Devanagari Letters

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 system), based on the ancient ''Brāhmī'' script, used in the northern Indian subcontinent. It was developed and in regular use by the 7th century CE. The Devanagari script, composed of 47 primary characters, including 14 vowels and 33 consonants, is the fourth most widely adopted writing system in the world, being used for over 120 languages.Devanagari (Nagari)
, Script Features and Description, SIL International (2013), United States

The orthography of this script reflects the pronunciation of the language. Unlike the Latin alphabet, the script has no concept of letter case. It is written from left to right, has a strong preference for symmetrical rounded shapes within squared outlines, and is recognisable by a horizontal line, known as a ''shirorekhā'', that runs along the top of full letters. In a cursory look, the Devanagari script appears different from other Indic scripts such as Bengali-Assamese, or Gurmukhi, but a closer examination reveals they are very similar except for angles and structural emphasis.

Among the languages using it – either as their only script or as one of their scripts – are Marathi, Pāḷi, Sanskrit (the ancient Nagari script for Sanskrit had two additional consonantal characters), Hindi, Boro, Nepali, Sherpa, Prakrit, Apabhramsha, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj Bhasha, Chhattisgarhi, Haryanvi, Magahi, Nagpuri, Rajasthani, Bhili, Dogri, Kashmiri, Konkani, Sindhi, Nepal Bhasa, Mundari, and Santali. The Devanagari script is closely related to the Nandinagari script commonly found in numerous ancient manuscripts of South India, and it is distantly related to a number of southeast Asian scripts.

Etymology

''Devanagari'' is a compound of " ''deva''" () and " ''nāgarī''" ().
''Deva'' means "heavenly or divine" and is also one of the terms for a deity in Hinduism.Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary” Etymologically and Philologically Arranged to cognate Indo-European Languages, Motilal Banarsidass, page 492 '' Nagari'' comes from (''nagaram'') a Sanskrit word which means town. Hence, ''Devanagari'' denotes ''from the abode of divinity or deities''.

' is the Sanskrit feminine of ' "relating or belonging to a town or city, urban". It is a phrasing with ''lipi'' ("script") as ' "script relating to a city", or "spoken in city".

Devanagari Script known as 'Script of the divine city' came from Devanagara or the 'city of the god'. And hence interpret it as " cript ofthe city of the gods".

The use of the name ' emerged from the older term '. According to Fischer, Nagari emerged in the northwest Indian subcontinent around 633 CE, was fully developed by the 11th-century, and was one of the major scripts used for the Sanskrit literature.

History

Devanagari is part of the Brahmic family of scripts of India, Nepal, Tibet, and Southeast Asia. It is a descendant of the 3rd century BCE Brahmi script, which evolved into the Nagari script which in turn gave birth to Devanagari and Nandinagari. Devanagari has been widely adopted across India and Nepal to write Sanskrit, Marathi, Hindi, Central Indo-Aryan languages, Konkani, Boro, and various Nepalese languages.

Some of the earliest epigraphical evidence attesting to the developing Sanskrit Nagari script in ancient India is from the 1st to 4th century CE inscriptions discovered in Gujarat., Rudradaman’s inscription from 1st through 4th century CE found in Gujarat, India, Stanford University Archives, pages 30–45, particularly Devanagari inscription on Jayadaman's coins pages 33–34 Variants of script called ''Nāgarī'', recognisably close to Devanagari, are first attested from the 1st century CE Rudradaman inscriptions in Sanskrit, while the modern standardised form of Devanagari was in use by about 1000 CE.Richard Salomon (2014), Indian Epigraphy, Oxford University Press, , pages 40–42 Medieval inscriptions suggest widespread diffusion of the Nagari-related scripts, with biscripts presenting local script along with the adoption of Nagari scripts. For example, the mid 8th-century Pattadakal pillar in Karnataka has text in both Siddha Matrika script, and an early Telugu-Kannada script; while, the Kangra Jawalamukhi inscription in Himachal Pradesh is written in both Sharada and Devanagari scripts.Richard Salomon (2014), Indian Epigraphy, Oxford University Press, , page 71

