11.1 Discussion

This final section will introduce you to a few final details that will allow you to move from reading and writing individual Hindi words to full texts. First, a note on punctuation. The punctuation conventions of Devanāgarī are mostly the same as in English; quote marks, commas, question marks, exclamation marks, and parenthesis are used in the same way as you are used to. The one major difference you will encounter as a learner is the use of a mark called विराम virām, a long vertical line, instead of a period at the end of sentences, such as:

आज कौनसा दिन है? āj kaunsā din hai? What day is today?

• è Question mark, same as English

आज मंगलवार है | āj maṅgalvār hai. Today is Tuesday.

• è Vertical line instead of period at end of sentence

Next, we will consider numbers (अंक aṅk). Although the Arabic numerals you are used to from English are also very common in South Asia, Devanāgarī has its own numerals as follows:

You may notice a great deal of similarity between some of the Devanāgarī forms and the Arabic numerals you use every day. Of course, this is far from coincidence; these sounds arrived in Europe through Arabic, but they in fact originated in India with the Brahmi script, as illustrated in the following chart:

Image: The Brahmi numeral system and its descendants.

Alt Text: A chart showing how the shapes of numerals change from Brahmi through Sanskrit and Arabic into more familiar numerals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Brahmi_numeral_system_and_its_descendants.png

These numerals combine in more or less the same way as you are used to, with one exception. In numbers over ten thousand South Asian languages have a different comma placement than in European languages and slightly different reckoning of larger numbers. The chart below illustrates the difference:

There are of course higher number terms, but practically speaking just being aware of this numbering difference is enough, as the terms lakh, crore, and so on are used across South Asia, even in English.