Grantha alphabet

Origin

The Grantha alphabet is a descendent of the Brahmi alphabet and started to emerge during the 5th century AD. Most of the alphabets of southern India evolved from Grantha, and it also influenced the Sinhala and Thai alphabets.

The Grantha alphabet has traditional been used by Tamil speakers to write Sanskrit and is still used in traditional vedic schools (patasalas)

Notable features

Each letters represents a consonant with an inherent vowel (a). Other vowels were indicated using a diacritics or separate letters.
Letters are grouped according to the way they are pronounced.

Grantha vowels

Grantha consonants

The last three consonants are example of conjuncts.

Links

Information about the Grantha Script
http://www.ancientscripts.com/grantha.html
http://www.mudgala.com/articles/grantha.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grantha_script

Grantha Script Tutorials
http://www.ibiblio.org/sadagopan/gsindex.html

Other syllabic alphabets

Ahom, Balinese, Batak, Bengali, Brahmi, Buhid, Burmese, Cham, Dehong Dai/Tai Le, Devanagari, Grantha, Gujarati, Gurmukhi (Punjabi), Hanuno'o, Hmong, Javanese, Kannada, Kayah Li, Kharosthi, Khmer, Lao, Lepcha, Limbu, Lontara/Makasar, Malayalam, Manpuri, Modi, Oriya, Phags-pa, Ranjana, Redjang, Sharda, Siddham, Sinhala, Sorang Sompeng, Sourashtra, Soyombo, Syloti Nagri, Tagalog, Tagbanwa, Tai Dam, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Tocharian, Varang Kshiti