Devanagari

Devanāgarī
Rigveda manuscript in Devanagari (early 19th century)
Type	abugida
Languages	Several Languages of India and Nepal, including, Hindi, Nepali, Marathi, Konkani, Bodo, Maithili and Sanskrit. Formerly used to write Gujarati .
Time period	c. 10th century – present[1]
Parent systems	Brāhmī Gupta Nāgarī Devanāgarī
Child systems	Gujarati Moḍī Ranjana
Sister systems	Sharada
ISO 15924	Deva, 315
Direction	Left-to-right
Unicode alias	Devanagari
Unicode range	U+0900–U+097F Devanagari, U+A8E0–U+A8FF Devanagari Extended, U+1CD0–U+1CFF Vedic Extensions

Devanagari used in Melbourne Australia to communicate in an advertisement

Devanagari used in Public Transport Tickets at Mumbai

Devanagari ( ; Hindustani: ; देवनागरी devanāgarī — a compound of "deva" [देव] and "nāgarī" [नागरी]), also called Nagari (Nāgarī, नागरी, the name of its parent writing system), is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal. It is written from left to right, does not have distinct letter cases, and is recognisable (along with most other North Indic scripts, with a few exceptions like Gujarati and Oriya) by a horizontal line that runs along the top of full letters. Since the 19th century, it has been the most commonly used script for writing Sanskrit.^[2] Devanagari is used to write Hindi, Nepali, Marathi, Konkani, Bodo and Maithili among other languages and dialects. It was formerly used to write Gujarati. Because it is the standardised script for the Hindi, Nepali, Marathi, Konkani and Bodo languages, Devanagari is one of the most used and adopted writing systems in the world.

Origins

Devanagari is part of the Brahmic family of scripts of India, Nepal, Tibet, and South-East Asia.^[3] It is a descendant of the Gupta script, along with Siddham and Sharada.^[3] Eastern variants of Gupta called nāgarī are first attested from the 7th century CE; from c. 1200 CE these gradually replaced Siddham, which survived as a vehicle for Tantric Buddhism in East Asia, and Sharada, which 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.^[1]

Sanskrit nāgarī is the feminine of nāgara "relating or belonging to a town or city". It is feminine from its original phrasing with lipi ("script") as nāgarī lipi "script relating to a city", that is, probably from its having originated in some city.^[4]

The use of the name devanāgarī is relatively recent, and the older term nāgarī is still common.^[3] The rapid spread of the term devanāgarī may be related to the almost exclusive use of this script to publish Sanskrit texts in print since the 1870s.^[3]

Devanagari text from Vayu Puran

Devanagari in Dictionary

Principle

As a Brahmic abugida, the fundamental principle of Devanagari is that each letter represents a consonant, which carries an inherent schwa vowel. This is usually written in Latin as a, though it is represented as [ə] in the International Phonetic Alphabet.^[5] The letter क is read ka, the two letters कन are kana, the three कनय are kanaya, etc. Other vowels, or the absence of vowels, require modification of these consonants or their own letters:

• A final consonant is marked with the diacritic ्, called the virāma in Sanskrit, halant in Hindi, and occasionally a "killer stroke" in English. This cancels the inherent vowel, so that from क्नय knaya is derived क्नय् knay. The halant is often used for consonant clusters when typesetting conjunct ligatures is not feasible.
• nasal stops). When applied to Sanskrit, however, it added a great deal of complexity to the script, due to the large variety of clusters in this language (up to five consonants, e.g. rtsny). Much of this complexity is required at least on occasion in the modern Indo-Aryan languages, due to the large number of clusters allowed and especially due to borrowings from Sanskrit.
• Vowels other than the inherent a are written with diacritics (termed matras). For example, using क ka, the following forms can be derived: के ke, कु ku, की kī, का kā, etc.
• For vowels as an independent syllable (in writing, unattached to a preceding consonant), either at the beginning of a word or (in Hindi) after another vowel, there are full-letter forms. For example, while the vowel ū is written with the diacritic ू in कू kū, it has its own letter ऊ in ऊक ūka and (in Hindi but not Sanskrit) कऊ kaū.

