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Devanāgarī () is an abugida writing system used to write, either along with other scripts, or exclusively, several North Indian languages, including Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Sindhi, Bihari, Bhili, Marwari, Konkani, Bhojpuri, Nepali, Nepal Bhasa from Nepal and sometimes Kashmiri and Romani. It is written and read from left to right. The transliteration used in this article follows the popular IAST conventions. The ITRANS * is a lossless transliteration scheme of Devanāgarī into ASCII that is widely used on Usenet. In ITRANS, the word Devanāgarī is written as "devanaagarii".
Origins Devanāgarī emerged around AD 1200 out of the Siddham script, gradually replacing the earlier, closely related Sharada script (which remained in parallel use in Kashmir). Both are immediate descendants of the Gupta script, ultimately deriving from the Brāhmī script attested from the 3rd century BC; Nāgarī appeared in approx. the 8th century as an eastern variant of the Gupta script, contemporary to Sharada, its western variant. The descendants of Brahmi form the Brahmic family, including the alphabets employed for many other South and South-East Asian languages. Etymology Sanskrit nāgarī is the feminine of nāgara "urban(e)", an adjectival vrddhi derivative from nagara "city"; the feminine form is used because of its original application to qualify the feminine noun lipi "script" ("urban(e) script", i.e. the script of the cultured). There were several varieties in use, one of which was distinguished by affixing deva "deity" to form a tatpurusha compound meaning the "urban(e) script of the deities (= gods)", i.e. "divine urban(e) script". However, the widespread use of "Devanāgarī" is a relatively recent phenomenon; well into the twentieth century, and even today, simply "Nāgari" was also in use for this same script. The rapid spread of the usage of "Devanāgarī" seems also to be connected with the almost exclusive use of this script in colonial times to publish works in Sanskrit, even though traditionally nearly all indigenous scripts have actually been employed for this language. This has led to the establishment of such a close connection between the script and Sanskrit that it is, erroneously, widely regarded as "the Sanskrit script" today. Interpreted by popular etymology to refer to a "City of the Gods", the name in certain Yogic traditions was taken to refer to the body of the individual. The philosophy behind this is that when one meditates on the specific sounds of the Devanāgarī alphabet, the written forms appear spontaneously in the mind. Principles Devanāgarī has 12 svara (pure sounds, or vowels) and 34 vyanjana (ornamented sounds, consonants). An akshara is formed by the combination of zero or one vyanjana and one or more svar, and represents a phonetic unit of the shabda (utterance). The akshara is written by applying standard diacritical modifiers to the vyanjana corresponding to the svara. An akshara is usually more basic and predictable than the syllable in English. For example, the English 'cat' (considered to have just one syllable) is written as two aksharas, the 'k-a' and the 'ta'. The svara and vyanjana are ordered and grouped logically for studying or reciting. Thus the pure sounds, 'a', 'i', 'u' and their lengthened versions ('aa', 'ii', 'uu') are followed by the combined ('e', 'ai', 'o', 'au'), nasal ('.m') and aspirated ('.h') forms. The vyanjana themselves are grouped into 6 groups (rows) of 5 (columns). The first five rows progress as velar, palatal, retroflex, dental and labial, corresponding to utilizing or touching the tongue to progressively outer parts of the mouth when making the sound. Additional vyanjana are technically sonorants, sibilants or widely used conjunct forms. For each row or group, the columns logically progress to softer sounds, paired with aspirated forms, ending in the nasal form for that group. Devanāgarī is written from left to right. In Sanskrit, words were written together without spaces, so that the top bar is unbroken, although there were some exceptions to this rule. The break of the top line primarily marks breath groups. In modern languages, word breaks are used. The Devanāgarī writing system can be called an abugida, as each consonant has an inherent vowel (a), that can be changed with the different vowel signs. Most consonants can be joined to one or two other consonants so that the inherent vowel is suppressed. The resulting conjunct form is called a ligature. Many ligatures appear simply as two individual consonants joined together, and so are a form of ligature. Some ligatures are more elaborately formed and not as easily recognized as containing the individual consonants. When reading Sanskrit written in Devanāgarī, the pronunciation is completely unambiguous. Similarly, any word in Sanskrit is considered to be written only in one manner (discounting modern typesetting variations in depicting conjunct forms). However, for modern languages, certain conventions have been made (e.g. truncating the vowel form of the last consonant while speaking, even as it continues to be written in full form). There are also some modern conventions for writing English words in Devanāgarī. Certain Sanskrit texts and mantras are typically written with additional diacritical marks above and below the akshara to denote pitch and tempo, to ensure