Invention of PIOA - Part 1

Hello Friends,

So I was telling about the circumstances in which the PIOA emerged. I was small when I tried to compare different alphabets. Those days alphabets used to be my favorite thing to know about. I was too much addicted to this website called Omniglot (it's head, Simon Ager, is a nice person and I am thankful to him). I still know how to read numerous scripts. I am a proud Indian, proud because of my ancestral roots and the glorious heritage that I inherited.

That's a long story. I eventually learnt reading Bengali (known by its endonym Bangla). I learnt Hindi because that's what I spoke mostly with outsiders in Mumbai. Anyways, learning Bangla and Hindi went hand in hand because they are similar in lexicon. The already too much Sanskritized language, my mother tongue Bangla helped in grasping the Hindi lessons (because the lessons taught in those classes were using a slightly Sanskritized version of Hindustani). Regularly watching news channels also helped in gaining vocabulary fast, and my native tongue accelerated the rate of learning Sanskrit-origin words because they were naturally very frequent in my language.

(Okay those who don't have Idea about this part, let me tell you that spoken or colloquial Hindustani is Persianized, that means spoken Hindi incorporates mostly Persian words, that means, in other words it's an ordinary way to speak Urdu.)

OK, then I started observing the situation of Indian languages within the subcontinent. I was very serious in those matters. It's a pity in a way that the technological progress of these languages was entirely too slow. The scripts of these languages were too much complicated unlike Latin. Then there was this problem of schwa deletion in scripts used by modern Northern Indian languages. In short, schwa deletion means that the value of the normal 'a' sound in, lets say Hindi, is occasionally reduced to nil, like the word 'Likhnaa' (to Write) in Hindi is written in Devanagari as 'Likhanaa' but the value of 'a' associated with the consonant 'kh' is reduced (I will explain it in any other post).

I did more research, and got to know that these scripts were too much complicated. History of these scripts (comparative phonology) clearly state that these scripts are now phonetically outdated (especially scripts used in Northern languages). Southern languages have phonetically better spelling rules (Tamil, Malayalam, Tulu, Kannada, Telugu), but writing and reading them is too much complicated, especially Malayalam and Tamil.

My language is Bengali and it shows a feature called Vowel Harmony. So you will be amazed that one vowel character is used to depict two vowel pronunciations!

The worst part of this language problem is that when people leave their native regions and settle in another region. People then in this case don't bother to revise their scripts or teach their children how to read and write in their language. You additionally also require enough time for it.

And then finally, I therefore after further study and research decided to Latinize them.

I learnt about history of Languages and Countries in this process. The program of the Harf Devrimi (or formerly, the Harf Inkilab meaning the Letter Revolution) headed by the National Hero of the Turkish Republic, Ghazi Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, inspired me. Then there was it's predecessor, the Latinization of Azerbaijani Turkish in the 1920's. I learnt about the Latinization of Romanian language in Romania and it's cultural brother, Moldova. Then the Latinization in the Turk nations of 1990's after the fall of Soviet Republic, i.e. Latinization of Turkmen, Azeri, Uzbek and Kazakh languages. The Latinization of Vietnamese inspired the whole way of how to Latinize the languages in an arranged and proper manner.

In order to design this script properly I had to study the phonologies of various Indian languages (thanks to IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet). Indian subcontinent is too much diverse in phonological aspect (this will be covered in a separate post). Ranging from proper Hindustani phonology to Malayalam, from Sindhi to Assamese, it's like touring the length and breadth of the whole nation.

I ensured each letter will represent either one or two sounds (depending on allophonic phenomena of respective languages). But mostly one value is kept to fit the standard phonology (yes, minimum ambiguity is my priority). For variations like regional dialects, other letters were added to the orthography.

In the next post I will explain about, as an ex-Devanagarist how did I ended up making a phonetic Latin alphabet for the whole subcontinent.

Anyways, this is the end of this post. Do comment below and share the link to others.