Ol Chiki script
The Ol Chiki script, also known as Ol Chemetʼ, Ol Ciki, Ol, and Santali alphabet is the official writing system for Santali, an Austroasiatic language recognized as an official regional language in India. It was invented by Pandit Raghunath Murmu in 1925. It has 30 letters, the design of which is intended to evoke natural shapes. The script is written from left to right, and has two styles. Unicode does not maintain a distinction between these two, as is typical for print and cursive variants of a script. In both styles, the script is unicameral.
History
The Ol Chiki script was created in 1925 by Raghunath Murmu for the Santali language, and publicized first in 1939 at a Mayurbhanj State exhibition. Unlike most Indic scripts, Ol Chiki is not an abugida, but is a true alphabet: giving the vowels equal representation with the consonants.Before the invention of Ol Chiki script, Santali was written in Bangla, Devanagari, Kalinga and Latin script. However, Santali is not an Indo-Aryan language and Indic scripts did not have letters for all of Santal's phonemes, especially its stop consonants and vowels, which make it difficult to write the language accurately in an unmodified Indic script.
For example, when missionary and linguist Paul Olaf Bodding, a Norwegian, studied the Santali language and needed to decide how to transcribe it, he decided to transcribe Santhali in the Roman alphabet: despite his observation that Roman script lacks many of the advantages of the Indic scripts, he concluded that the Indic scripts could not adequately serve the Santali language because the Indic scripts lack a way to indicate important features of Santali pronunciation to be even more appropriate for the language, because its letter-shapes are derived from the sounds of common Santali words and other frequent Santali morphemes: nouns, demonstratives, adjectives, and verb roots in the Santali language.
In other words, each Santali letter's name is, or is derived from, a common word or other element of the Santali language, and each letter's shape is derive from a simple drawing of the meaning of that word or other element. For example, the Santali letter “ol” is written with a shape originally derived from a simplified outline drawing of a hand holding a pen, because the name of this letter is also the Santali word for “writing.”
Print and cursive styles
The existence of these two styles of Ol Chiki was mentioned by the script's creator: Guru Gonke Pandit Raghunath Murmu in his book Ol Chemed which explains and teaches the Ol Chiki script. Chhapa is used for publication, while usaraà is used for handwriting.''Chhapa'' hand
Ol Chiki chhapa, or print style, is the more common style for digital fonts, and is used in the printing of books and newspapers.''Usaraà'' hand
Usaraà or usaraà ol is the cursive style, and is largely limited to pen and paper, though there are digital usaraà typefaces. Differences include the diacritic ahad, which in print style is used with,,,, and, all of which can form ligatures with in cursive. Further, cursive usaraà seldom uses several letter-shapes which are formed by combining the letter and the four semi-consonants,,, and with ahad; instead, these are generally written in a shorter form, as.Letters
The values of the Ol Chiki letters are as follows:Aspirated consonants are written as digraphs with the letter : /tʰ/, /gʱ/, /kʰ/, /jʱ/, /cʰ/, /dʱ/, /pʰ/, /ɖʱ/, /ɽʱ/, /ʈʰ/, and /bʱ/.
Other marks
Ol Chiki employs several marks which are placed after the letter they modify :| Mark | Name | Description |
| găhlă ṭuḍăg | This baseline dot is used to extend three vowel letters for the Santal Parganas dialect of Santali: ŏ /ɔ/, ă /ə/, and ĕ /ɛ/. The phonetic difference between and is not clearly defined and there may be only a marginal phonemic difference between the two. is rarely used. ALA-LC transliterates as "ạ̄". | |
| mũ ṭuḍăg | This raised dot indicates nasalization of the preceding vowel: /ɔ̃/, /ã/, /ĩ/, /ũ/, /ẽ/, and /õ/. ALA-LC transliteration uses "m̐" after the affected vowel. | |
| mũ găhlă ṭuḍăg | This colon-like mark is used to mark a nasalized extended vowel. It is a combination of mũ ṭuḍăg and găhlă ṭuḍăg: /ɔ̃/, /ə̃/, and /ɛ̃/. | |
| relā | This tilde-like mark indicates the prolongation of any oral or nasalized vowel. Compare /e/ with /eː/. It comes after the găhlă ṭuḍăg for extended vowels: /ɛː/. It is omitted in ALA-LC transliteration. | |
| ahad | This special letter indicates the deglottalization of a consonant in the word-final position. It preserves the morphophonemic relationship between the glottalized and voiced equivalents of consonants. For example, represents a voiced /g/ when word initial but an ejective /kʼ/ when in the word-final position. A voiced /g/ in the word-final position is written as. The ahad is used with,,,, and which can form cursive ligatures with in handwriting. ALA-LC transliteration uses an apostrophe to represent an ahad. | |
| phārkā | This hyphen-like mark serves as a glottal protector It preserves the ejective sound, even in the word-initial position. Compare /gɔ/ with /kʼɔ/. The phārkā is only used with,,, and. It is omitted in ALA-LC transliteration. |
Numerals
Ol Chiki has its own numerals:Punctuation
Some Western-style punctuation marks are used with Ol Chiki: the comma, exclamation mark, question mark, and quotation marks.The period/fullstop is not used, because it is visually confusible with the găhlă ṭuḍăg mark.; therefore, instead of periods, the script uses single or two Ol Chiki short dandas:
- marks a minor break
- marks a major break
Computing
Unicode
Ol Chiki script was added to the Unicode Standard in April, 2008 with the release of version 5.1.The Unicode block for Ol Chiki is U+1C50–U+1C7F:
Fonts
- Google's Noto Sans Ol Chiki.
- Microsoft's font family Nirmala UI.
Mixing the two letter styles
The invention of a lower case for Ol Chiki
Since 2017, Santali graphic designer, typographer, and film producer Sudip Iglesias Murmu has been working on design principles to provide a lowercase alphabet form for Ol Chiki, which would permit Ol Chiki writing and keyboarding to use a two-case, or bicameral, format, as is done in many other written languages, including the Roman-alphabet languages such as English. As the development of a lowercase form is contributed to developing a standardized cursive form, the evolution of lowercase is likely to allow standardizing cursive to the point of making it type able alongside more rigid "block" printed letterforms forms So far, only Ol Chiki letters are used in keyboarding, typesetting, and publishing. In writing quickly by hand, Ol Chiki is used: but, despite Ol Usara's potential for reaching high speed, the circulation of Ol Usara documents is negligible, and Ol Usara is yet to receive Unicode standardization, thus leaving it still neglected.In hopes to remedy this situation and to harmonize the two scripts, Sudip Iglesias Murmu has innovated by creating a series of lowercase letters, which he has integrated with the already existing font of Ol Chiki. According to him, providing lowercase letters increases the efficiency of keyboarding, both for Ol Chiki and for Ol Chiki, and allows keyboarding to reach the same speed that can be obtained when typing Santali in Roman-alphabet letters, which are likewise case-sensitive. However, his work is yet to be accepted officially.