BALASORE: The linguists and litterateurs of Orissa have reacted sharply over the information provided about Oriya scripts in a website developed by a San Francisco-based software engineer.
The website www.ancientscripts.com says “The Oriya script has been developed from an early form of the Bengali script, which belongs to the Northern group of South Asian scripts.” The website developed and maintained by Lawrence Lo is a compendium of world-wide writing systems from prehistoric times to the present day.
Terming his claims false and baseless, the linguists and litterateurs said the Oriya script had possibly been developed from the Kalinga script, one of the many descendents of the Brahmi script of ancient India. The earliest known inscription in the Oriya language, in the Kalinga script, dates from 1051.
“Brahmi script is the early form of Sanskrit in which our Vedas had been written. From this Brahmi script, all Aryan scripts had evolved. So there is no question of Oriya script being developed from Bengali script,” said retired prof. Durga Prasanna Panda. Quoting noted linguist, educationist and litterateur Suniti Kumar Chatterji, he said: “Oriya is the eldest of the three sisters - Oriya, Assamese and Bengali. Researcher Kunja Bihari Tripathy also has mentioned that the Oriya script has been derived from proto-Oriya script which was used in ancient sila lekhas (stone carvings),” he said.
Lawrence Lo said he was not an expert in South Asian writing systems. “I relied on several reliable published sources and they tend to agree that Oriya is developed from Nagari/Bengali script,” he wrote in an e-mail reply.