The terms "surat" and "ulu" are the origin of the name
Surat Ulu. While "ulu" ('upstream') refers to the highland region where the rivers in
South Sumatra and
Bengkulu originate (the
Barisan Mountains), "Surat" refers to the script. The user community first referred to this script family as
Surat Ulu. The
Rencong script () is another well-known naming system. "Rencong" is thought to be derived from the Old Malay word
mèncong, which means oblique or italics. It could also be derived from the word
runcing ('sharp'), as this script family was originally written with a sharp knife tip. Regardless of its origin, Western scholars frequently use this term to refer to this family of scripts. The
Kaganga script is another name coined by Mervyn A. Jaspan (1926-1975), an
anthropologist at the
University of Hull. He was probably not aware that most
Brahmi script lineages use KA Ga and Nga as the first characters of the alphabetic order. The name "Kaganga" is derived from the first three letters of the Pāṇini sequence, which is used in the
Brahmi (Indian) script family. == Materials ==