The Ol Chiki (ᱚᱞ ᱪᱤᱠᱤ, Santali pronunciation: [ɔl tʃiki], ɔl 'writing', tʃiki 'symbol') script, also known as Ol Chemetʼ (ᱚᱞ ᱪᱮᱢᱮᱫ, ol 'writing', chemetʼ 'learning'), Ol Ciki, Ol, and Santali alphabet is the official writing system for Santali, an Austroasiatic language recognized as an official regional language in India. It was invented by Pandit Raghunath Murmu in 1925. It has 30 letters, the design of which is intended to evoke natural shapes. The script is written from left to right, and has two styles (the print Chapa style and cursive Usara style). Unicode does not maintain a distinction between these two, as is typical for print and cursive variants of a script. In both styles, the script is unicameral (that is, it does not have separate sets of uppercase and lowercase letters).
The shapes of the letters are not arbitrary, but reflect the names for the letters, which are words, usually the names of objects or actions representing conventionalized form in the pictorial shape of the characters.
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. Unlike most Indic scripts, Ol Chiki is not an abugida, but is a true alphabet: giving the vowels equal representation with the consonants.
Before the invention of Ol Chiki script, Santali was written in Bangla, Devanagari, Kalinga and Latin script. However, Santali is not an Indo-Aryan language and Indic scripts did not have letters for all of Santal's phonemes, especially its stop consonants and vowels, which make it difficult to write the language accurately in an unmodified Indic script. For example, when missionary and linguist Paul Olaf Bodding, a Norwegian, studied the Santali language and needed to decide how to transcribe it (in producing his widely followed and widely respected reference books such as A Santal Dictionary), he decided to transcribe Santhali in the Roman alphabet: despite his observation that Roman script lacks many of the advantages of the Indic scripts, he concluded that the Indic scripts could not adequately serve the Santali language because the Indic scripts lack a way to indicate important features of Santali pronunciation (such as glottalization, combined glottalization and nasalization, and checked plosives, which can be more easily represented in the Roman alphabet through the use of diacritics. The phonology of the Santali language had also been similarly analyzed by various other authors, including Byomkes Chakrabarti in Comparative Study of Santali and Bengali and Baghrai Charan Hembram in A Glimpse of Santali Grammar. However, the Ol Chiki alphabet is considered (by many Santali) to be even more appropriate for the language, because its letter-shapes are derived from the sounds of common Santali words and other frequent Santali morphemes: nouns, demonstratives, adjectives, and verb roots in the Santali language. In other words, each Santali letter's name is, or is derived from, a common word or other element of the Santali language, and each letter's shape is derive from a simple drawing of the meaning of that word or other element. For example, the Santali letter “ol” (representing the sound /l/) is written with a shape originally derived from a simplified outline drawing of a hand holding a pen, because the name of this letter is also the Santali word for “writing.”
Print and cursive styles
The existence of these two styles of Ol Chiki was mentioned by the script's creator: Guru Gonke Pandit Raghunath Murmu (also known as Pandit Murmu) in his book Ol Chemed which explains and teaches the Ol Chiki script. Chhapa (Santali for 'print') is used for publication, while usaraà (Santali for 'quick') is used for handwriting.
Chhapa hand Ol Chiki chhapa, or print style, is the more common style for digital fonts, and is used in the printing of books and newspapers.
Usaraà hand Usaraà or usaraà ol is the cursive style, and is largely limited to pen and paper, though there are digital usaraà typefaces. Differences include the diacritic ahad, which in print style is used with ᱜ, ᱡ, ᱦ, ᱫ, and ᱵ, all of which can form ligatures with ᱽ in cursive. Further, cursive usaraà seldom uses several letter-shapes which are formed by combining the letter ᱦ and the four semi-consonants ᱜ, ᱡ, ᱫ, and ᱵ with ahad; instead, these are generally written in a shorter form, as ᱷ.
Letters The values of the Ol Chiki letters are as follows:
Aspirated consonants are written as digraphs with the letter ᱷ: ᱛᱷ /tʰ/, ᱜᱷ /gʱ/, ᱠᱷ /kʰ/, ᱡᱷ /jʱ/, ᱪᱷ /cʰ/, ᱫᱷ /dʱ/, ᱯᱷ /pʰ/, ᱰᱷ /ɖʱ/, ᱲᱷ /ɽʱ/, ᱴᱷ /ʈʰ/, and ᱵᱷ /bʱ/.
Other marks Ol Chiki employs several marks which are placed after the letter they modify (there are no combining characters):
Numerals Ol Chiki has its own numerals:
Punctuation Some Western-style punctuation marks are used with Ol Chiki: the comma (,), exclamation mark (!), question mark (?), and quotation marks (“ and ”). The period/fullstop (.) is not used, because it is visually confusible with the găhlă ṭuḍăg mark (ᱹ).; therefore, instead of periods, the script uses single or two Ol Chiki short dandas:
᱾ (mucăd) marks a minor break ᱿ (double mucăd) 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.
Mixing the two letter styles Although Ol Chiki (Chapa) and Ol Chiki (Usara) are normally never mixed, and the original inventor never mentioned mixing these letter styles, there have been some works that mix both forms, using them like English capital and small letters. However, this innovation is yet to be accepted officially.
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