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Revision as of 11:27, 13 December 2001 by Soam Vasani (talk | contribs) (added list of characters and some pronunciation info)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)A script to write languages in India like Hindi, Sanskrit and Marathi.
Devnagri is partly phonetic in the sense that a word written in it can
only be pronounced in one way, but not all possible pronunciations can
be written perfectly.
Devnagri has 34 consonants ("vyanjan"), and 12 vowels ("svar"). A
syllable ("akshar") is formed by the combination of one or more
consonants and one vowel.
Vowel Pronunciation
a 'a' as in about
aa 'a' as in art
i 'i' as in pit
ii 'ee' as in wheel
u 'u' as in put
uu 'oo' as in soot
e 'a' as in rate
ai
o 'o' as in old
au
aM
aH
When no vowel is written, 'a' is assumed. To specifically denote the
absence of a vowel, a halant is used.
Consonants:
k kh g gh ch chh j jh T Th D Dh N t th d dh n p ph b bh m y r l v/w sh shh s h L ksh gy/dny
The letters above are pronounced as in English, with the exceptions
of:
N
t
th
d 'th' as in the
dh
L
Among these, 'L' and 'N' are not used in Hindi. The entire set is
used in Marathi.
There is no distinction of case, i.e. no uppercase and lowercase
letters.
The ITRANS notation is a lossless transliteration scheme of
Devnagri into English. The letters used to represent Devnagri
alphabets in this notation have approximately the same pronunciation
in English. It is widely used on Usenet.
In ITRANS, the word Devnagri is written as "devanaagarii".
Devnagri is also used to write Nepali.
(Note: "Devnagri" is the most common transliteration. Others are
"Devanagari", "Devanagri", "Deonagri"(rare).)
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