The Gujarati script (ગુજરાતી લિપિ Gujarātī 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. An abugida or alphasyllabary is a writing system composed of signs (graphemes) denoting consonants with an inherent following vowel, which are consistently modified to indicate other vowels (or, in some cases, the lack of a vowel). ... is an Indo-Aryan language, part of the greater Indo-European language family. ... Kachhi (also spelled, Cutchi or Kachchhi) is an Indo-Aryan Language spoken in the Kutch region of the Indian state of Gujarat, with approximately 866,000 speakers. ... ISO 15924, Codes for the representation of names of scripts, defines two sets of codes for a number of writing systems (scripts). ... Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone meaning sound, voice) is the study of the sounds of human speech. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... Image File history File links Gujarati script; taken from the French Wiki File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas used in South Asia and Southeast Asia. ... An abugida or alphasyllabary is a writing system composed of signs (graphemes) denoting consonants with an inherent following vowel, which are consistently modified to indicate other vowels (or, in some cases, the lack of a vowel). ... For other uses, see Alphabet (disambiguation). ... is an Indo-Aryan language, part of the greater Indo-European language family. ... Kachhi (also spelled, Cutchi or Kachchhi) is an Indo-Aryan Language spoken in the Kutch region of the Indian state of Gujarat, with approximately 866,000 speakers. ... () is an abugida script used to write, either along with other scripts, or exclusively, several Indian languages, including Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Sindhi, Bihari, Bhili, Marwari, Konkani, Bhojpuri, Nepali, Nepal Bhasa from Nepal and sometimes Kashmiri and Romani. ...

With a few additional characters, added for this purpose, the Gujarati script is also often used to write Sanskrit. Sanskrit ( , for short ) is a classical language of India, a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and one of the 23 official languages of India. ...

Gujarati numerical digits are also different from their Devanagari counterparts. In mathematics and computer science, a numerical digit is a symbol, e. ...

Origin

Gujarati script is descended from Brahmi and is part of the Brahmic family. Variation of Brāhmī with dates. ... The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas (writing systems) used in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria. ...

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.^[1]

Overview

Categorization and Arrangement

Excerpt from "My experiments with truth" - the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi in its original Gujarati.

The Gujarati alphabet utilizes 75 fundamental shapes, which may be broken down as follows: Image File history File links Download high resolution version (376x614, 143 KB) Summary This is a scanned excerpt of one page (about 500 words) from the introduction section of the Autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi (in Gujarati script). ... Image File history File links Download high resolution version (376x614, 143 KB) Summary This is a scanned excerpt of one page (about 500 words) from the introduction section of the Autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi (in Gujarati script). ... My Experiments with Truth is the title of the English translation of Gandhis autobiography. ... Cover of the first English edition of 1793 of Benjamin Franklins autobiography. ... Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Gujarati: , Hindi: , IAST: mohandās karamcand gāndhī, IPA: ) (October 2, 1869 – January 30, 1948), was a major political and spiritual leader of India and the Indian independence movement. ...

• 75 shapes
  • 59 characters
    • 36 consonants
      • 34 singular
      • 2 compound
    • 13 vowels
    • 10 numerical digits
  • 16 diacritics
    • 13 vowelic
    • 3 other

The consonants (vyañjana) are grouped in eight categories; seven of which are named by considering the usage and position of the tongue during their pronunciation. These categories are (in order): velar, 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). Look up pronunciation in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate (the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum). ... Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the middle or back part of the tongue raised against the hard palate (the middle part of the roof of the mouth). ... Retroflex consonants are articulated with the tip of the tongue curled up and back so the bottom of the tip touches the roof of the mouth. ... Dentals are consonants such as t, d, n, and l articulated with either the lower or the upper teeth, or both, rather than with the gum ridge as in English. ... Labials are consonants articulated either with both lips (bilabial articulation) or with the lower lip and the upper teeth (labiodental articulation). ... In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant is a speech sound that is produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract. ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ... Recitation means a discussion carried by a Teaching Assistant to supplement a lecture given by a senior faculty at an academic institution. ... The Gujarati script (ગુજરાતી લિપિ GujarātÄ« Lipi), which like all NāgarÄ« writing systems is strictly speaking an abugida rather than an alphabet, is used to write the Gujarati and Kutchi languages. ...

