With conversion and conquest, Arabic became the language of much of North Africa and the Middle East. Significant holdouts were Persian and, later, the newcomer Turkish. Yet the religious and cultural significance of Arabic was such that both Turkish and Persian came to be written in Arabic script, as did the other Iranian languages Pashto, Kurdish, and Balochi; the Indo-Aryan languages Urdu, Sindhi, and Kashmiri; many of the Turkic languages of Inner Asia; various languages of North Africa; and Malay. To write these non-Semitic languages a number of new diacritics were added to represent additional consonants: for example, was made from to represent [v], and was made from to represent [p].
The Arabic script is deeply connected to the Muslim faith. The spread of Islam brought with it a spread of literacy, as did the spread of Buddhism in Central and East Asia and the spread of Christianity in Europe. Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, is a religion “of the Book.” In written form, God’s word is made available to all: what God has said is as settled and unarguable as a Sumerian tax receipt, though of course the interpretation of what God has said can vary considerably.
Figure 9.5 Islamic zoomorphic calligraphy. From northern India, nineteenth century. Image copyright © Victoria & Albert Museum, London/Art Resource, NY.
In the Hebrew Bible God speaks the world into existence (“Let there be light”). According to one Islamic tradition, by contrast, God made the world by writing it with a pen, and the Qur’n says that God teaches humans with a pen. As a result, the pen and the craft of writing are highly revered. The art of beautiful writing – calligraphy – plays a central role in Islamic art, the more so as representational arts are frowned upon, especially in a religious setting. Calligraphy is a form of religious expression, particularly in the Sufi tradition of Islam, which emphasizes mysticism and personal experience of God. In beautifully writing one’s worship, one draws nearer to God and communes with his transcendent creative spirit.
The maturation of Islamic calligraphy was abetted by the arrival in the Middle East of paper. Paper has a smoother surface than papyrus, allowing for more graceful, smoother lines. After Samarkand fell into Muslim hands in AD 751, the previously well-kept Chinese secret of papermaking spread to the Middle East. Subsequently, the Islamic tradition has produced a magnificent body of calligraphy in a number of styles (figure 9.5). There are plaited letters, mazes, architectural and geometric shapes, and compositions in the shape of a human face, an animal, a fruit or flower, or even a coffee urn, all making creative use of the flowing and curvaceous nature of the Arabic script, the most successful modern form of the Aramaic alphabet.
10
The Empire of Sanskrit
The one word that best describes India is diversity. In the cities of the world’s largest democracy, cell-phone users and bullock carts share the streets with a dizzying array of buses, cars, scooters, and auto-rickshaws. Historically the region has given birth to four of the world’s religions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism – while the modern nation also boasts a large Muslim population, Christian and Jewish communities that date back to the early centuries AD, one of the world’s few Baha’i temples, and the world headquarters of the Theosophical Society. The languages of India belong to five separate, unrelated language families. Yet somehow India today is a single nation, thanks to the fact that in classical times the people of the Indian subcontinent managed to forge elements of a common culture out of myriad local variations. How they did so is closely related to the story of their written words.
According to the People of India ethnographic survey conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Indians use 325 different languages at home. There is no single lingua franca with which to sort out this Babel: the survey also found that Indians use 96 different languages when speaking with members of other communities. The survey did not claim to be an exhaustive census, and there is room for endless debate as to whether certain forms of speech are different languages or different dialects of the same language. A definitive tally of India’s languages may therefore be impossible, but clearly the total is an impressive number.
Equally impressive is the fact that the survey received 25 different answers to the question of what script people write with, a figure that is the more striking given that many of the 325 mother tongues have no written form. No other nation uses such a profusion of scripts. The modern state of India is three-quarters the size of Europe, but modern Europe uses only three native alphabets (Greek, Roman, and Cyrillic).
India’s languages belong to five families. The two most populous families are the Indo-European family (mostly the Indo-Aryan branch), to which many of the northern languages belong, and the Dravidian family, to which the languages of southern India belong. Smaller numbers speak languages of the Austro-Asiatic family (mostly the Munda branch) in central and northeastern India, particularly in tribal communities. Around the edges of India are languages of the Sino-Tibetan family (almost exclusively the Tibeto-Burman branch), located along the Himalayan frontier and in the northeast, and those of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, which comprise a family of their own, apparently unrelated to any others on earth.
In sharp contrast to this diversity, all the traditional scripts of India belong to the same family. There are newcomers – the Arabic script (as adapted first for Persian and then for Indian languages), the Roman alphabet, and Ol Chiki (invented for the Munda language, Santali) – but the rest share a single historical source. Despite significant differences in appearance, the native scripts of India generally work on the same principles, encode the same phonemes, and list their letters in the same order. Furthermore, during the first millennium AD they were mostly used to write the same language, Sanskrit.
