independently, without help of a virama. Unlike a consonant represented by an ordinary consonant letter, this consonant is never followed by an inherent vowel. Anusvara and visarga fit this definition but are not usually included. ISCII and Unicode 5.0 treat a chillu as a glyph variant of a normal ("base") consonant letter. In Unicode 5.1 and later, chillu letters are treated as independent characters, encoded atomically. Number system and other symbols Numerals Malayalam numbers and fractions are written as follows. These are archaic and no longer used. Instead, the common Hindu-Arabic numeral system is followed. Note that there is a confusion about the glyph of Malayalam digit zero. The correct form is oval-shaped, but occasionally the glyph for () is erroneously shown as the glyph for 0. Number "11" is written as "൰൧" and not "൧൧". "32" is written as "൩൰൨" similar to the Tamil numeral system. For example, the number "2013" is read in Malayalam as (). It is split into: () : 2 – () : 1000 – () : 10 – () : 3 – Combine them together to get the Malayalam number . And 1,00,000 as "" = hundred(), thousand() (100×1000), 10,00,000 as "" = ten(), hundred(), thousand() (10×100×1000) and 1,00,00,000 as "" = hundred(), hundred(), thousand() (100×100×1000). Later on this system got reformed to be more similar to the Hindu-Arabic numerals so 10,00,000 in the reformed numerals it would be . Fractions In Malayalam you can transcribe any fraction by affixing () after the denominator followed by the numerator, so a fraction like would be read as () 'out of ten, seven' but fractions like and have distinct names (, , ) and () 'half quarter'. Vattezhuthu alphabet Vatteluttu (, "round writing") is a script that had evolved from Tamil-Brahmi and was once used extensively in the southern part of present-day Tamil Nadu and in Kerala. Malayalam was first written in Vattezhuthu. The Vazhappally inscription issued by Rajashekhara Varman is the earliest example, dating from about 830 CE. During the medieval period, the Tigalari script that was used for writing Tulu in South Canara, and Sanskrit in the adjacent Malabar region, had a close similarity to the modern Malayalam script. In the Tamil country, the modern Tamil script had supplanted Vattezhuthu by the 15th century, but in the Malabar region, Vattezhuthu remained in general use up to the 17th century, or the 18th century. A