Devanāgarī

Devanāgarī, (Sanskrit: deva, “god,” and nāgarī (lipi), “[script] of the city”) also called Nāgarī, script used to write the Sanskrit, Prākrit, Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali languages, developed from the North Indian monumental script known as Gupta and ultimately from the Brāhmī alphabet, from which all modern Indian writing systems are derived. In use from the 7th century ce and occurring in its mature form from the 11th century onward, Devanāgarī is characterized by long, horizontal strokes at the tops of the letters, usually joined in modern usage to form a continuous horizontal line through the script when written.

The Devanāgarī writing system is a combination of syllabary and alphabet. One of its more notable characteristics is the convention that a consonantal symbol lacking diacritics is read as the consonant followed by the letter a—that is, the a is implied rather than written as a separate character.

Another notable characteristic is that the most common traditional listing of Devanāgarī symbols follows a phonetic order in which the vowels are recited before the consonants; in contrast, most alphabets follow an order that mixes vowels and consonants together (e.g., A, B, C). Furthermore, Devanāgarī arranges the vowels and consonants in an order that starts with sounds pronounced at the back of the oral cavity and proceeds to sounds produced at the front of the mouth.

Click Here to see full-size tableThe Devanāgarī consonants are divided into classes of stops (sounds that are pronounced by stopping and then releasing the airflow, such as k, c, ṭ, t, p), semivowels (y, r, l, v), and spirants (ś, ṣ, s, h; h comes last because it has no unique place of articulation). The order for stops is: velar (or guttural; produced at the area of the velum), called jihvāmūlīya; palatal (produced with the middle of the tongue approaching or making contact at the hard palate), known as tālavya; retroflex or cacuminal (produced by curling the tongue back to the area back of the ridge called the alveolae and making quick contact there with the tip of the tongue), referred to as mūrdhanya; dental (produced by making contact with the tip of the tongue at the roots of the upper teeth), called dantya; and labial (produced by bringing the lower lip into contact with the upper lip), known as oṣṭhya.

Semivowels and spirants follow the same order, with the addition of the intermediate category “labio-dental” (produced by bringing the upper front teeth into contact with the inside of the lower lip, with very slight friction), called dantoṣṭhya, for v. Vowels follow the same general order, with simple vowels followed by original diphthongs. In addition, there are symbols for certain sounds that have no independent status and whose occurrence is determined by particular contexts: a nasal offglide called anusvāra and the spirants ḫk (jihvāmūlīya), ḫp (upadhmānīya), and ḥ (visarjanīya, visarga).

The name of each vowel is designated by its sound plus the suffix -kāra; thus, akāra is the name for a and ākāra for ā. A consonant is usually referred to by its sound plus the default vowel a and the suffix -kāra: kakāra is the name for k, khakāra for kh, gakāra for g, ghakāra for gh, ṅakāra for ṅ, yakāra for y, śakāra for ś, hakāra for h, and so on. The names of a few letters are irregular, notably repha (for r), anusvāra (for ṃ), and those of ḫk, ḫp, and ḥ, as noted earlier.

The precise realizations of particular sounds differed from area to area in Old Indo-Aryan and continue to do so in modern pronunciations. Thus, in earliest Indo-Aryan ṛ was a complex sound with r flanked by very short vowel segments (one-fourth mora each), as in ə̆rə̆. According to early descriptions, however, the quality of the vowel segments differed in various traditions of Vedic recitation. The modern Sanskrit pronunciation shows regional differences as well. For instance, ṛ is pronounced ri in the north and ru in areas such as Maharashtra; in very careful pronunciation (as taught, for example, in Maharashtra), this vowel is pronounced rɨ.

Phoneticians of the distant past described r both as retroflex (ɽ) and as alveolar. In modern pronunciation of Sanskrit, the distinction between palatal ś ([ç]) and retroflex ṣ ([ʂ]) is generally not observed—with a sound approximating [ʂ] for both—except in very careful pronunciation taught in some areas such as Maharashtra. The letter ṃ originally represented an offglide to a vowel that had nasality as its only proper quality and took on the color of a preceding vowel; e.g., aṃ was pronounced [ə^ə̆]. In modern Sanskrit pronunciation, the value of this sound differs somewhat from one region to the next: nasality of a preceding vowel before spirants, a nasalized w ([ᴡ̃]), a stop at the same place of articulation as a following stop, and [ŋ].

The letter ḥ was originally a voiceless spirant; in modern Sanskrit pronunciation it is a voiced h followed by an echo of the last preceding vocalic segment; for example, what is spelled as -āḥ, -iḥ, -eḥ, -oḥ, -aiḥ, -auḥ is pronounced as [āɦā], [iɦ], [eɦe], [oɦo], [əiɦi], [əuɦu].

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As noted above, a consonant symbol designates by default a consonant followed by a; an angled substroke is used to indicate that a consonant symbol stands for a consonant without any vowel. Syllables consisting of consonants followed by vowels other than a are designated with the use of attached vowel symbols—ā is represented by a vertical stroke to the right, i and ī respectively with strokes to the left and right connected to consonants by curved vertical strokes, u and ū with different subscripts, e and ai with superscripts; and o and au with combinations of a right vertical stroke and superscripts—and through the use of special symbols for ru and rū.

Combinations of consonant symbols are used to represent sound clusters. The precise positioning and shapes of some of these depends on whether the consonant in question has a central stroke, a right stroke, or neither. In addition, the symbol for r is different depending on whether the combination does or does not begin with this consonant. Moreover, there are special symbols and some variants for particular clusters.

In modern printing, for instance, ligatures of the type (kta), with a conjunct form of the first consonant symbol followed by the full symbol for the second consonant, are frequently used instead of single symbols of the type . In addition, there are variant symbols for single sounds that have a more old-fashioned look; e.g., instead of, . For Vedic texts, diacritic symbols are used for marking pitches and for varieties of anusvāra. A horizontal substroke regularly marks a low-pitched syllable. In the broadest notation, a syllable pronounced on a normal high tone is left unmarked, a horizontal subscript marks a low-pitched syllable, and a vertical superscript marks a svarita syllable—e.g., (agnim ī̀ḷe “I praise [invoke] Agni”).

In a narrower notation system used for texts of the Śuklayajurveda (“White Yajurveda”), there are special symbols for svarita syllables in different contexts and for variants of anusvāra and visarjanīya. The narrowest notation system, used in manuscripts of the Maitrāyaṇīsaṃhitā (“Saṃhitā of the Maitrāyaṇas”), not only marks different svaritas but also uses a superscript stroke to indicate high-pitched syllables. There are also Devanāgarī number symbols, though the constitution of India provides for the use of Arabic numerals as well.

The phonological systems of some modern languages require symbols not needed for others. For example, Marathi has ḷ, which in the inventory of sounds is listed after h. Modern languages that use the Devanāgarī alphabet also use some special symbols in borrowings. Such details concerning spelling conventions in various modern Indo-Aryan languages are best considered along with other aspects of these languages. Finally, there is a special symbol for the sacred syllable om: ॐ.