什么是印度诸文字体系

过去或现在用来书写南亚和东南亚许多语言的数十种文字的统称。除了约西元前4世纪到西元3世纪使用的佉卢文字外，该地区所有现存文字皆源於婆罗米（Brahmi）文字，中世纪阿育王的印度-雅利安石刻（西元前3世纪）是最早的证明。在阿育王以後的六个世纪里，婆罗米文字分化为北方和南方两种变体。北方形式发展为所谓的岌多体文字（4～5世纪），最後发展为天城体文字（现用来书写梵语、印地语、马拉塔语、尼泊尔语）、孟加拉文、奥里雅（Oriya）文和果鲁穆奇文（Gurmukhi，锡克教经籍文字）的前身，也用於印度的现代旁遮普语。南方形式则发展为僧伽罗语（Sinhalese）、泰卢固语（Telugu）、坎纳达语（Kannada）的文字体系以及帕那瓦（Pallava）文字，後者形成其他无数文字的基础，包括坦米尔语和马拉雅拉姆语、许多东南亚文字（例如那些用来书写孟语、缅甸语、高棉语、泰语、寮语的文字）及若干南岛诸语言。

Indic writing systems

Set of several dozen scripts used now or in the past to write many South and Southeast Asian languages. Aside from the Kharoshthi (Kharosthi) script, used c. 4th century BC-3rd century AD, all extant writing of the region descends from the Brahmi script, first attested in the Middle Indo-Aryan rock inscriptions of Ashoka (3rd century BC). In the first six centuries after Asoka, Brahmi appears to have diversified into northern and southern variants. The northern types gave rise to the so-called Gupta scripts (4th-5th century), which are ultimately the progenitors of the Devanagari script (now used to write Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali), the Bengali and Oriya scripts, and Gurmukhi, the script of the Sikh scriptures, used also for modern Punjabi in India. The southern types gave rise to the Sinhalese, Telugu, and Kannada scripts on the one hand, and to the Pallava script on the other. The latter formed the basis of numerous other scripts, including those of the Tamil and Malayalam languages, a host of Asian scripts (e.g., those used to write Mon, Burmese, Khmer, Thai, and Lao), and a number of Austronesian languages.