The Bharati (

ISO The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Me ...

: Bhārati) script is a constructed script created by a research team led by V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy at

IIT Madras The Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras or IIT-M) is a public technical university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. It is one of the eight public Institutes of Eminence of India. As an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), ...

. It is designed to serve as a common script or link script for Indian languages. It is a left-to-right

abugida An abugida (; from Geʽez: , )sometimes also called alphasyllabary, neosyllabary, or pseudo-alphabetis a segmental Writing systems#Segmental writing system, writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as units; each unit ...

in which the vowel

diacritics 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 ''diacrit ...

may be placed below, upon, or to the right of the primary character. The script borrows characters and concepts from multiple scripts including the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; in script: , , ) is an Indic script used in the Indian subcontinent. It is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental systems: alphabets, writing system), based on the ancient ''Brāhmī script, Brā ...

Tamil script The Tamil script ( ) is an abugida script that is used by Tamils and Tamil language, Tamil speakers in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and elsewhere to write the Tamil language. It is one of the official scripts of the Indian Republic. ...

Telugu script Telugu script (), an abugida from the Brahmic family of scripts, is used to write the Telugu language, a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana as well as several other neighbouring states. It is one ...

Kannada script The Kannada script ( IAST: ''Kannaḍa lipi''; obsolete: Kanarese or Canarese script in English) is an abugida of the Brahmic family, used to write Kannada, one of the Dravidian languages of South India especially in the state of Karnataka. I ...

Malayalam script Malayalam script (; / ) is a Brahmic scripts, Brahmic script used to write Malayalam, the principal language of Kerala, India, spoken by 45 million people. It is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union ter ...

, and the

Bengali–Assamese script The Bengali–Assamese script, sometimes also known as Eastern Nagri, is an eastern Brahmic script, primarily used today for the Bengali and Assamese language spoken in eastern South Asia. It evolved from Gaudi script, also the commo ...

. Like the

Gujarati script The Gujarati script (, transliterated: ) is an abugida for the Gujarati language, Kutchi language, and various other languages. It is one of the official scripts of the Indian Republic. It is a variant of the Devanagari script differentiated b ...

, it does not feature a running horizontal line above the characters, which is a characteristic of the Devanagari and Bengali-Assamese scripts.

Development

Bharati is proposed to be a common script or link script of Indian languages, including both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian language families, much as the

serves as a common script for many

European languages There are over 250 languages indigenous to Europe, and most belong to the Indo-European language family. Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language. The three larges ...

. It may also serve the purpose of providing a written means for tribal languages that do not have a writing system. V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy started this project at

and a research team led by him developed it.

Input and fonts

The Bharati script is supported on all operating systems using fonts created by the Bharati team, namely NavBharati and SundarBharati, which

transliterate Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus '' trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → and → the digraph , Cyrillic → , Armenian → or L ...

characters of supported scripts into their Bharati equivalents. NavBharati is a

TrueType TrueType is an Computer font#Outline fonts, outline font standardization, standard developed by Apple Inc., Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe Inc., Adobe's PostScript fonts#Type 1, Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the ...

sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif (), gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than ...

font which supports transliteration of the Devanagari, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam scripts. SundarBharati is an

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. Derived from TrueType, it retains TrueType's basic structure but adds many intricate data structures for describing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corpora ...

serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ( ...

font which supports transliteration of all of the scripts supported by NavBharati, in addition to the Bengali-Assamese script. Three Android apps are also offered, which can output text in chosen scripts using a Bharati-based keyboard and handwriting, and transliterate other scripts into Bharati. An OCR system for the script has also been developed. It is yet to be added to

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

Mudra Bharati

A finger-spelling system is proposed alongside the Bharati script named Mudra Bharati, for use as a

sign language Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with #Non-manual elements, no ...

. Unlike the American Sign Language convention, Mudra Bharati utilises two hands. A prototype has been developed using

self-organizing map A self-organizing map (SOM) or self-organizing feature map (SOFM) is an unsupervised machine learning technique used to produce a low-dimensional (typically two-dimensional) representation of a higher-dimensional data set while preserving the t ...

s and

convolutional neural network A convolutional neural network (CNN) is a type of feedforward neural network that learns features via filter (or kernel) optimization. This type of deep learning network has been applied to process and make predictions from many different ty ...

s, which can give out characters in Devanagari and Tamil scripts after recognition from Mudra Bharati.

References

External links

* {{list of writing systems Constructed scripts Abugida writing systems

Development

Input and fonts

Mudra Bharati

See also

References

External links