Warang Chiti (also written Varang Kshiti; , IPA: /wɐrɐŋ ʧɪt̪ɪ/) is a writing system invented by Lako Bodra for the

Ho language Ho (, Warang Chiti: ) is a Munda language of the Austroasiatic language family spoken primarily in India by about 2.2 million people (0.202% of India's population) per the 2001 census. It is spoken by the Ho, Munda, Kolha and Kol tribal ...

spoken in

East India East India is a region consisting of the Indian states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal and also the union territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The states of Bihar and West Bengal lie on the Indo-Gangetic plain. Jharkhan ...

. It is used in primary and adult education and in various publications. It has mainly gained acceptance among the easternmost group of speakers, and is more prevalent among those who have been educated in it. Many other speakers prefer oral transmission of knowledge,

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 ...

, or

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

, but Warang Chiti holds prestige among many Ho speakers.

History

Community leader Bodra invented it as an alternative to the writing systems devised by Christian missionaries. He claims that the alphabet was invented in the 13th century by Deowan Turi, and that it was rediscovered in a shamanistic vision and Bodra modernized. Shukla Warang Citi Om

Letters

Warang Citi is quite distinct from other writing systems of India, and it has features of an

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 ...

and an

alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...

. As in

Brahmic abugidas The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout South Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India and are used b ...

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

letters have an

inherent vowel An inherent vowel is part of an abugida (or alphasyllabary) script. It is a vowel sound which is used with each unmarked or basic consonant symbol. There are many known abugida scripts, including most of the Brahmic scripts and Kharosthi, the c ...

, usually /a/ or

/ɔ/ The open-mid back rounded vowel, or low-mid back rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is . The IPA symbol is a turned letter ''c'' ...

but sometimes

/ɛ/ The open-mid front unrounded vowel, or low-mid front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is the Latin epsilon, a Latinized varia ...

. The inherent vowel is not pronounced at the end of the word. Unlike in Brahmic abugidas, and more like in an alphabet, the full vowel letters are always written after the consonant, letters usually don't form ligatures, and there is no

virama Virama ( ्, ) is a Sanskrit phonological concept to suppress the inherent vowel that otherwise occurs with every consonant letter, commonly used as a generic term for a codepoint in Unicode, representing either # halanta, hasanta or explicit vir ...

character. It follows capitalization rules as are done in English and follows English punctuation. There are few ligatures that combine to form new sounds, and there are conjunct consonants that are used as well by stacking in some cases. It is written from

left to right A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independen ...

horizontal line In geometry, a straight line, usually abbreviated line, is an infinitely long object with no width, depth, or curvature, an idealization of such physical objects as a straightedge, a taut string, or a ray of light. Lines are spaces of dimens ...

s. The script begins with the letter Ong, which corresponds to Om in other Brahmic scripts. It has 32 letters in total with capital and small letters.

Numerals

Warang Citi uses its own set of numerals. The digits 0-9 are used in modern writing, but the signs for larger numbers are falling into disuse.

Unicode

Warang Citi was added to the

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 ...

Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0. The Unicode block for Warang Citi is U+118A0–U+118FF. Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points:

References

External links

Noto Sans Warang Chiti
a font made by Google

Alphabets Munda scripts Ho language Constructed scripts {{austroasiatic-lang-stub