Batak script

Fam1	Proto-Sinaitic alphabet
Fam2	Phoenician alphabet
Fam3	Aramaic alphabet
Fam4	Brāhmī
Fam5	Pallava
Fam6	Old Kawi
Sisters	Balinese Baybayin Buhid Hanunó'o Javanese Lontara Old Sundanese Rencong Rejang Tagbanwa

The Batak script, called locally the surat Batak, is an abugida that is used to write the Batak language of northern Sumatra, an Austronesian language spoken by about three million people on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. In most Batak communities, only the priests, or datu were able to use the Batak script, and used it mainly for magical texts and calendars. After the arrival of Europeans in the Batak lands, first German missionaries and, from 1878 onwards, the Dutch, the Batak script was, alongside the Roman script, taught in the schools, and teaching and religious materials were printed in the Batak script. Soon after the first world war the missionaries decided to discontinue printing books in the Batak script, not only for financial reasons but also because generally the Batak preferred using the Roman script. The script soon became obsolete and is nowadays only used for ornamental purposes.

The Batak script was probably derived from Pallava and Old Kawi alphabets, which ultimately were derived from the Brahmi alphabet, the root of almost all the Indic and Southeast Asian abugidas. It is written from left to right.

Like most abugidas, each letter has an inherent vowel of /a/, unless there is a diacritic (in Toba Batak called pangolat) to indicate the lack of a vowel. Other vowels and final ŋ and final velar fricative [x] are indicated by diacritics, which appear above, or after the consonant. For example, ba is written ba (one letter); bi is written ba.i (i follows the consonant); bang is written ba^ŋ (ŋ is above the consonant); and bing is ba^ŋ.i. Final consonants are written with the pangolat (here represented by "#"): bam is ba.ma.#. However, bim is written ba.ma.i.#: the first diacritic belongs to the first consonant, and the second belongs to the second consonant, but both are written at the end of the entire syllable. The following is rather corrupt rendering of the Batak script:

Sources

Kozok, Uli. 2009. Surat Batak: Sejarah Perkembangan Tulisan Batak, Berikut Pedoman Menulis Aksara Batak dan Cap Si Singamangaraja XII. Jakarta:Gramedia.

External links

Entry on Batak at Omniglot.com -- A guide to writing systems

Transtoba2 - transliteration software (roman to toba batak script), GNU GPL (by Uli Kozok and Leander Seige)

Category:Indonesian scripts Category:Brahmic scripts Category:North Sumatra Category:Batak

This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.

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Batak (Toba) Script - A Distance Learning.

Order: Reorder
Duration: 1:00
Published: 2008-01-27
Uploaded: 2010-08-26
Author: sitimsin

A Distance Learning a la youtube - Mastering Batak Language less than one minute. Money back guarantee!

Stuart Jay Raj - Help Preserve Javanese, Balinese and other Bahasa Daerah Indonesia - Hanacaraka

Order: Reorder
Duration: 3:56
Published: 2010-09-20
Uploaded: 2010-11-26
Author: stujaystujay

Over the years living in Thailand, I had many people coming from Non-English speaking backgrounds approach me about how they might best approach learning Thai. Many of these people came from language backgrounds that had their scripts based on the Indic Sound system - eg Burmese, Hindi, Nepali, Panjabi etc. My Burmese maid could speak Thai, but only read Burmese - this was a tool I used to help her start reading Thai. There were also several Thai born Panjabis that could kind of speak Panjabi, but couldn't read or write it. They could however read Thai, so I used this chart to help them learn to write the Gurmukhi script. There were also a lot of Indonesians in the group. Knowing that many of them would have at least had a grounding in 'Bahasa Daerah' or their own 'local language' when they were at school, I thought that this might be enough to give them a head start on their Thai. I originally wanted to include Javanese, Balinese, Sundanese, Batak and a few other 'Bahasa Daerah'. There wasn't enough space on this chart though, so I selected the languages that I thought would serve the largest amount of people living in Thailand / SE Asia. The two local Indonesian languages that I inlcuded in my Indic Consonant Compass are Javanese and Balinese. The whole gyst of this clip is to hopefully inspire Indonesians to not only dilligently persue learning languages from other countries, but to at the same time get excited about breathing new life into the 'Bahasa Daerah' or <b>...</b>

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