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Street banner in India |
Devanagari is the most important offspring of the Gupta script which itself descends from the old and very fertile Brahmi script. It originated in the 7th century in Northwest India under the name Nagari. The meaning of the word Devanagari is obscure. It might be “Script of the divine city”, as “deva” is “god” in Sanskrit, and “nagari” means “city”. But “deva” can also mean “perfect” or “excellent” which gives for Devanagari the simple meaning of “improved Nagari”.
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India and Nepal |
The script was very successful and quickly spread to become the most important script of the Indian subcontinent. The most widespread language using it is Hindi, but there are also a number of other languages written in Devanagari, coming from language families as diverse as Indoeuropean ((Sanskrit - the language for which it was originally invented - and Nepali), Munda (Ho, Mundari), and Dravidian (Gondi, Kurukh). Furthermore the Devanagari was itself the starting point for the development of some other scripts like Modi (used to write Marathi) and Tibetan. Close relatives of the Devanagari script that also originate in the Gupta are Bengal, Oriya, and Gujarati.
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Indian girl |
Typologically Devanagari belongs to a group of scripts that are positioned between real alphabets and syllabaries. Every glyph denotes a consonant with an inherent vowel (in case of Devanagari and most others this is the “a”) that can be changed by applying diacritical marks. These scripts are sometimes called “abugida”. In addition there are also some glyphs for writing vowels at the beginning of a word or after other vowels.
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The standard glyph inventory has 34 syllable characters, 9 ligatures to write consonant clusters, and 12 vowel glyphs (8 “real” vowels, 2 syllabic consonants, 2 diphthongs). Both the vowel and the consonant order follow phonetic criteria. The vowel order is first the short “pure” vowels, then the long ones, the diphthongs (including also e and o which are considered to emerge from the combinations a-I and a-u, respectively), the nasals and the aspirated vowels. The consonants are sorted by the position where they are articulated in the mouth. For the same position the sorting criteria are similar to the vowel ones.
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Sign in Devanagari and Latin scripts |
In addition Devanagari contains a number of diacritical marks, most of which modify vowels, and a set of numerals. Apart from modifying vowels there are diacritics that fulfill a number of different tasks such as nasalizing or oppressing vowels. Sanskrit holds even more of these diacritics that mark tone heights or rhythmic elements for recitation purposes. The diacritics are positioned above or below the consonant they are following or attached to a long “a” following a consonant. The notable exception is “i” which precedes the consonant it follows in reading. There is no case distinction, and the script is partially phonetic in that a written word can be pronounced unequivocally.
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Truck in Nepal |
Devanagari is written from left to right with spaces between the words (except for Sanskrit where spaces are usually omitted). A very typical trait of a text written in Devanagari is the horizontal line at the top of each word as every glyph (but for the numerals) contains this top line.
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