Talk:Devanagari

Untitled
In Devanagari, the placement of consonants in alphabetical order are horizontally grouped vaguely in accordance with the body part where their sounds originate from.

The meaning of phrase I have italicised is not obvious.

Teaching Devanagari
I would really like to see lessons teaching how to read and write Devanagari step-by-step. It's too hard to learn from an overview of letters. Lack of examples is another problem, but even if there were examples afterwards the learning situation would be far from perfect because the student would still have to memorise all letters at once in order to be able to begin practising.

What I have found really useful when learning non-Latin alphabets is a "divide and conquer" method that introduces few letters at a time and offers example words for practise immediately after each letter / each set of letters. What's even better is if those example words are understandable without prior knowledge of the language, that is, international words. For example: names of countries, cities or famous people (if their name isn't spelled significantly different in Devanagari than in English), common personal names, Indian words that have entered English, English words that are used in Indian languages, words that both have derived from Greek or Latin... The advantage of using these words is that students will be able to quickly see their own progress and the whole learning process becomes as fascinating as solving a puzzle. See the "Read Write and Pronounce Greek" lessons in the Modern Greek Wikibook for an example, or this external page on Cyrillic.

If you'd like to try this approach for teaching how to write Devanagari, I'd be glad to help you, even though I don't know it yet (I'd learn it though and I have learned a variety of foreign alphabets already). Just create a big list of suitable words on a planning page like Modern Greek/Writing lessons plan, answer me here and I'll try to find an optimal order for letters.

Thanks for your efforts to teach a language that is hard to find in European schools!

Junesun 16:42, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

P.S.: If there's somebody generally unsure about how to create good language lessons, I really recommend reading the following two pages about it: Authoring Foreign Language Textbooks and Authoring Foreign Language Textbooks/Bite-sized language lessons.

Ligatures Chart
Isn't the section on ligatures a bit misleading? There is a chart showing, for example, 'kakAra + virAma + akAra = kakAra', which, if you stop to think about it, doesn't make much sense. A kAra includes the vocal 'a', and virAma is added to the sign to remove it and obtain a 'crude' consonant. The way it is now, it basically says '2 + -1 + 1 = 2'.

Please check this entry - पित (pati, husband) should this be spelled पति ? Thanks ....

Uh, the spelling for the word "pati, husband" is पित and not पति. Most of the words with "ि " were wrongly spelled so I corrected them, having nothing better to do.

The "ि " is called "hraswa E" or short E. The ि is placed before a consonant as in पित and not पति which is nonsensical and to a native speaker of Nepali, Hindi etc., a mistake made in primary school.

I'll include some examples.

क + ि  = िक

क +  ी = की

Some other mistakes that I found were to the tune of:

टिका which should have been िटका (tika)

ट + ि = िट

क + ा = का

Something like िका does not make sense.

If you want to write something that sounds like "ki-aa" you write िकआ. Please note that I made up this word.

Also, the above consonants, before the vowels are added to them are written with a small hyphen like mark under them like in क् called "halanta". I did not do so becuase I find it difficult to

type in Devnagari and the idea of copy pasting the little bugger every time came to my idea as I finish this paragraph.

Edit 1: There are other other mistakes like पति  at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Hindi:Family_relations which I'm convinced you enthusiasts will correct.

Edit 2: I find out lack of something called "rendering support" in my browser has been letting me down, displaying things like पति.

Short i (ि) and rendering support
Some browsers (including, in my experience, Firefox on Linux) lack rendering support and will in particular not display the devanagari short i correctly. This may lead contributors to mess up the text in good faith, thinking they are fixing it. I just reverted a series of such edits. If this: पण्डित reads like the word "pandit", then your browser renders Indic text correctly. Linzer 05:25, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

The word pati, husband, should be spelled as पति and NOT पित which would make it pit. (entry in the third paragraph below the ligatures chart).