Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind

Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications

Page 361

360
THE ALPHABET
indeed, documents with a mixture of wedges and straight strokes, or with wedges which are so broad that they produce the same effect as the long straight top-strokes.
The Nagari script developed slowly in the first two or three centuries of its existence. However, by the eleventh century it was mature and was already predominant in many districts of northern India (Fig. 162, 1). Many palm-leaf manuscripts, dating from the tenth, eleventh and the following centuries, discovered in Gujarat, Rajputana and the northern Deccan, are also written in this script.
Nandi-nagari
The South-Indian form of Nagari is nowadays known as Nandinagari, which is an obscure term. Its archaic variety already appears in the eighth century A.D. (perhaps even earlier), and is fully developed by the beginning of the eleventh century. It differs from the northern variety mainly "by the want of the small tails slanting to the right from the ends of the verticals and in general by stiffer forms" (Buehler). Its later developments are represented in inscriptions of the thirteenthsixteenth centuries of the Kanarese country, and in the modern Nandinagari still used for manuscripts. See also below, under "Modi character."
Deva-nagari Character
The Nagari character is known nowadays as the Deva-nagari, from Sanskr. deva, "heavenly," i.e., the "Nagari of the gods" or Brahman, the "divine" or royal Nagari. It is one of the most perfect systems of writing apart from its main weakness of the short a inherent in each consonant unless otherwise indicated, which is not always pronounced and is often omitted in transliteration; the Deva-nagari character is therefore a semisyllabary. The system was obviously evolved by the learned grammarians of the Sanskrit language. The Deva-nagari script consists of 48 signs, of which 14 are vowels and diphthongs, and 34 basic consonants known as aksharas.
The basic forms of the vowels are only employed as "initial" vowels, at the commencement of words or syllables; when used after a consonant they take, except the a, new, "non-initial" forms, which are generally abbreviations. The basic consonants are divided into 7 groups (vargas); six of them, the gutturals, palatals, cacuminals, dentals, labials and semi-vowels consist of five basic consonants, whilst the seventh group consists of three sibilants and one aspirate. I have used the term "basic consonant" or akshara, to indicate the consonant when followed by the short a. When a word contains two or more syllables, the last of which contains a consonant, the inherent a in this last syllable is not pronounced; moreover, in reading prose, not poetry, custom demands