History of Devanagari Letterforms
Devanagari evolved from the Brahmi script. The word Devanagari has been mystery to scholars, there is a hypothesis that it might be combination of two Sanskrit words ‘Deva’ (God, king or Brahmans) and ‘Nagari’ (city). Literally it combines to form ‘City of Gods’, ‘Script of Gods’.
Devanagari, a development of Brahmi system of phonetics, is the only script which has specific signs (grapheme) for the phonetically arranged sounds of the human speech (phonemes), and it is flexible enough to write foreign sounds by attaching marks to the nearer grapheme. The Roman, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets have certain traditional names for indicating sound pictures but there is no guarantee that one sign will have only one phonetic value.
The Devanagari script is an important and widely used script of India. It is mainly used to write Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and Sanskrit languages. It also serves as an auxiliary script for other languages such as Punjabi, Sindhi and Kashmiri.
