![]() ![]() Many of the Buddhist texts which were taken to China along the Silk Road were written using a version of the Siddhaṃ script. The Semitic origin of the Brahmic scripts is not universally agreed upon. A special mark (virama) can be used to indicate that the letter stands alone with no vowel, which sometimes happens at the end of Sanskrit words. Diacritic marks indicate the other vowels, the pure nasal (anusvāra), and the aspirated vowel (visarga). If no other mark occurs then the short ‘a’ is assumed. Siddhaṃ is an abugida or alphasyllabary rather than an alphabet because each character indicates a syllable, but it does not include every possible syllable. The name arose from the practice of writing the word Siddhaṃ, or Siddhaṃ astu (may there be perfection) at the head of documents. The script is a refinement of the script used during the Indian Gupta Empire. There is some confusion over the spelling: Siddhāṃ and Siddhaṃ are both common, though Siddhaṃ is correct. ![]() It is descended from the Brahmi script via the Gupta script, which also gave rise to the Devanāgarī script as well as a number of other Asian scripts such as Tibetan script. Siddhaṃ (Sanskrit सिद्धं, “accomplished” or “perfected” Tibetanསིད་དྷཾ། Chinese: 悉曇文字 pinyin: Xītán wénzi Japanese: 梵字, bonji Middle Chinese (Baxter-Sagart): sit-dom mjun-dziH), also known in its later evolved form as Siddhamātṛkā, is the name of a North Indian script used for writing Sanskrit during the period ca 600-1200 CE. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |