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Revision as of 12:52, 13 December 2001 by Hannes Hirzel (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Devanagari is a script to write languages in India like Hindi, Sanskrit and Marathi. deva signifies 'heavenly' and nagari 'scirpt of the city' in Sankrit. An often uses transcription variant is Devnagri
Devanagari 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.
Devanagari 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
Devanagari into English. The letters used to represent Devanagari
alphabets in this notation have approximately the same pronunciation
in English. It is widely used on Usenet.
In ITRANS, the word Devanagari is written as "devanaagarii".
Devanagari is also used to write Nepali.
(Note: "Devanagari" is the most common transliteration. Others are
"Devnagri", "Devanagri", "Deonagri"(rare).)
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