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392
THE ALPHABET Pp. 42-76, and reproduced by Sir Albert Gray in the same journal, 1878. Nowadays, however, this script is sufficiently known.
There were two varieties of the Dives Akuru, (1) the ChZA monumental, lapidary script, in which each akshara or
letter was written separately; and (2) the current hand, in TOM which two aksharas were united, usually by carrying the ze Maldive forms of the Sinhalese elapilla or ispilla signs round
the head of its consonant to unite it with the next letter, The Dives Akuru probably contained originally, like other Indian characters, a more complete set of signs, but in the
course of time, under the influence of Arabic, there was no m 222
need for, and use of, the aspirated letters and the palatal phl
and cerebral sibilants, and these signs were discarded. dh
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dives 10 Zee Akuru gradually gave way more and more to the Tana
character, although in the Fig. 180
southern atolls it was The Maldivian Dives Akuru (1)
still used until the last und Gabuli Tana (2)
century.
NOSA
Gabuli Tana (Fig. 180, 2) The population of the Maldive Islands employ nowadays two different characters, (1) the Arabic alphabet, used for the Arabic speech, but also, very rarely indeed, for Maldivian, which can be written wholly in the Persian-Arabic alphabet, with dots here and there to represent particular Maldivian sounds; (2) the Tana or Gabuli Tana character, which, since the eighteenth century has supplanted the Dives Akuru.
The Gabuli Tana is a curious script, being formed from a combination of Arabic and Maldivian numerals with admixture of a few needed PersianArabic letters. On the whole, the character consists of 26 letters, of which the last 8 are modified Persian-Arabic additions, used only when absolutely necessary to give Persian-Arabic pronunciation to Arabic or Persian words written in Maldivian character. The first section of the Tana consists of the Arabic numerals 1 to 9-representing the sounds h, rh(th), 11, T, b, the cerebral I, k, the a-consonantal sign, and the v(x). The second section, for the letters mi, f(ph), dh, 1, l,g, n(g), 3, d, are drawn from the Maldivian numerals I to 9, several of which resemble Sinhalese and Indian numerical symbols. The direction of writing is, as in Semitic scripts, from right to left. Besides, the single letters, as in Semitic scripts (unlike the earlier Maldivian and all the Indian and Sinhalese characters, where the sound a is inherent in the single consonants), are pure consonants; the vocalization is provided by superscript or subscript or by diacritical marks. We can conclude from these peculiar features that the Gabuli
