indonesia the palm-leaf manuscript is called lontar.
The Indonesian word is the modern form of Old Javanese rontal. It is composed of two Old Javanese words, namely ron "leaf" and tal "Borassus flabellifer, palmyra palm". Due to the shape of the palmyra palm's leaves, which are spread like a fan, these trees are known as "fan trees"; the leaves of the rontal tree have always been used for many purposes, such as for the making of plaited mats, palm sugar wrappers, water scoops, ritual tools, writing material. Today, the art of writing in rontal still survives in Bali, performed by Balinese Brahmin as a sacred duty to rewrite Hindu texts. Many old manuscripts dated from ancient Java, were written on rontal palm-leaf manuscripts. Manuscripts dated from the 14th to 15th century during the Majapahit period; some were found earlier, like the Arjunawiwaha, the Smaradahana, the Nagarakretagama and the Kakawin Sutasoma, which were discovered on the neighboring islands of Bali and Lombok. This suggested that the tradition of preserving and rewriting palm-leaf manuscripts continued for centuries.
Other palm-leaf manuscripts include Sundanese language works: the Carita Parahyangan, the Sanghyang siksakanda ng karesian and the Bujangga Manik
New Tai Lue alphabet
New Tai Lue script known as Xishuangbanna Dai and Simplified Tai Lue, is an alphabet used to write the Tai Lü language. Developed in China in the 1950s, New Tai Lue is based on the traditional Tai Tham alphabet developed c. 1200. The government of China promoted the alphabet for use as a replacement for the older script. In addition, communities in Burma, Laos and Vietnam still use the Tai Tham alphabet. Similar to the Thai and Lao scripts, consonants come in pairs to denote two tonal registers. Final consonants do not have an inherent /a/ vowel, they are modified forms of initials with a virama-like hook: Consonants have a default vowel of /a/. In the table below,'◌' represents a consonant and is used to indicate the position of the various vowels: In some words, the symbol ᦰ is just used for distinguishing homonyms or displaying onomatopoeiae. Vowels in open syllables become long whereas ones in closed syllables become short. New Tai Lue has two tone marks which are written at the end of a syllable: ᧈ and ᧉ.
Because consonants come in pairs to denote two tonal registers, the two tone marks allow for representation of six specific tones: Two letters are used only for abbreviations: Syllable ᦶᦟᦰ can be abbreviated as the character ᧞ Syllable ᦶᦟᧁᧉ can be abbreviated as the character ᧟ New Tai Lue has its own set of digits: An alternative glyph for one is used when ᧑ might be confused with the vowel ᦱ. New Tai Lue script was added to the Unicode Standard in March, 2005 with the release of version 4.1. In June 2015 New Tai Lue was changed from logical ordering used by most Indic scripts to a visual ordering model as used by the Thai and Lao scripts; this change affected the four vowel letters. The Unicode block for New Tai Lue is U+1980–U+19DF: Tai Tham script Tai Le script
Brahmi script
Brahmi, developed in the mid-1st millennium BCE, is the oldest known writing system of Ancient India, with the possible exception of the undeciphered Indus script. Brahmi is an abugida that thrived in the Indian subcontinent and uses a system of diacritical marks to associate vowels with consonant symbols, it evolved into a host of other scripts, called the Brahmic scripts, that continue to be in use today in South and Central Asia. The Brahmi script has been dated to the beginning of the 4th century BCE from sherds inscribed with the script found at Anuradhapura; some of the earliest and best-known Brahmi inscriptions are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dating to 250–232 BCE. The first successful attempts at deciphering Brahmi were made in 1836 by Norwegian scholar Christian Lassen, who used the bilingual Greek-Brahmi coins of Indo-Greek kings Agathocles and Pantaleon to identify several Brahmi letters; the script was deciphered in 1837 by James Prinsep, an archaeologist and official of the East India Company, with the help of Alexander Cunningham.
The origin of the script is still much debated, with some scholars stating that Brahmi was derived from or at least influenced by one or more contemporary Semitic scripts, while others favor the idea of an indigenous origin or connection to the much older and as-yet undeciphered Indus script of the Indus Valley Civilization. Brahmi was at one time referred to in English as the "pin-man" script, "stick figure" script, it was known by a variety of other names until the 1880s when Albert Étienne Jean Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie, based on an observation by Gabriel Devéria, associated it with the Brahmi script, the first in a list of scripts mentioned in the Lalitavistara Sūtra. Thence the name was adopted in the influential work of Georg Bühler, albeit in the variant form "Brahma"; the Gupta script of the fifth century is sometimes called "Late Brahmi". The Brahmi script diversified into numerous local variants classified together as the Brahmic scripts. Dozens of modern scripts used across South Asia have descended from Brahmi, making it one of the world's most influential writing traditions.