The Nagari script was in regular use by the 7th century CE, and it was fully developed by about the end of first millennium. The use of Sanskrit in Nagari script in medieval India is attested by numerous pillar and cave temple inscriptions, including the 11th-century Udayagiri inscriptions in Madhya Pradesh, and an inscribed brick found in Uttar Pradesh, dated to be from 1217 CE, which is now held at the British Museum. The script's proto- and related versions have been discovered in ancient relics outside of India, such as in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Indonesia; while in East Asia, ''Siddha Matrika'' script considered as the closest precursor to Nagari was in use by Buddhists. Nagari has been the ''primus inter pares'' of the Indic scripts.George Cardona and Danesh Jain (2003), The Indo-Aryan Languages, Routledge, , pages 75–77 It has long been used traditionally by religiously educated people in South Asia to record and transmit information, existing throughout the land in parallel with a wide variety of local scripts (such as Modi, Kaithi, and Mahajani) used for administration, commerce, and other daily uses.

Sharada remained in parallel use in Kashmir. An early version of Devanagari is visible in the Kutila inscription of Bareilly dated to Vikram Samvat 1049 (i.e. 992 CE), which demonstrates the emergence of the horizontal bar to group letters belonging to a word. One of the oldest surviving Sanskrit texts from the early post- Maurya period consists of 1,413 Nagari pages of a commentary by Patanjali, with a composition date of about 150 BCE, the surviving copy transcribed about 14th century CE.

East Asia

In the 7th century, under the rule of Songtsen Gampo of the Tibetan Empire, Thonmi Sambhota was sent to Nepal to open marriage negotiations with a Nepali princess and to find a writing system suitable for the Tibetan language. Thus he invented the Tibetan script, based on the Nagari used in Kashmir. He added 6 new characters for sounds that did not exist in Sanskrit.

Other scripts closely related to Nagari such as Siddham Matrka were in use in Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan and other parts of East Asia by the 7th to 10th centuries.Richard Salomon (2014), Indian Epigraphy, Oxford University Press, , pages 157–160

Most of the southeast Asian scripts have roots in the Dravidian scripts, except for a few found in south-central regions of Java and isolated parts of southeast Asia that resemble Devanagari or its prototype. The Kawi script in particular is similar to the Devanagari in many respects though the morphology of the script has local changes. The earliest inscriptions in the Devanagari-like scripts are from around the 10th century, with many more between 11th and 14th centuries. Some of the old-Devanagari inscriptions are found in Hindu temples of Java, such as the Prambanan temple. The Ligor and the Kalasan inscriptions of central Java, dated to the 8th century, are also in the Nagari script of North India. According to the epigraphist and Asian Studies scholar Lawrence Briggs, these may be related to the 9th-century copper plate inscription of Devapaladeva (Bengal) which is also in early Devanagari script. The term Kawi in Kawi script is a loan word from ''Kavya'' (poetry). According to anthropologists and Asian studies scholars John Norman Miksic and Goh Geok Yian, the 8th-century version of early Nagari or Devanagari script was adopted in Java, Bali (Indonesia), and Khmer (Cambodia) around 8th or 9th centuries, as evidenced by the many inscriptions of this period.

Letters

The letter order of Devanagari, like nearly all Brahmic scripts, is based on phonetic principles that consider both the manner and place of articulation of the consonants and vowels they represent. This arrangement is usually referred to as the ' " garland of letters". The format of Devanagari for Sanskrit serves as the prototype for its application, with minor variations or additions, to other languages.

Vowels

The vowels and their arrangement are:

