Devanagari

Devanagari is the most-used member of the Brahmic family — the script of Hindi, the largest language of India, and of classical Sanskrit. Its most visible feature is the shirorekha, the horizontal headline bar running along the top of the letters. The eye follows it as a continuous line, and the letters hang from it rather than sitting on a baseline.

Like every Brahmic script it is an abugida: a consonant carries a built-in a, and the other vowels are written as signs — matras — attached to the left, right, top or bottom of the consonant. The base letter क already reads ka; to write ki or ku you add a sign, you do not add a separate letter.

Letters do not sit on the line; they hang beneath it.

When consonants meet with no vowel between them, they fuse into conjunct ligatures — क + ष becomes क्ष — which is where the script's real complexity lives. The descent from Brahmi through Gupta and Nagari is traced in the site's descent diagram in the Hall of Lineages.

A bare consonant is never truly bare: it carries an inherent a, so क alone reads ka. Every other vowel is written by hanging a sign — a matra — on the consonant: to the right, to the left, above or below. To strip the inherent vowel entirely and leave a pure consonant, a scribe adds the virama (हलन्त, the stroke ्) beneath the letter.