Avagraha (ऽ) is a symbol used to indicate prodelision of an अ (a) in many Indian languages like Sanskrit as shown below. It is usually transliterated with an apostrophe in Roman script and, in case of Devanagari, as in the Sanskrit philosophical expression शिवोऽहम् Śivo'ham (Śivaḥ aham), which is a sandhi of (शिवः + अहम्) ‘I am Shiva’. The avagraha is also used for prolonging vowel sounds in some languages, for example Hindi माँऽऽऽ! for ‘Mā̃ā̃ā̃ā̃!’ when calling to one's mother, or when transliterating foreign words in instant messaging: for example, 'cool' can be transliterated as कूऽल. [citation needed]
| ऽ | |
|---|---|
Avagraha |
In the case of Hindi, the character is also sometimes used as a symbol to denote long or heavy syllables, in metrical poetry. For example, the syllables in the word छंदः chandaḥ ‘metre’ (in nominative) can be denoted as "ऽऽ", meaning two long syllables. (Cf. other notations in entry "Systems of scansion".)
Avagraha in Unicode
editThe avagraha symbol is encoded at several Unicode points, for various Brahmic scripts that use it.[1][2][3][4][5][6]
| Character | Unicode character number | Full Unicode name |
|---|---|---|
| ऽ | U+093D | Devanagari sign avagraha |
| ꣱ | U+A8F1 | Combining Devanagari sign avagraha |
| ꣷ | U+A8F7 | Devanagari sign candrabindu avagraha |
| ঽ | U+09BD | Bengali sign avagraha |
| ઽ | U+0ABD | Gujarati sign avagraha |
| ଽ | U+0B3D | Odia sign avagraha |
| ఽ | U+0C3D | Telugu sign avagraha |
| ಽ | U+0CBD | Kannada sign avagraha |
| ഽ | U+0D3D | Malayalam sign avagraha |
| ᮺ | U+1BBA | Sundanese sign avagraha |
| 𑓄 | U+114C4 | Tirhuta sign avagraha |
| ྅ | U+0F85 | Tibetan sign paluta |
| ៜ | U+17DC | Khmer sign avakraha |
| ᢅ | U+1885 | Mongolian Galik sign baluda |
References
edit | This writing system–related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |