As someone passionate about linguistics, I’ve always paid special attention to the way languages are written in their particular writing systems — both from a functional point of view, but also from what a writing system can reveal about a language’s history. People and their languages learn to write from neighboring people, meaning that writing systems are often related to each other. The visual similarities between such scripts as the Greek, Latin, and Cyrillic alphabets are often discussed; but what can be said about the relationship between the writing systems of India: specifically, Devanagari, used to write Hindi, Marathi, and many other languages, and Bengali?
I started learning how to read and write in Devanagari and the Bengali script in early 2022. Bengali was self-taught, with reference lists of characters, like this one (Omniglot, https://www.omniglot.com/writing/bengali.htm):
I also learned Devanagari through the Hindi Duolingo course. One technique I use often is to learn relative to other languages. I do this with French, which is etymologically very close to English (Andres Simmons, https://medium.com/@andreas_simons/the-english-language-is-a-lot-more-french-than-we-thought-heres-why-4db2db3542b3), so that most French words or even grammatical features, like the subjunctive mood (English Club, https://www.englishclub.com/grammar/subjunctive.php and Lawless French, https://www.lawlessfrench.com/grammar/subjunctive/) can be related to a close equivalent in English (though the subjunctive is significantly less developed in English).
For Bengali and Devanagari specifically, it helped for me to learn them at the same time as each other, because the two scripts are very similar. They both are abugidas (Omniglot, https://omniglot.com/writing/abugidas.htm), for example, which means they write in syllables where a diacritic modifies or suppresses an inherent vowel. They also share similar characters.
They owe these similarities to both being Brahmic scripts. Granted, they are from different branches — Bengali is a Siddham script while Devanagari is, as the name suggests, a Nagari script, though the two branches are very closely related (Jainism.com, https://jainism.com/research/brahmi-mother-of-all-indic-scripts/)
Though Devanagari and Bengali both evolved from the same ancestral Brahmi script, over time, the two scripts gained their own senses of style. Where Devanagari has curves, Bengali often has points (compare क /ka/, प /pa/ to Bengali ক /kô/, প /pô/); and where it has lines, Bengali often has curves (compare Devanagari म /ka/, न /na/, ग /ga/ to Bengali ম /mô/, ন /nô/, গ /gô/). Bengali also favors a spiraling motif, seen in such letters as ক /kô/, ত /tô/, আ /a/, ল /lô/, থ /thô/ and so on; alongside a preference for loops, as in ম /mô/, ই /i/, ঈ /ii/, and হ /hô/.
There are even some more specific construction quirks in the Bengali script: for example, ছ (chhô) appears as a fusion of চ (chô) and হ (hô). There are also related characters in Devanagari, like स /sa/ and श /sha/, which both represent voiceless coronal sibilants. The relationship between the Devanagari and Bengali /sha/ glyphs isn’t obvious, but becomes more apparent when taking Devanagari’s version’s conjunct form: श्र, श्च, and श्व (/shra/, /shcha/, /shva/) all maintain a ribbon-shaped motif standing for /sh/ — that ribbon is the source of the same shape in the Bengali equivalent letter শ.
All in all, the evolution of Brahmi into Bengali (“8” on the chart) and Devanagari (“9”) is represented in this modified chart by James Prinsep (Wikimedia Commons, . Through a gradual exaggeration of features in the original Brahmi script’s characters in accordance with the two scripts’ particular styles (albeit handwritten — this document was made in 1838). Following standardization and change over the past two centuries, certain letters have changed their forms, seen in red for Bengali and purple for Devanagari. Note the increasing prevalence between 1838 and present of motifs like the spiral and loop in Bengali in letters like ণ, ঞ, খ, and ঙ.
But where exactly did Brahmi come from? The script was first attested around 300 BCE with a carbon-dated rock edict from the Indian emperor Ashoka (IAS Current, https://iascurrent.com/ancient-history/mahajanpadas/ashokan/), whose writings are well known for dispersing the Buddhist faith after witnessing a lifechanging war in Kalinga, in the east (World History, https://www.worldhistory.org/Edicts_of_Ashoka/).
Brahmi was deciphered by James Prinsep, who was the secretary in the Asiatic Society of India, a research center based in Kolkata which concerns the study of history and linguistics in India (Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Prinsep). The Asiatic Society is still active today (https://www.asiaticsocietykolkata.org/). Though Brahmi’s origins are not entirely understood, there are two leading theories (World History, https://www.worldhistory.org/Brahmi_Script/). One, that it developed from the independently invented Indus Valley Script, which may be merely pictographic or a fully-fledged, but undeciphered, script indigenous to the Indus River Valley Civilization. The other is that the Brahmi script was descended from Aramaic, making it part of the Semitic mega-family of scripts — evidence from similarities to Aramaic, from which descended a sister script to Brahmi, called Kharosthi, supports this. This chart (Wikipedia, using information from Richard Saloman, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmi_script)
Indeed, taking this into account, it is possible to draw correlations between English’s Latin script and Devanagari and Bengali. This is accentuated by English’s own descent from Phoenician, much like the hypothesis of the origins of Brahmi (Matt Baker’s Useful Charts, https://usefulcharts.com/blogs/charts/evolution-of-the-english-alphabet).
If the Semitic-origins theory of Brahmi is true, then this makes English and Devanagari, among the other Brahmic scripts, distantly related by origin — not unlike how English and Hindi themselves are distantly related languages. And this could be a powerful insight into the origins of writing itself.
As the study stands, writing has been independently invented only 3–5 times: Sumerian cuneiform, Chinese characters, Mayan petroglyphs, and the debatably independent Egyptian hieroglyphics (World History, https://www.worldhistory.org/writing/) alongside the Indus Valley Script, which is debatably only proto writing.
As a result, there are broadly only three families of writing systems, based on where they owe their origins.
· Chinese characters, Korean hangul, and Japanese kanji and kana all owe their development to the original Chinese writing system (Symbol Codes, https://sites.psu.edu/symbolcodes/languages/asia/korean/ and Japanese Meow, https://japanesemeow.com/hiragana-and-katakana/). Hangul, the kana systems, and Mandarin Chinese characters all encode one syllable per character, though their constructions are different.
· Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Cyrillic, and even the Mongolian script, among others, all ultimately derive from Sumerian cuneiform after the creation of the Phoenician and Aramaic systems (Research Gate, https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Historical-evolution-of-alphabets-from-the-proto-Semitic-alphabet-With-permission-from_fig2_329390262). The similarity between these is that they all encode consonants as independent units, and variably either write vowels (in alphabets, like Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic) or don’t (in Arabic and Hebrew, though they do write long vowels and have forms with diacritics to mark vowels).
· The Brahmic scripts are the most numerous, where the Semitic-derived alphabets are used by the most people. They all descend from Brahmi, and include dozens of scripts in South and Southeast Asia — which all function as abugidas, writing syllables with modifications to an inherent vowel (Lindenberg Software, https://lindenbergsoftware.com/en/notes/challenge-of-brahmic-scripts/index.html).
So, knowing this, if it is indeed true that the Brahmic and Semitic scripts are related, then that unites them into a massive Semitic script super-family, meaning that writing systems from Ethiopian Ge’ez to Laotian to Devanagari, Bengali, Latin and Arabic are all distantly related to one another. Maybe we, as people, aren’t as different from each other as we think. I hope you enjoyed reading, and stay tuned for more dives into language and design!
