From: CE Whitehead (cewcathar@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Jan 09 2011 - 10:22:36 CST
Hi, I have no information on the virama -- but Wikipedia says that it is much like the Arabic sukun (which means "rest" or "pause" in Arabic just as "virama" apparently means "rest" or "pause").
So historically the two terms may be related (this is just a wild idea) -- I've always assumed that "sukun" was the name given to the diacritic by Arabic grammarians and by no one else . . . (I googled on the diacritics and their origin and found Smith, "Dictionary of the Bible," v. 4, http://books.google.com/books?id=kbUOAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA2986&lpg=PA2986&dq=Arabic+grammarians+names+for+vowels+diacritics&source=bl&ots=Sxm6Sth-na&sig=hB7Gn-0ZBW8xXLFo3sUIi0Oez2k&hl=fr&ei=c9gpTezFIIP58Ab9tqj0AQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAg#v
on writing
also Singer, Adler, "The Jewish Encyclopedia"
http://books.google.com/books?pg=PA272&lpg=PA272&dq=Arabic%20grammarians%20names%20for%20vowels%20diacritics&sig=6I5hUsckVTDCFjFPe9AuuRqdrnI&ei=c9gpTezFIIP58Ab9tqj0AQ&ct=result&id=-ZNetFAlF3YC&hl=fr&ots=znqzYdIGgt&output=text
the modern diacritics came into use in by the 5th or 6th century A.D. maybe but maybe were used further back in antiquity in some ways but I'm not sure how they were named).
(To me the Arabic sukun looks exactly like the Arabic-Indic digit 0. -- but the name for 0 does not mean "rest" or "pause" however but "null" -- but I'm sure that this is getting off-topic; wish it helped but . . . .)
What is the origin of the Devangari writing system?
Best,
--C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar@hotmail.com
From: naa.ganesan@gmail.com
Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2011 07:11:48 -0600
Subject: The term called Virama in Unicode - its history in India
To: ctamil@services.cnrs.fr; unicode@unicode.org; glhart@mac.com; gthomgt@comcast.net; Asko.Parpola@helsinki.fi; frabrig@yahoo.it; mmdesh@umich.edu; ashok.aklujkar@ubc.ca; steiner@mailer.uni-marburg.de; witzel@fas.harvard.edu; georg@vonsimson.com; rabe@sxu.edu; dmswh@earthlink.net
Sanskrit grammars written in European languages in the 19th century
use the term, virāma to denote a vowel-killer diacritic to produce
a "dead" consonant - that is the akshara from which the
inherent vowel, /a/ has been deleted.
PiGkalantai nikaNTu in Tamil is the oldest text known from India
to use viraama for the "dead" consonant.
The question is: is it the European Sanskritists (working presumably from
Tamil country) who use the term Viraama for vowel-killing diacritic
in Orthography? Or, do we find the term, Virama as a vowel-deleter, in late centuries
of 2nd millennium Sanskrit grammar or other texts?
Thanks for any info,
N. Ganesan
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bidyut Baran Chaudhuri <bbcisical@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 4:20 AM
Subject: Re: Origin of the Unicode term virāma to denote vowel-killer
Dear all
Let me inform that the meaning of "VirAma" as understood in Eastern India like Bengal is pause or rest, while vowel killer is called "hasanta" very similar to Hindi "Halant".The word "Hal-Varna" means consonant character. "Hal" also means plow. The sign that is used in both Devanagari and Bangla alphabet looks like plow used by the peasants in India (drawn by bullocks).
I too believe like Prof Dashpande that the term "VirAma" used to represent vowel killer sign is pretty modern.
----Bidyut B Chaudhuri
On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 1:20 AM, N. Ganesan <naa.ganesan@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 10:33 AM, Shriramana Sharma <samjnaa@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Given that despite being a student [some say scholar ;)] of Sanskrit I
> am not aware of the native usage of the word virāma for the
> vowel-killer in Indic scripts -- we only call it (somewhat stiltedly)
> "ardhākṣaracihna" ("mark of the half-letter") -- I wonder where this
> actually came to Unicode from. Is it from ISCII?
>
> I have been "educating" the non-Unicode-savvy Sanskrit scholars here
> that the Sanskrit word virāma has been *adapted* by "the Unicode
> people" to denote the ardhākṣaracihna...
