Devnagri

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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