A note on numerals in Tamil script Sourashtran orthography, their use in orthographic

systems, and the order of signs in the akshara

Christopher Miller, February 2016

Numerals in the adaptation of Tamil script to writing Sourashtram

Sourashtram is a Indo-Aryan language spoken by a minority population in Tamil Nadu

whose historical traditions recount a migration from the Gujarati-Maharashtra region (Dave

1976; Randle 1944) — their name itself harks back to the Saurashtra or Kathiawar peninsula

of Gujarat. Their language is closely related to Gujarati and Marathi but its precise

relationships remain to be clarified. Traditionally, Sourashtram was written in at least two

different scripts closely related to each other, to the Marathi Moḍi script and to Mahajani and

other commercial script varieties of North India (Miller 2014). As a minority in Tamil Nadu

and before that in Telugu-speaking areas, bilingualism in the majority languages led to

Sourashtram being written in Telugu and Tamil scripts as well, and in fact the vowel and final

consonant signs of both Sourashtran scripts are largely adapted from the two South Indian

scripts.

Figure 1. The Obula wedding invitation

I recently received a wedding invitation (Figure 1) from Subramanian Obula, who actively

promotes Sourashtran language, culture and script with online blogs and videos (see links in

references section). The invitation is written for the most part in Sourashtram, but in two

different scripts in parallel. The first is the modernised version of the script first put into print

by the scholar Rāma Rāo around the turn of the 19th century (Rāma Rāo 1902, inter alia).

After each line in Rāma Rāo script, the same Sourashtram-language text is repeated in an

adaptation of Tamil script, for the benefit of readers literate in the latter but not the former.

Figure 2. Superscript numerals in Tamil script Sourashtran orthography

This is an interesting strategy for contrasting voiceless aspirated stops cf. (without marked

vowels) /kh/ (spelled க2), voiced unaspirated stops cf. /g/ (spelled க3) and voiced aspirated

stops cf. /gh/ (spelled க4 )with voiceless unaspirated stops cf. /k/, (spelled க), a four-way

contrast that Sourashtram shares with other Indo-Aryan languages. Since Tamil stops have

no phonemic contrasts in voicing or aspiration, Tamil script early abandoned Brahmic letters

for those other than the voiceless unaspirated series (k c ṭ t p), which was taken as basic,

each letter being the first of its series (varga) in the traditional varṇamālā arrangement. As a

result, writing the other three series of Sourashtram stops in Tamil script required some sort

of workaround strategy.

In itself, using numerals as part of the orthography of a language is unusual, so this seems

an appropriate place to review the few cases I know of where they are used to represent the

sounds of a language in one way or another. After this, I will come back to the specific way

the numerals are ordered relative to the basic vowel and consonant signs, as this is relevant

to the structure of the written akshara.

Use of Numerals in Scripts

It is not uncommon to use numerals in notation systems, and numerals are indeed used to

represent the tones of tonal languages, one of the better-known cases being the Wade-Giles

romanisation system for Mandarin, largely supplanted by Pinyin Zimu since the 1980s.

Where Pinyin represents tones with iconic diacritic accents (xiōng, xióng, xiǒng, xiòng),

Wade-Giles simply placed a numeral for each tone (in conventional citation order) at the end

of the written syllable (hstiung1, hsiung2, hsiung3, hsiung4).

Thai, as well as Lao (Lew 2014), adopted a similar strategy. In Thai, one of four tone

diacritics is placed above the base letter of an akshara to indicate (together with the series

the consonant belongs to as well as syllable structure) which tone is to be pronounced on its

vowel. The names of the diacritics are clearly borrowed from an Indo-Aryan language; the

form of the respective diacritics, though different from Thai numerals, is closely related to

numerals from 1 to 4 in most North Indian scripts but rotated leftward (compare the

Devanagari numerals in Figure 3); these facts taken together seem to indicate that they

were specifically borrowed from a similar source for this purpose.

