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Brahmi is the modern name given to one of the oldest writing systems used in the Indian subcontinent and in Central Asia during the final centuries BCE and the early centuries CE. Like its contemporary, Kharoṣṭhī, which was used in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is an abugida. The best-known Brahmi inscriptions are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dated to 250–232 BCE. The script was deciphered in 1837 by James Prinsep, an archaeologist, philologist, and official of the East India Company.〔(More details about Buddhist monuments at Sanchi ), Archaeological Survey of India, 1989.〕 The origin of the script is still much debated, with current Western academic opinion generally agreeing (with some exceptions) that Brahmi was derived from or at least influenced by one or more contemporary Semitic scripts, but a current of opinion in India favors the idea that it is connected to the much older and as-yet undeciphered Indus script.〔 Brahmi was at one time referred to in English as the "pin-man" script, that is "stick figure" script. It was denoted by a variety of other names until the 1880s when Albert Étienne Jean Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie, based on an observation by Gabriel Devéria, associated it with the Brahmi script, the first in a list of scripts mentioned in the ''Lalitavistara Sūtra''. Thence the name was adopted in the influential work of Georg Bühler, albeit in the variant form "Brahma". The Gupta script of the 5th century is sometimes called "Late Brahmi". The Brahmi script diversified into numerous local variants, classified together as the Brahmic scripts. Dozens of modern scripts used across South Asia have descended from Brahmi, making it one of the world's most influential writing traditions.〔Patel, P.G., Pandey, P., Rajgor, D. (2007) The Indic Scripts: Palaeographic and Linguistic Perspectives. D.K. Printworld.〕 One survey found 198 scripts that ultimately derive from it. The script was associated with its own Brahmi numerals, which ultimately provided the graphic forms for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system now used through most of the world. ==Origins== (詳細はKharosthi script is widely accepted to be a derivation of the Aramaic alphabet, the genesis of the Brahmi script is less straightforward. Salomon gave a thorough review of existing theories in 1998,〔 and only a limited overview of the more pertinent aspects of this very extensive topic can be presented here. Falk's 1993 overview of them, for instance, covers 59 pages.〔 An origin in Semitic scripts (usually Phoenician or Aramaic) has been proposed by some scholars since the publications by Albrecht Weber (1856) and Georg Bühler's ''On the origin of the Indian Brahma alphabet'' (1895). Bühler's ideas have been particularly influential, though even by the 1895 date of his opus on the subject, he could identify no less than five competing theories of the origin, one positing an indigenous origin and the others deriving it from various Semitic models. The most disputed point about the origin of the Brāhmī script has long been whether it was a purely indigenous development or was inspired or derived from scripts that originated outside India. Salomon noted that the indigenous view is strongly preferred by South Asian scholars, whereas the idea of borrowing or influence from a Semitic script is preferred most often by Western scholars. He agreed with S.R. Goyal that biases have influenced both sides of the debate.〔 Bühler curiously cited a passage by Sir Alexander Cunningham, one of the earliest indigenous origin proponents, that indicated that, in his time, the indigenous origin was a preference of English scholars in opposition to the "unknown Western" origin preferred by continental scholars. Cunningham in the seminal ''Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum'' of 1877 speculated that Brahmi characters were derived from, among other things, a pictographic principle based on the human body, but Bühler noted that by 1891, Cunningham considered the origins of the script uncertain. The current position among most scholars outside of South Asia is that Brahmi was likely derived from or influenced by a Semitic script model, with Aramaic being a leading candidate, but they are usually hesitant to consider the issue completely settled due to the lack of strong evidence.〔 Virtually all authors recognize that the degree of local development in both the graphic form and the structure was extremely extensive. It is also widely accepted that theories of Vedic grammar probably had a strong influence on this development. Some authors, particularly from South Asia,〔 reject the idea of foreign influence entirely, and many of these attempt to connect it to the Indus script. In the West, it is difficult to find authors who categorically reject this possibility, but it is generally regarded as highly speculative. The particular arguments for these viewpoints are discussed in subsections below. Like Kharosthi, the earliest known forms of Brāhmī were used to write early dialects of Prakrit, the lingua franca at the time. Surviving records of the script are mostly restricted to inscriptions on buildings and graves as well as liturgical texts.〔 Sanskrit was not written until many centuries later, and as a result, the original form of Brāhmī is not a perfect match for Sanskrit; several Sanskrit sounds could not be written in Brāhmī, though later forms were adapted to it.〔 There appears to be general agreement at least that Brahmi and Kharosthi are historically related, though much disagreement persists about the nature of this relationship. Bruce Trigger considered them, as a pair, to be one of four instances of the invention of an alphasyllabary, the other three being Old Persian cuneiform, the Meroitic script, and the Ge'ez script. All four of these have striking similarities, such as using short /a/ as an inherent vowel, but Trigger (who accepted the Aramaic inspiration of Brahmi with extensive local development, along with a pre-Ashokan date) was unable to find a direct common source among them. Justeson and Stephens proposed that this inherent vowel system in Brahmi and Kharosthi developed by transmission of a Semitic consonantal alphabet through recitation of its letter values. The idea is that learners of the source alphabet recite the sounds by combining the consonant with an unmarked vowel, e.g. /kə/,/kʰə/,/gə/..., and in the process of borrowing into another language, these syllables are taken to be the sound values of the symbols. They also accepted the idea that Brahmi was based on a North Semitic model. Perhaps the most important recent development regarding the origin of Brahmi has been the discovery of Brahmi characters inscribed on fragments of pottery from the trading town of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, which have been dated to the early 4th century BCE; Salomon recognized the potential significance of the Anuradhapura inscriptions with respect to dating the origin of Brahmi but was cautious in accepting the early dates.〔 Coningham et al., in their thorough analysis of the Anuradhapura inscriptions, found that the language was Prakrit rather than Dravidian, but they were unwilling to draw any conclusions about the affinities of the script beyond its being Brahmi. The historical sequence of the specimens was interpreted to indicate an evolution in the level of stylistic refinement over several centuries, and they concluded that the Brahmi script may have arisen out of "mercantile involvement" and that the growth of trade networks in Sri Lanka was correlated with its first appearance in the area.〔 These discoveries are the only examples of Brahmi dated before the Ashoka inscriptions of the 3rd century BCE that have been widely accepted. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Brahmi script」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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