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Wikipedia / Nuqta

The nuqta (, ; ), sometimes also spelled nukta, (, ); is a diacritic mark that was introduced in Devanagari and some other Indic scripts to represent sounds not present in the original scripts. It takes the form of a dot placed below a character. This idea is inspired from the Arabic script; for example, some letters in Urdu share the same basic shape but differ in the placement of dots(s) or nuqta(s) in the Perso-Arabic script: the letter ayn, with the addition of a nuqta on top, becomes the letter ghayn. The word itself means "dot" in Arabic.

Use in Devanagari

Perso-Arabic consonants

The term () is itself an example of the use of the nuqta. Other examples include ; and , a combination of a Türko-Mongolic (āġā) and a (k͟hān) honorific.The nuqta, and the phonological distinction it represents, is sometimes ignored in practice; e.g., being simply spelt as . In the text Dialect Accent Features for Establishing Speaker Identity, Manisha Kulshreshtha and Ramkumar Mathur write, "A few sounds, borrowed from the other languages like Persian and Arabic, are written with a dot (bindu or nuqtā). Many people who speak Hindi as a second language, especially those who come from rural backgrounds and do not speak conventional Hindi (also called Khaṛībōlī), or speak in one of its dialects, pronounce these sounds as their nearest equivalents." For example, these rural speakers will assimilate the sound (Devanagari: ; Nastaliq: ) as ɡ (Devanagari: ; Nastaliq: ).

With a renewed Hindi–Urdu language contact, many Urdu writers now publish their works in Devanagari editions. Since the Perso-Arabic orthography is preserved in Nastaʿlīq script Urdu orthography, these writers use the nuqta in Devanagari when transcribing these consonants.

Dravidian consonants

Devanagari also includes coverage for the Dravidian consonants ; and , modifying ; and , respectively. An example is .

Dardic consonants

For example, the letters and are used in Devanagari to write the Kashmiri alveolar affricates and , respectively.

Eastern Indo-Aryan letters

In Maithili, the four non-syllabic vowels , , , are formally written in Devanagari as , , and , respectively (though these are often colloquially written without nuqta, as , , and ).

The Bengali–Assamese script has , which are variations of ; however, and are completely different in nature.

Old Nepali Letters

In Old Nepali language texts, a nuqta-like diacritic is often found on similar glyphs or glyphs that have undergone phonological shifts. There are two use cases found for it:

  • The glyph was used to represent the phoneme , while the glyph was instead used to represent the phoneme .

  • The glyph was used to represent the phoneme , while the glyph was used to represent the phoneme . Many words that contained the also shifted in pronunciation to , following a common trend in Indo-Aryan languages.

Similar diacritics

Sindhi's and Saraiki's implosives are accommodated in Devanagari with a line attached below—a diacritical bar: , , , .

In the Tamil script, the special character (, ) is used like nuqta to represent non-native consonants.

In the Thaana script of Maldives, one or many nuqtas are used to represent non-native Perso-Arabic consonants.

For languages adopting the Thai script, the phintu (i.e., bindu) () (, ) is also used to represent sounds that do not exist in Thai. For example, when writing Kelantan–Pattani Malay, the letter รฺื ( with )) represents the phoneme (/).

See also

References

Notes

Works cited

Bibliography

  • Vajpeyi, K. D. (Kishorī Dās Vājpayī; किशोरीदास वाजपेयी), Hindī shabdanushāsan हिन्दी शब्दनुशासन (1957, 1958, 1973, 1976, 1988).