Such a letter or ligature, with its diacritics, is called an akṣara "syllable". For example, कनय kanaya is written with what are counted as three akshara, whereas क्न्य knya and कु ku are each written with one.

As far as handwriting is concerned, letters are usually written without the distinctive horizontal bar, which is added only once the word is completed.^[6]

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 varṇamālā "garland of letters".^[7] The format of Devanagari for Sanskrit serves as the prototype for its application, with minor variations or additions, to other languages.^[8]

Vowels

The vowels and their arrangement are:^[9]

• Arranged with the vowels are two consonantal nasal stop [...], a nasalised vowel, a nasalised semivowel, or all these according to context". The visarga represents post-vocalic voiceless glottal fricative [h], in Sanskrit an allophone of s, or less commonly r, usually in word-final position. Some traditions of recitation append an echo of the vowel after the breath:^[10] इः [ihi]. Masica (1991:146) considers the visarga along with letters ङ ṅa and ञ ña for the "largely predictable" velar and palatal nasals to be examples of "phonetic overkill in the system".
• Another diacritic is the nasal preceding another consonant:^[12] e.g. हँसी [ɦə̃si] "laughter", गंगा [ɡəŋɡɑ] "the Ganges". When an akshara 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:^[13] हूँ [ɦũ] "am", but हैं [ɦɛ̃] "are". Some writers and typesetters dispense with the "moon" stroke altogether, using only the dot in all situations.^[14]
• The avagraha ऽ अऽ (usually transliterated with an apostrophe) is a Sanskrit punctuation mark for the elision of a vowel in sandhi: एकोऽयम् eko'yam ( ← ekas + ayam) "this one". An original long vowel lost to coalescence is sometimes marked with a double avagraha: सदाऽऽत्मा sadātmā ( ← sadā + ātmā) "always, the self".^[15] In Hindi, Snell (2000:77) states that its "main function is to show that a vowel is sustained in a cry or a shout": आईऽऽऽ! āīīī!. In Madhyadeshi Languages like Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Maithili, etc. which have "quite a number of verbal forms [that] end in that inherent vowel",^[16] the avagraha is used to mark the non-elision of word-final inherent a, which otherwise is a modern orthographic convention: बइठऽ baiṭha "sit" versus *बइठ baiṭh
• The syllabic consonants ṝ, ḷ, and ḹ are specific to Sanskrit and not included in the varṇamālā of other languages. The sound represented by ṛ has also been lost in the modern languages, and its pronunciation now ranges from [ɾɪ] (Hindi) to [ɾu] (Marathi).
• ḹ 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.^[8]
• There are non-regular formations of रु ru and रू rū.

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 scientific transcription (IAST), the phonetic value (IPA) and the corresponding Urdu letter.^[17]

• Rounding this out where applicable is ळ ḷa / /, the intervocalic lateral flap allophone of the voiced retroflex stop in Vedic Sanskrit, which is a phoneme in languages such as Marathi, Konkani, and Rajasthani.^[18]
• Beyond the Sanskritic set, new shapes have rarely been formulated. Masica (1991:146) 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 क़ qa /q/, ख़ ḫa /x/, ग़ ġa /ɣ/, ज़ za /z/, श़ or झ़ zha /ʒ/, and फ़ fa /f/, and for the allophonic developments ड़ ṛa /ɽ/ and ढ़ ṛha /ɽʱ/. (Although ऴ ḷha /ɭʱ/ could also exist there is no use of it in Hindi.)
  • Sindhi's and Saraiki's implosives are accommodated with a line attached below: ॻ [ɠə], ॼ [ʄə], ॾ [ɗə], ॿ [ɓə].
  • Aspirated sonorants may be represented as conjuncts/ligatures with ह ha: म्ह mha, न्ह nha, ण्ह ṇha, व्ह vha, ल्ह lha, ळ्ह ḷha, र्ह rha.
  • Masica (1991:147) notes Marwari as using a special symbol for ḍa [ɗə] (while ड represents [ɽə]).
  • When writing Urdu, अ with vowel marking is used for the Perso-Arabic consonant ع ayin, which is silent in Urdu.^[19]

For a list of the 297 (33×9) possible Sanskrit consonant-(short) vowel phonemes, see Āryabhaṭa numeration.

