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The Gujarati script (ગુજરાતી લિપિ ''Gujǎrātī Lipi''), which like all Nāgarī writing systems is strictly speaking an Abugida rather than an Alphabet , is used to write the Gujarati and Kutchi languages. It is a variant of Devanāgarī script differentiated by the loss of the characteristic horizontal line running above the letters and by a small number of modifications in the remaining characters. With a few additional characters, added for this purpose, the Gujarati script is also often used to write Sanskrit . Gujarati Numerical Digit s are also different from their Devanagari counterparts. ORIGIN Gujarati script is descended from Brahmi and is part of the Brahmic Family . The Gujarātī script was adapted from the Devanāgarī script to write the Gujarātī language. The earliest known document in the Gujarātī script is a handwritten manuscript dating from 1592, and the script first appeared in print in a 1797 advertisement. Until the 19th century it was used mainly for writing letters and keeping accounts, while the Devanāgarī script was used for literature and academic writings. It is also known as the ''śarāphī'' (banker's), ''vāṇiāśāī'' (merchant's) or ''mahājanī'' (trader's) script. OVERVIEW Categorization and Arrangement " - the Autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi in its original Gujarati.]] The Gujarati alphabet utilizes 75 fundamental shapes, which may be broken down as follows:
The consonants (''vyañjana'') are grouped in eight categories; seven of which are named by considering the usage and position of the tongue during their , Palatal , Retroflex , Dental , Labial , Sonorant and Fricatives . Further, each group (with a couple of exceptions) has five consonants in which the group starts with the softer sounding consonants, then the aspirated forms appear, and the group ends with the nasal sounding consonant. The alphabetic arrangement thus made aids in easy Recitation and is retained in the memory for longer duration (see the Point On Alphabet Order below for more details). Vowels (''svara''), in their conventional order, are historically grouped into "short" (''hrasva'') and "long" (''dīrgha'') classes, based on the "light" (''laghu'') and "heavy" (''guru'') syllables they create in traditional verse. The historical long vowels ''ī'' and ''ū'' are no longer distinctively long in pronunciation. Only in verse do syllables containing them assume the values required by meter. Two new vowel characters were created in Gujarati to represent English 's /æ/'s and /ɔ/'s. Orthography The Gujarati writing system is an Abugida , in which each base consonantal character has an inherent vowel, that vowel being ''a''. For postconsonantal vowels other than ''a'', the consonant is applied with diacritics, while for non-postconsonantal vowels (initial and post-vocalic positions), there are full-formed characters. There is also a diacritic that strikes out the inherent ''a'', as well a nasalizing diacritic used for nasalizing vowels, and in place of the five nasal consonants. In accordance with all the other Indic Scripts , Gujarati is written from left to right, and is not case-sensitive. One or more letters join together to make a word (''śabda''), which then in turn, separated by spaces, join to make a sentence (''vākya'').
The Gujarati script is basically Phonemic , with a few exceptions. First out of these are ''a''- Elision s, or Schwa deletions; where some ''a'''s are not pronounced in spite of being represented. A part of script-based schwa deletion works on the same basis as phonological schwa deletion (''see Gujarati Phonology#.C9.99-deletion ''), but there is a difference. One is a phonological convention of the ''actual'' deletion of existing an schwa due to suffixing, while the other is a script convention of the ''inferred'' non-pronunciation of a written schwa due to what's already there. This elision falls in line with these rulesSnell, R. with Weightman, S. (1989) ''Teach Yourself Hindi''. McGraw-Hill. Reprint 2003. p. 16.:
Secondly, being of Sanskrit-based Devanagari, Gujarati's script retains notations for the obsolete (short ''i, u'' vs. long ''ī, ū''; ''ṛ'', ''ru''; ''ś'', ''ṣ''), and lacks notations for innovations (/e/ vs. /ɛ/; /o/ vs. /ɔ/; clear vs. Murmured vowels).
Punctuation Contemporary Gujarati uses European Punctuation , such as the Question Mark , Exclamation Mark , Comma , and Full Stop . Apostrophe s are used for the rare(ly written) Clitic . Quotation Mark s are not often used for direct quotes. The full stop replaced the traditional Vertical Bar , and the Colon , mostly obsolete in its Sanskrit capacity, follows the European usage. ROMANIZATION There are many possible Romanization schemes for Gujarati, initially created to represent Sanskrit/Devanagari. The 26 roman characters alone are not enough to clearly represent Gujarati, so this is dealt with by the use of diacritics in IAST , ISO 15919 , and the National Library At Calcutta Romanization , and by case-sensitivity and punctuation in ITRANS and Harvard-Kyoto . Used as the basis of the romanization of all specimens of Gujarati on Wikipedia unless otherwise noted, is IAST. Properties of IAST
Wikipedia-specific additions
GUJARATI CHARACTERS, DIACRITICS, AND NUMERALS Vowels Consonants
:Plosives & Nasals (left to right, top to bottom) → Sonorants & Sibilants (top to bottom, left to right) → Bottom box (top to bottom)
Digits GUJARATI IN UNICODE The Unicode range for Gujarati script is from U+0A80 to U+0AFF. The ISCII Code-page identifier for Gujarati script is 57010. The table below shows the glyphs that are implemented in Unicode standard 4.0.0. Gray boxes indicate the code-points that are undefined/unused.
GUJARATI KEYBOARD LAYOUTS Inscript keyboard layout Keyboard - available for MS Windows, Linux, Unix, Solaris.]] Keyboard and script resources
HOW TO: USE UNICODE FOR CREATING GUJARATI SCRIPT Additional details regarding how to use Unicode for creating Gujarati script can be found on Wikibooks: REFERENCES BIBLIOGRAPHY
SEE ALSO
EXTERNAL LINKS
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