numerals in tamil script sourashtran (c. miller, 2016)

8/18/2019 Numerals in Tamil Script Sourashtran (C. Miller, 2016)

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A note on numerals in Tamil script Sourashtran orthography, their use in orthographic

systems, and the order of signs in the akshara

Christopher Miller, March 2016

Numerals in the adaptation of Tamil script to writing Sourashtram

Sourashtram is a Indo-Aryan language spoken by a minority population in Tamil Nadu whose

historical traditions recount a migration from the Gujarat-Maharashtra region (Dave 1976; Randle

1944) — their name itself harks back to the Saurashtra or Kathiawar peninsula of Gujarat. Their

language is closely related to Gujarati and Marathi but its precise relationships remain to be

clarified. Traditionally, Sourashtram was written in at least two different scripts closely related to

each other, to the Marathi Mo!i script and to Mahajani and other commercial script varieties of

North India (Miller 2014). As a minority in Tamil Nadu and before that in Telugu-speaking areas,

Sourashtrans’ widespread bilingualism in the majority languages led to their own language being

written in Telugu and Tamil scripts as well, and in fact the vowel and final consonant signs of both

Sourashtran scripts are largely adapted from the two South Indian scripts.

Figure 1. The Obula wedding invitation

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I recently received a wedding invitation (Figure 1) from Subramanian Obula, who actively promotes

Sourashtran language, culture and script with online blogs and videos. The invitation is written for

the most part in Sourashtram, but in two different scripts in parallel. The first is the modernised

version of the script first put into print by the scholar R"ma R"o around the turn of the 19th century

(R"ma R"o 1902, inter alia). After each line in R"ma R"o script, the same Sourashtram-language textis repeated in an adaptation of Tamil script, for the benefit of readers literate in the latter but not

the former (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Superscript numerals in Tamil script Sourashtran orthography

Apart from the obvious visual differences between the two scripts, the Tamil script version has one

striking feature: the ubiquitous presence of superscript Arabic-Indic numerals used diacritically to

distinguish different manners of articulation (voicing, aspiration) on Tamil letters.

This is an interesting strategy for contrasting voiceless aspirated stops cf. (without marked

vowels) /kh/ ‹k2› !2, voiced unaspirated stops cf. /g/ ‹k3› !3 and voiced aspirated stops cf. /gh/ ‹k4›

!4 with voiceless unaspirated stops cf. /k/ ‹k› !, a four-way contrast that Sourashtram shares with

other Indo-Aryan languages. Since Tamil stops have no phonemic contrasts in voicing or aspiration,Tamil script early abandoned Brahmic letters for those other than the voiceless unaspirated series

(k c # t p), which was taken as basic, each letter being the first of its series (varga) in the traditional

var !am"l" arrangement. As a result, writing the other three series of Sourashtram stops in Tamil

script required some sort of workaround strategy.

In itself, using numerals as part of the orthography of a language is unusual, so this seems an

appropriate place to review the few cases I know of where they are used to represent the sounds of

a language in one way or another. After this, I will come back to the specific way the numerals are

ordered relative to the basic vowel and consonant signs, as this is relevant to the structure of thewritten akshara.

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Use of Numerals in Scripts

It is not uncommon to use numerals in notation systems, and numerals are indeed used to represent

the tones of tonal languages, one of the better-known cases being the Wade-Giles romanisation

system for Mandarin, which in the People’s Republic of China and Singapore has been largelysupplanted by Pinyin Zimu since the 1980s. Where Pinyin represents tones with iconic diacritic

accents (xi$ng, xióng, xi%ng, xiòng), Wade-Giles simply placed a numeral for each tone (in

conventional citation order) at the end of the written syllable (hsiung1, hsiung2, hsiung3, hsiung4).

Thai and Lao (Lew 2014) adopted a similar strategy. In Thai, one of four tone diacritics is placed

above the base letter of an akshara to indicate (together with the series the consonant belongs to as

well as syllable structure) which tone is to be pronounced on its vowel. The names of the diacritics

are clearly borrowed from an Indo-Aryan language; the form of the respective diacritics, though

different from Thai numerals, is closely related to numerals from 1 to 4 in most North Indian scripts

but rotated leftward (compare the Devanagari numerals in Figure 3); these facts taken together

seem to indicate that they were specifically borrowed from a similar source for this purpose.

