Brahmi (Unicode block)

Last updated
Brahmi
RangeU+11000..U+1107F
(128 code points)
Plane SMP
Scripts Brahmi
Assigned115 code points
Unused13 reserved code points
Unicode version history
6.0 (2010)108 (+108)
7.0 (2014)109 (+1)
14.0 (2021)115 (+6)
Note: [1] [2]

Brahmi is a Unicode block containing characters written in India from the 3rd century BCE through the first millennium CE. It is the predecessor to all modern Indic scripts.

Brahmi [1] [2]
Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF)
 0123456789ABCDEF
U+1100x𑀀𑀁𑀂 𑀃  𑀄 𑀅𑀆𑀇𑀈𑀉𑀊𑀋𑀌𑀍𑀎𑀏
U+1101x𑀐𑀑𑀒𑀓𑀔𑀕𑀖𑀗𑀘𑀙𑀚𑀛𑀜𑀝𑀞𑀟
U+1102x𑀠𑀡𑀢𑀣𑀤𑀥𑀦𑀧𑀨𑀩𑀪𑀫𑀬𑀭𑀮𑀯
U+1103x𑀰𑀱𑀲𑀳𑀴𑀵𑀶𑀷𑀸𑀹𑀺𑀻𑀼𑀽𑀾𑀿
U+1104x𑁀𑁁𑁂𑁃𑁄𑁅𑁆𑁇𑁈𑁉𑁊𑁋𑁌𑁍
U+1105x𑁒𑁓𑁔𑁕𑁖𑁗𑁘𑁙𑁚𑁛𑁜𑁝𑁞𑁟
U+1106x𑁠𑁡𑁢𑁣𑁤𑁥𑁦𑁧𑁨𑁩𑁪𑁫𑁬𑁭𑁮𑁯
U+1107x𑁰𑁱𑁲𑁳𑁴𑁵 BNJ 
Notes
1. ^ As of Unicode version 14.0
2. ^ Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Brahmi block:

