Devanagari trivia (was Tengwar question)

On Mon, 16 Jul 2007 20:32:25 +0200, Carsten Becker <carbeck@...>
wrote:

>On a side note: I wonder how you write for example [e:] (the
>thing that looks like long 'e', or rather twice the
>diacritic for 'e', is 'ai' according to the Unicode names)
>and multiple vowels in succession in Devanagari, e.g. like
>in <Kilauea>. Also, what are the Candra forms good for? And
>Nukta and Avagraha [sp?]? Omniglot doesn't say anything
>about those. Benct? Others?
See how Omniglot lists 'initial' and 'diacritic' forms of the vowels? That's
probably better said as "with syllable-initial consonant" and "without ...".
So, you'd spell Kilauea like this--- {ka_i la_au E A}

The candra vowels aren't used in Hindi; I understand that they're in use for
some other languages that use devanagari.

Nukta is the generic consonant-modifying diacritic. It's not in use a whole
lot in Hindi, apart from za (-> ja) and the retroflex flaps from d.a and
d.ha. Sometimes qa (-> ka) as well.

I'm not sure what an avagraha does.

-s

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