On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 1:21 PM, Christopher Fynn <[email protected]> wrote: > I've read that at one time Devanagri was often written more like > Tibetan (many complex conjuncts stacked vertically) - and have seen > manuscript examples of this.
Well I am a native user of Devanagari for Sanskrit, and even today we use complex ligatures and conjoining forms, but vertical stacking is not very strong in Devanagari (or even in other N Indian scripts) unlike in South India. (Only a few consonants, esp. the "semivowels" YA RA LA VA, go that way. As for Devanagari for Hindi, Hindi (or AFAIK any of the other languages that use Devanagari as the primary script) by nature does not have most of the heavy (i.e. 3+-consonant clusters) that Sanskrit does. So that would automatically eliminate most ligatures. To my knowledge it is only the Sanskrit 2003 (http://sanskritweb.net) and Siddhanta (http://svayambhava.org/) fonts that have the extended Devanagari ligatures required for Sanskrit. -- Shriramana Sharma ஶ்ரீரமணஶர்மா श्रीरमणशर्मा
