Re: The map of typological features


John Atkinson wrote:
"Yusuf B Gursey" <ybg@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...

IIRC Jensen or Diringer in theri books on alphabets specualted that the
inventor just assigned numbers for the previous letters just to make it
easier to study.

The first twelve letters of the original Divehi script were already used for
numbers -- the inventor just transfered ten of them to be the second ten
letters of his new system (not corresponding to the same phonemes as in the
old script, though, it appears).

Seems to me that, since there were already two scripts available and known
to many of the speakers of the language (the Divehi and Arabic scripts),
there must of been an incentive for them to invent and then to take up a new
one. It makes sense that (as the royal family website implies) the Divehi
script was unacceptable to some enthusiastic muslims because it was closely
associated with the old buddhist religion, but at the same time the nobility
and/or the intellegentsia didn't want to it to look like they were letting
foreigners impose their script on them. So they threw them both out and
invented a completely new script with elements of both (and better than
either for representing the Maldivian language, as it turned out).

The old script continued to be used in parallel with Thaana for three
hundred years, up to early in the 20th century.

Government literature from Maldives says that "Thaana script was invented
and introduced to accommodate Arabic sentences and words into the Dhivehi
texts." It's hard to see the logic in this statement. The only advantage
of Thaana over the old script for "accomodating Arabic sentences" is that
it's written from right to left instead of left to right. Anyway, Arabic
isn't written as such in Thaana text. Rather, it's transliterated, and in


it might have been in older times, as was done in ottoman turkish. and
buddhists used the uighur script (to accomodate chinese) vertically
while muslims used it horizontally (to accomodate arabic). so there are
precedents, and it may have been done earlier.

order to do so, 12 extra letters had to be specially invented. And these,
like the 24 standard letters, bear no resemblance to the corresponding
Arabic letters. Rather, they consist of the closest-sounding Thaana letters
with added dots. This approach could just as easily have been adopted when
writing in the old script. (And it probably was).

Juhn.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: The map of typological features
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  • Re: The map of typological features
    ... inventor just assigned numbers for the previous letters just to make it ... numbers -- the inventor just transfered ten of them to be the second ten ... old script, though, it appears). ... Government literature from Maldives says that "Thaana script was invented ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: The map of typological features
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