The story of PIOA Part 1

 PIOA: The Pan Indian Orthographic Alphabet

Those were the early days of 2017, and an idea was under consideration to be converted into reality. I had to deal with the script problems then. So for many days, I had to search for a different option, something out of the box, something very contemporary and modernistic, and something perfect for the languages spoken in my subcontinent.

Something was actually happening from the previous year. Turkish serials were introduced in India for the first time. Indeed Turkish serials were appreciated all over the world, including the subcontinent (I am not a fan of serials though), I observed something unexpected.

In the Eastern world where religion and culture both matter the most, there is one country which looks very progressive, very mature, and very sophisticated as well. It simply doesn't seem to be any normal Asian backward country. Simply we can't judge it by its past. The Ottoman past is present in physical form, but it is heavily influenced by the west materialistically. There's no energy which is coming from any direction which gives fuel to drive its progress and development, it is its youth which is providing the fuel for it.

This is modern Turkey.

We at that time studied just about Turkish words, the source for many words in Hindustani and other languages. Although they are few, they are worth mentioning. The word for scissors, horde, and medal are Tamgha (Chaghatai:tamğa; Turkish:demge), Urdu (Ordu), and Qainchi (Turkish: kayçı).

But not anything about Atatürk and his reforms, sorry Ata.

After seeing their Ottoman and Islamic past one would expect that Arabic would still be used and people would be more religiously oriented. Actually, it happens to be completely opposite. An average Turk doesn't have much to do with religion except whatever is necessary, like religious observances and rituals where reciting God's name is considered auspicious. For a long time, it has been a perfect example of democracy in the form of a modern secular state. Talking about the ever-evolving politics is a different issue. Anyways, it's one of the perfect blends of tradition and modernity on the Earth.

The most remarkable thing is the language. Previously written in the Arabic script, the Turkish language is one of the beautiful languages worth mentioning. Thanks to Ata, modern Turkish is now written in Latin characters which makes it super phonetic and cool!

I thought about it and started working on it though I had comparatively very less knowledge of phonetics and languages back then. The first event remarkable in this short history of the PIOA actually came a bit later, in the spring of March in the year 2017, my Senior Secondary Certificate exams would cover up the whole month's schedule. The exams started with Hindi as the first paper. What actually happened was that I was, for some time, writing in English to practice my other studies, (I studied in an English medium school then), and writing in Latin characters for a considerably longer time was the reason for causing pain while writing in Devanagari characters (official script for Hindi in India). A solution was to adopt a romanized scheme. The present romanization schemes were not suitable for the nature of the Hindi language in a way, and then I created another alphabet to counter this problem. It was ready in one or two days. I remember that I practiced only Hindi for ten days and from 1st to 10th March. 10th March was my Hindi exam.

This is how the project of Latin script started. The journey started with 1 person, and about 10 people are currently directly or indirectly engaged with it.

I have decided to make the 10th of March as the commemoration of the birth of the PIOA alphabet.

(stay tuned for more updates)