Adventures with Devanagari

Today I wrote my first sentences in Devanagari (in Hindi... Devanagari being the script and Hindi being the language). They were so simple that it was hard to tell, but I think I actually understood the grammar of what I was doing and knew the letters, so it wasn't just copying. Next thing I need to do is learn how to type. :P What I did today was all along the lines of "The boy writes" "I read", etc, although I stretched myself by using the verb hesitate, which literally translates to if-but-do. Clever. I also tried one more complex sentence, "The brother takes but the sister gives". These sentences barely make sense on their own and certainly not together, but just to feel accomplished I put several of them together to make a 'paragraph'. It looked very pretty.

So, Devanagari. I call it a script. It's not an alphabet because the symbols normally represent a full syllable each, not a consonant or a vowel that have to be combined to make a syllable. But it's not a syllabary, like Japanese's hiragana or katakana, because a syllabary has different syllables like "ma" "mo" "mu" "ga" "go "gu", and devanagari instead has only "ma" and "ga" and, to differentiate between different vowels, you modify these characters. So basically, it is the love child of a syllabary and an alphabet, and there's a word to describe what it is, abugida, but I usually just use the catch all word - script - when talking about it.

This is what the letters look like, although I don't think this is ALL of them:


On the top right, in that little box, it shows the matras. These are the things you add to the normal letters to change their vowel sound from the default a to something else. My feeling about this system is that it would work fine, if it was designed for a language which uses the default a a lot, other vowels slightly less often, and generally has word composed of consonant-vowel-consonant vowel, like Japanese or Hawaiian.

But that's the problem - it doesn't. Most hindi words don't end in a vowel, to start with, and they're actually reasonably fond of consonant clusters. So, to provide for this, they have a bunch of ways you can /literally/ combine two consonants, by cutting off half of the symbol. It's rather unsettling, really, because if, for example, this symbol:

makes the 'ka' sound, that doesn't mean that you can break the symbol apart into 'k' and 'a'. But, if you want to say 'kyaa', you can't have it being read as 'kayaa', so what do you do?


You take Ka...

And you take Ya...


And you sort of smash them together. Erm... okay.

The problem is that this one is relatively straightforward, you could probably even guess it and write it without ever having seen this combination, or conjunct, before. But others aren't like that. Many can be guessed when reading, but you can't really guess when you're writing. And a few seem to be completely irregular, but I'm not far enough along to speak authoritatively yet.

As for the characters themselves: I have a firm handle on about one third of them, but they seem to be used more than the ones I don't know as well, so I only need to check on every third or fourth word when reading. Still, I think it may go more slowly from here, because I'm not 100% sure of the pronunciation of some of the ones ahead, many of them don't have precise English equivalents, they're used less often, and in some cases they look a bit trickier to write.

The letters are curvy and feel sort of insubstantial, sometimes it's hard to find things to grab onto. It's sometimes hard for me to write them all distinctly, because the stroke order isn't as rigid as in Japanese so people get confused when you ask them how you're supposed to write a different character. So sometimes I start to feel like I'm just drawing squiggles and then decorating them with vowel and nasalization dots, lines, and more squiggles. It looks lovely and mysterious but also chaotic. Sounds strange but it reminds me a little of the alphabet I was trying to make for my conlang so many years ago. I wanted this curvy chaotic ornamental mess, but imposing enough order on it to make it reasonable was far beyond my capability.

I have to say this: I /love/ the line. It pulls the alphabet together, sort of reforms the chaos. All the squiggles and madness sort of hang down from it. It's so unique, distinct, and beautiful. It's not always super easy to work with, since you have to line up the characters well enough to connect them all with the line after you finish the sentence, but it's well worth it. And at least for the time being, I look forward to finishing each sentence and drawing the line. Much more satisfying than a period.



This is Alexander Arguelles, a Youtube-famous polyglot, writing in Arabic, then Sanskirt (Devanagari), then Chinese.

In Devanagari he writes this: विनाशमुखमेतत्ते केनाख्यातं दुरात्मना

I am happy to report that my handwriting is a little bit better than his. However, he writes like 3x as fast as I do. :P

This site has tons of children's poems and stories in Hindi, so it's a mid-term goal for me... http://www.4to40.com/ :)