________________
INDIAN BRANCH
361 that in the unaccented syllables of a word the inherent a should only be very slightly pronounced or not at all; this unaccented and unpronounced a is sometimes represented in European alphabets by an apostrophe.
"The practice of writing o and au with the radical a is quite modern, dating no further back than the early eighteenth century. It arose from the gradual blending of the characters for the vowels a and au from the tenth century onwards. The Nagari practice does not extend to the i and e vowels, which had no tendency to blend, and therefore retained their ancient special vocalic radicals" (Hærnle).
The Deva-nagari type has no pure consonants, that is consonants written by themselves. In order to represent them, whenever possible compounds of two or three consonants are used. These are formed in
us ways, some are quite irregular; or else an oblique stroke, called in Sanskr. tirama, is placed below the consonant in question. When a nasal consonant precedes another consonant, the quiescent nasal mn or 11 may, as a compendium scripturae, be denoted by the anusvara, namely a dot placed over the letter it follows in sound. A variety of the anusvara, called ananasika, consisting of a dot in a half circle, is used to give a nasal tone to any syllable over which it may be placed.
The Deva-nagari character, of which there are two main varieties, the eastern and the western, is used for Sanskrit, a purely literary language, never employed in daily life; it has after a long course of literary treatment and grammatical refinement remained practically standardized during the last two millennia or so. In consequence, the Deva-nagari has remained essentially unaltered for many centuries, being obviously easier to write correctly and consistently in a language not habitually used than in a living, especially a primitive tongue,
However, the importance of the Deva-nagari is paramount; it is the script of the educated classes, and the common means of communication between learned men throughout India. Its history is mainly connected with that of Sanskrit, which for many centuries was the exclusive literary language of northern India. Serious competition with Sanskrit arose when shortly after A.D. 1000, the successful raids of Sultan Mahmud culminated in the Moslem conquest of the Punjab, followed by the final conquest, towards the end of the twelfth century, which extinguished the Hindu political power in northern India, and thus brought the Persian script and language into use. Roughly about this time, the Indian vernaculars began to develop into literary languages; these will be mentioned further on.
Fig. 162, 2 shows the evolution of the northern and southern Devanavari and Tamil aksharas a and ka from the early Brahmi type of ca. 250 B.C. till the present day.
The Deva-nagari script is still the main literary vehicle of various Indian languages and dialects, amongst them those of the Western Hindi
