Devanagari

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Introduction

Devanagari is used for writing a variety of languages, most notably: Hindi and Sanskrit. But also Marathi and Nepalese are written in Devanagari.

Here we will focus on its usage in Hindi.

Devanagari is an alphasyllabic writing system. Every consonant has an inherent vowel (a) which can be altered with various vowel signs. Consecutive consonants can form ligatures, meaning they can alter form when they "join" with another consonant. This indian writing system is mostly phonetic, meaning that each letter conveys the idea of one sound. There are 46 characters in total, 35 consonants and 11 vowels.

Devanagari is written from left to right, like latin. A special characteristic of devanagari, and some other indian scripts, is the horizontal line that connects the various characters.

Character Table

Take a look at the following character table (the red characters are devanagari, the green ones are its urdu equivalents):

The vowels come in two rows, the upper most row is how they are written at the beginning of a word, and the lower row illustrates the vowel in combination with an example consonant (P in this case).