Name: mai + ek to tri cattawa

Thai tone marks

Devanagari numerals ! " # $

Figure 3. Thai tone marks compared with Devanagari numerals

Jawi Arabic script for Malay also used the inline Arabic numeral ‹2› to represent word root

reduplication and this was transferred into the older Malaysian and Indonesian Latin script

orthographies. The modern common Malaysian-Indonesian orthography got rid of that

abbreviation, but it is still used fairly often in informal writing. It is also used the same way, under

the name pada pangrangkep, in Javanese script.

The general idea was also adopted in the Makasarese “Jangang-jangang” script, but put to another

use. In South Sulawesi (and by inheritance the Philippines), pairs of syllables with the same onset

and a vowel sign on each could be abbreviated by writing the onset letter once and doubling the

two vowel signs on that letter. Since that didn't work if one akshara was read with /a/, Makasarese

scribes at some point adopted the Arabic number as a simpler-shaped stand-in for the second letter

(except, generally for ‹n›, which was a simple arch). If one of the two or both had a vowel other

than /a/, then it was marked as usual. The Makasarese parajanjiyana, borrowed from Malay

perjanjian ‘treaty, agreement’ (and bearing the definite suffix -a), is one example of this use of ;

instead of repeating the ‹j› letter with its ‹-i› vowel dot above, the vowel dot is placed over the as a

stand-in for the more complex letter.

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Arabic ‹2› Jangang-jangang ‹pa ra ja i ya na› parajanjiyana

Figure 4. Arabic ‹2› and its use in Makasarese Jangang-jangang spelling as a dummy

character for syllable onset repetition

The way it is used in Jangang-jangang is especially interesting, since like the other Sumatra-

Sulawesi-Philippine scripts, it doesn’t have its own (Indic) numerals and simply spells out numbers

or borrows Arabic or European numerals. There have been various proposals to add “indigenous”

numerals to one or another of these scripts, none of which has ever gained any ground — though a

curious indigenous quinary system called angka bejagung i.e. ‘barley-like numbers’ was used for

calculation and record-keeping by some Rejang users of Surat Ulu in South Sumatra ( Jaspan 1967).

There are two other, somewhat different cases of numerals used in a script that rely on the wayArabic letters are used in the old Aramaic order as numerals, the same way the letters of Aramaic,

Hebrew, Greek and other scripts were used to represent numbers before Arabic-Indic numerals

replaced the older systems for most purposes. However, these two scripts reverse the situation by

using the Arabic-Indic numerals to represent letters.

1. One was a cipher script, apparently developed in India, that used the Arabic numerals from 1-9

to stand in for Arabic letters. Since Arabic has 28 letters but there are only 9 numerals (other

than 0), the form of the numerals (usually the length of the stem) changes as they are used for

different powers. In the original version of the cipher, the first series uses 1-9 for the first 9

letters of the abjad order ‹'›, ‹b›, ‹j›, ‹d›, ‹h›, ‹w›, ‹z›, ‹(›, ‹#›, but they are shortened vertically.

The same numerals are used with their normal vertical length for ‹y›, ‹k›, ‹l›, ‹m›, ‹n›, ‹s›, ‹)›, ‹f›,

‹*›), which correspond to 10-90, and the numerals are then lengthened below the baseline for

‹q›, ‹r›, ‹+›, ‹t›, ‹,›, ‹x›, ‹-›, ‹!›, ‹.›, which correspond to 100-900; finally an extra tail is added at

the bottom of 1 for 1000 (i.e. corresponding to ‹/›).

A more complex version was adapted via Jawi Arabic script correspondences to write Malay

sounds and then a second time, via correspondences between Jawi and Bugis-Makasarese script,

to write riddle poetry and secret correspondence in Bugis as Lontara’ bilang-bilang ‘number

script’ (Figure 5) .

