A modern Gurmukhi refinement, doubtless inspired by the Arabic tashdīd used in Urdu orthography, indicates such doubling by a superscript semicircle ( addhik), but its use remains erratic. The doubled consonants so generally retained from Middle Indo-Aryan in Panjabi (unlike most New Indo-Aryan languages) are thus indicated as in Brahmi by writing a single consonant versus the clusters obligatory in Nagari, so Panjabi 〈makhan〉 = makkhan ‘butter’ versus Hindi 〈makkhan〉.

Although the letter shapes of the Gurmukhi script are similar to those of Nagari, its organization is generally closer to the original model of Brahmi than to the classicized norms of Nagari with their insistence on the special writings of consonant groups as graphic clusters. The most successful survivor of this group is the Gurmukhi script ( Shackle, 2003: 594–598), which has sacred associations with their scriptures (Panjabi gurmukhī ‘belonging to the Guru-guided ones’) to the Sikhs, and which is today the standard script for writing Panjabi in India.

Now mostly obsolete, these semi-learned scripts once included the Kaithi script associated with the scribal Kayasth caste of northern India ( Grierson, 1899), the Khojki script of the Khoja Ismaili Muslims of western India ( Shackle and Moir, 1992: 34–42), and the Hindu-Sindhi script abortively promulgated by the British in the late 19th century. There was also formerly in existence a category of fully voweled scripts, again particularly well represented in the northwest, which might be termed ‘semi-learned’ in view of their intermediate typological position between these commercial shorthands on the one hand and the learned northern scripts of the Nagari type on the other. Like most shorthands, they are accordingly easier to write quickly than to read accurately, hence the proverbial misreading of graphic 〈bb 'jmrgy bṛbh bhj djy〉, i.e., bābā ajmēr gayā baṛī bahī bhēj dījiyē ‘the “master has gone to Ajmer, send the big ledger,’ as bābā āj mar gayā baṛī bahū bhēj dījiyē ‘the master died today, send the chief wife!’ ( Grierson, 1899: 3). Best exemplified for the northwest ( Leitner, 1883), these characteristically dispense with most modifying vowel signs, although vowel letters are sometimes erratically inserted as matres lectionis. This is chiefly exemplified by the commercial shorthands ( Figure 4), generically labeled ‘Mahajani’ (Hindi mahājanī ‘mercantile’), which are now increasingly obsolete, but which were formerly used for many centuries as business and revenue scripts in a great variety of regional forms. Before turning to the description of Nagari, the most important modern Indian script, and the one that most fully exemplifies the implications of the Sanskritization of Indian writing, attention may be drawn to a less commonly noticed development in the opposite direction of simplification.

Devanagari alphabet pdf