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INTRODUCTION When you dig into the Nepali Script (and the romanized version) more and more, you will start to notice disparities in transliterations. This time, I want to set things straight in Transliteration and this will be the first step to understanding how people write phrases in English and the vernacular uses of the language. … Read more
INTRODUCTION The Devanagari script was primarily intended for Sanskrit, where words were written exactly how they were pronounced. The daughter languages of Sanskrit continued to use Devanagari (or related scripts) because it made sense: the vocabulary is largely derived from Sanskrit, and it’s not worth it to reinvent the wheel (or writing) all over again … Read more
INTRODUCTION Punctuation marks are marks used in writing sentences to separate ideas or elements in order to clarify meaning. Fortunately, punctuation marks are not that different in Nepali, except the full stop which is represented by a horizontal slash. Punctuation marks are called ‘विराम चिन्ह’ (virām cinha) in Nepali. TABLE OF PUNCTUATION MARKS Name Nepali Form Nepali … Read more
INTRODUCTION Devanagari is an alphasyllabary, meaning consonant-vowel sequences are written as one unit, as opposed to individual units. In the lesson The Consonant, we explored how consonants behave and how they can be used to build clusters. In this lesson, we will look how we can assign a vowel value to consonants or clusters to … Read more
INTRODUCTION Handwritten numbers look slightly different to its print form, thus it is also important to learn how to write numbers when you are practicing Nepali. I have included the number system as well, because numbers are counted a bit differently in Nepali. ZERO TO FOUR FIVE TO NINE EXAMPLE NUMBERS THE NUMBER SYSTEM Unlike … Read more
INTRODUCTION Now that we have learnt the Devanagari script, we now explore how to write it effectively as well. So far, we have treated the characters mostly as individual glyphs, rather than building blocks. Thus, we might be tempted to write each and every character as they appear, making the text blocky and choppy. This … Read more
INTRODUCTION Consonants are any sounds that involve blocking of air before it leaves the mouth. The definition of a consonant is not very important to us however, but rather how we can represent consonants and use them to form clusters and eventually syllables in Nepali. Syllables are made by combining consonants with vowels. In Devanagari, … Read more
INTRODUCTION Consonant clusters appear frequently throughout text, with some clusters appearing more often than others. In order to increase writing speed and condense some frequently used clusters, special glyphs were created to represent these clusters. Thus, special characters are ligatures or glyphs that represent frequently occurring consonant clusters. Take the cluster ‘tr’, which has a special … Read more
INTRODUCTION In every language, differences exist between the handwritten version and the printed version of the script. We were writing long before the printing press was created by Gutenberg, and most definitely ages before digitization. For example, the printed version of the alphabet “a” looks very different to its digital counterpart. Given that everything is … Read more
INTRODUCTION Over the previous few lessons, we have gone through the script in thorough detail. Now that you know how to write the script, it is now important how to read the Devanagari script as well. We will also look at how to pronounce words. Fortunately, Nepali is a very phonetic script. There are some … Read more