Scripts (Re: SV: Workshop on Islamicate Culture)

[Allen W Thrasher]

>>> Swaminathan Madhuresan <smadhuresan at YAHOO.COM> 03/15 9:52 AM >>>
This is a request for info from the venerable list.

1. Is Gurmukhi script given any patronage by Punjabis?   YES.  It is
the official script for Panjabi in India, as a Scheduled Language.
How are the administrative affairs conducted in print?
Gurmukhi? YES.

2. Does Marathi have a historic script? Or, is it the same
as Devanagari? If there was a switch, when?

It is Devanagari, with some variations in letter forms from that used
in North India.

3. Is Maithili still used by Bihar pundits?

4. What about Kashmir? Is it made into Devanagari script now?
Urdu or Sarada?

The most common script for it is Perso-Arabic.  The administrative
language of Jammu and Kashmir State is Urdu, which is taught much more
in the schools than Kashmiri.  Printing in Sarada continued into the
20th c. but as far as I can find has been extinct for some decades.
Traditional Kashmiri Hindu poetry I believe tends to be printed in
Nagari.  Kashmiri poetry is now usually in Perso-Arabic but may also
be printed in Nagari and even Roman (I am referring to printing for
Kashmiris, not scholarly or language instruction works for a foreign
or cosmopolite audience).  In neither of these is there a settled and
agreed upon system to deal with sounds peculiar to Kashmiri, of which
there are a good number.

There are eds. of Hindu, particularly Kashmiri Shaiva, religious
classics in Sanskrit that are both in Nagari and Arabic script, the
Arabic script version starting at the 'back' of the book if the
binding is held to the left.

Allen Thrasher

Thanks.


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