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[Peter D Banos]

On Tue, 20 Feb 1996 AmitaSarin at aol.com wrote:

> What is the relnship, if any, between Islamic chronograms and numerical
> values of Devanagiri consonants?  Which came first?  Did they develop
> independantly?  Are chronograms also composed in Hindi?

The Islamic chorongrams are based on a particular alphabetical order, 
"abjad," which is very different from that normally used for Arabic 
(Alif, ba, ta...) but is close to that used in other Semitic languages 
particularly Hebrew (Aleph, beth, gimel, daleth...). In fact I believe it 
works almost exactly the way the Hebrew chronographic system does. This 
would mean its origins are somewhere in the pre-Islamic Middle East.
I do not know of any Indic system that works the same way; but I've never 
looked into the question much and someone on the list probably knows better.

						-Peter D. Banos
						pdb1 at columbia.edu