Telugu script

The Brahmi script 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's relics.^[4][5] Buddhism spread to East Asia from the nearby ports of Ghantasala and Masulipatnam (ancient Maisolos of Ptolemy and Masalia of Periplus).^[6]Kadamba script developed by the Kadamba dynasty was derived from the Brahmi script and later evolved into the Telugu-Kannada script after the 7th century.^[1][7][8] The Telugu and Kannada scripts then separated by around 1300 CE.^[1][9][10] The Muslim historian and scholar Al-Biruni referred to both the Telugu language as well as its script as "Andhri".^[11]

Telugu uses sixteen vowels, each of which has both an independent form and a diacritic 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:

Subscript letters are used in consonant clusters and geminate consonants.

• Additionally there are ౘ (ĉa) and ౙ (ẑa) for /t͡sa, d͡za/ which are rarely used, letters for <c, j> are commonly used instead.^[12] They are referred in Telugu as dantya ca and dantya ja respectively. During the last century, ఱ (ṟa) known as banḍi ra in Telugu has been dropped. This letter is referred to as banḍi ra as opposed to ర (ra) which is referred to as repha.

The letter for a voiced alveolar plosive is found in some inscriptions, it is thought to have been distinguished from the trill ఱ (ṟa) intervocalically rarely; its mostly found after a nasal as in మూన్ౚు (mūnḏu).^[13]

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:

◌఼: Telugu nuqta.

ఽ: Telugu avagraha.

ౝ: Nakaara pollu.

ఀ: The combining candrabindu nasal vowel diacritic of the Telugu script.

ఄ: Combining anusvara above.

౷: Siddham sign.

౿: Tuumu sign.

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 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 and dental

Adhōṣṭa: 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

Abhyantara Prayatnam: Internal effort

Alpaprānam: Unaspirated

Mahāprānam: Aspirated

Śvāsa: Unvoiced

Nādam: Voiced

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 talakattu (the v-shaped headstroke). The following table shows all two-consonant conjuncts and one three-consonant conjunct, but individual conjuncts may differ between fonts. These are referred in Telugu as vattulu (వత్తులు).

The consonants with vowel diacritics are referred to in the Telugu language as guṇintālu (గుణింతాలు). The word Guṇita refers to 'multiplying oneself'. Therefore, each consonant sound can be multiplied with vowel sounds to produce vowel diacritics. The vowel diacritics along with their symbols and names are given below.^[15]

The following table contains the consonants with vowel diacritics in the Telugu language.

NOTE: ౹, ౺, and ౻ are used also for 1⁄64, 2⁄64, 3⁄64, 1⁄1024, etc. and ౼, ౽, and ౾ are also used for 1⁄256, 2⁄256, 3⁄256, 1⁄4096, etc.^[16]

Telugu script was added to the Unicode 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, where one Unicode code point represents the glyph for one syllable, Telugu combines multiple code points to generate the glyph for one syllable, using complex font rendering rules.^[17][18]

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.^[19][20] 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.^[21]

• Telugu Braille
• Kannada script
• Sinhala script
• Grantha script
• ISO 15919

• Ethnologue Languages of the World - Telugu
• Microsoft - Telugu Input tool
• OLAC resources in and about the Telugu language
• Omniglot - Telugu script
• Telugu to English Dictionary
• Telugu Alphabets