The Semitic influence in the invention of the Indian Alphabet, A Contrastive Study

Abstract

The archeological discoveries have opened new horizons in the history of India and put India into a new era of human civilization to meet with the most ancient civilizations in the Middle East. This explains why archeologists and orientalist researchers specialized in the field of Indian culture differed on identifying the date, origin and form of the Indian alphabet as was used by ancient Indians. Their task was not as easy as may be imagined because this language dates back to very ancient times a fact which made scientists to hypothesize many theories about the emergence of the Indian writing. The idea of writing this research comes to clarify and provide evidence that the Indian language, even though classified as Hamitic Indo-European language, has deep roots in (Semitic, Island, Arabic) languages family. Arabic civilization had a deep influence on it.

Based on some well- known traditions which are followed in the study of ancient alphabets, the research reviews the most important theories tackling the question of the emergence of writing in India, attempts to argue them in the light of contrastive linguistics approach and on the basis of the same approach the origin of the Indian ancient alphabet is illustrated as well as some ancient Semitic scripts which are similar to the Indian alphabet are displayed by the researcher.