Tirhuta

Tirhuta (तिरहुता / তিরহুতা) or Mithilakshar (मिथिलाक्षर / মিথিলাক্ষর) is the script used for the Maithili language originated in Present-day Janakpur in Mithila region of Nepal and the oldest reference to Tirhuta Script is in Janaki Mandir of Janakpur where Rama and Sita wed. The script has a rich history spanning a thousand years, but years of neglect by Nepal and the Bihar government have taken their toll on the use of Tirhuta. Most speakers of Maithili have switched to using the Devanagari script, which is also used to write neighboring Central Indic languages such as Nepali and Hindi. As a result, the number of people with a working knowledge of Tirhuta has dropped considerably in recent years.

Description

The related script used in West Bengal and Bangladesh is commonly called Bengali alphabet. In fact, many letters of Bengali alphabet (e.g. ক /k/, খ /kʰ/, দ /d̪/, জ /dʒ/) are written the same in both Tirhuta and Bengali. Nevertheless, there are sufficient differences between the two scripts to somewhat impede mutual comprehension. For example, the letter representing the sound /r/ in Tirhuta has the same form as the Bengali letter ব /b/, and the Bengali letter র /r/ has the same shape as the Tirhuta letter /w/. Furthermore, many of the conjunct letters and vowel signs mean different things in the two scripts. For example, the conjunct ত্ত represents a geminate voiceless unaspirated dental stop /t̪/ in Bengali script, but it represents the syllable /t̪u/ in Mithilakshar.

Tirhuta (Unicode block)

Tirhuta is a Unicode block containing characters for Brahmi-derived Tirhuta script which was the primary writing system for Maithili in Nepal and Bihar until the 20th century.

References