Brahmi-derived conscripts (was Re: New cyrilic orthography for WT6b)

On 22 Jan 00, at 17:55, BP Jonsson wrote:

> At 15:19 -0500 19.1.2000, Paul Bennett wrote:
> >
> >Can anyone show me an example?  I'm toying with making a devanagari-derived
> >script, and I'm not sure which directions to go in, as most variations I've
> >seen have been for languages with a substantially Sanskrit phonology.
>
> You may want to check out the Tibetan alphabet, and the alphabets used in
> South-East Asia.  They are strictly speaking not derived from Devanagari
> itself, but from various earlier forms -- all, including Devanagari,
> ultimately derived from the Brahmi script of ca 200 BCE.  There is also the
> hP`ags-pa ['phagba] script, a script derived from Tibetan in the 13th
> century CE and intended for writing Mongolian, Chinese and other languages
> of the empire of Khubilai Khan.  It is interesting in the fact that it is
> vritten vertically and all the vowel signs are written beneath the
> preceding consonant, which gives hP`ags-pa a different "feel" from other
> Brahmic scripts.
Thanks.  I've looked at hP`ags-pa before, and briefly created a workable
script which actually started as devanagari, went thru something vaguely
mongolian-ish (and absorbed some aramaic/mongolian letterforms) and ended
up in a square uncial form more like hP`ags-pa than I'd intended. I'm not
very satisfied with it, and I'm interested in how people have adapted
devanagari (or brahmi) to deal with foreign sounds (as per your example
below).

Are there any other conlangs (in addition to Saalangal) out there with
brahmi-derived scripts, anyone?  Particularly any which have done away with
the kill-sign.

> Nowadays diacritical dots and dashes below letters are used in India to eke
> out Devanagari.  The only graph for a non-sanskritic sound known from
> pre-modern times is a conjunct {ys} or {sj} to represent [z] in Central
> Asian manuscripts.
I wasn't aware of that particular usage, tho it makes sense.  Thanks, it's
a prime example of the sorts of thing I want to know about.

> >(I don't think phonology is the right word, but it's the closest I can come
> >up with.)
>
> Seems appropriate to me.
>
Okeydokey.


Thanks again,


---
Pb