A note on numerals in Tamil script Sourashtran orthography, their use in orthographic systems, and the order of signs in the akshara Christopher Miller, February 2016 Numerals in the adaptation of Tamil script to writing Sourashtram Sourashtram is a Indo-Aryan language spoken by a minority population in Tamil Nadu whose historical traditions recount a migration from the Gujarati-Maharashtra region (Dave 1976; Randle 1944) — their name itself harks back to the Saurashtra or Kathiawar peninsula of Gujarat. Their language is closely related to Gujarati and Marathi but its precise relationships remain to be clarified. Traditionally, Sourashtram was written in at least two different scripts closely related to each other, to the Marathi Moḍi script and to Mahajani and other commercial script varieties of North India (Miller 2014). As a minority in Tamil Nadu and before that in Telugu-speaking areas, bilingualism in the majority languages led to Sourashtram being written in Telugu and Tamil scripts as well, and in fact the vowel and final consonant signs of both Sourashtran scripts are largely adapted from the two South Indian scripts. Figure 1. The Obula wedding invitation I recently received a wedding invitation (Figure 1) from Subramanian Obula, who actively promotes Sourashtran language, culture and script with online blogs and videos (see links in references section). The invitation is written for the most part in Sourashtram, but in two different scripts in parallel. The first is the modernised version of the script first put into print by the scholar Rāma Rāo around the turn of the 19th century (Rāma Rāo 1902, inter alia). After each line in Rāma Rāo script, the same Sourashtram-language text is repeated in an adaptation of Tamil script, for the benefit of readers literate in the latter but not the former. Figure 2. Superscript numerals in Tamil script Sourashtran orthography This is an interesting strategy for contrasting voiceless aspirated stops cf. (without marked vowels) /kh/ (spelled க2), voiced unaspirated stops cf. /g/ (spelled க3) and voiced aspirated stops cf. /gh/ (spelled க4 )with voiceless unaspirated stops cf. /k/, (spelled க), a four-way contrast that Sourashtram shares with other Indo-Aryan languages. Since Tamil stops have no phonemic contrasts in voicing or aspiration, Tamil script early abandoned Brahmic letters for those other than the voiceless unaspirated series (k c ṭ t p), which was taken as basic, each letter being the first of its series (varga) in the traditional varṇamālā arrangement. As a result, writing the other three series of Sourashtram stops in Tamil script required some sort of workaround strategy. In itself, using numerals as part of the orthography of a language is unusual, so this seems an appropriate place to review the few cases I know of where they are used to represent the sounds of a language in one way or another. After this, I will come back to the specific way the numerals are ordered relative to the basic vowel and consonant signs, as this is relevant to the structure of the written akshara. Use of Numerals in Scripts It is not uncommon to use numerals in notation systems, and numerals are indeed used to represent the tones of tonal languages, one of the better-known cases being the Wade-Giles romanisation system for Mandarin, largely supplanted by Pinyin Zimu since the 1980s. Where Pinyin represents tones with iconic diacritic accents (xiōng, xióng, xiǒng, xiòng), Wade-Giles simply placed a numeral for each tone (in conventional citation order) at the end of the written syllable (hstiung1, hsiung2, hsiung3, hsiung4). Thai, as well as Lao (Lew 2014), adopted a similar strategy. In Thai, one of four tone diacritics is placed above the base letter of an akshara to indicate (together with the series the consonant belongs to as well as syllable structure) which tone is to be pronounced on its vowel. The names of the diacritics are clearly borrowed from an Indo-Aryan language; the form of the respective diacritics, though different from Thai numerals, is closely related to numerals from 1 to 4 in most North Indian scripts but rotated leftward (compare the Devanagari numerals in Figure 3); these facts taken together seem to indicate that they were specifically borrowed from a similar source for this purpose. Name: mai + ek to tri cattawa Thai tone marks Devanagari numerals १ २ ३ ४ Thai numerals Figure 3. Thai tone marks compared with Devanagari numerals Jawi Arabic script for Malay used the inline Arabic numeral ‹2› to represent word root reduplication and this was transferred into the older Malaysian and Indonesian Latin script orthographies. The modern common Malaysian-Indonesian orthography got rid of that abbreviation, but it is still used fairly often in informal writing. It is also used the same