Indian Palaeography c18.s3.11

c18.s3.11

The debt of Kharoshṭhī to Aramaic is not in borrowing the latter’s signs wholesale for writing the local language, but in making them the basis for the evolution of its own signs. This basis will be clear from the following analysis. Out of the twenty-two letters in Aramaic one has been adopted, as shown above, as the base of the vowels. The remaining letters are distributed as follows (Fig. 19):