Re: The map of typological features


"Yusuf B Gursey" <ybg@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote ...

John Atkinson wrote:

"Yusuf B Gursey" <ybg@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

He doesn't seemed to have used any order at all -- neither adjab, Arabic
dictionary, or Sinhalese (or other Brahmi-derived)

the origin of the order I don't know. h begins south arabian.

I did find resemblences to eastern arabic numerals from the writing I
saw on stamps.

OK. I've only looked at standard Arabic in printed form. If you want to
compare Thaana with any sort of Arabic you know of, it's available at

well, the numerals are similar, and vaguely the others.also the vowel
signs.

Yes, the first nine consonants (haa to alifu) and the vowels aba, ibi, and
ubu. Ebe and obo are new. The second nine consonants are supposed to be
the old numerals. They do indeed look quite like the numerals of Kannada or
Telugu, except that meemu and vaavu (1 and 2) are in the wrong order. They
are also the first nine letters of the old Divehi script. As for the last
six consonants, they "are mainly adaptions of earlier ones or Perso-Arabic
borrowings", a/c to WWS.

On the Maldive Royal Family Official Website, there's some discussion (I
don't know how accurate) concerning why the Thaana orthography was invented.
"The Thaana alphabetical script used to write modern Divehi was invented in
resistance to the drive to Arabise and strip the Maldives of its national
heritage by the Islamic intelligentsia. In that regard Maldivians proved to
the mullahs to be resilient and a tougher nut to crack than the Persians,
Islamised Indians, Turks and the Malays who all abandoned their indigenous
writing systems and adopted the Arabic script. The Maldivians invented their
own non-Indic, nevertheless, non-Arabic script we now call Thaana to replace
the former Indic script called Divehi Akuru. The Indic script was written
from left to right. The mullahs objected to that and tried to impose a
modified Arabic script which they called hedhi akuru. The civil
intellectuals refused a bar of that and devised the compromise Thaana
script."

John.


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