A comparative study of complexity of handwritten Bharati characters with that of major Indian scripts

TL;DR

This study introduces Bharati, a simplified script designed to unify Indian languages, and analyzes its complexity compared to nine major Indian scripts, demonstrating its relative simplicity based on catastrophe theory measures.

Contribution

The paper presents Bharati, a novel, phonetics-based script that simplifies Indian characters and provides a comprehensive complexity analysis comparing it with existing scripts.

Findings

Bharati is simpler than nine major Indian scripts in most complexity measures.

The script's design reflects phonetic organization, aiding ease of learning.

Complexity analysis uses catastrophe theory to quantify simplicity.

Abstract

We present Bharati, a simple, novel script that can represent the characters of a majority of contemporary Indian scripts. The shapes/motifs of Bharati characters are drawn from some of the simplest characters of existing Indian scripts. Bharati characters are designed such that they strictly reflect the underlying phonetic organization, thereby attributing to the script qualities of simplicity, familiarity, ease of acquisition and use. Thus, employing Bharati script as a common script for a majority of Indian languages can ameliorate several existing communication bottlenecks in India. We perform a complexity analysis of handwritten Bharati script and compare its complexity with that of 9 major Indian scripts. The measures of complexity are derived from a theory of handwritten characters based on Catastrophe theory. Bharati script is shown to be simpler than the 9 major Indian scripts in most measures of complexity.