Monday, December 3, 2007

Object: Malayalam Script

With Tamil, Kota, Kodagu and Kannada, Malayalam belongs to the southern group of Dravidian languages. Its affinity to Tamil is the most striking. Proto-Tamil Malayalam, the common stock of Tamil and Malayalam apparently disintegrated over a period of four of five centuries from the ninth century on, resulting in the emergence of Malayalam as a language distinct from Tamil. As the language of scholarship and administration Tamil greatly influenced the early development of Malayalam. Later the irresistable inroads the Brahmins made into the cultural life of Kerala accelerated the assimilation of many Indo-Aryan features into Malayalam at different levels.

The Malayalam script is an abugida of the Brahmic family, used to write the Malayalam language. From the Brahmi script, the Grantha script emerged as one of the earliest Southern scripts. It further evolved into the Malayalam script. The Malayalam script covers all the symbols of Sanskrit as well as special Dravidian letters. The alphabet is classified into two categories: swarams (or vowels) and vyanjanams (or consonants).

In the early thirteenth century /vattezhuthu/ (round writing) traceable to the pan-Indian brahmi script, gave rise to the Malayalam writing system, which is syllabic in the sense that the sequence of graphic elements means that syllables have to be read as units, though in this system the elements representing individual vowels and consonants are for the most part readily identifiable. In the 1960s Malayalam dispensed with many special letters representing less frequent conjunct consonants and combinations of the vowel /u/ with different consonants.

The Brahmi Script:
The Dravidian languages of southern India have Brahmic scripts that have evolved making them suitable to southern needs. The earliest evidence for Brahmi script in South India comes from Bhattiprolu in Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh [4]. Bhattiprolu was a great centre of Buddhism during 3rd century CE and from where Buddhism spread to east Asia. The present Telugu script is derived from 'Telugu-Kannada script', also known as 'old Kannada script', owing to its similarity to the same[5]. Initially minor changes were made which is now called Tamil brahmi which has far fewer letters than some of the other Indic scripts as it has no separate aspirated or voiced consonants. Later under the influence of Granta vetteluthu evolved which looks similar to present day malayalam script. Still further changes were made in 19th and 20th centuries to make use of printing and typewriting needs before we have the present script.


The Grantha Script:
Grantha Tamil, Malayalam, Sanskrit grantha meaning "book" or "manuscript") is an ancient script that was prevalent in South India. It evolved from Brahmi, another ancient Indic script. It has influenced the Malayalam, Tulu and Sinhala scripts.


Ancient malayalam alphabets
At present Malayalam has a script of its own, but in the early centuries it used a form called the vattezhuthu which had currency all over the regions of the Cheras and the Pandyas. It disappeared from the rest of the peninsula by about the fifteenth century, but in Kerala it continued to be in use for three more centuries. Documents, letters, books and inscriptions were mostly written in this script, and even after giving it up, children first initiated into the study of the language were required to learn the vattezhuthu characters also, besides those of Malayalam and Tamil.From the vattezhuthu was derived another script called the kolezhuthu. It is said that the ezhuthu or writing was done with a kol, a stick, and hence the name kolezhuthu for the script. There is no fundamental difference between the two scripts except that in kolezhuthu there are no specific symbols for endings in u and for a and o. This script was more commonly used in the Cochin and Malabar areas than in Travancore. Yet another script derived from the vattezhuthu was the Malayanma, which was in common use to the south of Thiruvananthapuram. Malayanma also does not differ fundamentally from the vattezhuthu.With three scripts in current use the writing and reading of Malayalam must indeed have been a difficult affair. Vattezhuthu was perhaps the better form, for it had currency all over Kerala and did not have any regional variations. But the absence of character combinations, the vowels a and o and conventions for symbols were real difficulties. The trouble with kolezhuthu was still more considerable, for it knew regional variations also. And in the case Malayanma, the complexity of the script, Tamil usage and conventional abbreviations for words were handicaps which made it unintelligible to the rest of the region. It is likely that in course of time these difficulties contributed to their disappearance and brought in the grandhalipi which is the basis of the present script.

It is held that grandhalipi-the term literally means ‘book-script’-was in use all over South India since the seventh century AD The advent of Manipravala literature must have been the major factor that paved the way for its introduction in Kerala.
There are 37 consonants and 16 vowels in the script. Malayalam has a written traditional dating back from the late 9th century and the earliest work dates from 13th century. Malayalam differs from other Dravidian language as the absence of personal endings on verbs. It has a one to one correspondence with the Indo Aryan Devanagari syllabarry.

1 comment:

bibu said...

Hi,

My name is Bibu. I would like to study vateezhuthu. Do you have any idea, kindly share with meee.. my mail id is bibubharathan82@gmail.com