
The Hunterian method was inherently simpler and extensible to several Indic scripts because it systematized grapheme transliteration, and it came to prevail and gain government and academic acceptance. When it was proposed, it immediately met with opposition from supporters of the earlier practiced non-systematic and often distorting "Sir Roger Dowler method" (an early corruption of Siraj ud-Daulah) of phonetic transcription, which climaxed in a dramatic showdown in an India Council meeting on where the new Hunterian method carried the day.

The Hunterian system was developed in the nineteenth century by William Wilson Hunter, then Surveyor General of India. The Hunterian system is the "national system of romanization in India" and the one officially adopted by the Government of India. Many Unicode fonts fully support IAST display and printing. An important feature of IAST is that it is losslessly reversible, i.e., IAST transliteration may be converted back to correct Devanāgarī or to other South Asian scripts without ambiguity. For example, dental and retroflex consonants are disambiguated with an underdot: dental द=d and retroflex ड=ḍ. It uses diacritics to disambiguate phonetically similar but not identical Sanskrit glyphs.
#Devanagari writing iso#
The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a subset of the ISO 15919 standard, used for the transliteration of Sanskrit, Prakrit and Pāḷi into Roman script with diacritics. 6 Computer use as a drive for romanization.3.1.1 National Library at Kolkata romanization.Over time, more characters and symbols were added to accommodate the needs of other regional languages. As Islam spread around the world, it took the Arabic script with it. This script dates back to around 400 AD, although its first large-scale use was to write the Qu’ran. Unlike the other previously mentioned scripts, Arabic is written from right to left. Around 660 million individuals use Arabic script to communicate in a number of languages, including: Urdu, Pashto, Arabic, Punjabi, Persian, Malaysian, and Kurdish (to name a few). ArabicĪrabic is the third most widely used script in the world. This script consists of thousands of characters and is considered the oldest continuously utilized form of writing in the world, with evidence of its use dating back to as early as the Shang Dynasty of 1200 BC. In fact, an estimated 1.34 billion people around the world use Chinese characters in written communication. The characters of this writing script are considered logograms and used in several different languages across Asia, including: Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. The second most widely used script in the world is Chinese, also known as hanzi, kanji, or hanja. Some of the major language families that utilize this script include: Germanic, Romance, Polish, Austronesian, and Turkish (among others). The Latin alphabet is also used as the basis for the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is used to express the phonetics of all languages. This script originated in present-day Italy and has since spread around the world with the help of several historic events, most notably: the Roman Empire, Christianity, and European colonization. Around 4.9 billion people or 70% of the global population relies on this alphabet, which generally consists of an average of 26 letters, to write a range of languages. Latin is an alphabet type of script and the most widely used in the world. The Most Popular Writing Scripts in The World 1. This article takes a closer look at some of the most widely used writing scripts in the world.

An alphabet uses separate symbols that represent a specific sound to form a word. Syllabary is a script that uses symbols to represent the syllables in a word. Logograms are written by using one character to represent an entire word or idea. These writing scripts can be classified into the following categories: logogram, syllabary, and alphabet. Languages from around the world are written by using a number of scripts.
