Re: Perhaps all of India should adopt one script


ranjit_mathews@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
mb wrote:
Considering Indian scripts, is there a single Brahmi based script
suitable for writing all Indian languages? I had to put together 3
scripts (Unicode Devanagari, Gurmukhi and Bengali) to arrive at a
phonetic superset of Devanagari that can be used to write an arbitrary
mixture of words from all the IE and Dravidian official languages of
India and her provinces. (IE languages include Urdu and English, of
course.)

That's because you are stuck with thinking in phonetic terms. It's not
about an arbitray mixture of terms, and it's not about particular
sounds. Assigning a phoneme value to a sign or combination of signs for
each language is not a big deal and of course you can write any
language with any system. All the rest is emotion or politics.

OK; let's say I speak a dialect with one set of phonemes and a mixture
of Malayalam, Tamil and English words. Someone else speaks another
dialect with a different set of phonemes and a mixture of Malayalam,
Tulu and English words. We can make ourselves understood to each other.
How do we write to each other? Do we have to learn each other's
phonemes and what graphemes are used for them before we set pen to
paper?

The proportion of such words and the phonemic distances from the script
are not likely to as huge, in such a case, as to impair communication.

Consider the cognates Tamil /un.d.a:ji/ vs. Malayalam /un.d.a:ji/. They
had the same phonemes and were originally the same word in an ancestor
of both languages and they still nominally have the same phonemes since
the scripts are supposed to be phonemic. Now, they have different
pronunciations and meanings, like English egregious and Italian
egregio. How do I use both words, in writing? In what script do I write
them and from where do I get extra graphemes every time I find that yet
another phone is a phoneme in my idiolect?

You somewhat confirm my saying that you are stuck in phonology. If
there is any script simplification the aim is not to unify speech, but
it could have an *accessory* result of helping comprehension of a
related language, as is the case with an American more or less
understanding stuff written by Englishmen or Indians (with dialects I
bet far more distant from each other in both phonology and semantics
than the ones you mention).

Not that I can see any value in the OP's proposal except if some
serious improvement in learning ease would occur *intra-language*
(like, say, Latin alphabet for everything).

Well, when you have a dialect continuum and the script used changes
every time you cross a state line, then even if the phonemes are the
same, people speaking dialects that are not far apart can't communicate
in writing because there's a state line between them. How easy would
Iberians find it to communicate if Catalonia switched to Cyrillic
script, Andalusia to Greek script and Portugal to Coptic? These are
more similar than Indian scripts are to each other.

Didn't get through. We were talking of unifying the script, provided it
offers a major incentive to learning.

.

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