Hosta

This article contains Indic text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks or boxes, misplaced vowels or missing conjuncts instead of Indic text.

Telugu script, an abugida from the Brahmic family of scripts, is used to write the Telugu language, a language found in the South-Central Indian state of Andhra Pradesh as well as several other neighboring states. The Telugu script is derived from the Bhattiprolu script. It gained prominence during Vengi Chalukyan era.^[1]

Derivation from Brahmi script

The Brahmi script used by Mauryan kings eventually reached Krishna River delta and gave rise to Bhattiprolu script found on the urn containing Buddha's relics.^[2][3] Buddhism spread to east Asia from the nearby ports of Ghantasala and Masulipatnam (ancient Maisolos of Ptolemy and Masalia of Periplus).^[4] The Bhattiprolu Brahmi script evolved into the Telugu script by 5th century C.E.^{[5][6][7][8][9][10][11]}

The Muslim historian and scholar Al-Biruni called the Telugu language and script Andhri.^[12]

Vowels

Telugu uses fourteen vowels, each of which has both a singular form and a diacritic form used with consonants to create syllables. It is important to note that this language does make a distinction between short and long vowels.

The singular form is used when the vowel occurs at the beginning of a word or syllable, or is a complete syllable in itself (example: a, u, o). The diacritic form is added to consonants (represented by the dotted circle) to form a consonant-vowel syllable (example: ka, kru, mo). అ does not have a diacritic form, because this vowel is already inherent in all of the consonants. The other diacritic vowels are added to consonants to change their pronunciation to that of the vowel.

Examples:

Consonants

Ligatures

Other diacritics

There are also several other diacritics used in the Telugu script. ్ mutes the vowel of a consonant, so that only the consonant is pronounced. ం and ఁ nasalize the vowels or syllables to which they are attached. ః adds a voiceless breath after the vowel or syllable it is attached to.

Examples:

Numerals

NOTE: ౹, ౺, and ౻ are used also for ¹⁄₆₄, ²⁄₆₄, ³⁄₆₄, ¹⁄₁₀₂₄, etc. and ౼, ౽, and ౾ are also used for ¹⁄₂₅₆, ²⁄₂₅₆, ³⁄₂₅₆, ¹⁄₄₀₉₆, etc.^[13]

Unicode

Telugu script was added to the Unicode Standard in October, 1991 with the release of version 1.0.

The Unicode block for Telugu is U+0C00–U+0C7F. Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points:

In contrast to a syllabic script such as katakana, where one Unicode code point represents the glyph for one syllable, Telugu combines multiple code points to generate the glyph for one syllable, using complex font rendering rules.^[14][15]

References

External links

• Useful and authenticated information about Telugu
• Telugu Association Inc. Sydney Australia. Celebration of Telugu Culture in Sydney
• Omniglot - Telugu script
• Microsoft - Telugu Input tool
• Telugu to English Dictionary