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Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati and other Indian scripts

Lesson 29 of 34 in Typography.

India's awesome hybrid alphabet thing - History of Writing Systems #10 (Alphasyllabary) · NativLang

Lesson

India has many official scripts and a great many more in use, and they are not variants of one another. Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Telugu, Odia, Malayalam and Gurmukhi each have their own structures, proportions and conventions.

Latin, Devanagari and Arabic aligned to different reference lines.

A rounded base shape with four small marks attaching on each side, and below it two shapes joining into a new combined shape. — A base shape takes small marks above, below, before or after it, and two shapes can fuse into a new one. Many Indian scripts build their syllables this way.

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Question 1, locked
A brand picks a Devanagari font for its packaging that is missing many conjuncts. What will readers see?
- Slightly plainer text that still reads correctly
- Broken or joined-up forms that look plainly wrong
- Text that looks fine, as the system fills the gaps
- Vowel marks that move above every consonant
Question 2, locked
A designer sets Gujarati the way they would set Devanagari, with a line running across the top of each word. What does the lesson say?
- That is correct, as all Indic scripts share the line
- That is fine, as long as the conjuncts are complete
- That suits Gujarati, which came from palm-leaf writing
- Gujarati has no headline, so it will look foreign
Question 3, locked
Most Indian scripts are abugidas. What does that mean?
- A consonant carries a built-in vowel, changed by marks
- Every vowel and every consonant has its own separate letter
- Words hang from a headline running across the top
- Each character stands for a whole word or idea

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