# Arranged with the vowels are two consonantal diacritics, the final nasal '' anusvāra'' ' and the final fricative ''visarga'' ' (called ' and '').'' notes of the ''anusvāra'' in Sanskrit that "there is some controversy as to whether it represents a homorganic nasal stop .. a nasalised vowel, a nasalised semivowel, or all these according to context". The ''visarga'' represents post-vocalic voiceless glottal fricative , in Sanskrit an allophone of '','' or less commonly '','' usually in word-final position. Some traditions of recitation append an echo of the vowel after the breath: . considers the ''visarga'' along with letters ' and ' for the "largely predictable" velar and palatal nasals to be examples of "phonetic overkill in the system".
# Another diacritic is the ''candrabindu''/''anunāsika'' . describes it as a "more emphatic form" of the '','' "sometimes ..used to mark a true owelnasalization". In a New Indo-Aryan language such as Hindi the distinction is formal: the ' indicates vowel nasalisation while the ' indicates a homorganic nasal preceding another consonant: e.g., "laughter", "the Ganges". When an ''akṣara'' has a vowel diacritic above the top line, that leaves no room for the ''candra'' ("moon") stroke ''candrabindu,'' which is dispensed with in favour of the lone dot: "am", but "are". Some writers and typesetters dispense with the "moon" stroke altogether, using only the dot in all situations.
# The '' avagraha'' (usually transliterated with an apostrophe) is a Sanskrit punctuation mark for the elision of a vowel in sandhi: ' ( ← ' + ') "this one". An original long vowel lost to coalescence is sometimes marked with a double ''avagraha:'' ' ( ← ' + ') "always, the self". In Hindi, states that its "main function is to show that a vowel is sustained in a cry or a shout": '. In Madhyadeshi Languages like Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Maithili, etc. which have "quite a number of verbal forms hatend in that inherent vowel", the ''avagraha'' is used to mark the ''non-''elision of word-final inherent ''a'', which otherwise is a modern orthographic convention: ' "sit" versus '
# The syllabic consonants ' (), '','' () and ' () are specific to Sanskrit and not included in the ' of other languages. The sound represented by ' has also been lost in the modern languages, and its pronunciation now ranges from (Hindi) to (Marathi).
# ' is not an actual phoneme of Sanskrit, but rather a graphic convention included among the vowels in order to maintain the symmetry of short–long pairs of letters.
# There are non-regular formations of ''ru'', ''rū'', and ''hṛ''.
# There are two more vowels in Marathi, and , that respectively represent [], similar to the received pronunciation, RP English pronunciation of in ‘act’, and [], similar to the RP pronunciation of in ‘cot’. These vowels are sometimes used in Hindi too, as in ''dôlar'', "dollar". IAST transliteration is not defined. In ISO 15919, the transliteration is ê and ô, respectively.

Consonants

The table below shows the consonant letters (in combination with inherent vowel ''a'') and their arrangement. To the right of the Devanagari letter it shows the Latin script transliteration using International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration, and the phonetic value (IPA) in Hindi.

* Additionally, there is ' (IPA: or ), the intervocalic lateral flap allophone of the voiced retroflex stop in Vedic Sanskrit, which is a phoneme in languages such as Marathi, Konkani, Garhwali, and Rajasthani.
* Beyond the Sanskritic set, new shapes have rarely been formulated. offers the following, "In any case, according to some, all possible sounds had already been described and provided for in this system, as Sanskrit was the original and perfect language. Hence it was difficult to provide for or even to conceive ''other'' sounds, unknown to the phoneticians of Sanskrit". Where foreign borrowings and internal developments did inevitably accrue and arise in New Indo-Aryan languages, they have been ignored in writing, or dealt through means such as diacritics and ligatures (ignored in recitation).
** The most prolific diacritic has been the subscript dot ('' nuqtā'') . Hindi uses it for the Persian, Arabic and English sounds ''qa'' /q/, ''xa'' /x/, ''ġa'' /ɣ/, ''za'' /z/, ''zha'' /ʒ/, and ''fa'' /f/, and for the allophonic developments ' /ɽ/ and ' /ɽʱ/. (Although ' could also exist, it is not used in Hindi.)
** Sindhi's and Saraiki's implosives are accommodated with a line attached below: , , , .
** Aspirated sonorants may be represented as conjuncts/ligatures with ''ha'': ''mha'', ''nha'', ', ''vha'', ''lha'', ', ''rha''.
** notes Marwari as using for ' (while represents ).
For a list of the 297 (33×9) possible Sanskrit consonant-(short) vowel syllables see Āryabhaṭa numeration.

Vowel diacritics

Table: Consonants with vowel diacritics. Vowels in their independent form on the top and in their corresponding dependent form (vowel sign) combined with the consonant '' on the bottom. '' is without any added vowel sign, where the vowel '' is inherent.