Although 22 of India’s 25 scripts stem from a common source, the first writing in India has left no modern descendants. Between 2600 and 1900 BC, the Indus Valley civilization – one of the world’s ancient river valley civilizations and a younger contemporary of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations – flourished in what is now Pakistan and northwestern India. The Indus Valley culture was apparently literate, as attested by short inscriptions on seals and other durable materials (figure 10.1), particularly from the major cities of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro (see appendix, figure A.7). But these undeciphered inscriptions are so short (averaging only five signs) that some have argued that they are not actually writing. If writing, they are commonly supposed to record an ancient Dravidian language, as the Dravidian languages were spoken in the Indian subcontinent before the arrival of the Indo-European Aryans; but this assumption cannot be proved. Without longer texts or a bilingual inscription, hopes for a decipherment remain slim. After centuries of prosperity, the Indus Valley civilization withered for unknown reasons, and its unique writing system died with it.
Figure 10.1 Seal with Indus Valley symbols, from Mohenjo Daro. National Museum of Pakistan, Karachi. Image copyright © Scala/Art Resource, NY.
The illiterate Aryans arrived in the subcontinent some four hundred years later. As they mingled with the native population, their language took on distinctively Indian characteristics, absorbing Dravidian words and pronunciations. The Dravidian and Munda languages absorbed Aryan characteristics in return. The Aryans, and many of the Dravidians and Mundas, clung to their individual native tongues, but they allowed each other enough influence that India became what is known as a linguistic area – a region in which the various languages share certain characteristics as a result of having borrowed them from each other, rather than having inherited them from a common ancestor. The unification of India had begun.
In time the Aryans developed a distinctively Indian religious tradition, complete with hymns, known as the Vedas, which were composed in the sacred, poetic form of their language, Vedic Sanskrit. The Vedas were transmitted orally, just as the Avesta was in Persia by the Aryans’ distant cousins, the Iranians (Iranian being another form of the word Aryan). As sacred works, the Vedas were carefully preserved, word for word, although the
language of everyday use continued to change through the centuries. By the time the Indo-Aryans wrote their language, what they actually spoke was not Sanskrit at all.
The growing gap between the formal language and everyday speech prompted an original Indian invention: grammar. If one was going to use holy language, one had best understand correctly the rules under which it operated; and so the science of linguistic description was born. Sometime around the fourth or fifth century BC the grammarian Pini composed his grammatical summary of Sanskrit, including both its older, Vedic version and the more modern variety in which sacred works were being composed at the time and which became the basis for the classical language. Many other grammatical treatises were composed over the next two millennia, but Ptini’s Astdyyi(“Eight Chapters”) justly remained the paragon of grammars.
It is not clear whether Ptini and his contemporaries were literate. The Astdyyi was composed in such a way as to facilitate oral recitation, but whether it originally existed solely in oral form is up for debate. Certainly, the Indian tradition of learning cultivated memory to a degree that is very difficult for us to imagine today. Yet it may have been some of these same early grammarians who designed the distinctively Indian style of scripts. They would have had the linguistic knowledge to do so, but any writing they may have done has not been preserved.
The oldest surviving, clearly datable pieces of writing in India are the edicts of the emperor Aoka (c.265–238 BC), carved into stone pillars and rock faces. Aoka, third emperor of the Mauryan dynasty, was a bloody conqueror who subdued most of the Indian subcontinent. Eventually he realized the human cost of his warmongering, renounced bloodshed, and converted to Buddhism. He then ordered his new ethical principles of tolerance, nonviolence, and just rulership inscribed in stone for all to see throughout India. At the frontier between his realm and Seleucid Persia his edicts were written in Greek and Aramaic, but elsewhere they were written in various forms of Prakrit in two different scripts, Brhm and
Prakrit was a general term used to describe vernacular Indo-Aryan languages as contrasted with the liturgical language, Sanskrit. Pali, the language of Buddhist scriptures, was an early Prakrit. Eventually Pali and certain other Prakrits were themselves fossilized in written texts and became literary languages distinct from the everyday speech of the Indian people. In Aoka’s time, however, using Prakrit was simply using normal language.
The origin of the Brhm and scripts in which Aoka’s edicts were written is a matter of some controversy. , whose use was restricted to the northwestern portion of the subcontinent and adjacent Inner Asia, eventually became extinct. Brhm, on the other hand, spread far and wide, developed numerous regional forms, and is survived today by descendants throughout the subcontinent and Southeast Asia from Punjab to the Philippines.
was probably the older of the two scripts. It was written from right to left and displays some similarities to Imperial Aramaic. Brhm was written from left to right, and is less reminiscent of Aramaic. Yet the similarities between Brhm and are more striking than the similarities between and Aramaic.
The Indian scripts, starting with Brhm and , are often assumed to be yet another adaptation of the Aramaic script, adding South and Southeast Asia to the portion of the world colonized by the Aramaic alphabet. Others have vigorously denied any link, especially in the case of Brhm, claiming an indigenous origin for Indian writing.