Name: mai + ek to tri cattawa

Thai tone marks

Devanagari numerals १ २ ३ ४

Thai numerals

Figure 3. Thai tone marks compared with Devanagari numerals

Jawi Arabic script for Malay used the inline Arabic numeral ‹2› to represent word root

reduplication and this was transferred into the older Malaysian and Indonesian Latin script

orthographies. The modern common Malaysian-Indonesian orthography got rid of that

abbreviation, but it is still used fairly often in informal writing. It is also used the same way,

under the name pada pangrangkep, in Javanese script.

The general idea was also adopted in the Makasarese "Jangang-jangang" script, but put to

another use. In South Sulawesi (and by inheritance the Philippines), pairs of syllable with the

same onset and a vowel sign on each could be abbreviated by writing the onset letter once

and doubling the two vowel signs on that letter. Since that didn't work if one akshara was

read with /a/, Makasarese scribes at some point adopted the Arabic number as a simpler-

shaped stand-in for the second letter (except, generally for <n>, which was a simple arch). If

one of the two or both had a vowel other than /a/, then it was marked as usual with the

corresponding vowel sign. The Makasarese parajanjiyana, borrowed from Malay perjanjian

‘treaty, agreement’, is one example of this use of ; instead of repeating the ‹j› letter with its

‹-i› vowel dot above, the vowel dot is placed over the as a stand-in for the more complex

letter.

Arabic ‹2› Jangang-jangang ‹pa.ra.ja. i.ya.na› parajanjiyana

Figure 4. Arabic ‹2› and its use in Makasarese Jangang-jangang spelling as a dummy

character for syllable onset repetition

The way it is used in Jangang-jangang is especially interesting, since like the other Sumatra-

Sulawesi-Philippine scripts, it doesn’t have its own (Indic) numerals and simply spells out

numbers or borrows Arabic or European numerals. There have been various proposals to

add “indigenous” numerals to one or another of these scripts, none of which has ever gained

any ground — though a curious quinary system called angka bejagung i.e. ‘barley-like

numbers’ was used for calculation and record-keeping by some Rejang users of Surat Ulu in

South Sumatra (Jaspan 1967).

There are two other, somewhat different cases of numerals used in a script that rely on the

way Arabic letters are used in the old Aramaic order as numerals, the same way the letters

of Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek and other scripts were used to represent numbers before Arabic-

Indic numerals replaced the older systems for most purposes. However, these two scripts

reverse the situation by using the Arabic-Indic numerals to represent letters.

1. One was a cipher script, apparently developed in India, that used the Arabic

numerals from 1-9 to stand in for Arabic letters. Since Arabic has 28 letters but there

are only 9 numerals (other than 0), the form of the numerals (usually the length of the

stem) changes as they are used for different powers. In the original version of the

cipher, the first series uses 1-9 for the first 9 letters of the abjad order ‹ˀ›, ‹b›, ‹j›, ‹d›,

‹h›, ‹w›, ‹z›, ‹ḥ›, ‹ṭ›, but they are shortened vertically. The same numerals are used

with their normal vertical length for ‹y›, ‹k›, ‹l›, ‹m›, ‹n›, ‹s›, ‹ˁ›, ‹f›, ‹ṣ›), which

correspond to 10-90, and the numerals are then lengthened below the baseline for

‹q›, ‹r›, ‹š›, ‹t›, ‹θ›, ‹x›, ‹ð›, ‹ḍ›, ‹ẓ›, which correspond to 100-900; finally an extra tail

is added at the bottom of 1 for 1000 (i.e. ‹ğ›). A more complex version was adapted

via Jawi Arabic script correspondences to write Malay sounds and then a second

time, via correspondences between Jawi and Bugis-Makasarese script, to write riddle

poetry and secret correspondence in Bugis as Lontara’ bilang-bilang ‘number script’

(Figure 5) .

Figure 5. Explanation of Lontara’ bilang-bilang cipher script from Matthes (1883)

2. The other is Thaana in the Maldives: it uses the Arabic numerals 1-9 for the first five

letters, but their values don’t correspond at all to the corresponding abjad letter.

