Origin

The Nāgarī or Devanāgarī alphabet descended from the Brahmi script sometime around the 11th century AD. It was originally developed to write Sanskrit but was later adapted to write many other languages.

The name Devanāgarī is made up of two Sanskrit words: deva, which means god, brahman or celestial, and nāgarī, which means city. The name is variously translated as "script of the city", "heavenly/sacred script of the city" or "[script of the] city of the Gods or priests". The origins and meaning of the name are uncertain.

Notable Features

• Type of writing system: alphasyllabary / abugida.
• Direction of writing: left to right in horizontal lines.
• Consonant letters carry an inherent vowel which can be altered or muted by means of diacritics or matra.
• Vowels can be written as independent letters, or by using a variety of diacritical marks which are written above, below, before or after the consonant they belong to. This feature is common to most of the alphabets of South and South East Asia.
• When consonants occur together in clusters, special conjunct letters are used.
• The order of the letters is based on articulatory phonetics.

Used to write:

Bhojpuri, Hindi, Konkani, Marathi, Mundari, Nepali, Pali, Sanskrit, Sindhi and many more.

Devanāgarī alphabet

Other symbols

Consonants

Variant letters

Some letters are two forms: the Classical, Northern or Kalikata (Calcutta) form is used in the north of India; while the Modern, Southern or Mumbai (Bombay) form is used in the south India and has become the standard form.

A selection of conjunct consonants

There are about a thousand conjunct consonants, most of which combine two or three consonants. There are also some with four-consonant conjuncts and at least one well-known conjunct with five consonants.

Complete chart of conjunct consonants

Download the chart (Excel, 39K)

Numerals

Links

Free Devanagari fonts
http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Devanagari.html
http://www.kiranfont.com

Sanskrit Translation

Our Price:$10.00

Devanagari script tutor
http://www.avashy.com/hindiscripttutor.htm

An archive of Sanskrit dictionaries, readers & grammars in German, English & Russian. (circa 4000 Mb Book Scans, devanagari fonts): http://groups.google.com/group/Nagari

Download free devanagari fonts & transliteration macros. History and hi-res scans of Indian typography: http://nagari.southindia.ru

ALPHABETUM is a Unicode font specifically designed for ancient languages that includes Devanagari, and many other ancient scripts
http://guindo.pntic.mec.es/~jmag0042/alphabet.html

Other syllabic alphabets

Ahom, Balinese, Batak, Bengali, Brahmi, Buhid, Burmese, Cham, Dehong Dai, Devanagari, Dhives Akuru, Ethiopic, Evēla Akuru, Grantha, Gujarati, Gurmukhi (Punjabi), Hanuno'o, Hmong, Javanese, Kannada, Kharosthi, Khmer, Lanna, Lao, Lepcha, Limbu, Lontara/Makasar, Malayalam, Manpuri, Modi, New Tai Lue, Oriya, Pallava, Phags-pa, Ranjana, Redjang, Shan, Sharda, Siddham, Sinhala, Sorang Sompeng, Sourashtra, Soyombo, Sundanese, Syloti Nagri, Tagalog, Tagbanwa, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Tocharian, Varang Kshiti

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