Version History

How the Vinara script evolved through four versions. This is the real story of its development.

Version 1 — The Symmetry Experiment

The original idea was not just to make Thaana LTR — it was to make an alphabet that could be written in both directions.

The concept: design characters that only extend vertically and are symmetrical horizontally — so they look the same whether read left-to-right or right-to-left. One script that works with both Thaana and Latin text regardless of direction.

The challenge: designing 24 truly symmetrical characters that are also visually distinct from each other is extremely difficult. The version was never completed.

Version 2 — Flipped Thaana

Abandoning the symmetry goal, version 2 took a simpler approach: just flip Thaana to LTR.

The goal was to stay as close to the original Thaana characters as possible — mirror them horizontally. This way existing Thaana readers could recognize the letters immediately.

This version still only had the original 24 Thaana consonants. No vowels, no extra letters. The scope was deliberately narrow — no "trying to do too much."

The problem that emerged: when you flip letters that were designed for RTL, some become ambiguous or too similar to each other. The visual logic of Thaana depends on its direction.

Version 3 — First Public Version

This was the first version shared publicly.

The core design decision: make every character visually distinct from every other character. This came from a personal experience learning Japanese — many unrelated Kana characters look similar to each other, creating unnecessary difficulty for learners. The same problem exists in Thaana for non-native learners.

Rather than designing random new shapes, inspiration came from Japanese and Chinese characters for two reasons:

1. They are visually neater and more distinct compared to characters from the Indian subcontinent and Arabic (the origins of Thaana)
2. The author was already studying Japanese and Chinese — no new visual language to learn, just adaptation

Several characters in v3 are directly taken or adapted from Japanese Kana and Chinese characters.

This version also introduced the vowel extender concept borrowed from Japanese ー and the idea of standalone vowel characters instead of diacritics.

The problem that emerged: every character in v3 was built from straight lines — highly angular. This made it readable on screen but extremely difficult to write by hand on paper.

Version 4 — Current Version

The angular characters of v3 needed to be made writable by hand without losing their screen readability.

The approach: take each v3 character and introduce gentle curves while keeping the core shape. Not decorative curves — functional ones that make the pen stroke natural.

For characters that were either too similar to existing Vinara, Thaana, or Latin characters, or that didn't curve naturally — inspiration was taken from Dhives Akuru, Thaana's predecessor script which was itself written LTR.

The four missing English consonants (C, W, X, Q) were added in this version — taken directly from their Latin forms but adjusted to match the visual style of the Vinara character set.

The vowels were kept close to their English equivalents — a deliberate choice. Short vowels in English and Dhivehi overlap significantly in sound, and since the vowel keys would be used for English orthographic writing anyway, visual similarity to English vowels made the most practical sense.

This is the version in use today.

Consonants (1–24)

Extra Consonants (25–28)

These four characters have no Thaana equivalent. They were added in v4 to give Vinara full coverage of English sounds.

Vowels (29–35)

The six vowel characters are designed to be simple and uniform. Each follows the same basic structure, with variations that make them distinguishable at a glance.

Sukun

In Vinara, sukun is written using the 35th character, typed as Shift + q. When placed after certain consonants at the end of a word, it indicates no vowel follows (implied sukun).

• W + Q = h (glottal stop, އް)
• s + Q = s (ސް)
• n + Q = n (ން)
• T + Q = th (ތް)
• S + Q = sh (glottal stop, ށް)

In transliteration, you can type hh to specify ށް instead of އް.