(However, 9, which looks like Arabic wāw, is used for that letter, like a very few other

non-numeral-based letters in the script that somewhat resemble their Arabic

counterpart.)

haa shaviyani noonu raa baa ḷaviyani kaafu alifu vaavu

Figure 6. Thaana letters and corresponding Arabic numerals (Indo-Persian variants)

These are interesting examples in themselves, but there are no other examples I know of

where numerals are used diacritically, though the semi-systematic graduated use of

one/two/three dots to distinguish letters with the same basic shape in Arabic script, and even

up to four in some of its derivatives (e.g. Sindhi), comes close. The Sourashtran adaptation

of Tamil script fits right in with the kinds of adaptations talked about in Miller (2014):

improving a known but ill-adapted script’s fit to the phonological needs of the language by

borrowing and integrating (parts of) an external system to “fill in the gaps”.

The whole question of the relation of the numeral component to the rest of a script is an

interesting one. It’s quite common for scripts with their own numerals to replace (or

augment) them for some or all purposes with a completely different numeral system (most

usually the Western Arabic-Indic numeral set). It strikes me, for example, how the

Sourashtran text in the wedding invitation uses its own Nagari-derived numerals whereas

the equivalent in Sourashtran Tamil script uses European numerals (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Nagari-derived Sourashtran numerals versus Tamil script use of Arabic-Indic

equivalents

I also find it interesting that modern Sourashtran script abandoned Rāma Rāo’s original use

of subscript conjuncts closely modelled on Telugu. The modern use of a Devanagari-like

halant/virāma below the vowelless letter seems directly modelled on the Tamil puḷḷi dot,

perhaps a concession to the Tamil spelling system most Sourashtrans in Tamil Nadu are

acquainted with. This can be seen in the first word of each of the second and third lines

illustrated in Figure 7: ‹“upamanØyu”› and ‹vilØlāpuramØ›, where I use Ø to stand

respectively for the Sourashtran halant and Tamil puḷḷi zero-vowel signs.

Position of the numeral diacritics and akshara structure

Apart from the fact that the diacritic numerals that distinguish the other three classes of

stops from voiceless non-aspirates are unusual in themselves, their placement in Tamil

script adapted to Sourashtram is worth noting. Rather than appear right next to the base

consonant letter itself, they are placed after any following vowel sign. If the sign appears

above, below or to the left of the letter, the numeral will appear immediately to the base

letter’s right, but in the case of ‹-ā› and ‹-o›, both of which use a detached sign to the right of

the base letter, the diacritic numeral is always placed to that sign’s right, rather than between

the base letter and the following sign. This can be seen in bovni in the first example in Figure

8 and in mhaṭo, beginning the second line.

This relates to another peculiarity of how Tamil script is adapted to spelling Sourashtram.

Apart from the normal Indo-Aryan complement of aspirated stops, voiced and voiceless,

Saurashtram has several aspirated sonorants that are spelled with a diacritic that

immediately follows the consonant letter in Rāma Rao script. This diacritic is found, for

example, in ‹mhu› and ‹rhi› in Rāma Rao (1902) — apparently the normal conjunct

form in that earlier version of the script — and may likely derive originally from a handwritten

variant of Nagari ‹h› similar to the found in some Gujarati Nagari annotations in Avestan

scriptures, by eliminating the adjunct vertical stroke on the left; the ‹h› letter in the quite

different Hāḷivi Sourashtran script appears to derive from a similar shape by starting with the

vertical stroke and following through to the serpentine body with a transitional loop (cf.

