Sunday, March 18, 2012

The #Santali language and the Ol Chiki script

At first the Santali language was hardly written and when it was, it was written in the Bengali alphabetOriya alphabet, or the Latin alphabetAs Santali is not an Indo-Aryan language (like most other languages in the north of India), Indic scripts do not have letters for all of Santali's phonemes, especially its stop consonants and vowels, which made writing the language accurately in an unmodified Indic script difficult. 


The  Ol Cemet', Ol Chiki or simply Ol was created in 1925 by Raghunath Murmu specifically for the Santali script one letter is assigned to each phoneme.

A Wikipedia has been requested for the Santali language and it will be localised in the script that is popular with most people. Apparently this is the Latin script. This does not mean that the Ol Chiki script is not relevant for use within a Santali Wikipedia.

There is a font that is available for free. Sadly it is not available under a free license. Finding the copyright holder for these fonts allows us to request a change of the license. Once the license is changed, we can make the font available as a web font.
Thanks,
     GerardM

6 comments:

Michael Everson said...

I wonder where you can get one.

Deepak said...

You can find it here! http://wesanthals.tripod.com/id19.html

Deepak said...

You can find it here!

http://wesanthals.tripod.com/id19.html

GerardM said...

I know, BUT it needs to be available with a free license..
Thanks,
Gerard

Badal said...

Unicode 2000 fonts include ol chiki.

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/ol-chiki.html

Unknown said...

Well I personally know people who own copyright of these fonts. Could you please suggest what needs to be done to get the fonts under free license.
Thanks,
Badal