Telugu script

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Telugu script, an abugida from the Brahmic family of scripts, is used to write Telugu language, a South Central Dravidian Language found in the Southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh as well as several other neighboring states. The Telugu script is derived from the Telugu-Kannada script^[1] and developed independently at the same time as the Kannada script which is why it has strong resemblance to it.^[2]

Derivation from Brahmi script

The Brahmi script used by Mauryan kings eventually reached Krishna River delta and gave rise to Bhattiprolu script found on the urn containing Buddha's relics^{[3] [4]}. Buddhism spread to east Asia from the nearby ports of Ghantasala and Masulipatnam (ancient Maisolos of Ptolemy and Masalia of Periplus)^[5]. The Bhattiprolu script also travelled giving rise to the modern Thai, Burmese, Javanese and Balinese scripts, which bear a strong resemblance to Telugu script^{[6][7] [8]}. The Bhattiprolu Brahmi script evolved into the old Telugu-Kannada script by 5th century C.E^[9][10][11].^{[12][13][14][15]}

The Muslim historian and scholar Al-Biruni called the Telugu language and script Andhri.^[16]

Vowels

Telugu uses fourteen vowels, each of which has both a singular form and a diacritic form used with consonants to create syllables. It is important to note that this language does make a distinction between short and long vowels.

The singular form is used when the vowel occurs at the beginning of a word or syllable, or is a complete syllable in itself (example: a, u, o). The diacritic form is added to consonants (represented by the dotted circle) to form a consonant-vowel syllable (example: ka, kru, mo). It should be noted that అ does not have a diacritic form, because this vowel is already inherent in all of the consonants. The other diacritic vowels are added to consonants to change their pronunciation to that of the vowel.

Examples:

Consonants

Other diacritics

There are also several other diacritics used in the Telugu script. ్ mutes the vowel of a consonant, so that only the consonant is pronounced. ం and ఁ nasalize the vowels or syllables to which they are attached. ః adds a voiceless breath after the vowel or syllable it is attached to.

Examples:

Telugu in Unicode

The Unicode range for Telugu is U+0C00–U+0C7F. Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points.

In contrast to a syllabic script such as katakana, where one Unicode code point represents the glyph for one syllable, Telugu combines multiple code points to generate the glyph for one syllable, using complex font rendering rules.^[17][18]

References

External links

• Useful and authenticated information about Telugu
• Telugu Association Inc. Sydney Australia. Celebration of Telugu Culture in Sydney
• Omniglot - Telugu script