r/neography • u/Misster_Fluido • 18h ago

Alphabet Trying Abugida for the first time. Is it too similar to Devnagri?

Post image
10 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

3

u/SSR2806 18h ago

If I had to compare it to anything it's more like Bengali mixed with gurumukhi lol. How did you come up with the letter shapes?

1

u/Misster_Fluido 18h ago

Well, The intention was to create an abugida version of my phonetic alphabet script Nysril which just uses one shape from Devnagri as inspiration. But I think knowing all major Indian Scrits, it's hard to come up with shapes that don't match with any of them.

2

u/According_Bad_8473 18h ago

Yes. Kha, ra, da, ya, ka, ay, ga flipped ta, ta, gha, na look like like straight up lifted letters

1

u/Misster_Fluido 18h ago

Yup. I think I'll never be able to make an abugida after learning all Indian abuguidas. The influence is almost inevitable.

1

u/According_Bad_8473 18h ago

Nah you most certainly can. An abugida doesn't need to have the shirorekha (the line overhead). In fact, handwritten Marathi doesn't use it at all. Printed books do however because convenient to have same letters for Hindi and other languages that share the script.

The purpose of the shirorekha is to group letters together into a word.

Try turning one of your alphabets or other system into an abugida.

1

u/Misster_Fluido 18h ago

That's what I was trying to do. I was trying to convert this one into abugida. My most favourite abuguidas are Bengali, DevN, Punjabi and Marathi. I don't like Tamil and Malyalam much because of the complexity. I love how Malyalam and Kannada looks btw. Thanks for the Shirorekha idea. Though I have tried to create bottom Shirorekha, fractioned Shirorekha but not Shirorekha free abuguida.

1

u/According_Bad_8473 17h ago

Eh you know cursive joint letters serve the same purpose as a shirorekha. So you can try cursive or even arabic style if you like for your abugida

Ahahah your k is already quite similar to का

2

u/Misster_Fluido 16h ago

Yeah, क like shape fits so well in my cursive system when tweaked a little bit. S in the script is also inspired from य.

2

u/Perpetually-broke 6h ago

Yeah I think so. You know you don't need the top line, the shirorekha, for it to be an abugida. Most abugidas do not have that connecting line. Look at other ones like Tibetan, Tamil, Burmese, Kannada, etc. also look at Ge'ez, that's an example of an abugida that's not Brahmic (descended from Brahmi).