Devanagari


Devanagari is an Indic script used in the Indian subcontinent. It is a left-to-right abugida, based on the ancient Brāhmī script. It is one of the official scripts of India and Nepal. It was developed in, and was in regular use by, the 8th century CE. It had achieved its modern form by 1000 CE. The Devanāgarī 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 most popular of which is Hindi.
The orthography of this script reflects the pronunciation of the language. Unlike the Latin alphabet, the script has no concept of letter case, meaning the script is a unicameral alphabet. 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, 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 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 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.

Etymology

is formed by the addition of the word to the word . is an adjective derived from , a Sanskrit word meaning "town" or "city", and literally means "urban" or "urbane". The word 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 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. The precise origin and significance of the prefix - remains unclear.

History

Devanāgarī 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 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, 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 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 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, the script 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 used for administration, commerce, and other daily uses.
Sharada remained in parallel use in Kashmir. An early version of Devanāgarī is visible in the Kutila inscription of Bareilly dated to VS 1049, 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 Sinja Valley, mid-western Nepal where the Nepali language originates from, the earliest examples of the Devanagari script from the 13th century were found on the cliffs and in nearby Dullu.

East Asia

In 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 were introduced throughout East and Southeast Asia from 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 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 the 9th century copper plate inscription of Devapaladeva which is also in early Devanāgarī script. The term kawi in Kawi script is a loan word from . 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 the many contemporaneous inscriptions of this period.

Letters

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 . The format of Devanāgarī for Sanskrit serves as the prototype for its application, with minor variations or additions, to other languages.
Overall, Devanagari "देवनागरी" means "script of the divine city" or "script of the city of God".
The vowels and their arrangement are:
  1. Arranged with the vowels are two consonantal diacritics, the final nasal ं and the final fricative ः . notes of the in Sanskrit that "there is some controversy as to whether it represents a homorganic nasal stop, a nasalised vowel, a nasalised semivowel, or all these according to context". The represents post-vocalic voiceless glottal fricative, in Sanskrit an allophone of, or less commonly, usually in word-final position. Some traditions of recitation append an echo of the vowel after the breath: इः. considers the along with letters ङ and ञ for the "largely predictable" velar and palatal nasals to be examples of "phonetic overkill in the system".
  2. Another diacritic is the / ँ अँ. describes it as a "more emphatic form" of the, "sometimes used to mark a true nasalization". In a new Indo-Aryan language such as Hindi the distinction is formal: the indicates vowel nasalisation while the indicates a homorganic nasal preceding another consonant: e.g., हँसी "laughter", गंगा "the Ganges". When an has a vowel diacritic above the top line, that leaves no room for the stroke, which is dispensed with in favour of the lone dot: हूँ "am", but हैं "are". Some writers and typesetters dispense with the "moon" stroke altogether, using only the dot in all situations.
  3. The is a Sanskrit punctuation mark for the elision of a vowel in sandhi: एकोऽयम् . An original long vowel lost to coalescence is sometimes marked with a double : सदाऽऽत्मा "always, the self". In Hindi, states that its "main function is to show that a vowel is sustained in a cry or a shout": आईऽऽऽ!. In Madhyadeshi languages like Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Maithili, etc. which have "quite a number of verbal forms that end in that inherent vowel", the is used to mark the non-elision of word-final inherent, which otherwise is a modern orthographic convention: बइठऽ "sit" versus बइठ
  4. The syllabic consonants ॠ, ऌ, and ॡ are specific to Sanskrit and not included in the of other languages. The sound represented by has also been largely lost in the modern languages, and its pronunciation now ranges from to .
  5. is not an actual phoneme of Sanskrit, but rather a graphic convention included among the vowels in order to maintain the symmetry of short–long pairs of letters.
  6. There are non-regular formations of रु, रू, and हृ.
  7. There are two more vowels in Marathi, ॲ and ऑ, that respectively represent , similar to the RP English pronunciation of in act, and , similar to the RP pronunciation of in cot. These vowels are sometimes used in Hindi too, as in . IAST transliteration is not defined. In ISO 15919, the transliteration is and, respectively.
  8. Kashmiri Devanagari uses letters like ॳ, ॴ, ॶ, ॷ, ऎ, ऒ, औ, ॵ to represent its vowels.