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.^[1]

Two new vowel characters were created in Gujarati to represent English's /æ/'s and /ɔ/'s. The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...

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 juxtaposed 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. An abugida or alphasyllabary is a writing system composed of signs (graphemes) denoting consonants with an inherent following vowel, which are consistently modified to indicate other vowels (or, in some cases, the lack of a vowel). ...

In accordance with all the other Indic scripts, Gujarati is written from left to right, and is not case-sensitive. One or more letters (akṣar) join together to make a word (śabda), which then in turn, separated by spaces, join to make a sentence (vākya). The family tree ([1]) of the scripts of the South and South-East Asian sub-continent. ...

Discrete letters are constituted by 0-5^* successive consonants, followed by a vowel. Thus when a consonant lacks a directly proceeding vowel, it is not written as its own letter; it condenses and joins as a fragment the proceeding vowel-possessing letter, to make a larger "joint letter" (joḍākṣar). However, when the joint letter form can't be remembered, or is difficult to write, the characters may be left uncondensed, with a diacritic representing the lack of a vowel instead.

The "dependent" vowels held by these consonants or consonants sets spring out as a diacritical mark, or as nothing at all in the case of the inherent, default a. In contrast, bare vowels, not held by consonants, are said to be in their "independent" form, and are written as a full character. These independent forms are found at the beginning of words or following other vowels.

The Gujarati script is basically phonemic, with a few exceptions. First out of these are a-elisions, or schwa deletions; where some a's are not pronounced in spite of the spelling. One 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 rules^[2]: This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... In music, see elision (music). ... In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa can mean: An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in any language, often but not necessarily a mid-central vowel. ... Gujarati phonology is the study of the inventory and patterns of the consonants, vowels, and prosody of the Gujarati language. ...

• A non-primary syllable, if a, will be silent if the following syllable has a non-a vowel, or has another syllable after it.
  • Among other things, this rule corresponds to phonological internal schwa deletion, such that schwas will be represented even if they have been deleted.
• If a word's final vowel (either before a space or a postposition) is a, it will be silent.
• The first rule does not, and the second rule might not, apply, when characters conjunct characters are involved.

Secondly, Gujarati script, being of Sanskrit-based Devanagari, 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).^[1] A postposition is a type of adposition, a grammatical particle that expresses some sort of relationship between a noun phrase (its object) and another part of the sentence; an adpositional phrase functions as an adjective or adverb. ... Breathy voice or murmured voice is a phonation in which the vocal folds are vibrating as in normal voicing, but the glottal closure is incomplete, so that the voicing is somewhat inefficient and air continues to leak between the vocal folds throughout the vibration cycle with audible friction noise. ...

^* 5 is the highest number of conjunct consonants in a real word, in Devanagari (Sanskrit) at least, with the usually quoted example being kārtsnya.^[3] In unicode it looks like कार्त्स्न्य — કાર્ત્સ્ન્ય, in the reference material the n fragment is made small and rests beneath s's connecting line to y.

Punctuation

Contemporary Gujarati uses European punctuation, such as the question mark, exclamation mark, comma, and full stop. Apostrophes are used for the rare(ly written) clitic. Quotation marks 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. This article is about the continent. ... The term punctuation has two different linguistic meanings: in general, the act and the effect of punctuating, i. ... The question mark (also known as an interrogation point, query,[1] or eroteme) is a punctuation mark that replaces the full stop at the end of an interrogative sentence. ... an exclamation mark An exclamation mark, exclamation point or bang, !, is usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feeling. ... The term comma has various uses; comma is the name used for one of the punctuation symbols: , The term comma is also used in music theory for various small intervals that arise as differences between approximately equal intervals. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... For other uses, see Apostrophe (disambiguation). ... In linguistics, a clitic is an element that has some of the properties of an independent word and some more typical of a bound morpheme. ... For the Wikipedia quotation template, see here. ... Vertical bar, verti-bar, vertical line, divider line, or pipe is the name of the character (|). Broken bar (¦) is a separate character. ... The colon (:) is a punctuation mark, visually consisting of two equally sized dots centered on the same vertical line. ...

