Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c7.s1.t3.7

c7.s1.t3.7

Various terms have been suggested for this type of script, intermediate between syllabary and alphabet, such as “neosyllabary,”²⁹ “pseudoalphabet,” or “alphabetic syllabary.”³⁰ There is as yet no commonly accepted term in the relatively rudimentarily developed field of grammatology for scripts of this type. Thus, for the present it may be best to refer to it by general descriptive terms such as semisyllabary or semialphabet (since it partakes of significant features of both systems), or, more precisely, as "diacritically (or alphabetically) modified consonant syllabary." Whichever terminology one might prefer to adopt, the Indic script family, comprising all of the derivatives and modifications of Brāhmī script in India and firmly entrenched that they were not subject to fundamental reform, or through the influence of the previously mentioned linguistic principle of the *akṣara*, or for other reasons; the vowel-cancelling marker alluded to earlier is, in general, used only when there is no other way to represent a vowelless consonant, such as at the end of a word, sentence, or line.³⁶ In any case, the result was that the Indic system, remarkable for precision if not for simplicity, has been preserved virtually unchanged in nearly all of the many scripts used for Sanskrit and other Indo-Aryan languages.³⁷