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 Dharmic ...

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 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

, 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 Rgya Gram Shad (Unicode ) is a character in the Tibetan character set. The character is a punctuation mark, an elaborate form of danda In Indic scripts, the daṇḍa (Sanskrit: दण्ड ' "stick") is a punctuation mark. The glyph consist ...

. ISCII encodes daṇḍa at 0xEA.

Footnotes

References

External links

* * {{wiktionary-inline, दण्ड Devanagari Grammar Semiotics Syntax Punctuation

Use

Computer encoding

See also

Footnotes

References

External links