Telugu script ( te, తెలుగు లిపి, Telugu lipi), an

abugida An abugida (, from Ge'ez language, Ge'ez: ), sometimes known as alphasyllabary, neosyllabary or pseudo-alphabet, is a segmental Writing systems#Segmental writing system, writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units; ...

from the Brahmic family of scripts, is used to write the

Telugu language Telugu (; , ) is a Dravidian language spoken by Telugu people predominantly living in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, where it is also the official language. It is the most widely spoken member of the Dravidian language f ...

, a Dravidian language spoken in the

India India, officially the Republic of India ( Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the ...

n states of

Andhra Pradesh Andhra Pradesh (, abbr. AP) is a state in the south-eastern coastal region of India. It is the seventh-largest state by area covering an area of and tenth-most populous state with 49,386,799 inhabitants. It is bordered by Telangana to t ...

and

Telangana Telangana (; , ) is a state in India situated on the south-central stretch of the Indian peninsula on the high Deccan Plateau. It is the eleventh-largest state and the twelfth-most populated state in India with a geographical area of and ...

as well as several other neighbouring states. The Telugu script is also widely used for writing

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominalization, nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cul ...

texts and to some extent the Gondi language. It gained prominence during the Eastern Chalukyas also known as Vengi Chalukya era. It shares extensive similarities with the Kannada script, as they both evolved from the Kadamba and Bhattiprolu scripts of the Brahmi family. In 2008, the Telugu language was given the status of a Classical Language of India, in recognition of its rich history and heritage.

History

The

Brahmi script Brahmi (; ; ISO 15919, ISO: ''Brāhmī'') is a writing system of ancient South Asia. "Until the late nineteenth century, the script of the Aśokan (non-Kharosthi) inscriptions and its immediate derivatives was referred to by various names such ...

used by Mauryan kings eventually reached the Krishna River delta and would give rise to the Bhattiprolu script found on an urn purported to contain Lord

Buddha Siddhartha Gautama, most commonly referred to as the Buddha, was a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in South Asia during the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism. According to Buddhist tradition, he was born in ...

's relics.

Buddhism Buddhism ( , ), also known as Buddha Dharma and Dharmavinaya (), is an Indian religion or philosophical tradition based on teachings attributed to the Buddha. It originated in northern India as a -movement in the 5th century BCE, and ...

spread to

East Asia East Asia is the eastern region of Asia, which is defined in both geographical and ethno-cultural terms. The modern states of East Asia include China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan. China, North Korea, South Korea ...

from the nearby ports of

Ghantasala Ghantasala may refer to: People * Ghantasala (musician) (Ghantasala Venkateswara Rao, 1922-1974), Telugu singer and composer * Ghantasala Balaramayya (1906 - after 1952), Telugu film producer and director * Ghantasala Sai Srinivas, professionally ...

and Masulipatnam (ancient Maisolos of

Ptolemy Claudius Ptolemy (; grc-gre, Πτολεμαῖος, ; la, Claudius Ptolemaeus; AD) was a mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist, who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were of import ...

and Masalia of Periplus). The Bhattiprolu Brahmi script evolved into the Kadamba script by the 5th century, which in turn developed into the Kannada-Telugu script (or old Kannada script) after the 7th century. The Kannada and Telugu scripts then separated by around 1300 C.E.Indian Epigraphy: a guide to the study of inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the other Indo-Aryan languages, by Richard Solomon, Oxford University Press, 1998, p.41, The Muslim historian and scholar Al-Biruni referred to both the Telugu language as well as its script as "Andhri".

Vowels

Telugu uses eighteen

vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (l ...

s, each of which has both an independent form and a

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...

form used with consonants to create syllables. The language makes a distinction between short and long vowels. The independent 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, kr̥, 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

* Additionally there are ౘ (ĉa) and ౙ (za) for /t͡sa, d͡za/.

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:

Places of articulation

There are five classifications of passive articulations: : Kaṇṭhya: Velar : Tālavya: Palatal : Mūrdhanya: Retroflex : Dantya: Dental : Ōshtya: Labial Apart from that, other places are combinations of the above five: : Dantōsthya: Labio-dental (E.g.: v) : Kantatālavya: E.g.:

Diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech ...

e : Kantōsthya: labial-velar (E.g.: Diphthong o) There are three places of active articulation: : Jihvāmūlam: tongue root, for velar : Jihvāmadhyam: tongue body, for palatal : Jihvāgram: tip of tongue, for

cerebral Cerebral may refer to: * Of or relating to the brain * Cerebrum, the largest and uppermost part of the brain * Cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the cerebrum * Retroflex consonant, also referred to as a cerebral consonant, a type of consonant so ...

and dental : : lower lip, for labial The attempt of articulation of consonants (Uccāraṇa Prayatnam) is of two types, : Bāhya Prayatnam: External effort :: Spṛṣṭa: Plosive :: Īshat Spṛṣṭa: Approximant :: Īshat Saṃvṛta:

Fricative A fricative is a consonant manner of articulation, produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two Place of articulation, articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the ba ...

: Abhyantara Prayatnam: Internal effort :: Alpaprānam: Unaspirated :: Mahāprānam: Aspirated :: Śvāsa: Unvoiced :: Nādam: Voiced

Articulation of consonants

Articulation of consonants is the logical combination of components in the two prayatnams. The below table gives a view upon articulation of consonants. The Telugu script has generally regular conjuncts, with trailing consonants taking a subjoined form, often losing the tallakattu (the v-shaped headstroke). The following table shows all two-consonant conjuncts and one three-consonant conjunct, but individual conjuncts may differ between fonts.

Numerals

NOTE: , , and are used also for , , , , etc. and , , and are also used for , , , , etc.

Unicode

Telugu script was added to the

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

Standard in October, 1991 with the release of version 1.0. The Unicode block for Telugu is U+0C00–U+0C7F: In contrast to a syllabic script such as

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived f ...

, where one Unicode

code point In character encoding terminology, a code point, codepoint or code position is a numerical value that maps to a specific character. Code points usually represent a single grapheme—usually a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or whitespace—bu ...

represents the

glyph A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...

for one syllable, Telugu combines multiple

s to generate the glyph for one syllable, using complex font rendering rules.

iOS character crash bug

On February 12, 2018 a bug in the iOS operating system was reported that caused iOS devices to crash if a particular Telugu character was displayed. The character is a combination of the characters "జ", "్", "ఞ", "ా" and The Zero-Width Non-Joiner character which looks combined like this "జ్ఞా". Apple confirmed a fix for iOS 11.3 and macOS 10.13.4.

References

External links

Ethnologue Languages of the World - Telugu

Microsoft - Telugu Input tool

OLAC resources in and about the Telugu language

Telugu to English DictionaryTelugu Alphabets
{{DEFAULTSORT:Telugu Alphabet Brahmic scripts Abugida writing systems Officially used writing systems of India