Fraction signs in Oriya

Posted on Wed 08 May 2013 in unicode

Six fraction signs historically used in Oriya have been included in Unicode 6.0. These characters appear in written and printed documents, and were part of at least four different sets of Oriya metal fonts. The fraction signs were commonly used until 1958, at which time the Government of India adopted the decimal system for currency and the metric system for weights and measures. The characters are now obsolete.

The fraction signs are illustrated by R. J. Grundy in the Concise Oriya-English Dictionary (Cuttack: Orissa Mission Press, 1928):

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Amos Sutton shows only the quarter fractions in the Introductory Grammar of the Oriya Language (Cuttack: Baptist Mission Press, 1831):

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These fraction signs are now part of the Oriya block in Unicode:

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The Oriya fractions are related to the ‘currency numerator’ signs used in Bengali for writing fractions:

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More information on the Oriya fraction signs is available in the original proposal to encode these signs. Information about the ‘Common Indic’ fraction signs shown in the above image may be found in the proposal to encode ‘Common Indic Number Forms’ in Unicode.