Hindi Evolution: From the Indus to Devanagari Script

The paper presents a generalised survey on the Hindi language evolution based on the research results of the previous studies in this area and the author’s hypothetical assumptions. The author focuses on the major scripts that could be/ are of crucial influence on Hindi development. Four stages in Hindi evolution are highlighted (5 – in case of separating an ancient and medieval development phases), namely: 1) ancient and medieval period (up to ca. 1500 AD); 2) early modern period (ca. 1500–1800 AD); 3) British colonial period (ca. 1800–1947); 4) post-independence and contemporary Hindi (1947 – present). However, only three major scripts are described, namely: the Indus script, the Brahmi script, and the Devanagari script. The status of the Indus script as a precursor of the other Indian scripts is highly disputable, though the author recognises this possibility and considers the Indus script (with mnemonic and proto-symbolic systems) as a pre-phonographic phase of a writing system. The Brahmi script, marking the beginning of the phonographic tradition in India underwent a significant evolution and gave rise to regional variants with the Gupta script as a direct descendant of Brahmi. Further, the Gupta script evolved into the Nagari one, and the latter served as a direct antecedent of the Devanagari script. Delving into scripts evolution/changes can facilitate and improve the quality of optical character recognition, as well as of transliteration into various languages, which have become widespread research trends in the modern digitalised era.