Use of Devanagari for Sanskrit
George Hart
glhart at BERKELEY.EDU
Tue Sep 4 19:40:55 UTC 2007
In a draft about unicode Eric Muller has written "By the eleventh
century, the modern script known as Devanagari was in ascendancy in
India proper as the major script of Sanskrit literature." This seems
wrong to me -- certainly, in South India grantha, Telugu, Malayalam
and Kannada scripts continued to be used for Sanskrit into the 20th
century and, to some extent, are still used (e.g. by priests in the
Murugan temple in Concord, CA). I would be interested in getting
some feedback on this matter -- when and where did Devanagari become
standard for Sanskrit? I would guess that it begins fairly early in
the North and only reaches South India in the 20th century. Many
years ago, I purchased 2 large collections of Sri Vaisnava books from
the estates of two devotees who had passed away (their children had
no use for them, sadly). The books, all of which were published in
the first half of the 20th century, include perhaps 1/3 Sanskrit
texts. Of these about 1/10 are in devanagari, 75% are in Telugu
script and 15% are in grantha. The collections also include a large
number (30%) of Tamil books printed in Telugu script -- which enables
one to write Sanskrit phonemes which are not represented in the Tamil
script. The rest are Tamil books in Tamil script, with Sanskrit
(quoted and used liberally by commentators) generally in grantha. It
is worth remembering that after 1100 or so, the majority of Sanskrit
writers have been South Indians -- at least that is what I have
read. George Hart
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