A vowel combines with a consonant in their diacritic form. For example, the vowel () combines with the consonant () to form the syllabic letter (), with halant (cancel sign) removed and added vowel sign which is indicated by diacritics. The vowel () combines with the consonant () to form () with halant removed. But the diacritic series of ... () is without any added vowel sign, as the vowel अ (a) is inherent. The transliteration of each combination will appear on mouseover.

Conjunct consonants

As mentioned, successive consonants lacking a vowel in between them may physically join together as a ''conjunct consonant'' or ligature. When Devanagari is used for writing languages other than Sanskrit, conjuncts are used mostly with Sanskrit words and loan words. Native words typically use the basic consonant and native speakers know to suppress the vowel when it is conventional to do so. For example, the native Hindi word ''karnā'' is written (''ka-ra-nā''). The government of these clusters ranges from widely to narrowly applicable rules, with special exceptions within. While standardised for the most part, there are certain variations in clustering, of which the Unicode used on this page is just one scheme. The following are a number of rules:
* 24 out of the 36 consonants contain a vertical right stroke ( ''kha'', ''gha'', ''ṇa'' etc.). As first or middle fragments/members of a cluster (when letters are to be written as half pronounced), they lose that stroke. e.g. + = ''tva'', + = ''ṇḍha'', + = ''stha''. In Unicode, as in Hindi, these consonants without their vertical stems are called half forms. ''ś(a)'' appears as a different, simple ribbon-shaped fragment preceding ''va'', ''na'', ''ca'', ''la'', and ''ra'', causing these second members to be shifted down and reduced in size. Thus ''śva'', ''śna'', ''śca'' ''śla'', ''śra, and'' ''śri.''
* ''r(a)'' as a first member takes the form of a curved upward dash above the final character or its ''ā-''diacritic. e.g. ''rva'', ''rvā'', ''rspa'', ''rspā''. As a final member with ''ṭa'', ''ṭha'', ''ḍa'', ''ḍha'', ''ṛa'', ''cha'', it is two lines together below the character pointed downwards. Thus ''ṭra'', ''ṭhra'', ''ḍra'', ''ḍhra'', ''ṛra'', ''chra''. Elsewhere as a final member it is a diagonal stroke extending leftwards and down. e.g. . ''ta'' is shifted up to make the conjunct ''tra''.
* As first members, remaining characters lacking vertical strokes such as ''d(a)'' and ''h(a)'' may have their second member, reduced in size and lacking its horizontal stroke, placed underneath. ''k(a)'', ''ch(a)'', and ''ph(a)'' shorten their right hooks and join them directly to the following member.
* The conjuncts for ' and ' are not clearly derived from the letters making up their components. The conjunct for ' is ( + ) and for ' it is ( + ).

Accent marks

The pitch accent of Vedic Sanskrit is written with various symbols depending on shakha. In the Rigveda, ''anudātta'' is written with a bar below the line (), ''svarita'' with a stroke above the line () while ''udātta'' is unmarked.

Punctuation

The end of a sentence or half-verse may be marked with the "" symbol (called a '' daṇḍa'', meaning "bar", or called a ', meaning "full stop/pause"). The end of a full verse may be marked with a double-''daṇḍa'', a "" symbol. A comma (called an ', meaning "short stop/pause") is used to denote a natural pause in speech.Transliteration from Hindi Script to Meetei Mayek
Watham and Vimal (2013), IJETR, page 550 Punctuation marks of Western origin, such as the colon, semicolon, exclamation mark, dash, and question mark have been in use in Devanagari script since at least the 1900s, matching their use in European languages.

Old forms

The following letter variants are also in use, particularly in older texts.

Numerals

Fonts

A variety of Unicode fonts are in use for Devanagari. These include Akshar, Annapurna, Arial, CDAC-Gist Surekh,CDAC-GIST Surekh Unicode
South Asia Language Resource, University of Chicago (2009) CDAC-Gist Yogesh, Chandas,Sanskrit Devanagari Fonts
Harvard University (2010); se
Chanda and Uttara ttf
2010 archive (Accessed: July 8, 2015) Gargi, Gurumaa, Jaipur, Jana, Kalimati, Kanjirowa, Lohit Devanagari, Mangal, Kokila, Raghu, Sanskrit2003, Santipur OT,Sanskrit Devanagari Fonts
Harvard University (2010); se
Chanda and Uttara ttf
2010 archive (Accessed: July 8, 2015) Siddhanta, and Thyaka.

