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Font: Telugu
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Belonging to the group of Southern Indic scripts, Telugu script is used in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh for writing the Telugu language, a member of the Dravidian group of languages. Because of their common ancestry in Old Kannada script, Telugu script resembles and is closely related to, Kannada script. By the 16th century AD, Old Kannada script had split into two branches, Kannada and Telugu. The arrival of the printing press in the 19th century further sealed the differences between the two. Telugu is spoken by more people than any of the other Dravidian languages. As other Brahmi-derived Indic scripts, Telugu demonstrates the major features of that model.1 It is a syllabic alphabet whose basic unit is the consonant-based syllable with an inherent [a] vowel. Similar to other Southern Indic scripts, Telugu script has typically rounded features.
Telugu is written horizontally from left to right and its basic set of symbols consists of 35 consonants and 14 vowels. At the beginning of a word, vowels appear in independent form. When used to replace the inherent vowel of a consonantal syllable, vowels appear in diacritic (or satellite) form before, after, above, below or surrounding the modified syllable. In many cases, consonant-vowel combinations may be written with special ligatures which break the predictable pattern. Consonant clusters, a series of consonants without intervening vowels, are typically written by attaching the secondary component as a reduced subscript to the primary consonant. However, the subscript form of a consonant may not at all resemble the full form. In Telugu script, the inherent vowel of a syllable is suppressed by a viramamu which is a superscript mark on the syllable. Originally devised to indicate vowel nasalization, the ring-shaped anusvara is used for nasal consonants in Modern Telugu. Words are separated by a space and the end of a sentence is signaled by a dot as in European practice. Although Telugu has a native set of symbols for numerals, nowadays Arabic numbers are used.
1 For a fuller description of the features of Brahmi-derived scripts, see 'Devanagari'.
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