Tirhuta

Tirhuta, Mithilakshar
Type	Abugida
Languages	Maithili
Time period	c. 15th–mid 20th century
ISO 15924	Tirh, 326
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols.

Tirhuta (Devanagari: तिरहुता tirhutā; Eastern Nagari: তিরহুতা) or Mithilakshar (Devanagari script मिथिलाक्षर mithilākṣar; Eastern Nagari script: মিথিলাক্ষর) is the script traditionally used for the Maithili language, an Indo-European language spoken in the Indian state of Bihar, Jharkhand, parts of West Bengal and eastern Nepal. The language has a rich history spanning a thousand years, but years of neglect by the Bihar government and migration have taken their toll on the use of Tirhuta. Most speakers of the language have switched to using the Devanagari script, which is also used to write neighboring Central Indic languages to the west such as Hindi. As a result, the number of people with a working knowledge of Tirhuta has dropped considerably in recent years.

Description

Tirhuta resembles the closely related Eastern Nagari script, used to write other Eastern Indic languages, such as Bengali and Assamese. In fact, many letters (e.g. ক /k/, খ /kʰ/, দ /d̪/, জ /dʒ/) are written the same in both Tirhuta and Eastern Nagari. Nevertheless, there are sufficient differences between the two scripts to somewhat impede mutual comprehension. For example, the letter representing the sound /r/ in Tirhuta has the same form as the Eastern Nagari letter ব /b/, and the Eastern Nagari letter র /r/ has the same shape as the Tirhuta letter /w/. Furthermore, many of the conjunct letters and vowel signs mean different things in the two scripts. For example, the conjunct ত্ত represents a geminate voiceless unaspirated dental stop /t̪/ in Eastern Nagari script, but it represents the syllable /t̪u/ in Mithilakshar.

History and current status

The oldest specimen of Tirhuta is a Shaivite temple inscription in Tilkeshwarsthāna near Kusheshwarsthāna in the Darbhangā district of Bihar. In the inscription, it is mentioned in the ancient Magadhi Prakrit language that the temple was built on "Kāttika sudi" in "Shake 125" (AD 203), which is the day following Diwali, a holiday that is still regarded as very auspicious for installing the icon in a temple. The script of this inscription has little difference with modern Tirhuta.

Despite the near universal switch from Tirhuta to the Devanagari script for writing Maithili, some traditional pundits still use the script for sending one another ceremonial letters (pātā) related to some important function such as marriage. Fonts for this script were developed in 2003. An effort is underway to preserve Tirhuta and develop it for use in digital media by encoding the script in the Unicode standard, for which proposals^[1][2][3] have been submitted (now the ISO, the Unicode Technical Committee has approved the application for encoding of Tirhuta as Unicode).

The 2003 inclusion of Maithili in the VIIIth Schedule of the Indian Constitution having accorded official recognition to it as a language independent of Hindi, there is a possibility that this might lead to efforts to reimplement Tirhuta on a wider basis, in accord with similar trends in India reinforcing separate identities.

Image gallery

The first two images shown below are samples illustrating the history of Tirhuta. The first is the sacred sign of Ganesha, called āñjī, used for millennia by students before beginning Tirhuta studies. Displayed further below are images of tables comparing the Tirhuta and Devanagari scripts.

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References

1. ^ Pandey, Anshuman. 2006. Request to Allocate the Maithili Script in the Unicode Roadmap
2. ^ Pandey, Anshuman. 2009
3. ^ Pandey, Anshuman. 2011

External links

1. Maithili Font Maithili Software
2. Tirhuta Lipi: Native Script of Maithili
3. Mithila Online
4. Learn Mithilakshara by Gajendra Thakur
5. Tirhuta Lipi: Link to download a maithili or tirhuta font