India is the country of most importance in the development of the south Asiatic alphabets. The forms of the Sanskrit letters show that they and the subsequent Hindu alphabets are derivatives, though much altered ones, from the primitive Semitic writing. Exactly how the alphabet was carried from the shore of the Mediterranean to India has not been fully determined. By some the prototype of the principal earliest Indian form of writing is thought to have been the alphabet of the south Arabian Sabæans or Himyarites of five or six hundred years B.C. As the Arabs were Semites, and as there was a certain amount of commerce up and down the Red Sea, it is not surprising that even these rather remote and backward people had taken up writing. Between south Arabia and India there was also some intercourse, so that a further transmission by sea seems possible enough. Another view is that Hindu traders learned and imported a north Semitic alphabet perhaps as early as during the seventh century, from which the Brahmi was made over, from which in turn all living Indian alphabets are derived. Besides this main importation, there was another, from Aramæan sources, which gave rise to a different form of Hindu writing, the Kharoshthi or Indo-Bactrian of the Punjab, which spread for a time into Turkistan but soon died out in India.
147. Syllabic Tendencies
One trait of Indian alphabets leads back to their direct Semitic origin: they did not recognize the vowels. The Hindus speaking Indo-European were confronted with the same difficulty as the Greeks when they took over the vowelless Semitic alphabet. But they solved the difficulty in their own way. They assumed that a consonantal letter stood for a consonant plus a vowel. Thus, each letter was really the sign for a syllable. The most common vowel in Sanskrit being A, this was assumed as being inherent in the consonant. For instance, their letter for K was not read K, but KA. This meant that when K was to be read merely as K, it had to be specially designated: something had to be done to take away the vowel A. A diacritical sign was added, known as the virama. This negative sign is a “point” just as much as the positive vowel points of Hebrew; but was used to denote exactly the opposite.
There are of course other vowels than A in Sanskrit. These were represented by diacritical marks analogous to the virama. Thus while this is a diagonal stroke below the consonant, U is represented by a small curve below, E by a backward curve above, AI by two such, and so on.
If a syllable had two consonants before the vowel, these were condensed into one, the essential parts of each being combined into a more complex character. This was much as if we were to write “try” by forcing t and r into a special character showing the cross stroke of the t and the roll or hook of the r, and superposing a diæresis for the vowel. This process reduced every syllable to a single though often compound letter. If the syllable ended in a consonant, this carried over as the beginning of the next syllable. Even the end consonant of a word was written as the first letter of the next. According to the Sanskrit plan, “the dog is mad” would be rendered “the do gi sma d-.”
Obviously, there is something unnaturally regular, a systematic artificiality, about such a scheme. Love of system cropped out otherwise. The Hindus devised a new symbol—mainly by differentiation of old ones—for every sound that they had and Semitic lacked. Thus they doubled the number of their letters. Then they rearranged their order on a phonetic and logical basis. All sounds made against the back palate were brought into one group; those formed against the fore-palate, gums, and teeth came after; the lip sounds last. Within each of the groups the letters followed one another in a fixed order according to their method of production—voiceless stops always first, nasals always last.
The result of these innovations was that the Hindu alphabets diverged much more from the Semitic original than did ours. This perhaps was really to be expected, since writing entered India by long leaps between peoples that were not in intimate relations. Also, by the time the alphabet first reached them, the Hindus, in the isolation of their remote peninsula, had already worked out an advanced and unique type of civilization. This fact must have predisposed them to make over any imported invention in conformity with their established habits.
148. The East Indies: Philippine Alphabets
The spread of the Hindu alphabet within India, over southeastern Asia, and into the East Indian archipelago, cannot be followed here because it is an intricate story, interwoven with the history of Brahmanism and Buddhism. It may be said that in general, with the chief exception of China, Hindu writing followed where Hindu religion penetrated. But it may be illuminating to touch briefly on one of the extensions.
In the early centuries after Christ, Hindus began to reach the East Indies, especially Sumatra and Java. Here they established principalities or kingdoms and their religion. Many arts were also imported by them, such as iron working, batik dyeing, sculpture, drama, and writing. From perhaps the sixth to the fifteenth centuries, the Malaysian population of Java lived under a heavy layer of Hindu culture (§ [104], [126], [262]), and literacy evidently became fairly widespread. Greater or less portions of this culture were transported to the other East Indian islands and with them went writing. In the Philippines, the Spaniards of the sixteenth century found several related alphabets, one to each of the principal nationalities, which seem derived from Bengal some eight hundred years before.