The form of Devanagari fonts vary with function. According to Harvard College for Sanskrit studies:

The Google Fonts project has a number of Unicode fonts for Devanagari in a variety of typefaces in serif, sans-serif, display and handwriting categories.

Transliteration

There are several methods of Romanisation or transliteration from Devanagari to the Roman script.

Hunterian system

The Hunterian system is the "''national system of romanisation in India''" and the one officially adopted by the Government of India.

ISO 15919

A standard transliteration convention was codified in the ISO 15919 standard of 2001. It uses diacritics to map the much larger set of Brahmic graphemes to the Latin script. The Devanagari-specific portion is nearly identical to the academic standard for Sanskrit, IAST.

IAST

The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is the academic standard for the romanisation of Sanskrit. IAST is the de facto standard used in printed publications, like books, magazines, and electronic texts with Unicode fonts. It is based on a standard established by the ''Congress of Orientalists'' at Athens in 1912. The ISO 15919 standard of 2001 codified the transliteration convention to include an expanded standard for sister scripts of Devanagari.Devanagari IAST conventions
Script Source (2009), SIL International, United States

The National Library at Kolkata romanisation, intended for the romanisation of all Indic scripts, is an extension of IAST.

Harvard-Kyoto

Compared to IAST, Harvard-Kyoto looks much simpler. It does not contain all the diacritic marks that IAST contains. It was designed to simplify the task of putting large amount of Sanskrit textual material into machine readable form, and the inventors stated that it reduces the effort needed in transliteration of Sanskrit texts on the keyboard. This makes typing in Harvard-Kyoto much easier than IAST. Harvard-Kyoto uses capital letters that can be difficult to read in the middle of words.

ITRANS

ITRANS is a lossless transliteration scheme of Devanagari into ASCII that is widely used on Usenet. It is an extension of the Harvard-Kyoto scheme. In ITRANS, the word ''devanāgarī'' is written "devanaagarii" or "devanAgarI". ITRANS is associated with an application of the same name that enables typesetting in Indic scripts. The user inputs in Roman letters and the ITRANS pre-processor translates the Roman letters into Devanagari (or other Indic languages). The latest version of ITRANS is version 5.30 released in July 2001. It is similar to Velthuis system and was created by Avinash Chopde to help print various Indic scripts with personal computers.Transliteration of Devanāgarī
D. Wujastyk (1996)

Velthuis

The disadvantage of the above ASCII schemes is case-sensitivity, implying that transliterated names may not be capitalised. This difficulty is avoided with the system developed in 1996 by Frans Velthuis for TeX, loosely based on IAST, in which case is irrelevant.

ALA-LC Romanisation

ALA-LC romanisation is a transliteration scheme approved by the Library of Congress and the American Library Association, and widely used in North American libraries. Transliteration tables are based on languages, so there is a table for Hindi, one for Sanskrit and Prakrit, etc.

WX

WX is a Roman transliteration scheme for Indian languages, widely used among the natural language processing community in India. It originated at IIT Kanpur for computational processing of Indian languages. The salient features of this transliteration scheme are as follows.
* Every consonant and every vowel has a single mapping into Roman. Hence it is a prefix code, advantageous from computation point of view.
* Lower-case letters are used for unaspirated consonants and short vowels, while capital letters are used for aspirated consonants and long vowels. While the retroflex stops are mapped to 't, T, d, D, N', the dentals are mapped to 'w, W, x, X, n'. Hence the name 'WX', a reminder of this idiosyncratic mapping.

Encodings

ISCII

ISCII is an 8-bit encoding. The lower 128 codepoints are plain ASCII, the upper 128 codepoints are ISCII-specific.

It has been designed for representing not only Devanagari but also various other Indic scripts as well as a Latin-based script with diacritic marks used for transliteration of the Indic scripts.

ISCII has largely been superseded by Unicode, which has, however, attempted to preserve the ISCII layout for its Indic language blocks.

Unicode

The Unicode Standard defines four blocks for Devanagari: Devanagari (U+0900–U+097F), Devanagari Extended (U+A8E0–U+A8FF), Devanagari Extended-A (U+11B00–11B5F), and Vedic Extensions (U+1CD0–U+1CFF).

