Devanagari

Page from a dispersed Bhagavata Purana, ink and opaque watercolor on paper, from Mewar, Rajasthan, India, c. 1630–50; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Devanagari, script used to write the Sanskrit, Prakrit, Hindi, Marathi, Konkani, and Nepali languages, developed from the North Indian monumental script known as Gupta and ultimately from the Brahmi 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, Devanagari 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 Devanagari 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 Devanagari 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, Devanagari 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 Devanagari 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 toward the hard palate behind the alveolar ridge 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 off-glide called anusvāra and the spirants ẖk (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 ẖk, 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 (retroflex r) was a complex sound with r flanked by very short vowel segments (one-fourth mora each), as in ərə. 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 the southwest of India; in very careful pronunciation (as taught, for example, in parts of 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 (anusvāra) originally represented an off-glide 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^ə]. 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 (visarga) 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].

The sound inventory, with Devanagari symbols, the transliterations prevalent among Sanskritists (e.g., omitting the default vowel a that accompanies consonants), and the approximate equivalents in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) notation, is shown in the table.

As noted above, a consonant symbol designates by default a consonant followed by a; an angled substroke (virāma or halant) 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 depend 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. Anusvāra (ṃ) is indicated by a dot above the preceding consonant or anunāsika as a dot above a crescent, called chandrabindu (moon-dot). 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 or regional look—e.g., (a), (ṇ), and (ṛ), instead of , , and .

The avagraha (separator) ऽ is a mark of elision between two words to indicate the prodelision of an initial a following a word ending in e or o and can be doubled if preceding ā. It is indicated in transliteration with an apostrophe. For punctuation, Devanagari uses a single vertical line, ।, called a daṇḍa (Sanskrit: “stick”), which can be doubled as॥ to indicate a further level of finality. This punctuation is used to mark the ends of sentences, metrical lines in prosody, or sections of text; doubled it can also be used to offset numbers in versed material. In modern texts, punctuation from European scripts, including question marks and quotation marks, can be found.

For Vedic texts, diacritic symbols are used for marking pitches and for varieties of anusvāra. In the broadest notation, a syllable pronounced on a normal high tone (udātta) is left unmarked, a horizontal subscript marks a low-pitched syllable (anudātta), and a vertical superscript marks a svarita (combined high then low) syllable—e.g., (agnim īḷe “I praise [invoke] Agni”).

In a narrower notation system used for texts of the Shuklayajurveda (“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 (“Samhita of the Maitrayanas”), not only marks different svarita syllables but also uses a superscript stroke to indicate high-pitched syllables. There are also Devanagari number symbols, though the constitution of India provides for the use of Arabic numerals as well.

The Arabic numerals, as they are known in the West, are better called Hindu-Arabic numerals because they began in ancient India, were adopted in Devanagari, and were later introduced to Europe through Arabic.

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 Devanagari alphabet also add some special symbols in borrowings from Arabic, Dravidian, and European languages. For example, modern Hindi writes many sounds not originally in Sanskrit by adding a dot—called a nuqtā, from the Arabic for “dot”—to Devanagari characters, such as क़ (dotted k) for q, ज़ (dotted j) for z, and फ़ (dotted ph, pronounced in Sanskrit as an aspirated p) for f. Finally, there is a special symbol for the sacred syllable om: ॐ.