59-479: Devanagari ( / ˌ d eɪ v ə ˈ n ɑː ɡ ə r i / DAY -və- NAH -gə-ree ; देवनागरी , IAST : Devanāgarī , Sanskrit pronunciation: [deːʋɐˈnaːɡɐriː] ) is an Indic script used in the Indian subcontinent . Also simply called Nāgari ( Sanskrit : नागरि , Nāgari ), it is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system ), based on the ancient Brāhmi script. It
118-568: A macron ). Vocalic (syllabic) consonants, retroflexes and ṣ ( / ʂ ~ ɕ ~ʃ/ ) have an underdot . One letter has an overdot: ṅ ( /ŋ/ ). One has an acute accent : ś ( /ʃ/ ). One letter has a line below: ḻ ( / ɭ / ) (Vedic). Unlike ASCII -only romanisations such as ITRANS or Harvard-Kyoto , the diacritics used for IAST allow capitalisation of proper names. The capital variants of letters never occurring word-initially ( Ṇ Ṅ Ñ Ṝ Ḹ ) are useful only when writing in all-caps and in Pāṇini contexts for which
177-509: A century of scholarly usage in books and journals on classical Indian studies. By contrast, the ISO 15919 standard for transliterating Indic scripts emerged in 2001 from the standards and library worlds. For the most part, ISO 15919 follows the IAST scheme, departing from it only in minor ways (e.g., ṃ/ṁ and ṛ/r̥)—see comparison below. The Indian National Library at Kolkata romanization , intended for
236-515: A closer examination reveals they are very similar except for angles and structural emphasis. Among the languages using it as a primary or secondary script are Marathi , Pāḷi , Sanskrit , Hindi , Boro , Nepali , Sherpa , Prakrit , Apabhramsha , Awadhi , Bhojpuri , Braj Bhasha , Chhattisgarhi , Haryanvi , Magahi , Nagpuri , Rajasthani , Khandeshi , Bhili , Dogri , Kashmiri , Maithili , Konkani , Sindhi , Nepal Bhasa , Mundari , Angika , Bajjika and Santali . The Devanāgarī script
295-520: A family of abugida writing systems . They are used throughout the Indian subcontinent , Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia . They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India and are used by various languages in several language families in South , East and Southeast Asia : Indo-Aryan , Dravidian , Tibeto-Burman , Mongolic , Austroasiatic , Austronesian , and Tai . They were also
354-433: A font, etc. It can be enabled in the input menu in the menu bar under System Preferences → International → Input Menu (or System Preferences → Language and Text → Input Sources) or can be viewed under Edit → Emoji & Symbols in many programs. Equivalent tools – such as gucharmap ( GNOME ) or kcharselect ( KDE ) – exist on most Linux desktop environments. Users of SCIM on Linux based platforms can also have
413-576: A sentence or half-verse may be marked with the " । " symbol (called a daṇḍa , meaning "bar", or called a pūrṇa virām , meaning "full stop/pause"). The end of a full verse may be marked with a double- daṇḍa , a " ॥ " symbol. A comma (called an alpa virām , meaning "short stop/pause") is used to denote a natural pause in speech. Punctuation marks of Western origin, such as the colon , semicolon , exclamation mark , dash , and question mark have been in use in Devanāgarī script since at least
472-521: Is inherent . Notes Notes The Brahmi script was already divided into regional variants at the time of the earliest surviving epigraphy around the 3rd century BC. Cursives of the Brahmi script began to diversify further from around the 5th century AD and continued to give rise to new scripts throughout the Middle Ages. The main division in antiquity was between northern and southern Brahmi . In
531-516: Is a table for Hindi, one for Sanskrit and Prakrit, 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 ,
590-649: Is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless romanisation of Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit and related Indic languages. It is based on a scheme that emerged during the 19th century from suggestions by Charles Trevelyan , William Jones , Monier Monier-Williams and other scholars, and formalised by the Transliteration Committee of the Geneva Oriental Congress , in September 1894. IAST makes it possible for
649-657: 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 Devanāgarī (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. The disadvantage of