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 here and with all specimens of Gujarati on Wikipedia unless otherwise noted, is IAST. Here are its properties: In linguistics, romanization (or Latinization, also spelled romanisation or Latinisation) is the representation of a word or language with the Roman (Latin) alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system. ... IAST, or International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration is the academic standard for writing the Sanskrit language with the Latin alphabet and very similar to National Library at Calcutta romanization standard being used with many Indic scripts. ... A romanization or latinization is a system for representing a word or language with the Roman (Latin) alphabet, where the original word or language used a different writing system. ... The National Library at Calcutta romanization is the most widely used in dictionaries and grammars of Indic languages. ... The Indian languages TRANSliteration (ITRANS) is an ASCII transliteration scheme for Indic scripts, particularly, but not exclusively, for Devanāgarī (used for the Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Nepali, Sindhi and other languages). ... The Harvard-Kyoto Convention is a system for transliterating the Sanskrit language in ASCII. It is predominantly used informally in e-mail, and for electronic texts. ... Wikipedia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ...

• Diacritic-based, not case-sensitive.
• Transliteration rather than transcription, inheriting the same gulfs between speech and script.
• However, it does take heed of schwa elision: સરકાર → sarakāra → sarkār.
• Uses 22 characters. f, q, w, z excluded. (Though on Gujarati Wikipedia pages, f and ph are used interchangeably.)
• Overlining for long vowels: ā, ī, ū. e and o are long, but are not overlined as Gujarati does not have their short counterparts.
• Proceeding h for aspiration.
• Underlying dot for retroflex: ṭ, ṭh, ḍ, ḍh ṇ, ḷ, ṣ.

Transliteration is the practice of transcribing a word or text written in one writing system into another writing system. ... Look up Transcription in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

Gujarati characters, diacritics, and numerals

Vowels

A central vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. ... A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. ... Vowels Near-close Close-mid Mid Open-mid Near-open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ... A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. ... A mid vowel is a vowel sound used in some spoken languages. ... In phonetics, a diphthong (in Greek δίφθογγος) is a vowel combination usually involving a quick but smooth movement from one vowel to another, often interpreted by listeners as a single vowel sound or phoneme. ...

Consonants

• Listed above is the traditional Sanskrit-based consonantal matrix. Gujarati deviations from that are signified by yellow-colouring, and superscripted to an explanation.
  • ¹ Originally /p^h/
  • ² More accurately alveolar
  • ³ Originally /ʂ/
• The palatals c, ch, j, and jh are phonetically affricates but they pattern like the other stops.^[4]
• Letters can take names, by suffixing કાર kār. ર ra is an exception; it's called રેફ reph.^[5]
• Starting with ક ka and ending with જ્ઞ jña, the order goes^[6]:

Plosives & Nasals (left to right, top to bottom) → Sonorants & Sibilants (top to bottom, left to right) → Bottom box (top to bottom)

• ⁴ These are compound characters that happen to be traditonally included in the set.

A stop, plosive, or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. ... A nasal consonant is produced when the velum—that fleshy part of the palate near the back—is lowered, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. ... In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant is a speech sound that is produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract. ... A sibilant is a type of fricative or affricate, made by directing a jet of air through a narrow channel towards the sharp edge of the teeth. ... Phoneticians define phonation as use of the laryngeal system to generate an audible source of acoustic energy, i. ... In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies the release of some obstruents. ... Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate (the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum). ... Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate (the middle part of the roof of the mouth). ... Sub-apical retroflex plosive In phonetics, retroflex consonants are consonant sounds used in some languages. ... Dentals are consonants such as t, d, n, and l articulated with either the lower or the upper teeth, or both, rather than with the gum ridge as in English. ... Labials are consonants articulated either with both lips (bilabial articulation) or with the lower lip and the upper teeth (labiodental articulation). ... Guttural is an obsolete term used to describe any of several consonantal speech sounds whose primary place of articulation is near the back of the oral cavity, and include some velar consonants, uvular consonants, and pharyngeal consonants. ... Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli (the sockets) of the superior teeth. ... An affricate is a consonant that begins like a stop (most often an alveovelar, such as [t] or [d]) and that doesnt have a release of its own, but opens directly into a fricative (or, in one language, into a trill). ...