The developmental stages – if there were any – of Brhm and are long lost to us, so the controversy may never be fully settled. The most reasonable guess, however, is that writing in India was neither a completely independent discovery nor a slavish borrowing of someone else’s technology. Given the presence of the Achaemenid Persian Empire at India’s northwest frontier, it is reasonable to assume that Imperial Aramaic played a role in inspiring script development in India. It would be an error, however, to overestimate the similarities of either Brhm or to Aramaic. Brhm and were thoughtfully designed to match the phonemes present in the Indian Prakrits, which were quite different from the Semitic consonants of Aramaic. Rather than making yet another slight modification to the Aramaic alphabet, the Indians discovered an entirely new way to write. They may well have learned from Aramaic-speaking Persians the alphabetic principle of representing each individual consonant with its own symbol, but their approach to representing vowels was novel, quite different from the beefing-up of matres lectionis into independent vowel letters that occurred at various points in the Aramaic alphabet’s eastward journey. Though probably not an entirely indigenous invention, the scripts of India nevertheless started a new chapter in the history of writing – a case of what anthropologists call stimulus diffusion, rather than an outright borrowing or close adaptation.
, Brhm, and the modern descendants of Brhm are generally called alphasyllabaries, suggesting some combination of an alphabet and a syllabary but leaving unhelpfully vague how such a combination would actually work. The scripts are actually alphabetic in that each phoneme receives its own symbol (with one exception), but the symbols are combined in ways that are foreign to Western alphabets, which (especially since the advent of printing) proceed letter by letter in a single straight line. In native terminology, the Indic writing systems employ units known as akaras, in which vowel signs are written as appendages to consonant symbols. One vowel is left unwritten, inferred to occur after a consonant if neither the “absence of vowel” sign nor another vowel sign is added.
To take an example from the Devangar script (used for Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, and modern publications in Sanskrit; figure 10.2), is the letter k, read (with the inferred vowel) as ka, phonetically or . If the k is followed by any other vowel, a symbol is added to the right, left, top, or bottom of the character, depending on the vowel. So is k (with a long [a] vowel), is kau. Each of these CV sequences is considered a single akara, a grouping reminiscent of the syllabic symbols in a syllabary. However, the contribution of each consonant and vowel phoneme is clearly visible, making the system alphabetic despite the fact that the characters do not follow each other linearly as they do in Western alphabets.
So far the system is easy. However, special treatment is needed both for consonants that are not followed by a vowel and for vowels which are not preceded by consonants – in other words, for phonemes that don’t fit into CV sequences. Initial vowels were rare in Sanskrit, not because words didn’t begin with vowels, but because spaces were not left between words. (The modern languages, by contrast, have adopted word spacing on the European model.) If one word ended in a vowel and the next one began with a vowel, the two vowels were blended into a single one by a set of grammatical rules known as sandhi. Thus only vowels that were sentence- or verse-initial did not have a preceding consonant. There were special symbols for these “independent” initial vowels: au.
In principle the independent forms of the vowels could have been used throughout: k would then be written , and pe as , etc. The resulting linear scripts would be more familiar to those raised with Western-style alphabets, but they would be more cumbersome to write, requiring far more strokes of the pen. With upwards of 45 letters to distinguish, the characters of the Indic scripts are relatively complex; writing vowels as attachments to consonants makes them safely distinct visually and cuts down on the effort of writing them. (The fact that most linear alphabets, by contrast, have fewer than about 30 letters is a historical accident, related more to the number of consonants in Semitic languages than to the number of phonemes a language can have.)
Besides having two versions of the vowels, the other complication of the akara system occurs with consonants that are not followed by a vowel. Sanskrit abounded in consonant clusters, as Indo-European languages are wont to do. Any sequence of consonants was crammed together into a single akara. plus makes , kka, (s) plus makes , ska, and plus stva. (Prakrit did not have as many consonant clusters, so the complexity of akaras may have ended up being more than the original designers intended.) Generally the pieces – the individual consonants – of the
combination are clearly visible, though usually all but the last lack the vertical bar that stand-alone consonants usually have. However, are exceptional ligatures that disguise their constituent pieces, and the combination forms of , r, are unusual: , kra, while , rka.
A consonant that occurs without either a following vowel or consonant – because it is mentioned alone, or it occurs at the end of a word or sentence (depending on word-spacing conventions) – traditionally takes a sign known as halant or virama, which silences the implied a vowel: is read ka, but is read as merely k.
The modern languages that use Devangar have reduced the use of the inherent vowel. Words that used to end in the default vowel a are now pronounced without it, such that , Rma, one of the avatars – or incarnations – of the god Vishnu, is now Rm. Strictly speaking, this should have caused a proliferation of virmas marking the absence of the vowel, but (sensibly, perhaps) this has not been done. In modern Hindi, therefore, a consonant symbol by itself can stand for either the consonant plus an a-vowel or the consonant alone. So “bus” is , bas, in Hindi, the first consonant being read with the unwritten vowel and the second consonant not. For a speaker of Hindi it is pretty easy to tell where the default vowel is needed on the basis of how words of the language normally sound. Hindi also uses far fewer conjunct consonants than Sanskrit, again on the principle that the presence or absence of the default vowel can be easily judged.
The Writing Revolution Page 21