Cham alphabet

The Cham script is a Brahmic abugida used to write Cham, an Austronesian language spoken by some 245,000 Chams in Vietnam and Cambodia. It is written horizontally left to right, just like other Brahmic abugidas.

History

The Cham script is a descendant of the Brahmi script of India.Cham. In ''The Unicode Standard, Version 11.0'' (p. 661). Mountain View, CA: Unicode Consortium. Cham was one of the first scripts to develop from a script called the Pallava script some time around 200 CE. It came to Southeast Asia as part of the expansion of Hinduism and Buddhism. Hindu stone temples of the Champa civilization contain both Sanskrit and Chamic language stone inscriptions.Thurgood, Graham. ''From Ancient Cham to Modern Dialects: Two Thousand Years of Language Contact and Change''. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. The earliest inscriptions in Vietnam are found in Mỹ Sơn, a temple complex dated to around 400 CE. The oldest inscription is written in faulty Sanskrit. After this, inscriptions alternate between Sanskrit and the Cham language of the times.Claude, Jacques. "The Use of Sanskrit in the Khmer and Cham Inscriptions." In Sanskrit Outside India (Vol. 7, pp. 5-12). Leiden: Panels of the VIIth World Sanskrit Conference. 1991.

Cham kings studied classical Indian texts such as the ''Dharmaśāstra'' and inscriptions make reference to Sanskrit literature. Eventually, while the Cham and Sanskrit languages influenced one another, Cham culture assimilated Hinduism, and Chams were eventually able to adequately express the Hindu religion in their own language. By the 8th century, the Cham script had outgrown Sanskrit and the Cham language was in full use. Most preserved manuscripts focus on religious rituals, epic battles and poems, and myths.

Modern Chamic languages have the Southeast Asian areal features of monosyllabicity, tonality, and glottalized consonants. However, they had reached the Southeast Asia mainland disyllabic and non-tonal. The script needed to be altered to meet these changes.

Variety

The Cham now live in two groups: the Western Cham of Cambodia and the Eastern Cham (Phan Rang Cham) of Vietnam. For the first millennium AD, the Chamic languages were a dialect chain along the Vietnam coast. The breakup of this chain into distinct languages occurred once the Vietnamese pushed south, causing most Cham to move back into the highlands while some like Phan Rang Cham became a part of the lowland society ruled by the Vietnamese. The division of Cham into Western and Phan Rang Cham immediately followed the Vietnamese overthrow of the last Cham polity. The Western Cham people are mostly Muslim and therefore prefer the Arabic script. The Eastern Cham are mostly Hindu and continued to use the Indic script. During French colonial times, both groups had to use the Latin alphabet.

There are two varieties of the Cham script: ''Akhar Thrah'' (Eastern Cham) and ''Akhar Srak'' (Western Cham). The two are distinct enough to be encoded in separate blocks. A standard ALA-LC romanization of both varieties, which is based on EFEO romanization of Cham, is available.

Usage

The script is highly valued in Cham culture, but this does not mean that many people are learning it. There have been efforts to simplify the spelling and to promote learning the script, but these have met with limited success. Traditionally, boys learned the script around the age of twelve when they were old and strong enough to tend to the water buffalo. However, women and girls did not typically learn to read.Blood, Doris E. "The Script as a Cohesive Factor in Cham Society". In ''Notes from Indochina on ethnic minority cultures''. Ed. Marilyn Gregerson. 1980 p35-44. The traditional Indic Cham script is still known and used by Vietnam's Eastern Cham but no longer by the Western Cham.Akbar Husain, Wim Swann ''Horizons of Spiritual Psychology'' 2009 - Page 28 "The traditional Cham script, based on an Indian script, is still known and used by the Eastern Cham in Vietnam, but it has been lost by the Western Cham. The Cham language is also non-tonal. Words may contain one, two, or three syllables."

Structure

Similar to other abugidas, the consonants of Cham have the inherent vowel. Dependent vowel diacritics are used to modify the inherent vowel. Since Cham does not have '' virāma'', special characters should be used for pure consonants. This practice is similar to the ''chillu consonants'' of the Malayalam script.

Most consonant letters, such as , , or , includes an inherent vowel which does not need to be written. The nasal stops, , , , and (the latter two transliterated ''ny'' and ''ng'' in the Latin alphabet) are exceptions, and have an inherent vowel (transliterated ''â''). A diacritic called ''kai,'' which does not occur with the other consonants, is added below a nasal consonant to write the vowel.

Cham words contain vowel and consonant-vowel (V and CV) syllables, apart from the last, which may also be CVC. There are a few characters for final consonants in the Cham script; other consonants merely extend a longer tail on the right side to indicate the absence of a final vowel.

Consonants

Medial consonants

Final consonants

Cham does not employ a virama to suppress vowels. Final consonants are indicated in one of three ways: an explicit final consonant letter, a combining diacritic mark, or by .

Independent vowels

Six of the initial vowels are represented with unique letters:

Dependent vowels

Other initial vowels are represented by adding a diacritic to the letter (a). The same diacritics are used with consonants to change their inherent vowel:

Numerals

Cham has a distinctive set of digits:

Other symbols

Unicode

Cham script was added to the Unicode Standard in April, 2008 with the release of version 5.1.

The Unicode block for Cham is U+AA00–U+AA5F:

Notes

References

Bibliography

*
*
*Blood, Doris (1980a). Cham literacy: the struggle between old and new (a case study). ''Notes on Literacy'' 12, 6-9.
*Blood, Doris (1980b). The script as a cohesive factor in Cham society. In ''Notes from Indochina'', Marilyn Gregersen and Dorothy Thomas (eds.), 35-44. Dallas: International Museum of Cultures.
*Blood, Doris E. 2008. The ascendancy of the Cham script: how a literacy workshop became the catalyst. ''International Journal of the Sociology of Language'' 192:45-56.
*Brunelle, Marc. 2008. Diglossia, Bilingualism, and the Revitalization of Written Eastern Cham. ''Language Documentation & Conservation'' 2.1: 28-46. (Web based journal)
*Moussay, Gerard (1971). ''Dictionnaire Cam-Vietnamien-Français''. Phan Rang: Centre Culturel Cam.
*Trankell, Ing-Britt and Jan Ovesen (2004). Muslim minorities in Cambodia. NIASnytt 4, 22-24. (Also on Web)
*R. Malatesha Joshi, Catherine McBride(2019). Handbook of Literacy in Akshara Orthography

External links

Omniglot Entry on Cham

more info on Cham alphabet (in Spanish)

Brunelle's article

Conservation of Cham language and script on Lauthara.org
* https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2022/22095-western-cham.pdf

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cham Script
Brahmic scripts