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Telugu script (), an abugida from the Brahmic family of scripts, is used to write the
Telugu language Telugu (; , ) is a Dravidian languages, Dravidian language native to the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, where it is also the official language. Spoken by about 96 million people (2022), Telugu is the most widely spoken member of ...
, a Dravidian language spoken in the
India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...
n states of
Andhra Pradesh Andhra Pradesh (ISO 15919, ISO: , , AP) is a States and union territories of India, state on the East Coast of India, east coast of southern India. It is the List of states and union territories of India by area, seventh-largest state and th ...
and Telangana as well as several other neighbouring states. It is one of the official scripts of the Indian Republic. The Telugu script is also widely used for writing Sanskrit texts and to some extent the Gondi language. It gained prominence during the Eastern Chalukyas also known as Vengi Chalukya era. It also shares extensive similarities with the Kannada script.


History

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. Buddhism spread to East Asia from the nearby ports of Ghantasala and Masulipatnam (ancient Maisolos of
Ptolemy Claudius Ptolemy (; , ; ; – 160s/170s AD) was a Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were important to later Byzantine science, Byzant ...
and Masalia of Periplus). 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.The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems by Florian Coulmas, p. 228Handbook of Literacy in Akshara Orthography, R. Malatesha Joshi, Catherine McBride (2019), p. 29 The Telugu and Kannada scripts then separated by around 1300 CE.Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in the Indo-Aryan Languages, by Richard Solomon, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 35, 40–41, The Muslim historian and scholar Al-Biruni referred to both the Telugu language as well as its script as "Andhri".


Vowels

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). 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:


Consonants

The consonants and their combining forms (on the right) are provided below. Subscript letters are used in consonant clusters and geminate consonants.


Marginal and archaic consonants

* Additionally there are ౘ (ĉa) and ౙ (ẑa) for /t͡sa, d͡za/ which are rarely used, letters for are commonly used instead. 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).


Other diacritics

There are also several other diacritics used in the Telugu script. mutes the vowel of a consonant, so that only the consonant is pronounced. represents a corresponding class nasal sound when followed by a consonant from that class (i.e., the last column of the corresponding consonant row for the first five rows of the consonants table); when not followed by anything or by a consonant from the first five rows of the consonant table, it represents a true nasal sound. represents a historically used that is no longer pronounced, or a nasalized vowel when transliterating other languages (e.g., Hindi) into the Telugu script. adds a voiceless breath after the vowel or syllable it is attached to. Examples:


Marginal and archaic diacritics and signs

*: Telugu nuqta *: Telugu avagraha *: Nakara pollu *: The combining candrabindu nasal vowel diacritic of the Telugu script *: Combining anusvara above *: Siddham sign *: Tuumu sign


Places of articulation

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 : : 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

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).


Consonants with vowel diacritics

The consonants with vowel diacritics are referred to in the Telugu language as guṇintālu (). 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. The following table contains the consonants with vowel diacritics in the Telugu language.


Numerals

NOTE: , , and are used also for , , , , etc. and , , and are also used for , , , , etc.


Unicode

Telugu script was added to the
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 ...
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.


iOS character crash bug

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. 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.


See also

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


Notes


References


External links


Ethnologue Languages of the World - Telugu

Microsoft - Telugu Input tool

OLAC resources in and about the Telugu language



Telugu to English DictionaryTelugu Alphabets
{{DEFAULTSORT:Telugu Alphabet Brahmic scripts Abugida writing systems