Lord Adinath had two daughters named Brahmi and Sundari. Sundari was proficient in mathematics whilst Brāhmi was expert in linguistics and created her own script named after her. Brahmi script is believed to be forerunner amogst all languages in South East Asia.
Although without knowing the language, it is interesting to observe patterns and decipher the Navkar Mantra written in the Brahmi script. For instance, we can observe and infer the following:
- The first letter of the first five verses begins with “na” and the letter circled green is “na” in Brahmi script.
- The second letter is “mo” and the letter circled red is “ma”, though we can infer that the horizontal line going across the letter turns the “ma” into “mo”.
- The letter circled pink is “a”
- The letter circled brown is “ra” though the flick on the top makes it into “ri”
- The dot after the letter coloured purple and blue turns the “ha” into “han” and “na” into “nam” respectively.
Sanskrit, Hindi, Gujarati and other Indic languages can be seen to follow a similar pattern of transforming the base letters into different forms by using certain inflections, dots, etc e.g. “ka”, “kā”, “ki”, “ku”, etc as illustrated below.
Source:
1. Prabodh Tika
2. Young Jains America article on International Women’s Day Feature: Brahmi and Sundari
3. Internet
I apologise and seek pardon for any unintentional errors in the above post.
