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Devanagari is a script used to write some Indian languages, inclucing
Hindi, Sanskrit and
Marathi, as well as Nepali.
Indian languages written in scripts other than Devangari include Gujarati and Urdu.
Deva is the Sanskrit for god, and Nagari is a city; together they mean, literally, "City of the Gods" (when the compound is read as a shashtitatpurusha). This refers to the legend that the script was one used in such a city. So the compound really functions as a bahuvrihi. An often-used 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 zero or one or more
consonants, and one vowel.
If you don't have a proper Unicode font installed, the Devanagari characters in the following tables may not appear correctly.
Devanagari Vowels and Related Symbols
| Vowel | Transliteration | Pronunciation/Note |
|---|
| अ | a | 'a' as in about |
| आ | aa | 'a' as in art |
| इ | i | 'i' as in pit |
| ई | ii | 'ee' as in wheel |
| उ | u | 'u' as in put |
| ऊ | uu | 'oo' as in soot |
| ऋ | RRi | |
| ॠ | RRI | |
| ऌ | LLi | |
| ॡ | LLI | |
| ए | e | 'a' as in rate |
| ऐ | ai | |
| ओ | o | |
| औ | au | |
| ः | aH | visarga |
| ् | halant | suppresses inherent vowel |
When no vowel is written, 'a' is assumed. To specifically denote the
absence of a vowel, a halant (also called virama) is used.
The letters above are pronounced as in English, with the exceptions
of:
| Consonant | Pronunciation |
|---|
| 'n' with the tongue bent back |
| 'th' as in thin, but it's a stop |
| aspirated version of 't' |
| 'th' as in the, but it's a stop |
| aspirated version of above |
| 'l' with the tongue bent back |
Among these, 'L' is not used in Hindi. The entire set is
used in Marathi.
There is no distinction of case, i.e. no uppercase and lowercase
letters.
Devanagari digits are written as follows:
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".
Note: "Devanagari" is the most common transliteration. Others are
"Devnagri", "Devanagri", "Deonagri" (rare).