Single Alphabetical Umbrella to Cover All Indian Languages

To almost all of us, whatever our mother-tongue, learning another Indian language is a jump into the unknown. Everything is new, the shape of the characters, the nuances of the sounds, the combination of two letters, etc. On an average each language has at least ninety characters in its alphabet. Lesson number one is to master these characters before we even think of proceeding with the effort. Instead of this plunge into the unknown, what if we start with a small known factor? What is this known factor? It is the Roman letter. Just think for a moment. When a train passes a station whenever we do not know the local language we try to ‘catch’ the name of the place by glancing at the Roman letters on the platform. We have no difficulty reading names of persons, places whenever they are presented in the media. We are already attuned to the practice, this is the known factor. Suppose that we apply it to learning a language? It becomes a study of the unknown with the help of the known.

The question arises how? We shall go into it presently. An Indian language has a dozen vowels, about thirty consonants, vowel signs which we add to the consonants, conjunct consonants (when two or more consonants combine without any intervening vowels e.g. sma, pri, etc.) Every language has to assign a letter symbol to a conjunct consonant. On an average there are about forty such symbols for a language. If we add up, the total number of unique characters for the twelve major languages, the grand total would be more than a thousand. No wonder there have been no attempts from any quarter to learn all the major languages. When utilizing computer keyboards, there are “stationary keys” whenever we want to insert a vowel sign. This adds to the burden.