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Rational Approach to Hindi Literacy
(A Technical Report)ByVirendra P Singh
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION Chapter 2: LANGUAGE AND LITERACY Chapter 3: DEVANAGARI SCRIPT AND HINDI Chapter 4: HINDI AND ROMANIZATION Chapter 5: ROMANAAGARII SCRIPT Chapter 6: ROMANAAGARII TO SARAL SCRIPTS Chapter 7: SIMPLIFICATION OF THE NUMBERING SYSTEM Chapter 8: TEACHING ROMANAAGARII AND SARAL SCRIPTS Chapter 9: SARAL SCRIPTS AND LITERACY Chapter 10: SARAL SCRIPTS, COMPUTERS AND THE INTERNET Appendix 1: Hindi phonemes and fonts Appendix 2: Comparative view of fonts Appendix 3: Comparative view of IAST, SARAL Inglish(SI), Romanaagarii(RN),SARAL Roman(SR) SARAL Hindi (SH), SARAL Gujarati(SG), SARAL Urdu(SU) andRoman Urdu(RU) writing systems. Appendix 4: Unicode and SARAL Hindi Appendix 5: SARAL Numbering System
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Chapter 1INTRODUCTION
Concept of Romanaagarii
The relationship between language and script is established through symbolicrepresentations of sounds for which there are no established rules. Differentpeople in different parts of the world have been using different symbols torepresent sounds. Thus, there are numerous scripts and the phoneticrelationship between symbols and sounds differs from script to script. In somescripts, one symbol could represent more than one sound while one soundcould be represented by more than one symbol. Roman script of the Englishlanguage is known for this kind of irregularity. Arrangement of symbols couldalso affect clarity and easy printability of a script. Change in symbols andirregular combination of different symbols to produce sounds could causeconfusion and problems for typing and printing. From this point of view, theuniform size of letters and systematic placement of vowels after consonantsare strong points of Roman script.Devanagari script, which was originally developed for writing Sanskritlanguage, contains phonetic merits but has printing weaknesses. Presently,Hindi language is written in Devanagari script with some modifications. InDevanagari, the use of different symbols for half consonants as well as theirirregular shape and placement of vowels cause printing problems. Althoughmost symbols represent a distinct sound, there are some sounds representedby more than one symbol.Through Romanaagarii script, an attempt has been made to combine theprinting advantages of Roman characters and phonetic merits of Devanagariscript. Romanaagarii script is based on the principle of one sound and onesymbol correspondence. The concept of Romanaagarii script can be adoptedto represent any number of symbols required to write any spoken language.However, the exact number of letters would depend on the total number ofsounds used in a language. Some sounds not represented by a single lettercould be represented by two or more letters placed together in a systematicway.
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