Devanagari - Principle

Principle

As a Brahmic abugida, the fundamental principle of Devanāgarī is that each letter represents a consonant, which carries an inherent "schwa" vowel. This is usually written in Latin as a but is more accutately translated as .To pronounce it, pronounce a short "u" (as in cup) but open your mouth a little more. It's somewhat difficult for English speakers, but Latin speakers will recognize this immediately as a normal "a". The letter क is read ka, the two letters कन are kana, the three कनय are kanaya, etc. Other vowels, or the absence of vowels, require modification of these consonants or their own letters:

• A final consonant is marked with the diacritic ्, called the virāma in Sanskrit, halant in Hindi, and occasionally a "killer stroke" in English. This cancels the inherent vowel, so that from क्नय knaya is derived क्नय् knay. The halant is often used for consonant clusters when typesetting conjunct ligatures is not feasible.
• Consonant clusters are written with ligatures (saṃyuktākṣara "conjuncts"). For example, the three consonants क्, न्, and य्, (k, n, y), when written consecutively without virāma form कनय, as shown above. Alternatively, they may be joined as clusters to form क्नय knaya, कन्य kanya, or क्न्य knya. This system was originally created for use with the Middle Indic languages, which have a very limited number of clusters (the only clusters allowed are geminate consonants and clusters involving homorganic nasal stops). When applied to Sanskrit, however, it added a great deal of complexity to the script, due to the large variety of clusters in this language (up to five consonants, e.g. rtsny). Much of this complexity is required at least on occasion in the modern Indo-Aryan languages, due to the large number of clusters allowed and especially due to borrowings from Sanskrit.
• Vowels other than the inherent a are written with diacritics (termed matras). For example, using क ka, the following forms can be derived: के ke, कु ku, की kī, का kā, etc.
• For vowels as an independent syllable (in writing, unattached to a consonant), either at the beginning of a word or (in Hindi) after another vowel, there are full-letter forms. For example, while the vowel ū is written with the diacritic ू in कू kū, it has its own letter ऊ in ऊक ūka and (in Hindi but not Sanskrit) कऊ kaū.

Such a letter or ligature, with its diacritics, is called an akṣara "syllable". For example, कनय kanaya is written with what are counted as three akshara, whereas क्न्य knya and कु ku are each written with one.

As far as handwriting is concerned, letters are usually written without the distinctive horizontal bar, which is added only once the word is completed.