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Figure 5. Explanation of Lontara’ bilang-bilang cipher script from Matthes (1883)

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2. The other is Thaana in the Maldives: it uses the Arabic numerals 1-9 for the first five letters, but

their values don’t correspond at all to the corresponding abjad letter. (However, 9, which looks

like Arabic w"w, is used for that letter, like a very few other non-numeral-based letters in the

script that somewhat resemble their Arabic counterpart.)

haa shaviyani noonu raa baa 0aviyani kaafu alifu vaavu

Figure 6. Thaana letters and corresponding Arabic numerals (Indo-Persian variants)

These are interesting examples in themselves, but there are no other examples I know of where

numerals are used diacritically, though the semi-systematic graduated use of one/two/three dots todistinguish letters with the same basic shape in Arabic script, and even up to four in some of its

derivatives (e.g. Sindhi), comes close. The Sourashtran adaptation of Tamil script fits right in with

the kinds of adaptations talked about in Miller (2014): improving a known but ill-adapted script’s fit

to the phonological needs of the language by borrowing and integrating (parts of) an external

system to “fill in the gaps”.

The whole question of the relation of the numeral component to the rest of a script is an interesting

one. It’s quite common for scripts with their own numerals to replace (or augment) them for some

or all purposes with a completely different numeral system (most usually the Western Arabic-Indic

numeral set). It strikes me, for example, how the Sourashtran text in the wedding invitation uses its

own Nagari-derived numerals whereas the equivalent in Sourashtran Tamil script uses European

numerals (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Nagari-derived Sourashtran numerals versus Tamil script use of Arabic-Indicequivalents

I also find it interesting that modern Sourashtran script abandoned R"ma R"o’s original use of

subscript conjuncts closely modelled on those used in Telugu script. The modern use of a

Devanagari-like halant/vir"ma below the vowelless letter seems directly modelled on the Tamil

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pu00i dot, perhaps a concession to the Tamil spelling system most Sourashtrans in Tamil Nadu are

acquainted with. This can be seen in the first word of each of the second and third lines illustrated

in Figure 7: ‹“upamanØyu”› and ‹vilØl"puramØ›, where I use Ø to stand respectively for the

Sourashtran halant and Tamil pu00i zero-vowel signs.

Position of the numeral diacritics and akshara structure

Apart from the fact that the diacritic numerals that distinguish the other three classes of stops from

voiceless non-aspirates are unusual in themselves, their placement in Tamil script adapted to

Sourashtram is worth noting. Rather than appear right next to the base consonant letter itself, they

are placed after any following vowel sign. If the sign appears above, below or to the left of the letter,

the numeral will appear immediately to the base letter’s right, but in the case of ‹-"› and ‹-o›, both

of which use a detached sign to the right of the base letter, the diacritic numeral is always placed to

that sign’s right, rather than between the base letter and the following sign. This can be seen in

bovni in the first example in Figure 8 and in mha#o, beginning the second line.

This relates to another peculiarity of how Tamil script is adapted to spelling Sourashtram. Apart

from the normal Indo-Aryan complement of aspirated stops, voiced and voiceless, Saurashtram has

several aspirated sonorants that are spelled with a bound sign that immediately follows the

consonant letter in R"ma Rao script. This bound sign is found, for example, in ‹mhu› and ‹rhi›

in R"ma Rao (1902) — apparently the normal conjunct form in that earlier version of the script —

and may likely derive originally from a handwritten variant of Nagari ‹h› similar to the found in

some Gujarati Nagari annotations in Avestan scriptures, by eliminating the adjunct vertical stroke

on the left; the ‹h› letter in the quite different (and equally early) H"0ivi Sourashtran script

appears to derive from a similar shape by starting with the vertical stroke and following through to

the serpentine body with a transitional loop (cf. Figure 1 in Miller 2014). Figure 8 shows three

examples of the modern reformed script’s spelling of /mh/ and one of /rh/.

viveha rubh mhuh1rtu bovni patriko

mha!o mho##"n rh 2

Figure 8. Spelling of /rhV/ and /mhV/ in Sourashtran and Tamil Sourashtran scripts

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For each Tamil script example in Figure 8, the aspiration is spelled with a visarga (:). Just like the

diacritic numerals, the visarga appears after a postconsonantal vowel sign, which can be seen in

mho$$"n in the second of three examples in the lower part of the figure. In both cases, the structure

of the akshara requires the vowel sign to be directly adjacent to its base consonant letter, with any

diacritics modifying the consonant moved to the end of the sequence of signs making up the

akshara. This is reminiscent of the behaviour of the repha sign for an akshara-initial /r/ in

