Ol Chiki script
The Ol Chiki script, also known as Ol Cemetʼ, Ol Ciki, Ol, and sometimes as the Santali alphabet, is the official writing system for Santali, an Austroasiatic-Munda language recognized as an official regional language in India. It has 30 letters, the forms of which are intended to evoke natural shapes. The script is written from left to right.
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.Previously, Santali had been written with the Latin script. However, Santali is not an Indo-Aryan language and Indic scripts did not have letters for all of Santali's phonemes, especially its stop consonants and vowels, which made writing the language accurately in an unmodified Indic script difficult. The detailed analysis was given by Byomkes Chakrabarti in his "Comparative Study of Santali and Bengali". Missionary and linguist Paul Olaf Bodding, a Norwegian, introduced the Latin script, which is betterat representing Santali stops, phonemes and nasal sounds with the use of diacritical marks and accents. Unlike most Indic scripts, Ol Chiki is not an abugida, with vowels given equal representation with consonants. Additionally, it was designed specifically for the language, but one letter could not be assigned to each phoneme because the sixth vowel in Ol Chiki is still problematic.
Letters
The values of the 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 /k’/ 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 /k’ɔ/. The phārkā is only used with,,, and. It is omitted in ALA-LC transliteration. |
Digits
Ol Chiki has its own set of digits:| Digit | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| Ol Chiki | ||||||||||
| Bengali | ||||||||||
| Devanagari | ||||||||||
| Odia | ||||||||||
| Persian |
Punctuation
Some Western-style punctuation marks are used with Ol Chiki: comma, exclamation mark, question mark, and quotation marks.Period is not used because it is visually confusable with the găhlă ṭuḍăg mark. Instead of periods the script uses two 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.