On plain texts and ciphers (a thought experiment)

[-JKP-]

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I myself live in Southern India (Kerala), and my native language, Malayalam has a style of writing in which to every consonant sound, has a short /a/ vowel added to it by default, unless indicated otherwise by a diacritical mark (one that indicates another wovel sound, or even a mark for lack of the short /a/ vowel to make it sound more like the way we'd expect as english speakers.

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The convention of adding a vowel by default was echoed in the Latin script of the Medieval period by adding a tail to the letter (which creates a shape very much like those in old Gujurati and other Indic scripts). Thus, in Latin, r with a tail becames "ra" (or r with another vowel such as re or re, since in Latin the tail could represent various vowels).

The shape on the left of sha and sa in old Gujurati is used as a scribal convention in Medieval Latin to represent ra (and r with other vowels). In Gujurati the tail swings down, in Latin the tail swings up to the left, but the concept is the same.

I blogged about this (you have to scroll down 2/3 of the way to see the section on Indic languages and implied vowels, particularly the vowel /a/ when it is Indic script) and described the similarity between Indic scripts and Medieval Latin scripts in terms of implied vowels—a similarity that disappeared when modern Latin dropped the scribal conventions:

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