Version Final code points [lower-alpha 1] Count L2  ID WG2  IDDocument
6.0U+11000..1104D, 11052..1106F108 L2/98-032 N1685 Everson, Michael (1998-01-18), Proposal to encode Brahmi in Plane 1 of ISO/IEC 10646
L2/98-286 N1703 Umamaheswaran, V. S.; Ksar, Mike (1998-07-02), "8.19", Unconfirmed Meeting Minutes, WG 2 Meeting #34, Redmond, WA, USA; 1998-03-16--20
L2/00-128 Bunz, Carl-Martin (2000-03-01), Scripts from the Past in Future Versions of Unicode
L2/02-397 Baums, Stefan; Glass, Andrew (2002-11-02), Note for the UTC on the encoding of Brahmi in Unicode
L2/03-249R Baums, Stefan; Glass, Andrew (2003-07-27), Proposal for the Encoding of Brahmi in Plane 1 of ISO/IEC 10646
L2/08-277R N3490R Everson, Michael; Glass, Andrew; Baums, Stefan (2007-08-14), Progressing the encoding of Brahmi in the SMP of the UCS
L2/07-342 N3491 Baums, Stefan; Glass, Andrew (2007-10-09), Proposal for the encoding of Brāhmī in Plane 1 of ISO/IEC 10646
L2/07-406 Glass, Andrew; Baums, Stefan (2007-10-31), Scripts on Roadmap covered by Brahmi encoding (L2/07-342)
L2/08-253R2 Moore, Lisa (2008-08-19), "Brahmi (B.15.1, C.3.1)", UTC #116 Minutes
L2/08-412 N3553 (pdf, doc)Umamaheswaran, V. S. (2008-11-05), "M53.22", Unconfirmed minutes of WG 2 meeting 53
L2/12-020 Sharma, Shriramana (2012-01-12), Special rendering of some jihvamuliya/upadhmaniya characters
L2/12-031 Anderson, Deborah; McGowan, Rick; Whistler, Ken (2012-01-27), "III. BRAHMI", Review of Indic-related L2 documents and Recommendations to the UTC
L2/12-007 Moore, Lisa (2012-02-14), "Consensus 130-C11", UTC #130 / L2 #227 Minutes, The UTC has determined that a virama should not be used in Sharada sequences involving Jihvamuliya and Upadhmaniya.
L2/12-106 Sharma, Shriramana (2012-03-17), "5. Brahmi", Request for editorial updates to various Indic scripts
L2/12-147 Anderson, Deborah; McGowan, Rick; Whistler, Ken (2012-04-25), "V. BRAHMI", Review of Indic-related L2 documents and Recommendations to the UTC
L2/12-239 Moore, Lisa (2012-08-14), "Consensus 132-C16", UTC #132 Minutes, Create a glyph erratum for Brahmi Letter LLLA based on the image in document L2/12-292.
L2/14-066 Sharma, Shriramana (2014-02-07), Representation of the Brahmi and Kannada Jihvamuliya/Upadhmaniya Characters in the Code Charts
L2/16-343 A, Srinidhi; A, Sridatta (2016-11-05), Request to change the glyphs of Brahmi vowel signs Vocalic R and Vocalic RR
L2/16-321R A, Srinidhi; A, Sridatta (2016-12-23), Request to change the glyph of 11008 BRAHMI LETTER II
L2/17-037 Anderson, Deborah; Whistler, Ken; Pournader, Roozbeh; Glass, Andrew; Iancu, Laurențiu; Moore, Lisa; Liang, Hai; Ishida, Richard; Misra, Karan; McGowan, Rick (2017-01-21), "3. Brahmi", Recommendations to UTC #150 January 2017 on Script Proposals
L2/17-016 Moore, Lisa (2017-02-08), "Consensus 150-C11, Action item 150-A64", UTC #150 Minutes
L2/17-224 McGowan, Rick (2017-07-25), "Dotted box for Brahmi/Kannada fricative characters", Comments on Public Review Issues (May 01 - July 25, 2017)
L2/17-426 A, Srinidhi; A, Sridatta (2017-12-08), Request to change the glyphs of THIRTY and FORTY of Brahmi
L2/18-039 Anderson, Deborah; Whistler, Ken; Pournader, Roozbeh; Moore, Lisa; Liang, Hai; Cook, Richard (2018-01-19), "8. Brahmi", Recommendations to UTC #154 January 2018 on Script Proposals
L2/17-362 Moore, Lisa (2018-02-02), "153-A92", UTC #153 Minutes
L2/18-115 Moore, Lisa (2018-05-09), "Action item 154-A103", UTC #155 Minutes, Create a glyph erratum for U+1105D and U+1105E.
7.0U+1107F1 L2/10-340 Sharma, Shriramana (2010-09-14), Using ZWJ in the encoded representation of Brahmi numbers
L2/10-440 Anderson, Deborah; McGowan, Rick; Whistler, Ken (2010-10-27), "3. Brahmi Numbers", Review of Indic-related L2 documents and Recommendations to the UTC
L2/10-416R Moore, Lisa (2010-11-09), "Action item 125-A20", UTC #125 / L2 #222 Minutes, Create an alternate proposal for Brahmi numbers.
L2/11-357R N4166 Glass, Andrew; Sharma, Shriramana (2011-11-02), Proposal to encode 1107F Brahmi Number Joiner
L2/11-353 Moore, Lisa (2011-11-30), "D.8", UTC #129 / L2 #226 Minutes
N4253 (pdf, doc)"M59.16d", Unconfirmed minutes of WG 2 meeting 59, 2012-09-12
14.0U+11070..110756 L2/19-402 Rajan, Vinodh; Sharma, Shriramana (2019-12-18), Proposal to Encode 6 Characters in the Brahmi Block
L2/20-046 Anderson, Deborah; Whistler, Ken; Pournader, Roozbeh; Moore, Lisa; Liang, Hai (2020-01-10), "7. Brahmi", Recommendations to UTC #162 January 2020 on Script Proposals
L2/20-015R Moore, Lisa (2020-05-14), "D.3 Proposal to Encode 6 Characters in the Brahmi Block", Draft Minutes of UTC Meeting 162
L2/20-129 Ganesan, Naga (2020-06-01), Comments on L2/20-069: Encoding of Tamil Brahmi Virama (U+11070)
L2/20-169 Anderson, Deborah; Whistler, Ken; Pournader, Roozbeh; Moore, Lisa; Constable, Peter; Liang, Hai (2020-07-21), "10. Brahmi", Recommendations to UTC #164 July 2020 on Script Proposals
L2/20-172 Moore, Lisa (2020-08-03), "Consensus 164-C13", UTC #164 Minutes
  1. Proposed code points and characters names may differ from final code points and names

Related Research Articles

Tamil script Brahmic script

The Tamil script is an abugida script that is used by Tamils and Tamil speakers in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and elsewhere to write the Tamil language. Certain minority languages such as Saurashtra, Badaga, Irula and Paniya are also written in the Tamil script.

