I'm finding the eight scripts (actually seven, one used for two languages) posted this past Sunday (2010-03-22) endlessly fascinating. The inventor, Prasanna Sree of the English department at Andhra University, has combined elements from various sources for each of the scripts.

In general, they are sort of grab-bag combinations of elements she invented herself plus letters from a variety of Indian scripts, either on their own or combined with other shapes into a single letter. Sometimes the borrowed letters are used for the sound in the original script; as often if not more, she just assigns them arbitrarily to a different sound in the new script. Apart from letters or parts of letters from Gujarati, Devanagari, Sinhalese, Tamil, Bengali, Burmese and possibly Malayalam scripts, she also uses a couple of hiragana, at least one letter from the extinct Bimanese script of Sumbawa as illustrated by Raffles, at least one letter from Georgian, quite likely the Inuktitut ‹vu› and several from Old Philippine Baybayin.

Her invented scripts are interesting, though I wonder why she went to such lengths to get all these letter shapes from all over the place only to use them in such an arbitrary way...? And the letters in several of the scripts seem too complex by half to be really practical, though that may just be my personal impression...

I'm wondering if anyone else can detect letters she might have taken from other scripts and used either with their own values or just used arbitrarily for another sound?

The Konda Dora version takes letters from Bengali, New Tai Lue, and Ahom.....with most of the glyphs being used arbitrarily. The Jatapu uses a lot of letters from Shan for example: Ka representing /a/, La representing /o/, Ta representing /oo/, Nya representing /ou/, Ba representing /uu/ etc......and of course all the scripts you named.

I too have to wonder why Dr. Prasanna Sree went to such lengths to create such scripts using a multitude of somewhat modified glyphs from existing historical scripts in an arbitrary fashion. It reminds me of the Thai-based script that C.K.Trung used to write Hmong....which didn't catch on at all because of the extreme uncanonical vowel usage. To what end? I really can't see any of India's aboriginal groups actually using any of these scripts. .

Anyway, until the script is taken up by the actual Gadaba, Jatapu, etc., communities, I really think Simon should relegate these scripts to the Conscript category in Omniglot - where I think they are likely to remain for a mighty long time.

I think it's likely none of these would be a short-term Unicode candidate...

Apart from the grab-bag of letter shapes borrowed from other scripts, I notice that several of the scripts are put together with a stem and headstrokes reminiscent of the Nagari scripts, though the headstrokes here represent individual vowels. But in other scripts, she doesn't do this at all. So the strange eclecticism affects not only the sources of the letter shapes, but the overall "semantic" design of each script.