Devengari

Alphabet

खझ Jha

Kha

Devanagari "Buddha" written in Samrup Rachna calligraphy

Origins

Alphabet

Devanagari is part of the Brahmic family of script and also contains elements of Gupta, Siddham, and Sharada script. These scripts are native to India, Nepal, Tibet, and South-East Asia. Variations of what the Gupta called nāgarī where first found from the 7th century CE and after 1200 CE these were replaced with Siddham until an early occurrence of Devanagari appeared in 922 CE. The popularity and growth of Devanagari can be attested to the simplicity in which it can be used to inscribe many different oral languages. This is because it is the only script which has specific signs (grapheme) for the phonetically arranged sounds of the human speech (phonemes), and it is flexible enough to write foreign sounds by attaching marks to the nearer grapheme. It’s rise can also can be attested to the words meaning in Sanskrit; devi meaning divine and nāgarī meaning city. These come together to describe it as the sophisticated script of the urban world.

Because of its popularity and parent languages Devanagari is the most popular choice for writing Sanskrit one of the oldest languages in the world.

Devanagari operates with forty seven letters on average with thirty three consonants and fourteen vowels.

Indian phonography is vowel dominant; each vowel is realizable in 3 scales Short, Long, Prolonged. All vowels can be pronounced in non-nasal and nasal modes. Which means each vowel can have 18 realizations. These cannot be written and must be listened to learn.

Devanagari is written from left to right with a continuous line over to letters to form them together to make words. These words are made up of vowels primarily with letters changing with dots and accents to confer their relationships with consonants within the word and extra sounds that change the meaning of the word.

तस Ta

Sa

Grammar

Consonant Clusters

A letter in Devanagari has the default vowel of /a/. To indicate the same consonant followed by another vowel, additional strokes are added to the letter, like in the following example:

Often in Devanagari words do not have vowels in them. To indicate just the consonant clusters, the letters are fused together in a variety of ways, a process called samyoga (meaning “yoked together” in Sanskrit). Sometimes the individual letters can still be discerned, while other times the conjunction creates new shapes These combinations have over 1296 possibilities and are governed by formal rules that regulate how the letters form together.

In addition, a few other “diacritics” are used at the end of words. To denote the nasal [-am], a dot is placed above the letter, much like the /am/ letter. Similarly, to write [-ah], two dots are written to the right of the letter, like the / ah/ letter.

Speaking

नमस्ते आप कैसे हैं ? आपका स्वागत हैं। 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.

The 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

When a consonant ends a word, it is necessary to indicated that the last letter has no vowel. To do so, a diagonal line, called virama, is drawn under the letter. Letters with the virama are called halanta letters.

Welcome!

Vowels of Devanagari Ben Adams

'AARAMBH' (THE BEGINNING) Akshar Bodh

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.

Hi!

How are you?

Namastey

Aap kaisey hain?

Aapka swaagat hai!

क Pha

Califont

Adobe Devanagari

Usage

Devanagari or otherwise known as Nagari is a Abugida alphabet of India and Nepal.

It is used to write Hindi, Nepali, Marathi, Konkani, Bobo, and Maithili making it one of the most used and adopted writing systems in the world. Over 400 million people use the script across the world and it continues to grow as new countries and cultures begin to integrate the script into their languages.

Devanagari has been fully translated into the international language of technology with many keyboards, fonts, and programs integrating the letters and symbols associated with the script.

Sources

http://www.ancientscripts.com/devanagari.html http://www.dsource.in/resource/devanagari-letterformshistory/devanagari_letterforms/digital_typefaces.html

Designed by Evan McEldowney Type2 Fall 2014

Devanagari Ganesha Shubhangi P