Devanagari and Gujarati scripts: although it represents a preceding /r/ orthographically annexed to

the onset of the following akshara, it is not always written on the consonant letter itself (unlike, for

example, post-consonantal /r/ in a /pr/ sequence where the combination of ‹p› % with following ‹r›

& yields the compound form ' ): instead, the repha preconsonantal ‹r-›, a rightward hook, is written

over the rightmost component of an akshara. Thus, when the vowel of the akshara is long and

written with ‹-"› ( , ‹-o› ) , ‹-au› * or ‹- 2 › + , it appears above that vowel sign and not the letter

representing the consonant that it precedes in speech. This can be seen, for example, in the name

,-. 3arm". (As a learner of Devanagari, I had to force myself not to read this iconically as / 45m67r/

rather than / 45rm67/ as the orthography demands!)

Both the Devanagari and Tamil-Sourashtran examples illustrate how the akshara as an orthographic

reflection of the syllable can lead to non-iconic orderings of elements, treating the C+V sequence as

the core. Yet other akshara-based orthographies, such as Lampung, Surat Ulu and Batak in Sumatra

(see Miller 2014), allow the vowel sign to be displaced from its logical host onto a following

consonant letter marked with a “vowel killer” as a syllable coda. Nonetheless, even in this case, the

displaced vowel sign is always immediately associated with the coda consonant letter and always

precedes the “vowel killer” sign. These conventions can be traced to ultimately arbitrary changes

occurring in previous stages of the evolution of the relevant scripts, but whether any general

synchronic ordering constraints valid for all akshara orthographies exist remains an interesting

question for further research.

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“

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Sonali Nag for first pointing out the interest of the use of numerals in

Sourashtran script, for encouraging me to explore this question further in a note for Lingua Akshara,

and for her suggestions that have helped to improve this note in form and content over several

successive versions. And thanks no less are due to Mr Subramanian Obula for originally sharing

with me the wedding invitation that brought about these questions, as well as for his responses to

my occasional questions about the Sourashtran script; his dedication to preserving and defending

this important aspect of Sourashtran culture is admirable.

===

We would like to thank Mr. Obula S. Subramanian who kindly gave us permission to share his son’s wedding

invitation on the Lingua Akshara. Here is a note from him on the orthography (personal communication,

16.1.16):

Since this script is not taught in Schools, and since almost all Sourashtras know Tamil language

(as they study in schools Tamil and English), we are using Tamil script with superscript numbers

2,3, and 4 for the consonants ka, ca, Ta, ta and pa since Tamil has only 18 consonants. Sourashtra

language has 35+4 consonant symbols.

We live in Tamil Nadu State of India and almost all Sourashtras are bilinguals knowing Tamil

language besides Sourashtram which they speak in their homes.

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References

(! = return to text)

Dave, I. R. (1976). The Saurashtrians in South India. Their Language, Literature and Culture. Rajkot:

Saurashtra University. !

Jaspan, M. (1967). Symbols at work. Aspects of kinetic and mnemonic representation in Redjangritual. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 123 (1967) No. 4, 476-516. !

Lew, Sigrid (2014). A linguistic analysis of the Lao writing system and its suitability for minoritylanguage orthographies. Writing Systems Research Vol. 6, No. 1, 25-40. !

Matthes, B.F. (1883). Eenige Proeven van Boegineze en Makassaarsche Poëzie. The Hague: Nijhoff (GoogleBooks digital edition). !

Miller, C. (2014). Devanagari’s descendants in North and South India, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Writing Systems Research Vol. 6, No. 1, 10-24. ( p1 !) ( p6 !) ( p7!) ( p8!)

R"ma R"o, T. M. (1902). Saur "&$ ra-n' ti- ( ambu [A Hundred Saurashtra Moral Maxims]. Madras.( p2 !) ( p7 !)

Randle, H. N. (1944). The Saurashtrans of South India. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britainand Ireland, 2, 151–164. !

Internet links !

“Upamanyu” blog. http://subramanian-obula.blogspot.com/

Subramanian Obula blog. https://plus.google.com/109960219105236913501

Subramanian Obula gallery. https://www.flickr.com/photos/29347649@N02/

Subramanian Obula YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/user/upamanyuoss

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numerals in tamil script sourashtran (c. miller, 2016)

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