way, under the name pada pangrangkep, in Javanese script. The general idea was also adopted in the Makasarese "Jangang-jangang" script, but put to another use. In South Sulawesi (and by inheritance the Philippines), pairs of syllable with the same onset and a vowel sign on each could be abbreviated by writing the onset letter once and doubling the two vowel signs on that letter. Since that didn't work if one akshara was read with /a/, Makasarese scribes at some point adopted the Arabic number as a simpler- shaped stand-in for the second letter (except, generally for <n>, which was a simple arch). If one of the two or both had a vowel other than /a/, then it was marked as usual with the corresponding vowel sign. The Makasarese parajanjiyana, borrowed from Malay perjanjian ‘treaty, agreement’, is one example of this use of ; instead of repeating the ‹j› letter with its ‹-i› vowel dot above, the vowel dot is placed over the as a stand-in for the more complex letter. Arabic ‹2› Jangang-jangang ‹pa.ra.ja. i.ya.na› parajanjiyana Figure 4. Arabic ‹2› and its use in Makasarese Jangang-jangang spelling as a dummy character for syllable onset repetition The way it is used in Jangang-jangang is especially interesting, since like the other Sumatra- Sulawesi-Philippine scripts, it doesn’t have its own (Indic) numerals and simply spells out numbers or borrows Arabic or European numerals. There have been various proposals to add “indigenous” numerals to one or another of these scripts, none of which has ever gained any ground — though a curious quinary system called angka bejagung i.e. ‘barley-like numbers’ was used for calculation and record-keeping by some Rejang users of Surat Ulu in South Sumatra (Jaspan 1967). There are two other, somewhat different cases of numerals used in a script that rely on the way Arabic letters are used in the old Aramaic order as numerals, the same way the letters of Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek and other scripts were used to represent numbers before Arabic- Indic numerals replaced the older systems for most purposes. However, these two scripts reverse the situation by using the Arabic-Indic numerals to represent letters. 1. One was a cipher script, apparently developed in India, that used the Arabic numerals from 1-9 to stand in for Arabic letters. Since Arabic has 28 letters but there are only 9 numerals (other than 0), the form of the numerals (usually the length of the stem) changes as they are used for different powers. In the original version of the cipher, the first series uses 1-9 for the first 9 letters of the abjad order ‹ˀ›, ‹b›, ‹j›, ‹d›, ‹h›, ‹w›, ‹z›, ‹ḥ›, ‹ṭ›, but they are shortened vertically. The same numerals are used with their normal vertical length for ‹y›, ‹k›, ‹l›, ‹m›, ‹n›, ‹s›, ‹ˁ›, ‹f›, ‹ṣ›), which correspond to 10-90, and the numerals are then lengthened below the baseline for ‹q›, ‹r›, ‹š›, ‹t›, ‹θ›, ‹x›, ‹ð›, ‹ḍ›, ‹ẓ›, which correspond to 100-900; finally an extra tail is added at the bottom of 1 for 1000 (i.e. ‹ğ›). A more complex version was adapted via Jawi Arabic script correspondences to write Malay sounds and then a second time, via correspondences between Jawi and Bugis-Makasarese script, to write riddle poetry and secret correspondence in Bugis as Lontara’ bilang-bilang ‘number script’ (Figure 5) . Figure 5. Explanation of Lontara’ bilang-bilang cipher script from Matthes (1883) 2. The other is Thaana in the Maldives: it uses the Arabic numerals 1-9 for the first five letters, but their values don’t correspond at all to the corresponding abjad letter. (However, 9, which looks like Arabic wāw, is used for that letter, like a very few other non-numeral-based letters in the script that somewhat resemble their Arabic counterpart.) haa shaviyani noonu raa baa ḷaviyani kaafu alifu vaavu Figure 6. Thaana letters and corresponding Arabic numerals (Indo-Persian variants) These are interesting examples in themselves, but there are no other examples I know of where numerals are used diacritically, though the semi-systematic graduated use of one/two/three dots to distinguish letters with the same basic shape in Arabic script, and even up to four in some of its derivatives (e.g. Sindhi), comes close. The Sourashtran adaptation of Tamil script fits right in with the kinds of adaptations talked about in Miller (2014): improving a known but ill-adapted script’s fit to the phonological needs of the language by borrowing and integrating (parts of) an external system to “fill in the gaps”. The whole question of the relation of the numeral component to the rest of a script is an interesting one. It’s quite common for scripts with their own numerals to replace (or augment) them for some or all purposes with a completely different numeral system (most usually the Western Arabic-Indic numeral set).