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It’s not used in orthography — it’s more like a short prayer or gesture of respect before heading into the mundane business of everyday writing.
The rest of the alphabet is also unusually rich. According to K. David Harrison of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, “Each successive grapheme has a mythology that relates its shape, sound, or appearance to the unique Ho cultural context and worldview. This mythology serves as a mnemonic used in teaching and memorizing the Ho syllabary.”
Not surprisingly, the script has mystical and even mysterious roots. It was invented in the 1950s by Lako Bodra, a charismatic Ho community leader, as an alternative to the writing systems devised by Christian missionaries. He claimed that the alphabet was invented in the 13th century by Dhawan Turi, and that he rediscovered it in a shamanistic vision and modernised by it. The alphabet is also known as Varang Kshiti.
Warang Citi remains very much a minority script even among the Ho (who, as a Scheduled Tribe, are some of the poorest people in India), many of whom don’t write their language in any form, many of whom prefer the standard Devanagari script.
In the last few years, Warang Citi has benefited from an unusually far-sighted multilingual education program that supports linguistic diversity in Jharkhand. (See Ol Chiki.)
Another scholar reported, “The Ho orthography is rapidly gaining a wider user base, despite lack of representation of the language in official media and in state schools. We have encountered, for example, a Ho blogger and Ho speakers who use ASCII characters to write Ho in e-mails.”
Links
General Script, Language, and Culture Resources
- Omniglot
- Wikipedia
- Unicode (PDF)
- The Story of Ho Writing
- Warang Chiti Alphabet Video
- Wikipedia (Ho Language)
- Scriptsource
- Sisu Halam Warang Chiti
- Living Tongues Warang Chiti Unicode
- Online Warang Chiti Talking Dictionary Project PDF
- Ho-language talking dictionary, video of a teacher teaching the Warang Citi alphabet, and other resources by Swarthmore College Laboratory for Endangered Languages Research and Documentation
Community Resources
Font/Keyboard Resources
- Ho Language Fonts
- Disum Sans
- BoyoGagraiUnicode Regular
- Aksharamukha converter (helps convert Warang Citi to other writing systems)
- Warang Citi Unicode chart (particularly useful for typeface designers)
- Ho-language talking dictionary, video of a teacher teaching the Warang Citi alphabet, and other resources by Swarthmore College Laboratory for Endangered Languages Research and Documentation
- Fonts and digital resources
- Warang Citi Unicode chart (PDF)
- Aksharamukha converter (helps convert Warang Citi ↔ other writing systems)
- BoyoGagraiUnicode Regular Font