LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 6 : 1 January 2006

Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Associate Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.

HOME PAGE

AN APPEAL FOR SUPPORT

PAYPAL

  • We seek your support to meet expenses relating to some new and essential software, formatting of articles and books, maintaining and running the journal through hosting, correrspondences, etc. You can use the PAYPAL link given above. Please click on the PAYPAL logo, and it will take you to the PAYPAL website. Please use the e-mail address thirumalai@mn.rr.com to make your contributions using PAYPAL.
    Also please use the AMAZON link to buy your books. Even the smallest contribution will go a long way in supporting this journal. Thank you. Thirumalai, Editor.

PAYPAL

In Association with Amazon.com

BOOKS FOR YOU TO READ AND DOWNLOAD FREE!

REFERENCE MATERIAL

BACK ISSUES

  • E-mail your articles and book-length reports (preferably in Microsoft Word) to thirumalai@mn.rr.com.
  • Contributors from South Asia may send their articles to
    B. Mallikarjun,
    Central Institute of Indian Languages,
    Manasagangotri,
    Mysore 570006, India     or e-mail to mallikarjun@ciil.stpmy.soft.net

  • Your articles and booklength reports should be written following the MLA, LSA, or IJDL Stylesheet.

  • The Editorial Board has the right to accept, reject, or suggest modifications to the articles submitted for publication, and to make suitable stylistic adjustments. High quality, academic integrity, ethics and morals are expected from the authors and discussants.

Copyright © 2004
M. S. Thirumalai
Google

NAYANAGARI - A SIMPLE CONJUNCT-FREE SCRIPT FOR DEVANAGARI
Shah Musa, Ph.D.

CONJUNCT SCRIPTS OF SOUTH ASIA

The conjuncts (or ligatures) are a fundamental issue for the Devanagari script (or lipi), as it is for any other Brahmi scripts (excluding the Tamil script), for example, Bengali or Bangla, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, etc. The conjuncts make the script unnecessarily complex and difficult to learn and to use. The conjuncts not only engender an exponentially large number of total characters for the script, but also render the character set of the script to stay undefined and open ended. For example, one is unable to conclusively answer the question, exactly how many conjunct characters exists (or will exist in future) there in the Devanagari script? If we can do away with the conjuncts we can make the script not only very simple, but also truly complete (or close ended).

A PROPOSAL FOR A CONJUNCT-FREE DEVANAGARI

In this paper a complete script of a conjunct-free writing system of Devanagari, named as Nayanagari, is presented. The alphabet set of the Nayanagari script and the rules to convert any Devanagari word into Nayanagari format is described. Nayanagari is simple, direct, and easy to use in computing and in any other use. An efficient and easy-to-memorize mapping of the QWERTY keyboard for the Nayanagari characters is illustrated as well.

THE PROPOSAL IS APPLICABLE TO ANY OTHER BRAHMI SCRIPT

The concepts and the ideas of Nayanagari are equally applicable to any other Brahmi script. In designing, developing, grouping and ordering the alphabets of the Nayanagari script, we put significant effort so that each character (in both the vowel and the consonant tables, as illustrated below) has (or potentially has) a phonetically identical character in any Brahmi script (with 1:1 mapping), only the artistic rendering of the characters being different. In other words, in our new simple and enhanced scripting proposal below, the Nayanagari character set represent the alphabet set of any Brahmi script in a generic fashion.

This paper is presented as a PDF file, because of numerous Devanagari characters and the alternatives suggested. Please click the link given below to access the complete paper in a printer-friendly format.

CLICK HERE FOR THE PRINTER-FRIENDLY COMPLETE ARTICLE.

TSUNAMI AFTER-SHOCKS- SOME JAPANESE WORDS IN ENGLISH | A SOCIO-LINGUISTC STUDY OF CODE SWITCHING AMONG THE COCHIN TAMILS | PRACTICING LITERARY TRANSLATION - A SYMPOSIUM BY MAIL -- FOURTH ROUND | TEXT FAMILIARITY, READING TASKS, AND ESP TEST PERFORMANCE: A STUDY ON IRANIAN LEP AND NON-LEP UNIVERSITY STUDENTS - A DOCTORAL DISSERTATION | ADVANCED WRITING - A COURSE TEXTBOOK | A SIMPLE SCRIPT FOR BANGLA AND THE IPA MAPPING THEREOF | EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE POLICY - BRITISH CABINET MISSION TO CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY - CHANGING POLICIES OF THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS AND THE ALL INDIA MUSLIM LEAGUE | NAYANAGARI - A SIMPLE CONJUNCT-FREE SCRIPT FOR DEVANAGARI | HOME PAGE | CONTACT EDITOR

Shah M. Musa, Ph.D.
Intel Corporation
Santa Clara, CA, USA
shah.musa@intel.com
  • Send your articles
    as an attachment
    to your e-mail to
    thirumalai@mn.rr.com.
  • Please ensure that your name, academic degrees, institutional affiliation and institutional address, and your e-mail address are all given in the first page of your article. Also include a declaration that your article or work submitted for publication in LANGUAGE IN INDIA is an original work by you and that you have duly acknolwedged the work or works of others you either cited or used in writing your articles, etc. Remember that by maintaining academic integrity we not only do the right thing but also help the growth, development and recognition of Indian scholarship.