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Deva, 315
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.
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]
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:
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]
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]
The vowels and their arrangement are:[9]
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]
For a list of the 297 (33×9) possible Sanskrit consonant-(short) vowel phonemes, see Āryabhaṭa numeration.
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]
[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]
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:
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.
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.
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.
The following letter variants are also in use, particularly in older texts.[32]
There are several methods of Romanisation or transliteration from Devanagari to the Roman script.[33]
The Hunterian system is the "national system of romanisation in India" and the one officially adopted by the Government of India.[34][35][36]
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.
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.
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 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[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 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.
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.
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).
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.
A Devanagari INSCRIPT bilingual keyboard.
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.
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.
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".
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).
... schwa deletion is an important issue for grapheme-to-phoneme conversion of IAL, which in turn is required for a good Text-to-Speech synthesiser ...
... Without the appropriate deletion of schwas, any speech output would sound unnatural. Since the orthographical representation of Devanagari gives little indication of deletion sites, modern TTS systems for Hindi implemented schwa deletion rules based on the segmental context where schwa appears ...
... Without any schwa deletion, not only the two words will sound very unnatural, but it will also be extremely difficult for the listener to distinguish between the two, the only difference being nasalisation of the e at the end of the former. However, a native speaker would pronounce the former as dha.D-kan-eM and the later as dha.Dak-ne, which are clearly distinguishable ...
... With the passage of time there has emerged a practically uniform system of transliteration of Devanagari and allied alphabets. Nevertheless, no single system of Romanisation has yet developed ...
... In India the Hunterian system is used, whereby every sound in the local language is uniformly represented by a certain letter in the Roman alphabet ...
... The Hunterian system of transliteration, which has international acceptance, has been used ...
Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Indo-Aryan languages, India
Devanāgarī, Maharashtra, Goa, Daman and Diu, Hindi
Delhi, India, Rajasthan, Pakistan, Maharashtra
Mumbai, Marathi literature, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Varkari, Marathi language
Devanagari, Hunterian transliteration, Hinduism, Shiva, Upanishads
Devanagari, India, Pāṇini, Hindi, Hinduism
Devanagari, Malayalam script, Gurmukhī script, Tamil script, Gujarati script