completely accurate reproduction of the sound. Symbols of Devanāgarī All the vowels in Devanāgarī are attached to the top or bottom of the consonant or to an " column contains the symbol used when a vowel is attached to a consonant, shown with the letter as an example, the "Unicode name" column contains the name given in the Unicode specification for the vowel, and the "IPA" column contains the International Phonetic Alphabet character(s) corresponding to the Hindi pronunciation of the Devanāgarī character. Vowels The vowels of the Devanāgarī script with their word-initial Devanāgarī symbol, diacritical mark with the consonant प् (/p/), pronunciation (of the vowel alone and of /p/+vowel) in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), equivalent in International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) and Indian languages transliteration (ITRANS) and (approximate) equivalents in Standard English are listed below: Additional points: Consonants The table below shows the traditional listing of the Sanskrit consonants with the (nearest) equivalents in English/Spanish/Italian. The parentheses give the corresponding transliteration (of the consonant alone) in IAST scheme—the most popular one. Each consonant shown below is by default followed by the neutral vowel schwa (), and is given in the table in this form. At the end of the traditional table of alphabets, three cosonantal clusters are also added: क्ष (k) (in Hindi), त्र (tr) and ज्ञ (jñ) (in Hindi; pronounced as + nasalization in Sanskrit). Other than these, sounds borrowed from the other languages like Persian and Arabic are written with a dot (bindu or nukta) beneath the nearest approximate letter. They are not included in the traditional listing. Many native Hindi speakers, especially those who come from rural backgrounds and do not speak proper Khariboli or Urdu, confuse these sounds (except ) and pronounce them as the nearest equivalents in Sanskritized Hindi (listed in column 5). These are: Additional points: Ligature (typography)|Ligatures Consonant clusters of two or more phonemes are realized by combining the aksharas into ligatures. Typically, the preceding akshara loses its vertical stroke and is put in direct contact with the succeeding one. In cases of aksharas that do not have vertical strokes in their independent form, the following aksharas are usually placed underneath the preceding one. In some cases, the ligatures take forms not readily recognizable as composed of the individual aksharas (e.g. Diacritics Accent marks The pitch accent of Vedic Sanskrit is written with various symbols depending on shakha. In the Rigveda, anudatta is written with a bar below the line (॒), svarita with a stroke above the line (॑) while udatta is unmarked. Numerals Transliteration This section describes some features of transliteration from Devanāgarī into Roman scripts. Pronunciation of the final "a" Many words and names transliterated from Devanāgarī end with "a", to indicate the pronunciation in the original Sanskrit. This final 'inherent a' is often no longer pronounced in some Sanskrit-derived Indian languages, including Hindi. This results in an alternative 'modern' transliteration that omits it. Some words keep the final a, generally because they would be difficult to say without it: e.g; Kriśna, vajra, Maurya Some Indian languages continue to use the original pronunciation today. Some have an intermediate pronunciation. Retroflex consonants Most Indian languages make a distinction between the retroflex and dental forms of the dental consonants. In IAST transliteration, the retroflex forms are and . In formal transliteration schemes, the standard Roman letters are used to indicate the dental form, and the retroflex form is indicated by special marks, or the use of other letters. In most informal transliterations the distinction between retroflex and dental consonants is not indicated. Aspirated consonants Where the letter "h" appears after a plosive consonant in Devanāgarī transliteration, it always indicates aspiration, thus "ph" is pronounced as the p in "pit" (with a small puff of air released as it is said) never as the ph in "photo". On the other hand "p" is pronounced as the p in "spit" with no release of air. Similarly "th" is an aspirated "t", neither the th of "this" or the th of "thin". The aspiration is generally indicated in both formal and informal transliteration systems. See also: IAST, National Library at Calcutta romanization, ITRANS ISCII ISCII is a fixed-length 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 Devanāgarī, 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 obsoleted by Unicode, which has however attempted to preserve the ISCII layout for its Indic language blocks. See: Devanāgarī in Unicode The Unicode range for Devanāgarī is U+0900 .. U+097F. Grey blocks indicate characters that are undefined. Devanāgarī and Devanāgarī-QWERTY keyboard layouts for Mac OS X The Mac OS X operating system supports convenient editing for the Devanāgarī script by insertion of appropriate Unicode characters with two different keyboard layouts available for use. To input Devanāgarī text, one goes to System Preferences → International → Input Menu and enables the keyboard layout that is to be used. One then views the keyboard layout at the Indian Language Kit Manual at Apple Docs. INSCRIPT
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