Nepali Fonts Standard

Nepal Codes for Information Interchange White Paper v2 Font Standardisation Working Committee, 1997 page 8 Part II The standard. 1. The alphabet to be encoded. As seen in Part I, Nepali uses the character set of Devanagari, but has evolved three new consonants from the conjuncts of Devanagari - ksha 4 , tra i , and gya : - placed at the end after ha ®. The other languages of Nepal have sounds (phonetic values) not present in Nepali, and thus require extra letters like the glottal stop, as well as not requiring some of the letters of Nepali. The new letters might be borrowed from Sanskrit, or might be created especially for the language, perhaps from some existing Devanagari letter with some extra diacritic mark like a dot to differentiate it. This has led to the following table of letters of the combined alphabets of Nepal, arranged in the order in which they appear in the telephone directory, dictionary, and similar documents. Table 3. The alphabet for the languages of Nepal. Notes. The last two vowels are required for Newari but not for Nepali, while the second palatal consonant is required for Hindi but not for either Nepali or Newari. There are two vowel nazalisation modifiers - chandrabindu and anuswar required for Newari. Anuswar as a nasal consonant has not been included, it being assumed that the correct nasal consonant will be used, and replaced by the anuswar during rendering if that is what the font does. Other languages have been accommodated by the inclusion of four vowel and consonant modifiers to be determined to enable them to match their own phonetic structures. The devanagari characters \¼ and =¼ are required for Nepali but not Newari, and if needed for other languages the dot beneath them would be handled by a consonant modifier. LETTER COMMENT Description character Vowels nazalisation modifier chandrabindu à¿ nazalisation modifiers anuswar àÁ Required for Newari, but not for Nepali visarga avagraha ¸ Required for Sanskrit, Maithili umlaut àß Required for Thulung language vowel modifiers VM1 VM2 VM3 VM4 For expansion of the codes to handle new languages vowel letter short A $ vowel letter long AA $È vowel letter short I & vowel letter long II ' vowel letter long U ( vowel letter short UU ) vowel letter vocalic R * vowel letter vocalic RR 4 vowel letter LR 5

Nepali Fonts Standard

Pages