Prachalit Nepal alphabet

Nepal script used on letterhead of Nepalese business house in Lhasa dated 1958.

Letter in Nepal Bhasa and Nepal script dated 7 May 1924 sent from Lhasa to Kathmandu.

Prachalit Nepal script is a type of Abugida script developed from the Mol script derivatives of Brahmi script. It is used to write Nepal Bhasa, Sanskrit and Pali. Various publications are still published in this script including the Sikkim Herald the bulletin of the Sikkim government (Newari edition).

Unicode

A Unicode character set was proposed in May 2011. A previous tentative mapping of the first SMP also included the script and later versions include the proposal. A revised proposal using the name "Newar" is reflected in the roadmap from 6.0.12. This revised proposal was "to enable the broadest representation of the Newar script, from the historical forms of Old Newar manuscripts to the present style of 'Prachalit' known as 'Nepal Lipi'". An alternative proposal was produced by a group of Newars in Kathmandu led by Devdass Manandhar supported by the distinguished linguist Prof Tej Ratna Kansakar, which differed in a number of ways from the Pandey proposals, the most significant being the inclusion of a number of breathy (nasalised) consonants which had historically been written with a grapheme that could be mistaken for a conjunct but written the wrong way round.

See also

• Nepal script

Bibliography

• Covers Prachalit, Ranjana and Bhujimol, development, current use, information about and drawings of character formation.
• Problems with Unicode for Languages Unsupported by Computers by Pat Hall, with extensive coverage of Nepali scripts, and the history of Unicode coverage.

External links

• Scriptsource page on Prachalit Nepal
• Prachalit, Ranjana and Bramhi fonts and key mappings