Geometric Shapes is a Unicode block of 96 symbols at code point range U+25A0–25FF.

Number Forms is a Unicode block containing Unicode compatibility characters that have specific meaning as numbers, but are constructed from other characters. They consist primarily of vulgar fractions and Roman numerals. In addition to the characters in the Number Forms block, three fractions were inherited from ISO-8859-1, which was incorporated whole as the Latin-1 supplement block.

Combining Diacritical Marks is a Unicode block containing the most common combining characters. It also contains the character "Combining Grapheme Joiner", which prevents canonical reordering of combining characters, and despite the name, actually separates characters that would otherwise be considered a single grapheme in a given context. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Generic Diacritical Marks.

Block Elements is a Unicode block containing square block symbols of various fill and shading. Used along with block elements are box-drawing characters, shade characters, and terminal graphic characters. These can be used for filling regions of the screen and portraying drop shadows. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Blocks.

Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 code points, five have been assigned since Unicode 3.0:

Devanagari is a Unicode block containing characters for writing languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Bodo, Maithili, Sindhi, Nepali, and Sanskrit, among others. In its original incarnation, the code points U+0900..U+0954 were a direct copy of the characters A0-F4 from the 1988 ISCII standard. The Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam blocks were similarly all based on their ISCII encodings.

Cherokee is a Unicode block containing the syllabic characters for writing the Cherokee language. When Cherokee was first added to Unicode in version 3.0 it was treated as a unicameral alphabet, but in version 8.0 it was redefined as a bicameral script. The Cherokee block contains all the uppercase letters plus six lowercase letters. The Cherokee Supplement block, added in version 8.0, contains the rest of the lowercase letters. For backwards compatibility, the Unicode case folding algorithm—which usually converts a string to lowercase characters—maps Cherokee characters to uppercase.

Hangul Compatibility Jamo Unicode character block

Hangul Compatibility Jamo is a Unicode block containing Hangul characters for compatibility with the South Korean national standard KS X 1001. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Hangul Elements.

Hiragana is a Unicode block containing hiragana characters for the Japanese language.

Katakana is a Unicode block containing katakana characters for the Japanese and Ainu languages.

Katakana Phonetic Extensions is a Unicode block containing additional small katakana characters for writing the Ainu language, in addition to characters in the Katakana block.

Variation Selectors Supplement is a Unicode block containing additional Variation Selectors beyond those found in the Variation Selectors block.

Enclosed CJK Letters and Months is a Unicode block containing circled and parenthesized Katakana, Hangul, and CJK ideographs. Also included in the block are miscellaneous glyphs that would more likely fit in CJK Compatibility or Enclosed Alphanumerics: a few unit abbreviations, circled numbers from 21 to 50, and circled multiples of 10 from 10 to 80 enclosed in black squares.

Byzantine Musical Symbols is a Unicode block containing characters for representing Byzantine-era musical notation.

Alchemical Symbols is a Unicode block containing symbols for chemicals and substances used in ancient and medieval alchemy texts.

Siddham is a Unicode block containing characters for the historical, Brahmi-derived Siddham script used for writing Sanskrit between the years c. 550 – c. 1200.

Tirhuta is a Unicode block containing characters for Brahmi-derived Tirhuta script which was the primary writing system for Maithili in Bihar, India and Madhesh, Nepal until the 20th century.

Cherokee Supplement is a Unicode block containing the syllabic characters for writing the Cherokee language. When Cherokee was first added to Unicode in version 3.0 it was treated as a unicameral alphabet, but in version 8.0 it was redefined as a bicameral script. The Cherokee Supplement block contains lowercase letters only, whereas the Cherokee block contains all the uppercase letters, together with six lowercase letters. For backwards compatibility, the Unicode case folding algorithm—which usually converts a string to lowercase characters—maps Cherokee characters to uppercase.

Bhaiksuki is a Unicode block containing characters from the Bhaiksuki alphabet, which is a Brahmi-based script that was used for writing Sanskrit during the 11th and 12th centuries CE, mainly in the present-day states of Bihar and West Bengal in India, and in parts of Bangladesh.

References

  1. "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2016-07-09.
  2. "Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2016-07-09.