One survey found 198 scripts that derive from it. The script was associated with its own Brahmi numerals, which provided the graphic forms for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system now used through most of the world; the Brahmi script is mentioned in the ancient Indian texts of Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as their Chinese translations. For example, the Lipisala samdarshana parivarta lists 64 lipi, with the Brahmi script starting the list; the Lalitavistara Sūtra states that young Siddhartha, the future Gautama Buddha, mastered philology and other scripts from the Brahmin Lipikāra and Deva Vidyāiṃha at a school. A shorter list of eighteen ancient scripts is found in the texts of Jainism, such as the Pannavana Sutra and the Samavayanga Sutra; these Jaina script lists include Brahmi at number 1 and Kharoṣṭhi at number 4 but Javanaliya and others not found in the Buddhist lists. While the contemporary Kharoṣṭhī script is accepted to be a derivation of the Aramaic alphabet, the genesis of the Brahmi script is less straightforward.
Salomon reviewed existing theories in 1998, while Falk provided an overview in 1993. Early theories proposed a pictographic-acrophonic origin for the Brahmi script, on the model of the Egyptian hieroglyphic script; these ideas however have lost credence, as they are "purely imaginative and speculative". Similar ideas have tried to connect the Brahmi script with the Indus script, but they remain unproven, suffer from the fact that the Indus script is as yet undeciphered. An origin in Semitic scripts has been proposed by some scholars since the publications by Albrecht Weber and Georg Bühler's On the origin of the Indian Brahma alphabet. Bühler's ideas have been influential, though by the 1895 date of his opus on the subject, he could identify no less than five competing theories of the origin, one positing an indigenous origin and the others deriving it from various Semitic models; the most disputed point about the origin of the Brahmi script has long been whether it was a purely indigenous development or was borrowed or derived from scripts that originated outside India.
Goyal noted that most proponents of the indigenous view are Indian scholars, whereas the theory of Semitic origin is held by "nearly all" Western scholars, Salomon agrees with Goyal that there has been "nationalist bias" and "imperialist bias" on the two respective sides of the debate. In spite of this, the view of indigenous development had been prevalent among British scholars writing prior to Bühler: A passage by Alexander Cunningham, one of the earliest indigenous origin proponents, suggests that, in his time, the indigenous origin was a preference of British scholars in opposition to the "unknown Western" origin preferred by continental scholars. Cunningham in the seminal Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum of 1877 speculated that Brahmi characters were derived from, among other things, a pictographic principle based on the human body, but Bühler noted that by 1891, Cunningham considered the origins of the script uncertain. Most scholars believe that Brahmi was derived from or influenced by a Semitic script model, with Aramaic being a leading candidate.
However, the issue is not settled due to the lack of direct evidence and unexplained differences between Aramaic, Kharoṣṭhī, Brahmi. Though Brahmi and the Kharoṣṭhī script share some general features, but the differences between the Kharosthi and Brahmi scripts are "much greater than their similarities," and "th
Tamil-Brahmi
Tamil-Brahmi, or Tamili aka Tamizhi is a variant of the Brahmi script used to write the Tamil language. These are the earliest documents of a Dravidian language, the script was well established in the Chera and Pandyan states, in what is now Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. Inscriptions have been found on cave beds, pot sherds, Jar burials, coins and rings; the language is Archaic Tamil, led to classical Sangam literature. Tamil Brahmi differs in several ways from Ashokan Brahmi, it adds diacritics to several letters for sounds not found in Prakrit, producing ṉ ṟ ṛ ḷ. Secondly, in many of the inscriptions the inherent vowel has been discarded: A consonant written without diacritics represents the consonant alone, whereas the Ashokan diacritic for long ā is used for both ā and short a in Tamil Brahmi; this is unique to Tamil Bhattiprolu among the early Indian scripts. This appears to be an adaptation to Dravidian phonotactics, where words end in consonants, as opposed to Prakrit, where this never occurs.
According to Mahadevan, in the earliest stages of the script the inherent vowel was either abandoned, as above, or the bare consonant was ambiguous as to whether it implied a short a or not. Stages of Tamil Brahmi returned to the inherent vowel, the norm in India; the origins of Brahmi in general and Tamil Brahmi are unclear. There are a number of inscriptions. A number of theories have been put forward based on literary and archeological evidence; the consensus is a 3rd-century "post-Ashokan" dispersal, but since the year 2000, there have been two serious candidates for a pre-Ashokan date. The earliest mention of a script for writing the Tamil language is found in the Jaina work Samavayanga Sutta and Pannavana Sutta where a script called Damilli is mentioned. In the Buddhist work, Lalitavistara, a script called. According to Kamil Zvelebil and Dravidalipi are synonymous for Tamil writing. References to writing are available in early Tamil literature. Tolkappiyam in stanza 16 and 17 mentions; the author of Tolkappiyam displays awareness of a writing system and the graphic system as he knew it corresponds with writing systems.