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#1732793530253708-782: Is by setting up an alternative keyboard layout . This allows one to hold a modifier key to type letters with diacritical marks. For example, alt + a = ā. How this is set up varies by operating system. Linux/Unix and BSD desktop environments allow one to set up custom keyboard layouts and switch them by clicking a flag icon in the menu bar. macOS One can use the pre-installed US International keyboard, or install Toshiya Unebe's Easy Unicode keyboard layout. Microsoft Windows Windows also allows one to change keyboard layouts and set up additional custom keyboard mappings for IAST. This Pali keyboard installer made by Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC) supports IAST (works on Microsoft Windows up to at least version 10, can use Alt button on
767-562: Is closely related to the Nandināgarī script commonly found in numerous ancient manuscripts of South India , and it is distantly related to a number of southeast Asian scripts. Devanāgarī is formed by the addition of the word deva ( देव ) to the word nāgarī ( नागरी ). Nāgarī is an adjective derived from nagara ( नगर ), a Sanskrit word meaning "town" or "city," and literally means "urban" or "urbane". The word Nāgarī (implicitly modifying lipi , "script")
826-409: Is indicated by diacritics . The vowel अ ( a ) combines with the consonant क् ( k ) to form क ( ka ) with halant removed. But the diacritic series of क , ख , ग , घ ( ka, kha, ga, gha , respectively) is without any added vowel sign, as the vowel अ ( a ) is inherent . The combinations of all Sanskrit consonants and vowels, each in alphabetical order, are laid out in
885-466: Is one of the official scripts of the Republic of India and Nepal . It was developed and in regular use by the 8th century CE and achieved its modern form by 1000 CE. The Devanāgari script, composed of 48 primary characters, including 14 vowels and 34 consonants, is the fourth most widely adopted writing system in the world, being used for over 120 languages. The orthography of this script reflects
944-553: Is part of the Brahmic family of scripts of India , Nepal , Tibet , and Southeast Asia . It is a descendant of the 3rd century BCE Brāhmī script , which evolved into the Nagari script which in turn gave birth to Devanāgarī and Nandināgarī . Devanāgarī 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
1003-617: 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 Devanāgarī. Thousands of manuscripts of ancient and medieval era Sanskrit texts in Devanāgarī have been discovered since the 19th century. Major catalogues and census include: IAST The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration ( IAST )
1062-449: Is the best in terms of ligatures but, because it is designed for Vedic as well, requires so much vertical space that it is not well suited for the "user interface font" (though an excellent choice for the "original field" font). Santipur OT is a beautiful font reflecting a very early [medieval era] typesetting style for Devanagari. Sanskrit 2003 is a good all-around font and has more ligatures than most fonts, though students will probably find
1121-466: 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 Devanāgarī. The National Library at Kolkata romanisation , intended for
1180-682: Is the standard keyboard layout for Devanāgarī as standardized by the Government of India. It is inbuilt in all modern major operating systems . Microsoft Windows supports the InScript layout, which can be used to input unicode Devanāgarī characters. InScript is also available in some touchscreen mobile phones. 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
1239-459: 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 करना ( ka-ra-nā ). The government of these clusters ranges from widely to narrowly applicable rules, with special exceptions within. While standardised for
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#17327935302531298-487: Is visible in the Kutila inscription of Bareilly dated to VS 1049 (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 Nāgarī pages of a commentary by Patanjali , with a composition date of about 150 BCE, the surviving copy transcribed about 14th century CE. In
1357-765: The Siddhaṃ matrika script (considered as the closest precursor to Nāgarī) was in use by Buddhists . Nāgarī has been the primus inter pares of the Indic scripts. 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 Moḍī , Kaithi , and Mahajani ) used for administration, commerce, and other daily uses. Sharada remained in parallel use in Kashmir . An early version of Devanāgarī
1416-486: The bārākhaḍī ( बाराखडी ) or bārahkhaṛī ( बारहखड़ी ) table. In the following barakhadi table, the IAST transliteration of each combination will appear on mouseover: The following letter variants are also in use, particularly in older texts and in specific regions: As mentioned, successive consonants lacking a vowel in between them may physically join as a conjunct consonant or ligature . When Devanāgarī
