The Pyu script is a writing system used to write the Pyu language, an extinct Sino-Tibetan language that was mainly spoken in present-day central

Burma Myanmar, officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar; and also referred to as Burma (the official English name until 1989), is a country in northwest Southeast Asia. It is the largest country by area in Mainland Southeast Asia and ha ...

. It was based on the

Brahmi Brahmi ( ; ; ISO: ''Brāhmī'') is a writing system from ancient India. "Until the late nineteenth century, the script of the Aśokan (non-Kharosthi) inscriptions and its immediate derivatives was referred to by various names such as 'lath' or ...

-based scripts of both north and south India. The best available evidence suggests that the Pyu script gradually developed between the 2nd and 6th centuries CE. The Pyu script's immediate precursor appears to be the Kadamba script of southwest India. The early period Pyu inscriptions always included interlinear Brahmi scripts. It was not until the 7th and 8th centuries that Sri Ksetra's inscriptions appeared all in the Pyu script, without any interlinear Brahmi.Aung-Thwin, pp. 35–36 Many of the important inscriptions were written in Sanskrit and Pali, alongside the Pyu script. The Pyu sites have yielded a wide variety of Indian scripts ranging from Ashokan

script and Tamil Brahmi script, both dated to the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, to the Gupta script and Kadamba script dated to the 4th to 6th centuries CE.Harvey, p. 4 The Pyu script is presently not in

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 ...

. Its inclusion was proposed in 2010, and has tentative placement in the Unicode Consortium's roadmap.

Notes

External links

Pyu script

References

* * {{list of writing systems Brahmic scripts Obsolete writing systems Languages of Myanmar