Scripts

I was in Mexico last week and was quite excited to try my Spanish there. I studied some Spanish 3–4 years ago using Michel Thomas courses, and did a few levels on Duolingo, and combined with my French, I can get a general sense of simple written Spanish, but I had literally zero on-ground speaking experience. There are plenty of Spanish speakers in California, so it’s not difficult at all to find people to chat with if you really care, but it somehow never happened.

I have a lot of interest in writing systems, which is why you will find a lot of posts on this blog around them. A few years ago, I wrote about the Bharati script, which was touted as an attempt to create a universal script for Indian languages. I had expressed measured skepticism about the idea, but had also said I would like to see the script, and luckily, was contacted by Chetan Shenoy, an undergrad from IIT Madras, who works under Prof Chakravarthy, the creator of the script.

A couple of days ago, I came across a few news reports that a professor from IIT Madras (Professor V Srinivas Chakravarthy) has developed a script (called Bharati) to “unify 22 Indian languages”. As a script-enthusiast, I was of course slightly interested. There is a lot of self-congratulatory rhetoric in India about how Indian scripts are very ‘scientific’. On the contrary, the English script (which, in most cases, is the only other kind of script most Indians know) is criticized for being arbitrary, ambiguous, unscientific, what have you.