Schwa syncope in Hindi consonants

Although the Devanagari script is used as a standard to write modern Hindi, the schwa ('ə') implicit in each consonant of the script is "obligatorily deleted" at the end of words and in certain other contexts, unlike in Sanskrit.^[20] This phenomenon has been termed the "schwa syncope rule" or the "schwa deletion rule" of Hindi.^[20][21] One formalisation of this rule has been summarised as ə -> ∅ | VC_CV. In other words, when a schwa-succeeded consonant is followed by a vowel-succeeded consonant, the schwa inherent in the first consonant is deleted.^[21][22] However, this formalisation is inexact and incomplete (it sometimes deletes a schwa when it should not and, at other times, it fails to delete it when it should) and can cause errors. Schwa deletion is computationally important because it is essential to building text-to-speech software for Hindi.^[22][23]

As a result of schwa syncope, the Hindi pronunciation of many words differs from that expected from a literal Sanskrit-style rendering of Devanagari. For instance, राम is Rām (not Rāma), रचना is Racnā (not Racanā), वेद is Vēd (not Vēda) and नमकीन is Namkīn (not Namakīna).^[22][23] The name of the script itself is pronounced devnāgrī (not devanāgarī).^[24]

Correct schwa deletion is also critical because, in some cases, the same Devanagari letter sequence is pronounced two different ways in Hindi depending on context, and failure to delete the appropriate schwas can change the sense of the word.^[25] For instance, the letter sequence 'रक' is pronounced differently in हरकत (har.kat, meaning movement or activity) and सरकना (sarak.nā, meaning to slide). Similarly, the sequence धड़कने in दिल धड़कने लगा (the heart started beating) and in दिल की धड़कनें (beats of the heart) is identical prior to the nasalisation in the second usage. Yet, it is pronounced dhaṛak.nē in the first and dhaṛ.kanē in the second.^[25] While native speakers correctly pronounce the sequences differently in different contexts, non-native speakers and voice-synthesis software can make them "sound very unnatural", making it "extremely difficult for the listener" to grasp the intended meaning.^[25]

Allophony of 'v' and 'w' in Hindi

[v] (the voiced labiodental fricative) and [w] (the voiced labio-velar approximant) are both allophones of the single letter 'व' in Hindi Devanagari. More specifically, they are conditional allophones, i.e. rules apply on whether 'व' is pronounced as [v] or [w] depending on context. Native Hindi speakers pronounce 'व' as [v] in vrat ('व्रत', fast) and [w] in pakvān ('पकवान', food dish), perceiving them as a single phoneme and without being aware of the allophone distinctions they are systematically making.^[26] However, this specific allophony can become obvious when speakers switch languages. Non-native speakers of Hindi might pronounce 'व' in 'व्रत' as [w], i.e. as wrat instead of the more correct vrat. This results in a minor intelligibility problem because wrat can easily be confused for aurat, which means woman, instead of the intended fast (abstaining from food), in Hindi.^[26]

Conjuncts

The ddhrya-ligature (द्ध्र्य) of JanaSanskritSans.^[27]

You will be able to see the ligatures only if your system has a Unicode font installed that includes the required ligature glyphs (such as one of the TDIL^[28] fonts, see "external links" below).

As mentioned, successive consonants lacking a vowel in between them may physically join together as a conjunct or ligature. Conjuncts are used mostly with loan words. Native words typically use the basic consonant and native speakers know to suppress the vowel. For example, the native Hindi word “karnā” is written करना (ka-ra-na).^[29] 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 (ख, घ, ण etc.). As first or middle fragments/members of a cluster, they lose that stroke. e.g. त + व = त्व, ण + ढ = ण्ढ, स + थ = स्थ. In Unicode, these consonants without their vertical stems are called half forms.^[30] श ś(a) appears as a different, simple ribbon-shaped fragment preceding व va, न na, च ca, ल la, and र ra, causing these second members to be shifted down and reduced in size. Thus श्व śva, श्न śna, श्च śca श्ल śla, and श्र śra.
• र r(a) as a first member takes the form of a curved upward dash above the final character or its ā-diacritic. e.g. र्व rva, र्वा rvā, र्स्प rspa, र्स्पा rspā. As a final member with ट ठ ड ढ ङ छ it is two lines below the character, pointed downwards and apart. Thus ट्र ठ्र ड्र ढ्र ङ्र छ्र. Elsewhere as a final member it is a diagonal stroke extending leftwards and down. e.g. क्र ग्र भ्र. त ta is shifted up to make त्र tra.
• As first members, remaining characters lacking vertical strokes such as द d(a) and ह h(a) may have their second member, reduced in size and lacking its horizontal stroke, placed underneath. क k(a), छ ch(a), and फ ph(a) shorten their right hooks and join them directly to the following member.
• The conjuncts for kṣ and jñ are not clearly derived from the letters making up their components. The conjunct for kṣ is क्ष (क् + ष) and for jñ it is ज्ञ (ज् + ञ).