1475-590: The Government of India . A standard transliteration convention was codified in the ISO 15919 standard of 2001. It uses diacritics to map the much larger set of Brāhmic graphemes to the Latin script. The Devanāgarī-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
1534-644: The Kadamba , Pallava and Vatteluttu scripts, which in turn diversified into other scripts of South India and Southeast Asia. Brahmic scripts spread in a peaceful manner, Indianization , or the spread of Indian learning. The scripts spread naturally to Southeast Asia, at ports on trading routes. At these trading posts, ancient inscriptions have been found in Sanskrit, using scripts that originated in India. At first, inscriptions were made in Indian languages, but later
1593-539: The 1900s, matching their use in European languages. A variety of Unicode fonts are in use for Devanāgarī. These include Akshar, Annapurna, Arial , CDAC-Gist Surekh, CDAC-Gist Yogesh, Chandas, Gargi, Gurumaa, Jaipur, Jana, Kalimati, Kanjirowa, Lohit Devanagari, Mangal, Kokila, ,Preeti, Raghu, Sanskrit2003, Santipur OT, Siddhanta, and Thyaka. The form of Devanāgarī fonts vary with function. According to Harvard College for Sanskrit studies: Uttara [companion to Chandas ]
1652-715: 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. He then invented the Tibetan script based on the Nāgarī used in Kashmir. He added 6 new characters for sounds that did not exist in Sanskrit. Other scripts closely related to Nāgarī (such as Siddhaṃ ) were introduced throughout East and Southeast Asia from
1711-560: The 7th or 8th century, include Nagari , Siddham and Sharada . The Siddhaṃ script was especially important in Buddhism , as many sutras were written in it. The art of Siddham calligraphy survives today in Japan . The tabular presentation and dictionary order of the modern kana system of Japanese writing is believed to be descended from the Indic scripts, most likely through the spread of Buddhism . Southern Brahmi evolved into
1770-618: The 7th to the 10th centuries CE: notably in Indonesia, Vietnam, and Japan. Most of the Southeast Asian scripts have roots in Dravidian scripts, but a few found in south-central regions of Java and isolated parts of southeast Asia resemble Devanāgarī or its prototypes. The Kawi script in particular is similar to the Devanāgarī in many respects, though the morphology of the script has local changes. The earliest inscriptions in
1829-523: The 9th century copper plate inscription of Devapaladeva (Bengal) which is also in early Devanāgarī script. The term kawi in Kawi script is a loan word from kāvya (poetry). According to anthropologists and Asian studies scholars John Norman Miksic and Goh Geok Yian, the 8th century version of early Nāgarī or Devanāgarī script was adopted in Java, Bali , and Khmer around the 8th–9th centuries, as evidenced by
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1888-676: The Devanāgarī-like scripts are from around the 10th century CE, with many more between the 11th and 14th centuries. Some of the old-Devanāgarī 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 Nāgarī script of north India. According to the epigraphist and Asian Studies scholar Lawrence Briggs, these may be related to
1947-950: The Indic language Misplaced Pages and other wikiprojects, including Hindi, Bhojpuri, Marathi, and Nepali Misplaced Pages. While some people use InScript , the majority uses either Google phonetic transliteration or the input facility Universal Language Selector provided on Misplaced Pages. 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: अक्षरांतरण , Hindi: लिप्यंतरण, बोलनागरी ) and InScript keyboard (Marathi: मराठी लिपी ). The Ubuntu Linux operating system supports several keyboard layouts for Devanāgarī, including Harvard-Kyoto, WX notation , Bolanagari and phonetic. The 'remington' typing method in Ubuntu IBUS
2006-577: The Latin alphabet and the IME automatically converts it into Devanāgarī. Some popular phonetic typing tools are Akruti, Baraha IME and Google IME . The Mac OS X operating system includes two different keyboard layouts for Devanāgarī: one resembles the INSCRIPT/KDE Linux, while the other is a phonetic layout called "Devanāgarī QWERTY". Any one of the Unicode fonts input systems is fine for
2065-674: 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 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
