8 : 23rd December, 1990 My dear Pranav,
In my previous letter I wrote to you about Vinoba’s idea of a common alternative script. In practice, it means Gujarati would be written in its present script as well as it can be written in Devanagari. So would Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Malyalam and other languages to be written.
All North Indian languages from Kashmiri, Assamese, to Marathi have developed from Sanskrit. Hindi, Marathi and Sanskrit have a common Devanagari script. It involves almost 30 crores of people. Bengali; Oriya, Assamese and Gujarati, could easily adopt Devanagari.
Languages will continue to be separate, but once they are expressed in a common script you will start realising that there are many common words, constructions and proverbs in the Indian languages than one has imagined.
‘Maitri” a journal brought out by Brahmavidya Mandir at Pavnar, publishes its Kannada edition in Devanagari script. Bhoomiputra, a Gujarati journal published from Baroda devotes a few pages to Gujarati articles in the Devanagari script.
I have also made some efforts in this direction. I am the Editor of the House Magazine published by the company for which I work. We include articles in Bengali, Kannada and Gujarati in the Devanagari script. Most of them are easily understood by people who do not know these languages. Since they can read the script they can understand the contents to a large extent. Often the same root word sounds different because it is pronounced differently. Script poses no such problem.
This should not really surprise people. In Europe, the Romanscript with some small adaptations is used for all printed materials, road signs, and so on. Languages are very different,
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