It is by 1877 that the Europeans started studying and classifying the scripts of oriental languages especially, South Asian and East Asian. 

Probably Holle did the first attempt of cataloging the Sanskrit and its apparently descending languages within the Indian subcontinent and beyond.


Please see this informative document which also points to the changes that may have occurred to these scripts due to social reasons.


http://home.gwu.edu/~kuipers/kuipers%20insular%20seasia%20scripts.pdf

-Viswam



On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 2:14 PM, Vishnu t <visdaviva@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Tejaswini and Friends,

It is an interesting and pertinent issue. I do completely concur with Tejaswini on the problem of 'using philological classifications and terminology'. However, it will be interesting to track the history of how we have ended up with the term 'Indic', in the computing context. Do friends on the list know of any history of computing terms and how 'Indic' has come to be used?

Would be useful if any body can shed light on this and let us also put this up on Wikipedia.

The Wiktionary entry for 'Indic' is here https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Indic

Look forward to more conversations on this.

Regards,
Vishnu



On 14 February 2013 09:34, Tejaswini Niranjana <teju@cscs.res.in> wrote:
Correction: by Dravidian language in Pakistan I suppose you meant Brahui, which has a couple of million speakers. Doesn't appear to be much writing in the language though. We will have to find out more.

And one more comment on your suggestion about using 'Indic-Dravidian': do remember that we have several languages in the north-east which are part of neither of these groupings, since they are from the Tibeto-Burman family of languages! This is what I meant by the problem of using philological classifications and terminology.

TN