Other works such as Tirukkural mentions writing using the word ezhuttu. Cilappatikaram mentions kannezhuttu, used to mark merchandise imported at the port emporium of Kaveripattinam, it mentions kannezhuttalar or scribes. A reference to palm leaf manuscript writing is found in Nalatiyar and Purananuru mentions a hero stone that has the name of the hero etched in it. Based on the literature analysis, Kamil Zvelebil believes writing was known to Tamil people at least from the 3rd century BCE; the evidence for pre-Ashokan dispersal comes from Sri Lanka and more Tamil Nadu. The earliest well accepted Brahmi inscriptions in South Asia are found in the citadel of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka and are dated to the 4th century BCE. According to Coningham et al. Brahmi developed before the southern spread of Ashokan missionary activities and spread across South Asia due to trade networks. However, these early instances of Brahmi were not considered to be examples of Tamil-Brahmi. In 2013, Rajan and Yatheeskumar published excavations at Porunthal and Kodumanal in Tamil Nadu, where numerous both Tamil-Brahmi and "Prakrit"-Brahmi inscriptions and fragments have been found.
Their stratigraphic analysis combined with radiocarbon dates of paddy grains and charcoal samples indicated that inscription contexts date to as far back as the 5th and 6th centuries BCE. As these were published recently, they have as yet not been commented on extensively in the literature. Indologist Harry Falk has criticized Rajan's claims as "particularly ill-informed". Based on the epigraphic review, several hypotheses have been proposed, with the theory suggested by epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan having consensus. According to Mahadevan, the Brahmi script reached the Tamil country due the southern spread of Jainism and Buddhism from North India, was adapted to suit the Tamil phonetic system; this theory presupposes that the Brahmi script itself was either originated within the imperial courts of Mauryan kingdom or evolved from a more ancient foreign script and it was dispersed to South India and Sri Lanka after the 3rd century BCE. The time line of dispersal is either early Mauryan period.
Ahmed Hassan Dani questioned the 3rd century BCE date and suggested the 1st century CE as the probable date, but this has been discounted by others such as T. V. Mahalingam and Richard Salomon. A 2012 discovery of a 2nd-century BCE Tamil-Brahmi inscription in Samanamalai, Madurai district, indicates widespread use in the Tamil territory in the period after the 3rd century BCE. Artifacts such as inscribed potsherds, coins or any other that are found in Tamil Nadu in successive undisturbed cultural layers are dated based on stratigraphy; the top layer is considered younger than the layer, found below. Thus, a succession of layers provides a relative chronological sequence from earliest to latest; the inscribed potsherds recovered from Kodumanal when analyzed on the basis of stratigraphical sequences are dated to the 4th century BCE at the lowermost level. The lowermost level potsherd had scripts peculiar to Tamil characters and, in addition, a distinctive shape
Pallava script
The Pallava script, a Brahmic script, was developed under the Pallava dynasty of Southern India around the 6th century of AD. Southeast Asian scripts such as Grantha, Kawi, Mon, Khmer, Thai, Lao and the New Tai Lue alphabet are either direct or indirect derivations from the Kadamba-Pallava alphabet; the form shown here is based on examples from the 7th century AD. Letters labeled * have uncertain sound value; each consonant has an inherent / a /. If two consonants follow one another without intervening vowel, the second consonant is made into a subscript form, attached below the first. During the rule of Pallavas, the script accompanied priests, monks and traders into South East Asia. Pallavas developed the Pallava script based on the Tamil-Brahmi script; the main characteristics of the newer script fuller consonant glyphs. Similar to Pallava script visible in the writing systems of Chalukya, Vengi at the time of Ikshvakus. Brahmi design was different of the scripts of Cholas and Cheras. Pallava script first significant developments of Brahmi in India, take care in combining rounded and rectangular strokes and adding typographical effects, was suitable for civic and religious inscriptions.
Kadamba-Pallava script evolved into early forms of Telugu scripts. Glyphs incorporate loops because of writing upon leaves and paper. Sivaramamurti, C, Indian Epigraphy and South Indian Scripts. Bulletin of the Madras Government Museum. Chennai 1999 Media related to Pallava script at Wikimedia Commons Examples of Pallava at SkyKnowledge.com
listen, Tai Lü: ᨲ᩠ᩅᩫᨵᨾ᩠ᨾ᩼, Tham, "scripture"), is used for Northern Thai (that is, Kham Mueang), Tai Lü, and Khün. In addition, the Lanna script is used for Lao Tham (or Old Lao) and other dialect variants in Buddhist palm-leaf manuscripts and notebooks; the script is also known as Tham or Yuan script.[1]
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