2124-593: The adoption of Nāgarī 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 Devanāgarī scripts. The Nāgarī script was in regular use by the 7th century CE, and it was fully developed by about
2183-587: The area of Sanskrit studies make use of free OpenType fonts such as FreeSerif or Gentium , both of which have complete support for the full repertoire of conjoined diacritics in the IAST character set. Released under the GNU FreeFont or SIL Open Font License , respectively, such fonts may be freely shared and do not require the person reading or editing a document to purchase proprietary software to make use of its associated fonts. Brahmic family The Brahmic scripts , also known as Indic scripts , are
2242-463: The consonant letters (in combination with inherent vowel a ) and their arrangement. To the right of the Devanāgarī letter it shows the Latin script transliteration using International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration , and the phonetic value ( IPA ) in Hindi . The table below shows consonants with common vowel diacritics and their ISO 15919 transliteration. Vowels in their independent form on
2301-536: The consumer edition since XP. This is limited to characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). Characters are searchable by Unicode character name, and the table can be limited to a particular code block. More advanced third-party tools of the same type are also available (a notable freeware example is BabelMap ). macOS provides a "character palette" with much the same functionality, along with searching by related characters, glyph tables in
2360-582: The convention is to typeset the IT sounds as capital letters. For the most part, IAST is a subset of ISO 15919 that merges the retroflex (underdotted) liquids with the vocalic ones ( ringed below ) and the short close-mid vowels with the long ones. The following seven exceptions are from the ISO standard accommodating an extended repertoire of symbols to allow transliteration of Devanāgarī and other Indic scripts , as used for languages other than Sanskrit. The most convenient method of inputting romanized Sanskrit
2419-608: The earliest epigraphic evidence attesting to the developing Sanskrit Nāgarī script in ancient India is from the 1st to 4th century CE inscriptions discovered in Gujarat . Variants of script called nāgarī , recognisably close to Devanāgarī, are first attested from the 1st century CE Rudradaman inscriptions in Sanskrit, while the modern standardised form of Devanāgarī was in use by about 1000 CE. Medieval inscriptions suggest widespread diffusion of Nāgarī-related scripts, with biscripts presenting local script along with
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2478-701: The end of first millennium. The use of Sanskrit in Nāgarī 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 prototypes and related versions have been discovered with ancient relics outside India, in places such as Sri Lanka , Myanmar and Indonesia . In East Asia,
2537-531: 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 is a lossless transliteration scheme of Devanāgarī 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
2596-552: The many contemporaneous inscriptions of this period. The letter order of Devanāgarī, like nearly all Brāhmic 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"). The format of Devanāgarī for Sanskrit serves as the prototype for its application, with minor variations or additions, to other languages. The vowels and their arrangement are: The table below shows
2655-532: 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 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
2714-700: The opportunity to install and use the sa-itrans-iast input handler which provides complete support for the ISO 15919 standard for the romanization of Indic languages as part of the m17n library. Or user can use some Unicode characters in Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended Additional and Combining Diarcritical Marks block to write IAST. Only certain fonts support all the Latin Unicode characters essential for
2773-474: 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 शिरोरेखा śirorekhā , that runs along the top of full letters. In a cursory look, the Devanāgarī script appears different from other Indic scripts , such as Bengali-Assamese or Gurmukhi , but
2832-491: The reader to read the Indic text unambiguously, exactly as if it were in the original Indic script. It is this faithfulness to the original scripts that accounts for its continuing popularity amongst scholars. Scholars commonly use IAST in publications that cite textual material in Sanskrit, Pāḷi and other classical Indian languages. IAST is also used for major e-text repositories such as SARIT, Muktabodha, GRETIL, and sanskritdocuments.org. The IAST scheme represents more than
