This is the first font ever made of the recently-constructed script for the endangered Malavedan language ChathiPaani, a Dravidian language of Kerala and Tamil Nadu that is closely related to Malayalam.
This font project was requested by a person of the Malavedan tribe who reached out to me on Reddit.
Image shows font at version 0.950. Download from Releases page.
click to expand to view font image
View the keyboard layout (choose latest version number)
Watch a short video demonstrating how to type some letters (downloads because github doesn't have a video player)
I'd say you can read more at the following links, but there's really not much information online.
Notably, none of these pages seem to mention the Chathi subgroup or language.
Click to see links
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malavedan_language
- https://www.ethnologue.com/language/mjr/
- https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q12952775
- https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/mala1463
- https://globalrecordings.net/en/language/13414
- https://anythingtranslate.com/translators/malavedan-malayalam-script-translator/ (I have no idea how this works or if it's remotely correct)
- https://dbpedia.org/page/Malavedan_language
- https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/dlsa-adopts-tribal-settlement/article69382094.ece
The script's symbols in the font are (will be) bound to their own unicode range (the PUA) and directly to the Latin (English) QWERTY layout.
This Malavedan (Malai Vedan, IPA: [mɐlɐʋeːɖɐn]) script is an abugida, with visual and structural similarities to the Malayalam script.
This Malavedan script uses 17 diacritics in total:
- to mark 11 vowels (in addition to the inherent a)
- a circle, for a nasal coda, perhaps similar to the anusvara of Devanagari
- a dot above, I think to mark if a letter takes syllable-final sound
- a u above, for the removal of the inherent a, perhaps similar to the halant of Devanagari
- a ring above, to join two consonants directly together (stronger than the 'anusvara')
- a breve below, to add an /ɹ/-like sound to the consonant
- a dot below, to indicate the corresponding letters of Malayalam that aren't present in Malavedan pronunciation
From the tribe member who requested this font:
"This is for the Malavedan tribe. The name of our language is ChathiPaani. Chathi denotes our tribe and Paani means language or word. Very few people are using this language in this time, the rest of them are using Malayalam."
-
create typing method -
add numbers -
add basic punctuation and symbols - attach glyphs to sensible unicode range in PUA
- build basic website to host fonts, text and dictionary of Malavedan language (put in separate github repository)
- create conversion script to convert between QWERTY encoding and PUA encoding (and future dedicated unicode range when it's been accepted by the Unicode Consortium)
- draft submission proposal for the Unicode Consortium for Malavedan