Devanagari's descendants in North and South India, Indonesia and the Philippines

Abstract

Several scripts in northern and southern India, Indonesia and the Philippines developed from informal varieties of Devanagari restricted to intimate, shorthand-like uses by members of mercantile occupations. The mercantile varieties took a characteristic quasi-abjad form with postconsonantal vowels unspelt. This paper follows the development of these scripts, demonstrating how they gave rise to the new scripts in South India, Indonesia and the Philippines. The basic relationships between these scripts are demonstrated with cursory descriptions of their structural correspondences, followed by a discussion for each of the ways the orthographic system changed back to a more classic abugida as a result of borrowing from prestige contact scripts or innovations in the use of existing resources. In addition to these more typical phenomena, we describe some quirky spelling conventions in Sumatran, Sulawesi and Philippine scripts, tracing them to practices used to teach combinations of vowel and coda signs on consonant letters.