2891-471: The right side of the keyboard instead of Ctrl+Alt combination). Many systems provide a way to select Unicode characters visually. ISO/IEC 14755 refers to this as a screen-selection entry method . Microsoft Windows has provided a Unicode version of the Character Map program (find it by hitting ⊞ Win + R then type charmap then hit ↵ Enter ) since version NT 4.0 – appearing in
2950-486: The romanisation of all Indic scripts , is an extension of IAST. The IAST letters are listed with their Devanagari equivalents and phonetic values in IPA , valid for Sanskrit , Hindi and other modern languages that use Devanagari script, but some phonological changes have occurred: * H is actually glottal , not velar . Some letters are modified with diacritics : Long vowels are marked with an overline (often called
3009-400: 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. 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
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#17327935302533068-399: The same column all derive from the same Brahmi glyph. Accordingly: The transliteration is indicated in ISO 15919 . Vowels are presented in their independent form on the left of each column, and in their corresponding dependent form (vowel sign) combined with the consonant k on the right. A glyph for ka is an independent consonant letter itself without any vowel sign, where the vowel a
3127-399: The scripts were used to write the local Southeast Asian languages. Hereafter, local varieties of the scripts were developed. By the 8th century, the scripts had diverged and separated into regional scripts. Some characteristics, which are present in most but not all the scripts, are: Below are comparison charts of several of the major Indic scripts, organised on the principle that glyphs in
3186-517: The source of the dictionary order ( gojūon ) of Japanese kana . Brahmic scripts descended from the Brahmi script . Brahmi is clearly attested from the 3rd century BCE during the reign of Ashoka , who used the script for imperial edicts . Northern Brahmi gave rise to the Gupta script during the Gupta period , which in turn diversified into a number of cursives during the medieval period . Notable examples of such medieval scripts, developed by
3245-613: The spacing of the CDAC-Gist Surekh font makes for quicker comprehension and reading. The Google Fonts project has a number of Unicode fonts for Devanāgarī in a variety of typefaces in serif, sans-serif, display and handwriting categories. There are several methods of Romanisation or transliteration from Devanāgarī to the Roman script . The Hunterian system is the national system of romanisation in India , officially adopted by
3304-449: The top and in their corresponding dependent form (vowel sign) combined with the consonant ' k ' on the bottom. ' ka ' is without any added vowel sign, where the vowel ' a ' is inherent . A vowel combines with a consonant in their diacritic form. For example, the vowel आ ( ā ) combines with the consonant क् ( k ) to form the syllabic letter का ( kā ), with halant (cancel sign) removed and added vowel sign which
3363-487: The transliteration of Indic scripts according to the IAST and ISO 15919 standards. For example, the Arial , Tahoma and Times New Roman font packages that come with Microsoft Office 2007 and later versions also support precomposed Unicode characters like ī . Many other text fonts commonly used for book production may be lacking in support for one or more characters from this block. Accordingly, many academics working in
3422-646: 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 superseded by Unicode, which has, however, attempted to preserve the ISCII layout for its Indic language blocks. The Unicode Standard defines four blocks for Devanāgarī: Devanagari (U+0900–U+097F), Devanagari Extended (U+A8E0–U+A8FF), Devanagari Extended-A (U+11B00–11B5F), and Vedic Extensions (U+1CD0–U+1CFF). InScript
3481-408: Was used on its own to refer to a North Indian script, or perhaps a number of such scripts, as Al-Biruni attests in the 11th century; the form Devanāgarī is attested later, at least by the 18th century. The name of the Nandināgarī script is also formed by adding a prefix to the generic script name nāgarī . The precise origin and significance of the prefix deva remains unclear. Devanāgarī
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