Telugu 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 and Masalia of Periplus). Kadamba script developed by the Kadamba dynasty was derived from the Brahmi script and later evolved into the Kannada-Telugu script after the 7th century. The Telugu and Kannada scripts then separated by around 1300 CE. 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). 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:

Consonants

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

Archaic and obsolete consonants

The consonants ౘ (ĉa) and ౙ (ẑa) represent the /t͡sa/ and /d͡za/, respectively, but are rarely used; they are commonly substituted with చ (ca) and జ (ja) instead, respectively. They are referred in Telugu as dantya ca and dantya ja, respectively.

The letter for a voiced alveolar plosive is found in some inscriptions and is thought to be used as distinguished from the trill ఱ (ṟa) intervocalically in rare cases. It is mostly found after a nasal as in మూన్ౚు (mūnḏu), but is obsolete in modern Telugu.

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 (indicating guttural plosives, like 'q')

⟨ఽ⟩: Telugu avagraha (apostrophe)

⟨ౝ⟩: 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

Ōṣṭhya: Labial

Apart from that, other places are combinations of the above five:

Dantōṣṭhya: Labio-dental (e.g.: v)

Kaṇṭatālavya: e.g.: Diphthong e

Kaṇṭōṣṭhya: 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

Īṣat Spṛṣṭa: Approximant

Īṣat Saṃvṛta: Fricative

Abhyantara Prayatnam: Internal effort

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.

Consonant conjuncts

The Telugu script has generally regular consonant 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 (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.

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

Numerals

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.

Unicode

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.

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 ⟨ా⟩, and the zero-width non-joiner character, which displays as ⟨జ్ఞా⟩. Apple confirmed a fix for iOS 11.3 and macOS 10.13.4.