The Indic Scripts

This Volume Is The First Attempt To Cross-Fertilize Palaeography And Linguistics In The Ongoing Research On Brahma And Its Daughter Scripts Used In The Present-Day India. The Palaeographic Papers Cover The Main Issues In The Decipherment Of The Indus Valley Script, And The Linguistic Papers Explore The Issues Of The Roots Of The Orthographic Unit Akshara In Vedic Phonetics. Palaeographers Epigraphists, Linguists And Computational Scientists, Will Find This Volume Interesting And Useful.

This is the first comprehensive text on Optical Character Recognition for Indic scripts. It covers many topics and describes OCR systems for eight different scripts—Bangla, Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Gujarti, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Urdu.

The Therīgāthā is one of the oldest surviving literatures by women, composed more than two millennia ago and originally collected as part of the Pali canon of Buddhist scripture. These poems were written by some of the first Buddhist women—therīs—honored for their religious achievements. Through imaginative verses about truth and freedom, the women recount their lives before ordination and their joy at attaining liberation from samsara. Poems of the First Buddhist Women offers startling insights into the experiences of women in ancient times that continue to resonate with modern readers. With a spare and elegant style, this powerful translation introduces us to a classic of world literature.

The authors show that Indian languages derive strongly from the ethnic community or the territory in which the language is used. They investigate the distribution of different language families, the larger spread of languages such as Hindi, Marwari, Urdu and Telugu, language-contactsituations, and bilingualism.

Calligraphic History and Mystic Function of the Brahmi Writing System

The Therīgāthā, composed more than two millennia ago, is an anthology of poems in the Pali language by and about the first Buddhist women. These women were therīs, the senior ones, among ordained Buddhist women, and they bore that epithet because of their religious achievements. The poems they left behind are arguably among the most ancient examples of women's writing in the world and they are unmatched for their quality of personal expression and the extraordinary insight they offer into the lives of women in the ancient Indian past--and indeed, into the lives of women as such. This new version of the Therīgāthā, based on a careful reassessment of the major editions of the work and printed in the Roman script common for modern editions of Pali texts, offers the most powerful and the most readable translation ever achieved in English. The Murty Classical Library of India makes available original texts and modern English translations of the masterpieces of literature and thought from across the whole spectrum of Indic languages over the past two millennia in the most authoritative and accessible formats on offer anywhere.

This book provides a general survey of all the inscriptional material in the Sanskrit, Prakrit, and modern Indo-Aryan languages, including donative, dedicatory, panegyric, ritual, and literary texts carved on stone, metal, and other materials. This material comprises many thousands of documents dating from a range of more than two millennia, found in India and the neighboring nations of South Asia, as well as in many parts of Southeast, central, and East Asia. The inscriptions are written, for the most part, in the Brahmi and Kharosthi scripts and their many varieties and derivatives. Inscriptional materials are of particular importance for the study of the Indian world, constituting the most detailed and accurate historical and chronological data for nearly all aspects of traditional Indian culture in ancient and medieval times. Richard Salomon surveys the entire corpus of Indo-Aryan inscriptions in terms of their contents, languages, scripts, and historical and cultural significance. He presents this material in such a way as to make it useful not only to Indologists but also non-specialists, including persons working in other aspects of Indian or South Asian studies, as well as scholars of epigraphy and ancient history and culture in other regions of the world.

This book is intended to facilitate access to the amazing wealth of documents written in the five major South Indian scripts. It focusses on the South Indian Sanskrit tradition, but also takes into account the modern alphabets of the respective Dravidian languages. The sometimes bewildering variety of the five scripts is mapped out in altogether c. 5200 basic characters, ligatures (i.e., vocalizations), conjuncts/consonant clusters, numerals, abbreviations etc. Special care has been taken to break down the complexity of Grantha Tamil in a system of graphic classification.The material surveyed comprises Sanskrit manuscripts as well as the Southern tradition of Sanskrit printing, and books in Dravidian languages (including Tranquebar prints).