This volume presents the advances in the ongoing research on Brahmi and its daughter scripts used in the present day India. It brings together two main trends: evolutionary-historical development and linguistic grounding. This is the first attempt to cross-fertilize palaeography and linguistics. The palaeographic papers cover the main issues in the decipherment of the Indus Valley script, the origin and evolution of Brahmi, and the palaeographic methods and considerations employed in the decipherment of scripts. These present different trends and arguments of writers on the origin of Brahmi as having been around the Mauryan era or at a much earlier stage, relate to broader historical and cultural issues. They also deal with the need for the use of established and more current palaeographic techniques in classifying regional and stylistic variants of scripts. The linguistic papers in the volume explore the issues of the roots of the orthographic unit aksara in Vedic phonetics, its claim as a minimal articulatory phonetic unit, and the properties of Brahmi as a generative writing system. The philosophical and linguistic underpinning of the concept aksara is shown to thread its use in the varieties of treatises, from the Vedas to phonetic texts. The papers help in providing linguistic evidence for historical accounts of the script as an invention at a given time or as an evolving evolutionary system, apart from relating the development of the script to the linguistic history of India. Palaeographers-epigraphists, linguists and computational scientists, will find this volume interesting and useful.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR P.G. Patel
Purushottam G. Patel, Specialized in Psycholinguistics-Neurolinguistics for his PhD at the University of Alberta. This background is reflected in his recent monograph, Reading Acquisition in India: Models of Learning and Dyslexia. Previously he co-authored with Donald G. Doehring the book Reading Disabilities: The Interaction of Reading, Neuropsychological and Language Deficits. At the moment he is working on the draft manuscript of The Brahmi Writing System: Ancient Indian Phonetics with Modern Currency.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Pramod Pandey
Pramod Kumar Sudhakar Pandey, with research degrees in English and Linguistics, was awarded with Third world Linguists Award (The Hague), Nuffield Foundation Travelling Fellowship (Yord, England), 1987 Linguistic Institute Fellowship (Stanford University) and Rockefellar Foundation Residency Fellowship (Bellagio, Italy). His research interests are: Phonetics-Phonology-Morphology, Historical Linguistics, Writing Systems and Applied Linguistics.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rajgor .
Dr. Rajgor received his Master's Degree in Indian History, Culture and Archaeology with a Post-graduate Diploma in Linguistics from the M.S. University of Baroda. He holds doctorate in Numismatics from the University of Bombay. He has edited the Khabarnama and the ICS newsletter from 1987-94. His published works include Standard Catalogue of Sultanate Coins of India (1991); and Studies in the Coinage of the Western Kshtrapas (with Amiteshwar Jha in 1994). Numismatic Heritage of Early Historic Gujarat; and Janapada Coins of Buddist India. He is currently completing linguistic analysis of Brahmi script. He has participated in various international and national seminars and conferences and has contributed forty-five research papers to different journals and books He has also been awarded the Lowick Memorial Grant of the Royal Numismatic Society, U.K. in 1991; and the Indological Fellowship of the Asiatic Society of Bombay in 1994.
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