learning scripts (Was: the farce that is Urdu)

[Allen W Thrasher]

Rajarshi Banerjee said:

<<The different scripts are mainly a change of font.

Given a few days a speaker could read kaithi and devnagari with equal
ease.
I started reading bengali in 2 days with no formal training in the
language,
never having read the script before. Since I could speak the language
I
guessed half the words at first.
 My gujarati friend has the disavantage of being a non speaker but
she can
still read at a slow pace. frequent look up to the alphabet is needed
at
times. But it will only be a few days before she picks up speed.
So leave alone hindi all indian languages have a very standard
script
system.
Sindhi was also written using a brahmi based scripts like khojki.
The
specially modified arabic script for sindhi was designed later.>>

I think people experience radically different degrees of difficulty
in learning new scripts, even if they are based on the same structural
principles.  For instance, one could by the same principle as Banerjee
implies call Greek and Cyrillic "changes of font" from the Latin
script.  There are of course many alphabets based on the Arabic script
but in general the difference in "style" or "calligraphy" or "font"
between these is less than that between the various modern scripts
derived from Brahmi.  I have repeatedly learned other Brahmic scripts
than Nagari but the only one I can read easily without learning over
again each time is Gujarati.

The computer scientist and philosopher Douglas Hofstadter discusses
the question of what is the "essence" or "minimum" of a letter in an
alphabet in one of his books, I forget which.

Some empirical or even just anecdotal research on this might be quite
interesting, and also pertinent to language teaching and language
policy.

Indians may find it easier to learn multiple scripts than some others
because they so often learn two or more scripts from nursery school.
E.g. I have Kashmiri friends whose children learn English, Urdu, and
Hindi and the corresponding scripts from that early age.  I imagine
there are few South Asians who are literate at all nowadays who don't
know the Latin alphabet, whether or not they know English.  I know
Indians of humble station who have had no formal training in English
who can read signs and very brief notes.

I notice that when I tell people my main foreign language is Sanskrit
tthey frequently ask questions that imply the script (about which they
know nothing) must be a major difficulty.

By the way, I would suspect that Khojki was developed by and for
Hindus, in accord with David Dirringer's principle "Language follows
religion."  Frequently the script that is used for a sacred language
is then adopted and adapted for a secular one.  E.g. some Syrian
Christians, particularly I believe the clergy, used the Syriac
alphabet for Malayalam until some time in the last century, because
they learned Syriac first to take part in the liturgy.  Parallels are
numberless in other places.

Allen Thrasher



Allen W. Thrasher, Ph.D.

Senior Reference Librarian       101 Independence Ave., SE
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Email: athr at loc.gov

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