>
> Then one day (today?) I find that Burnell himself has used it this way
> in his 1878 Elements of S Indian Palaeography -- p 45:
>
> "... the expression of the absence of the inherent vowel (virāma) ...
> The puḷḷi or dot above the consonant which serves the purpose of the
> virāma ..."
>
> --
> Shriramana Sharma.
>
Obviously, virama was only a phonetic concept in Sanskrit
texts for a long time, only in the late 2nd millennium Sanskrit
grammars talk of it as orthographic (influence from Dravidian?).
It will be interesting to find out if Virama as Vowel killer
was first used by a European (usually a missionary)
or a native Indian pundit.
This is what prof. Madhav Deshpande
(U. of Michigan, Sanskrit and Linguistics) told me many years ago.
----------------------
<<<
The use of the virAma to refer to a written ligature marking subtraction
of vowel 'a' from the consonant sign is very late, and not to be found in
the texts of Sanskrit grammarians. In those works, the term virAma does
exist, but it marks the end of an utterance cf. virAmo 'vasAnam (P. 1.4.
110), or a pause. Its immediate reference is phonetic (cessation of the
phonetic process of utterance), and not orthographic.
>>>
and
"The use of the virAma to refer to a written ligature marking subtraction
of vowel 'a' from the consonant sign is very late, and not to be found in
the texts of Sanskrit grammarians. In those works, the term virAma does
exist, but it marks the end of an utterance cf. virAmo 'vasAnam (P. 1.4.
110), or a pause. Its immediate reference is phonetic (cessation of the
phonetic process of utterance), and not orthographic.
Madhav Deshpande
----------------------------------
Back in early 1970s, an ethnic Tamil & prof. of
Electrical & Computer engineering, V. Rajaraman
and his student did a study to determine the underlying
concept of the design of Brahmi scripts of India. Rajaraman, being
a Tamil, knew the PuLLi concept well as the Virama is explicit
in Tamil, but all other scripts have mostly hidden virama due
to conjunct formation. Later, this paper on computer encoding (7-bit) gave birth to ISCII.
In ISCII, the Virama is called by its Hindi name, "Vowel Omission Sign, Halant"
See Section 4.6, pg. 12:
" 4.6 Vowel Omission Sign: Halant #Â
In Indian scripts consonants are assumed to have an implicit vowel + "a" within them unless an explicit Matra (vowel-sign) is attached. Thus a special sign Halant (#Â) is needed for indicating that the consonant does not have the implicit + vowel in it.
In Northern languages, the Halant at the end of a word generally gets dropped, though the ending still gets pronounced without a vowel. Example: Ashok = +¶ÉÉäEÂò => +¶ÉÉäEò
This doesn't happen in Southern languages and Sanskrit, where a Halant is always used to indicate a vowel-less ending. Example: param={É®ú¨É (Sanskrit word). "
http://varamozhi.sourceforge.net/iscii91.pdf
(correction needed for Devanagari words for readability, I just cut & paste from pdf).
> So it is indeed singular that even in Burnell one
> finds the usage of the term virāma as the vowel-killer.
Tamil texts 1000 years old call the PuLLi 'dot' (Vowel killer)
as Viraama. As A. C. Burnell worked in Tamil country and
South India, he would have heard Virama as vowel
killer. Remember the first European grammar for Sanskrit was written
with Grantha script examples. Hence, the use of
Virama as vowel killer in Whitney (1889, 2nd Ed.) or probably before him.
PiGkalantai nikaNTu (9th century) is the first
Tamil text that defines Viraama as "dead"
consonant with puLLi. See also clear statement on vowel killing:
In the Tiruvaymozi ITu for the 7th decad
"எழுத்து உரு அழியாதே கிடந்தாலும், புள்ளி குத்தினால்
அத்தைக் கழித்து" - vowel deletion in using
Virama/Pulli is mentioned in this quotation.
So, for Virama used as a term for orthography,
Pingalantai is the oldest text in India.
N. Ganesan
--
*****************************************************
Prof. Bidyut B. Chaudhuri FNA, FNAE, FIAPR, FIEEE
J. C. Bose Fellow and Head
Computer Vision & Pattern Recognition Unit
Indian Statistical Institute
203 B. T. Road
Kolkata 700108
West Bengal, India
Phone: (91) (33) 2575 2852
www.isical.ac.in/~bbc
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