In
Indic scripts
The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India ...
, the daṇḍa (
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
: दण्ड ' "stick") is a
punctuation
Punctuation (or sometimes interpunction) is the use of spacing, conventional signs (called punctuation marks), and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding and correct reading of written text, whether read silently or aloud. An ...
mark.
The
glyph
A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...
consists of a single vertical stroke.
Use
The daṇḍa marks the end of a sentence or line, comparable to a
full stop
The full stop (Commonwealth English), period (North American English), or full point , is a punctuation mark. It is used for several purposes, most often to mark the end of a declarative sentence (as distinguished from a question or exclamation ...
(period) as commonly used in the
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...
, and is used together with Western punctuation in most modern
Indic
Indic may refer to:
* Indic languages (disambiguation)
* Various scripts:
** Brahmic scripts, a family of scripts used to write Indian and other Asian languages
** Kharosthi (extinct)
* Indian numerals
* Indian religions, also known as the Dharm ...
languages.
The daṇḍa and double daṇḍa are the only punctuation used in Sanskrit texts.
[ No distinct punctuation is used to mark questions or exclamations, which must be inferred from other aspects of the sentence.][
In metrical texts, a double daṇḍa is used to delimit verses, and a single daṇḍa to delimit a pada, line, or semi-verse. In prose, the double daṇḍa is used to mark the end of a paragraph, a story, or section.][
]
Computer encoding
The Devanagari
Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental syste ...
character can be found at code point
In character encoding terminology, a code point, codepoint or code position is a numerical value that maps to a specific character. Code points usually represent a single grapheme—usually a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or whitespace—but ...
U+0964 () in Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
. The "double daṇḍa" is at U+0965 (). The Unicode standard recommends using this character also in other Indic scripts
The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India ...
, like Bengali, Telugu, Oriya, and others. Encoding it separately for every Indic script was proposed, but as of 2020, this proposal has not been implemented.
Danda and similar characters are encoded separately for some scripts in which its appearance or use is significantly different from the Devangari one. These include forms with adornments, such as the Rgya Gram Shad.
ISCII
Indian Script Code for Information Interchange (ISCII) is a coding scheme for representing various writing systems of India. It encodes the main Indic scripts and a Roman transliteration. The supported scripts are: Bengali–Assamese, Devanagar ...
encodes daṇḍa at 0xEA.
See also
*Vertical bar
The vertical bar, , is a glyph with various uses in mathematics, computing, and typography. It has many names, often related to particular meanings: Sheffer stroke (in logic), pipe, bar, or (literally the word "or"), vbar, and others.
Usage
...
Footnotes
References
External links
*
* {{wiktionary-inline, दण्ड
Devanagari
Grammar
Semiotics
Syntax
Punctuation