Major languages

 Established conventions are very hard to break. Whether one likes them or not one ends up in following them, willy-nilly. English language is the most important and prestigious language. Perhaps the most, if not all, scientific knowledge is written in English. There are several other languages, which started as languages of the clans in the beginning, and ended up being the languages of several clans, regions, small and large countries and sometimes continents. Chines, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, French, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, among others, have very large speaking population. None of them come even close to the English in their scholarly and scientific usage. The scientific community, irrespective of their nationality, has translated and converted material in other languages into English. Who, therefore, wants to learn other languages? Actually, the native speakers. It would be their first duty. They would be happy in doing so, as long their needs are basic communication. If and when they rise above their basic communication needs and would like to communicate with other linguistic groups, they have to learn that language. Most everybody switch to English. 

Languages using Devnagari script

 To turn this argument around, let us imagine that the world is eager to learn Indian languages such as Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, and Nepali, all written in Devnagari script. There are minor variations in their written Devnagari script, nothing that one cannot adapt easily. These languages are written phonetically. What you see is what you get, WYSIWIG, if you know what I mean.

Simplicity of Roman script

English speakers, therefore, have tremendous trouble in figuring Devnagari writing. English is written in mere 26 letters, five vowels and 21 consonants. Devnagari in its current apparition has 52 letters, 18 vowels and 34 consonants. The letter-forms change when complex sounds are represented or basic vowel forms change when they are joined with the consonants to form separate individual glyphs. When consonants collide, they form different shapes requiring more unique glyphs. Normal letter shape is, thus, modified to extend to all four sides. The bottom extension gets very serious. It can increase the basic letter space to the double of its original size. Since this space must be reserved for the entire line there is useless space between two lines.

Roman script as used to write English has capital letters and lower-case letters. The capital letters are of uniform height, whereas, lower case letters have what is called ascenders and descenders. Printed lines, without leading can come close together and are still readable. Vertical space required by each letter is uniform. The widest letters such as "M" and "W" use more horizontal space, letters "i"and "I" require the least. This horizontal orientation of the written English is its best feature.

English can be written by hand without lifting one's pen till the entire word is fully spelled out. The exceptions are for crossing the tees (t) and dotting the eyes (I). This superior feature cannot be duplicated in writing Devnagari by hand. One has to lift hand countless times and move in all directions to finish writing a single word. As the complicated glyphs occupy the limited letter space the writing becomes illegible. When it is illegible, it could be misinterpreted. Even though the complicated glyphs are rarely used in modern languages like and Hindi, one has to deal with them in Sanskrit. This is an additional burden thrust upon the unsuspecting student of the Sanskrit language. He can always master his handwriting by more practice. He has enormous difficulties when it comes to using a computer keyboard.

Difficulty in typing Devnagari script

 The writing and typing in Devnagari is very difficult, if not impossible. It is not the most difficult, and cannot be compared with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Further problems arise when it comes to writing in Devnagari, using Qwerty keyboard on the computer. Qwerty keyboard is designed for English writing. It serves all the English speaking community. Even though there were movements to replace the keyboard mapping for typewriting, none succeeded in replacing the Querty keyboard. Devnagari writers on the computer keyboard must use the Querty keyboard that they are accustomed to. It has to be adapted for the use of Devnagari writing.

Standardization of keyboard mapping

Since there is no standardization evolved or enforced, all those computer font designers of Devnagari, have created a mess by introducing their propriety keyboard mappings. Standardization pays in the long run. We need to standardize keyboard mapping of Devnagari based on current Qwerty keyboard. That would be another topic for discussion at, perhaps, another time.

Current Devnagari writing conventions

Vowels-svar

Symbols-icanh representing vowels.

= is a common symbol used to increase the length of any vowel.

Consonants-AkaraMt vyaMjana

Table of consonant-vowel pairs-saMimaEa svar vyaMjana