Re: Grantha

At 19:33 -0800 6.1.2000, Barry Garcia wrote:
>
>I've been developing a more plausible script for Saalangal, based off of
>the Grantha script of southern India. This script is the ancestor of  the
>Tamil, Kannada, and Sinhal  scripts. I've been simplifying the letter
>forms down from the rather extravagant letter forms of Grantha.
>
>I found one site with an image of the script (Found at:
>http://sdlcfsn.cs.iitm.ernet.in/tidbits.html ) , but it only had the
>tranlisteration in Devanagari (so, i went to a site with the Devanagari
>letters and their Latin equivalents). Then I came across a problem, I
>found I could not find the sound for 'ng' (palatal n) anywhere. Anyway, I
>was hoping someone out on the list may have another example of the script,
>or could give me some plausible ideas on how to create ng from the
>existing characters.
They probably just used anusvaara, the sign for a preceding nasal -- a
small circle over the character --, most of the time, since that's just
about the only context where an /N/ will occur compulsorily in Sanskrit.
The character will have been identical to the Tamil/Malayalam ones, tho.

(Writing out a preconsonantal nasal in full was *very* unusual in Sanskrit
manuscripts, almost bad spelling, until western scholars came along and
upset things.)


/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson  <mailto: bpj@...> <mailto: melroch@...>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~__
            Anant' avanaute quettalmar!               \ \
   __  ____ ____    _____________  ___ __   __ __     / /
   \ \/___ \\__ \  /___  _____/\ \\__ \\ \  \ \\ \   / /
   / /   / /  /  \    / /Melroch\ \_/ // /  / // /  / /
  / /___/ /_ / /\ \  / /Melarocco\_  // /__/ // /__/ /
 /_________//_/  \_\/ /Eowine__   / / \___/\_\\___/\_\
I neer Pityancalimeo\ \_____/ /ar/ /_atar Mercasso naan
~~~~~~~~~Cuinondil~~~\_______/~~~\__/~~~Noolendur~~~~~~
|| Lenda lenda pellalenda pellatellenda cuivie aiya! ||
"A coincidence, as we say in Middle-Earth" (JRR Tolkien)