Perczel has long been fascinated by the world of Syrian Christians in India. This will allow people to familiarise themselves with the script and access historical records believed to have been destroyed.
#Old manuscripts software#
His team is also working on optical character recognition and handwriting recognition software for Garshuni Malayalam.
#Old manuscripts for free#
The script has its own Unicode, a universal character encoding standard available online for free use. He also said that the keyboard will be “freeware and downloadable.” Perczel added that his three-person team was mostly of Indian origin, consisting of his PhD student Saranya Chandran and informatician Mujib Rahman. SAMHiTA webinar recently organised by the India International Centre. Type Garshuni Malayalam as if you were typing Malayalam,” Perczel said at a Kriti. “We’re working on a keyboard that will help you In Budapest, is building a Garshuni Malayalam keyboard to help peopleĬommunicate online in the language. Held considerable privilege and prestige, and claimed that their forefathers had beenĬonverted by the apostle Thomas in 52 AD.Īlong with his team, Perczel, who is a professor at the Central European University Surprised to find an existing community of Christians in Kerala. When European Catholic missionaries arrived in India for the first time, they were Medieval texts show mud-slinging among Jains, Buddhists, Hindus The digitised records along with a keyboard in the Garshuni Malayalam script will give millions of Syrian Christians the world over the chance to relearn the language and their history, said Perczel.Īlso Read: Food fights not new to India. They weren’t, or they were venerated but not conserved,” said Perczel. Manuscript libraries, they were kept very well, like in Thrissur. Others had been burnt with their blackened remnants left behind. “In some Some of the manuscripts he found were dust-ridden, rat-eaten and worm-worn. It was used by the Kerala Syrian Christian clergymen till the early 20th century. While Garshuni is traditionally referred to as Arabic in a Syriac script, the records Perczel is digitising are Malayalam written in the Syriac script. Most of the records, popularly believed to have been destroyed in the 16th century by the Roman Catholic Church, are written in Garshuni Malayalam. They were arguably the oldest written historical records of the Syrian, or Saint Thomas Christians, a community that converted long before colonisation and missionary expansion in India. He is now on a quest to develop an InScript keyboard for the lost script-the first of its kind-for which he had to decode thousands of palm-leaf documents lying forgotten in cupboards. But instead of engaging in gun fights and discovering lost treasure and ancient cities, The Hungarian scholar of Byzantine history and early Christianity is bringing to life a forgotten body of Malayalam scholarly literature-one that is written in a script based on the Syriac alphabet, an ancient writing system that dates back to the 1st century AD, and shares similarities with Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic and Sogdian. István Perczel could well be a modern-day Indiana Jones for Kerala’s elite approximately 60,00,000- strong Syrian Christian community spread across the globe.
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