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. Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... ISCII (Indian Script Code for Information Interchange) is a coding scheme for representing various Indic scripts as well as a Latin-based script with diacritic marks used to depict Romanised Indic languages. ...

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.

• For further details regarding Unicode Code-points and standards, you may refer to Unicode Code-chart — Standard 4.1.

Gujarati keyboard layouts

Inscript keyboard layout

Image File history File links Guj_Script_Inscipt_kb_01. ...

Keyboard and script resources

• The India Linux Project - Gujarati
• MS Windows keyboard layout reference for major world languages
• Sun Microsystem reference: Indic keyboard layouts
• Linux: Indic language support
• Microsoft — Indic language website: Use of Gujarati Input Method Editor (IME) (free download)
• How To: Set your existing keyboard as Gujarati (Unicode) keyboard in Windows XP
• Indic Multilingual Project by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing — C-DAC India

How To: Use Unicode for creating Gujarati script

Additional details regarding how to use Unicode for creating Gujarati script can be found on Wikibooks: b:How to use Unicode in creating Gujarati script or on this Subpage - /How To: Use Unicode for creating Gujarati script

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} Mistry, P. J. (1996) "Gujarati Writing". The World's Writing Systems. Ed. Daniels and Bright: Oxford University Press. pp. 391-393.
2. ^ Snell, R. with Weightman, S. (1989) Teach Yourself Hindi. McGraw-Hill. Reprint 2003. p. 16.
3. ^ Wikner, C. (1996) A Practical Sanskrit Introductory. p. 59.
4. ^ Mistry, P.J. (2001) "Gujarati". Facts about the world's languages: An encyclopedia of the world's major languages, past and present. Ed. Jane Garry, and Carl Rubino: New England Publishing Associates. pp. 274-277.
5. ^ Dwyer, R. (1995) Teach Yourself Gujarati. (43 Mb) London: Hodder and Stoughton. p. 18.
6. ^ Gujarati-English Dictionary. Ratilal Chandaria's Online Language Resources. —Notice the order of the consonants on the keyboard.

This article is about the capital of England and the United Kingdom. ...

See also

• Wikibooks: How to use Unicode in creating Gujarati script
• Gujarati language
• Gujarati grammar
• Gujarati phonology
• Unicode and HTML
• Yudit - open source tool for editing in Gujarati and other Unicode scripts.
• Gujarati Wikipedia
• Gujarati course in Wikibooks

is an Indo-Aryan language, part of the greater Indo-European language family. ... The grammar of the Gujarati language (ગુજરાતી વ્યાકરણ Gujarātī Vyākaraṇ) is the study of the word order, case marking, verb conjugation, and other morphological and syntactic structures of the Gujarati language, an Indo-European language native to the Indian state of Gujarat, also spoken abroad where Gujaratis have carried it... Gujarati phonology is the study of the inventory and patterns of the consonants, vowels, and prosody of the Gujarati language. ... The relationship between Unicode and HTML tends to be a difficult topic for many computer professionals, document authors, and web users alike. ... (Yudit is an alternative spelling of Gudit, a Felasha queen who sacked the Ethiopian imperial capitol of Axum around the year 960 AD.) Yudit is a unicode text editor for the X Window System. ... Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ...

External links

• TDIL: Ministry of Communication & Information Technology, India
• Gujarati Wiktionary
• Gujarati Editor
• Send email in Gujarati script (No fonts required)