Devanagari

We owe this cultural contribution to our friend, Saurabh Thirani in the CTS office in Kolkata. हम सौरभ को बहुत शुक्रिया देते हैं।


Saurabh wrote:

The word Devanagari has its roots in the two words – Deva and Nagari. Nagari means script. Deva on the other hand literally means a being of light and is used to refer to a highly evolved being who exists at the etheric level with an analogy for a kind of a demi-god.

You might have seen a phrase called Mahadeva (Maha = Great) which means a great being of life i.e. used to refer to the trinity or the three aspects of the almighty -the Father (aka Brahma or the Creator), the Son (aka Vishnu of the Preserver) and the Holy Ghost (aka Shiva or the Destroyer).

Anyways no digressing so much… the devanagari script literally means the Script Of The Gods. Sanskrit (acknowledged by many including Max Mueller) as the most scientific of all languages is also written in devanagari. The idea behind this script is that it is the most complete and can be used to write down any language in the world taking into account aspects such as the phonetics of pronunciations.

The reason why the devanagari script is considered to be the most scientific is that if one were to create a hollow clay mould of any of the characters of this script leaving two ends open, and then if one were to blow into one of the open ends then a sound would get produced… and that sound would be the same as the pronunciation of that character.