What is "virama"

n. 1 A diacritic used in most writing systems of the Indian subcontinent to signify the lack of an inherent vowel. 2 A sign which serves the same purpose in any writing system.

Virama ( ्) is a generic term for the diacritic in many Brahmic scripts, including Devanagari and Eastern Nagari script, used to suppress the inherent vowel that otherwise occurs with every consonant letter. The name is Sanskrit for "cessation, termination, end". As a Sanskrit word, it is used in place of several language-specific terms, such as halant ( ्), halant ( ्)hoshonto ( ্), halantu ( ్), pulli ( ்), chandrakkala ( ്), halanta ( ್), halanta ( ୍), halant ( ୍), a that (, a.sat , lit. "nonexistence" ်), and karan or thanthakhat .

In Devanagari and many other Indic scripts, a virama is used to cancel the inherent vowel of a consonant letter and represent a consonant without a vowel, a "dead" consonant. For example, in Devanagari,

1. is a consonant letter, ka,

2. ् is a virama; therefore,

3. (ka + virama) represents a dead consonant k.

If this k is further followed by another consonant letter, for example, ṣa , the result might look like , which represents kṣa as ka + (visible) virama + ṣa. In this case, two elements k and ṣa are simply placed one by one, side by side. Alternatively, kṣa can be also written as a ligature , which is actually the preferred form.

Generally, when a dead consonant letter C and another consonant letter C are conjoined, the result may be:

1. A fully conjoined ligature of C+C;
2. Half-conjoined—
   • C-conjoining: a modified form (half form) of C attached to the original form (full form) of C
   • C-conjoining: a modified form of C attached to the full form of C; or
3. Non-ligated: full forms of C and C with a visible virama.

If the result is fully or half-conjoined, the (conceptual) virama which made C dead becomes invisible, logically existing only in a character encoding scheme such as ISCII or Unicode. If the result is not ligated, a virama is visible, attached to C, actually written.

Basically, those differences are only glyph variants, and three forms are semantically identical. Although there may be a preferred form for a given consonant cluster in each language and some scripts do not have some kind of ligatures or half forms at all, it is generally acceptable to use a nonligature form instead of a ligature form even when the latter is preferred if the font does not have a glyph for the ligature. In some other cases, whether to use a ligature or not is just a matter of taste.

The virama in the sequence C + virama + C may thus work as an invisible control character to ligate C and C in Unicode. For example,

• ka + virama + ṣa = kṣa

is a fully conjoined ligature. It is also possible that the virama does not ligate C and C, leaving the full forms of C and C as they are:

• ka + virama + ṣa = kṣa

is an example of such a non-ligated form.

The sequences ङ्क ङ्ख ङ्ग ङ्घ , in correct Devanagari handwriting, should be written as conjuncts (the virama and the top cross line of the second letter disappear, and what is left of the second letter is written under the ङ and joined to it).