Figure 1 in Miller 2014). Figure 8 shows three examples of the modern reformed script’s

spelling of /mh/ and one of /rh/.

viveha rubh mhuhūrtu bovni patriko

mhaṭo mhoṭṭān rhī

Figure 8. Spelling of /rhV/ and /mhV/ in Sourashtran and Tamil Sourashtran scripts

For each Tamil script example in Figure 8, the aspiration is spelled with a visarga (:). Just

like the diacritic numerals, the visarga appears after a postconsonantal vowel sign, which

can be seen in mhoṭṭān on the second line of the figure. In both cases, the structure of the

akshara requires the vowel sign to be directly adjacent to its base consonant letter, with any

diacritics modifying the consonant moved to the end of the sequence of signs making up the

akshara. This is reminiscent of the behaviour of the repha sign for an akshara-initial /r/ in

Devanagari and Gujarati scripts: although it represents a preceding /r/ orthographically

annexed to the onset of the following akshara, it is not always written on the consonant letter

itself (unlike, for example, postconsonantal /r/ in a /pr/ sequence where the combination of

‹p› प with following ‹r› र yields the compound form ): instead, the repha preconsonantal ‹r-›

is written on the rightmost component of an akshara. Thus, when the vowel of the akshara

is long and written with ‹-ā› , ‹-o› , ‹-au› or ‹-ī› , it appears above that vowel sign and

not the letter representing the consonant that it precedes in speech. This can be seen, for

example, in the name Śarmā. (As a learner of Devanagari, I had to force myself not to

read this iconically as /ʃəmɑːr/ rather than /ʃərmɑː/ as the orthography demands!)

Both the Devanagari and Tamil-Sourashtran examples illustrate how the akshara as an

orthographic reflection of the syllable can lead to non-iconic orderings of elements, treating

the C+V sequence as the core. Yet other akshara-based orthographies, such as Lampung,

Surat Ulu and Batak in Sumatra (see Miller 2014), allow the vowel sign to be displaced from

its logical host onto a following consonant letter marked with a “vowel killer” as a syllable

coda. Nonetheless, even in this case, the displaced vowel sign is always immediately

associated with the coda consonant letter and always precedes the “vowel killer” sign. These

conventions can be traced to ultimately arbitrary changes occurring in previous stages of the

evolution of the relevant scripts, but whether any general synchronic ordering constraints

valid for all akshara orthographies exist remains an interesting question for further research.

====

We would like to thank Mr. Obula S. Subramanian who kindly gave us permission to share

his son’s wedding invitation on the Lingua Akshara. Here is a note from him on the

orthography (personal communication, 16.1.16):

Since this script is not taught in Schools, and since almost all Sourashtras know Tamil

language (as they study in schools Tamil and English), we are using Tamil script with

superscript numbers 2,3, and 4 for the consonants ka, ca, Ta, ta and pa since Tamil has

only 18 consonants. Sourashtra language has 35+4 consonant symbols.

We live in Tamil Nadu State of India and almost all Sourashtras are bilinguals knowing Tamil

language besides Sourashtram which they speak in their homes.

References

Dave, I. R. (1976). The Saurashtrians in South India. Their Language, Literature and

Culture. Rajkot: Saurashtra University.

Jaspan, M. (1967). Symbols at work. Aspects of kinetic and mnemonic representation in

Redjang ritual. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 123 (1967) No. 4, 476-516.

Lew, Sigrid (2014). A linguistic analysis of the Lao writing system and its suitability for

minority language orthographies. Writing Systems Research Vol. 6, No. 1, 25-40.

Matthes, B.F. (1883). Eenige Proeven van Boegineze en Makassaarsche Poëzie. The

Hague: Nijhoff (Google Books digital edition).

Miller, C. (2014). Devanagari’s descendants in North and South India, Indonesia and the

Philippines. Writing Systems Research Vol. 6, No. 1, 10-24.

Rāma Rāo, T. M. (1902). Saurāṣṭra-nīti-śambu [A Hundred Saurashtra Moral Maxims].

Madras.

Randle, H. N. (1944). The Saurashtrans of South India. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society

of Great Britain and Ireland, 2, 151–164.

Internet links

“Upamanyu” blog. http://subramanian-obula.blogspot.com/

Subramanian Obula blog. https://plus.google.com/109960219105236913501

Subramanian Obula gallery. https://www.flickr.com/photos/29347649@N02/

Subramanian Obula YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/user/upamanyuoss