Devanagari keyboard layouts

InScript layout

InScript is the standard keyboard layout for Devanagari as standardized by the Government of India. It is inbuilt in all modern major operating systems. Microsoft Windows supports the InScript layout (using the Mangal font), which can be used to input unicode Devanagari characters. InScript is also available in some touchscreen mobile phones.

Typewriter

This layout was used on manual typewriters when computers were not available or were uncommon. For backward compatibility some typing tools like Indic IME still provide this layout.

Phonetic

Such tools work on phonetic transliteration. The user writes in the Latin alphabet and the IME automatically converts it into Devanagari. Some popular phonetic typing tools are Akruti, Baraha IME and Google IME.

The Mac OS X operating system includes two different keyboard layouts for Devanagari: one resembles the INSCRIPT/KDE Linux, while the other is a phonetic layout called "Devanagari QWERTY".

Any one of the Unicode fonts input systems is fine for the Indic language Wikipedia and other wikiprojects, including Hindi, Bhojpuri, Marathi, and Nepali Wikipedia. While some people use InScript, the majority uses either Google phonetic transliteration or the input facility Universal Language Selector provided on Wikipedia. On Indic language wikiprojects, the phonetic facility provided initially was java-based, and was later supported by Narayam extension for phonetic input facility. Currently Indic language Wiki projects are supported by Universal Language Selector (ULS), that offers both phonetic keyboard (Aksharantaran, Marathi: , Hindi: ) and InScript keyboard (Marathi: ).

The Ubuntu Linux operating system supports several keyboard layouts for Devanagari, including Harvard-Kyoto, WX notation, Bolanagari and phonetic. The 'remington' typing method in Ubuntu IBUS is similar to the Krutidev typing method, popular in Rajasthan. The 'itrans' method is useful for those who know English (and the English keyboard) well but are not familiar with typing in Devanagari.

See also

* Languages of India
* Clip font
* Devanagari transliteration
* Devanagari Braille
* ISCII
* Nagari Pracharini Sabha
* Nepali
* Schwa deletion in Indo-Aryan languages
* Shiksha – the Vedic study of sound, focusing on the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet

References

Citations

General sources

* .
* .
* .
* .
* .
* .

Census and catalogues of manuscripts in Devanagari

Thousands of manuscripts of ancient and medieval era Sanskrit texts in Devanagari have been discovered since the 19th century. Major catalogues and census include:

* , Medical Hall Press, Princeton University Archive
* , Vol 1: Upanishads, Friedrich Otto Schrader (Compiler), University of Michigan Library Archives

A preliminary list of the Sanskrit and Prakrit manuscripts
Vedas, Sastras, Sutras, Schools of Hindu Philosophies, Arts, Design, Music and other fields, Friedrich Otto Schrader (Compiler), (Devanagiri manuscripts are identified by Character code De.)

Catalogue of the Sanskrit Manuscripts
Part 1: Vedic Manuscripts, Harvard University Archives (mostly Devanagari)

Catalogue of the Sanskrit Manuscripts
Part 4: Manuscripts of Hindu schools of Philosophy and Tantra, Harvard University Archives (mostly Devanagari)

Catalogue of the Sanskrit Manuscripts
Part 5: Manuscripts of Medicine, Astronomy and Mathematics, Architecture and Technical Science Literature, Julius Eggeling (Compiler), Harvard University Archives (mostly Devanagari)
* , Part 6: Poetic, Epic and Purana Literature, Harvard University Archives (mostly Devanagari)
* David Pingree (1970–1981), Census of the Exact Sciences in Sanskrit: Volumes 1 through 5
American Philosophical Society
Manuscripts in various Indic scripts including Devanagari

External links

Devnagari Unicode Legacy Font Converters


Digital Nagari fonts
University of Chicago


Wazu, Japan (Alternate collection

, McGill University)
* , Rudradaman's inscription in Sanskrit Nagari script from 1st through 4th century CE (coins and epigraphy), found in Gujarat, India, pages 30–45

Numerals and Text in Devanagari
, 9th century temple in Gwalior Madhya Pradesh, India, Current Science
*

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