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Gujarati characters, diacritics, and numerals The Gujarati alphabet utilizes overall 94 distinct legitimate and recognised shapes, which mainly includes 34 vyanjana (ornamented sounds – consonants), 2 compound characters that are treated as consonants (not lexically though), and 14 svara (pure sounds – vowels). The alphabet is ordered by logically grouping the vowels and the consonants based on their pronunciations. The vowels (svara) consists of three pure sounds – a, i, and u. In the alphabet, the vowels follow the following order: i, iiu, uu The consonants (vyanjana), on the other hand, are grouped in eight categories; seven of which are named by considering the usage and position of the tongue during their pronunciation. These categories are (in order): velar, palatal, retroflex, dental, labial, sonorant and fricatives. Further, each group (with a couple of exceptions) has five consonants in which the group starts with the softer sounding consonants, then the aspirated forms appear, and the group ends with the nasal sounding consonant. The alphabetic arrangement thus made aids in easy recitation and is retained in the memory for longer duration. Sentence construction In accordance with all the other Indic scripts, Gujarati is also written from left to right, and is not case-sensitive. One or more letters join together to make a word (śabda), which then in turn join to make a sentence (vākya). The discrete symbols that make up letters (shown below) are constituted by 0-5 successive consonants (vyanjana), followed by a vowel (svara). Consonant-less, bare vowels are said to be in their independent form, and are written differently than their dependent forms that spring from a consonant. They are found at the beginning of words or following other vowels. When a consonant lacks a vowel, it is not meant to be written as a lone letter. It condenses with the proceeding vowel-posessing letter, to make a "joint letter" . When the joint letter form can't be remembered, or is difficult to write, just leaving the characters uncondensed is acceptable. Unlike Sanskrit where a sentence may be written literally without any spaces in between, Gujarati words are separated by a blank space. A space indicates the end of a word, but is not used as a form of explicit punctuation. The Gujarati writing system can be categorized under abugida, where each consonant has an inherent vowel (a), which can be modified by the application of other vowels. Resemblance with Devanagari Owing to their origin from Brahmi, both Devanagari (used for Indic languages like Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi and alike) and Gujarati scripts share the same shape for majority of their alphabets. The apparent difference can be attributed to the missing horizontal top bar from the Gujarati letter-forms compared to Devanagari. That apart, a reader who is able to read Devanagari script, should be able to interpret Gujarati script fairly easily. Consider the following example where a Sanskrit shloka is written in both the scripts: Reading Gujarati is a semi-phonetic script; it can be pronounced as it is written, with these few exceptions. Gujarati romanization, however, takes these exceptions into consideration and omits as where necessary. Therefore, Romanized Gujarati is completely phonetic. Alphabet table Foreign Sounds The 3 major foreign influences to Gujarati's Indo-Aryan base are English, Persian, and Arabic. English is accommodated with two new vowels: ઍ and ઑ, representing the sounds in English's at and hot, respectively. Perso-arabic consonants may be represented by the domestic character that sounds most like it, with a dot, (nukta), underneath. However, this is not done as frequently in Hindi, and the foreign consonant is just approximated with the closest domestic. Where a Hindi speaker may be faithful to Persian's "life" with ज़िंदगी zindagī, a Gujarati will say જિંદગી jindgī. Alphabet and script related reference and resources Gujarati in Unicode The Unicode range for Gujarati script is from U+0A80 to U+0AFF. The ISCII Code-page identifier for Gujarati script is 57010. The table below shows the glyphs that are implemented in Unicode standard 4.0.0. Gray boxes indicate the code-points that are undefined/unused.
Inscript keyboard layout
Keyboard and script resources How To: Use Unicode for creating Gujarati script Additional details regarding how to use Unicode for creating Gujarati script can be found on Wikibooks: b:How to use Unicode in creating Gujarati script or on this Subpage - /How To: Use Unicode for creating Gujarati script See also | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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