The table below shows all the 1296 viable symbols for the biconsonantal clusters formed by collating the 36 fundamental symbols of Sanskrit as listed in Masica (1991:161–162). Scroll your cursor over the conjuncts to reveal their romanizations (in ISO 15919^[31]) and IPA transcriptions.

Biconsonantal conjuncts

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 a dot known as a pūrṇa virām or a vertical line danda: ।. The end of a full verse may be marked with two vertical lines: ॥. A comma, or alpa virām, is used to denote a natural pause in speech. Nowadays though, with expansion of English speakers in India, the full stop is also sometimes used.

Old forms

The following letter variants are also in use, particularly in older texts.^[32]

Letter variants

Standard form	Variant form

Numerals

Transliteration

There are several methods of Romanisation or transliteration from Devanagari to the Roman script.^[33]

Hunterian system

The Hunterian system is the "national system of romanisation in India" and the one officially adopted by the Government of India.^[34][35][36]

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. See also: Transliteration of Indic scripts: how to use ISO 15919.^[37] 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 and magazines, and with the wider availability of Unicode fonts, it is also increasingly used for electronic texts. It is based on a standard established by the Congress of Orientalists at Athens in 1912.

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. 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.

ALA-LC Romanisation

ALA-LC^[38] 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,^[39] one for Sanskrit and Prakrit,^[40] 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 three blocks for Devanagari: Devanagari (U+0900–U+097F), Devanagari Extended (U+A8E0–U+A8FF), and Vedic Extensions (U+1CD0–U+1CFF).

Devanagari keyboard layouts

InScript is the standard keyboard layout for Devanagari. 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.

InScript layout

A Devanagari INSCRIPT bilingual keyboard.

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 Roman and the IME automatically converts it into Devanagari. Some popular phonetic typing tools are BarahaIME and Google IME.

Bolnagri phonetic keyboard layout for Linux/GNOME

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

One can use ULS "अक्षरांतरण" (Transliteration) or "मराठी लिपी" (Inscript) typing options to search or edit Marathi WorldHeritage articles as shown in this video clip; One can click on the 'cc to change the subtitle languages to Marathi, English, Sanskrit, Kokani, Ahirani languages.

Any one of Unicode fonts input system is fine for Indic language WorldHeritage and other wikiprojects, icluding Hindi, Bhojpuri, Marathi, Nepali WorldHeritage. Some people use inscript. Majority uses either Google phonetic transliteration or input facility Universal Language Selector provided on WorldHeritage.On Indic language wikiprojects Phonetic facility provided initially was java-based 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:अक्षरांतरण, Hindi:लिप्यंतरण, बोलनागरी ) and InScript keyboard (Marathi:मराठी लिपी).

See also

References

Footnotes

•  .
• Snell, Rupert (2000),  .
• Salomon, Richard (2003), "Writing Systems of the Indo-Aryan Languages", in Cardona, George; Jain, Dhanesh, The Indo-Aryan Languages, Routledge, pp. 67–103,  .
• Verma, Sheela (2003), "Magahi", in Cardona, George; Jain, Dhanesh, The Indo-Aryan Languages, Routledge, pp. 498–514,  .
• Wikner, Charles (1996), A Practical Sanskrit Introductory .

External links

• Unicode Chart for Devanagari
• Hindi/Devanagari Script Tutor

For a list of Devanagari input tools and fonts, please see .