Moḍī (मोडी) is one of the scripts used to write the Marathi language, which is the primary language spoken in the state of Maharashtra in western India. There are several theories about the origin of this script. One of them claims that it was developed by Hemadpant (or Hemadri Pandit) during the reign of Mahadev Yadav and Ramdev Yadav (1260–1309). Others claim that it was brought by Hemandpant from Sri Lanka. It is a popular notion that only Marathi is written in Modi. Other languages that have also been found to have been written in Modi are Urdu, Kannada, Gujarati, Hindi and Tamil.
Primarily this epithet has most probably been derived from the verb "modane" (मोडणे) meaning to break in Marathi. Modi is essentially prepared by breaking original Devanagari characters and so that should be considered the proper etymology however, there are also other experts who believe that the word 'Modi' could have been derived from the word 'Mouryi' which indicates the origin or derivation of Modi from an earlier 'Mouryi' script used during the reign of the Maurya dynasty who ruled India during 322–185 BCE. However, there is no resemblance in these two scripts so that this opinion is no more considered valid. Modi was developed as a faster way of writing Marathi as compared to the more complicated Devanagari script. This was done by "breaking" some of the characters of the alphabet (to make them simpler) and also by making them more "circular"[1] in shape, which aided in moving from one character to the next without lifting the pen from the paper. Thus, Modi was a sort of "cursive" style of writing Marathi, although reading it may not have been as easy.
Modi has had a major use as a shorthand script for faster writing in business and other administration. Modi does not take account of vowel length, and does not include conjunct consonants like Devanagari and some other Indic scripts.
A Modi clip font kotem1 developed by Ashok Kothare, is now available.
Even today most of the printed material in Modi is handwritten. Using offset printing machines, previously Lithography printing was in vogue. However, Devanagari has been the main script for all Marathi literature and other writings from the beginning. Modi was used primarily by political and administrative people as well as businessmen in keeping their accounts and writing Hundis. Modi was also used to encrypt the message since not all people were well versed in reading this script. All Marathi writing has been written and printed in the Devanagari script, which is the same script as is used to write Hindi and some other Indian languages.
Some linguists in Pune have recently begun trying to revive the script. There is a project underway to encode Modi in the Unicode standard.[2][3]
See also
References
- ^ Cursive
- ^ Pandey, Anshuman. 2009. Preliminary Proposal to Encode the Modi Script in ISO/IEC 10646
- ^ Pandey, Anshuman. 2010. Revised Code Chart and Names List for the Modi Script
External links
- Modi Script Resources
- Modi at Omniglot
- Modi at Ancient Scripts
- Site on Modi Script(Marathi)
- Orkut Group dedicated for the preservation of the script
- Site for learning Modi Script
|
|
|||||
Recent Comments