Ol Chiki script

The Ol Chiki () script, also known as Ol Cemetʼ (Santali: "ol" 'writing', "cemet" 'learning'), Ol Ciki, Ol, and sometimes as the Santali alphabet, is the official writing system for Santali, an Austroasiatic language recognized as an official regional language in India. It has 30 letters, the forms of which are intended to evoke natural shapes. The script is written from left to right.
History.
The Ol Chiki script was created in 1925 by Raghunath Murmu for the Santali language, and publicized first in 1939 at a Mayurbhanj State exhibition.
Previously, Santali had been written with the Latin script. However, Santali is not an Indo-Aryan language and Indic scripts did not have letters for all of Santali's phonemes, especially its stop consonants and vowels, which made writing the language accurately in an unmodified Indic script difficult. The detailed analysis was given by Byomkes Chakrabarti in his "Comparative Study of Santali and Bengali". Missionary and linguist Paul Olaf Bodding, a Norwegian, introduced the Latin script, which is better at representing Santali stops, phonemes and nasal sounds with the use of diacritical marks and accents. Unlike most Indic scripts, Ol Chiki is not an abugida, with vowels given equal representation with consonants. Additionally, it was designed specifically for the language, but one letter could not be assigned to each phoneme because the sixth vowel in Ol Chiki is still problematic.
Myths.
There are two prominent myths associated with the creation of Ol Chiki. One of them is tied to the genesis legend as it believed by the Santals. According to this myth, the Ol Chiki writing system originated during the creation of the earth. The first character "ᱚ" is shaped after the fire created by lightning. The first five characters "ᱚ" ("sengel" - fire), "ᱛ" ("hasa" - soil/earth) , "ᱜ" ("dak" - water), "ᱝ" ("hoi" - air) and "ᱞ" ("soon" - sky) represent the five classical elements. Noting about the myth, Rameswar Murmu has written the belief of Raghunath Murmu as a small child seeing the Santal deities "Bidu" and "Chandan" in his dreams where the deities would ask him to worship them which will follow the appearance of the script. This would follow Raghunath Murmu going to the mountain "Kaphiburu" alone to worship the deities. The deities would later show the writing system in a dream.
The second myth is related to a divine origin of Ol Chiki script through a blessed man (Raghunath Murmu) as opposed to any human creation.
Letters.
The values of the letters are as follows:
Aspirated consonants are written as digraphs with the letter : /tʰ/, /gʱ/, /kʰ/, /jʱ/, /cʰ/, /dʱ/, /pʰ/, /ɖʱ/, /ɽʱ/, /ʈʰ/, and /bʱ/.
Other marks.
Ol Chiki employs several marks which are placed after the letter they modify (there are no combining characters):
Digits.
Ol Chiki has its own set of digits:
Punctuation.
Some Western-style punctuation marks are used with Ol Chiki: comma (,), exclamation mark (!), question mark (?), and quotation marks (“ and ”).
Period (.) is not used because it is visually confusable with the găhlă ṭuḍăg mark (ᱹ). Instead of periods the script uses two dandas:
Computing.
Unicode.
Ol Chiki script was added to the Unicode Standard in April, 2008 with the release of version 5.1.
The Unicode block for Ol Chiki is U+1C50–U+1C7F: