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{{short description|Diacritic in many Brahmic scripts}}

factoids

Virama ( ्) is a Sanskrit phonological concept to suppress the inherent vowel that otherwise occurs with every consonant letter, commonly used as a generic term for a codepoint in Unicode, representing either

1. halanta, hasanta or explicit virāma, a diacritic in many Brahmic scripts, including the Devanagari and Bengali scripts, or
2. saṃyuktākṣara (Sanskrit: संयुक्ताक्षर) or implicit virama, a conjunct consonant or ligature.

Unicode schemes of scripts writing Mainland Southeast Asia languages, such as that of Burmese script and of Tibetan script, generally do not group the two functions together.

Names

The name is Sanskrit for "cessation, termination, end". As a Sanskrit word, it is used in place of several language-specific terms, such as:{| class="wikitable sortable"!Name in English books!Language!In native language!Form!Notes

halant|Hindi	lang=hi	trans=halant|showlang=false}}|्|

halanta	Punjabi language>Punjabi	lang=pa	trans=halanta	showlang=false}}|੍|

Marathi language>Marathi	lang=mr	trans=halanta	showlang=false}}|् |

Nepali language>Nepali	lang=ne	trans=halanta|showlang=false}}|्|

|Kannada

lang=kn	trans=halanta	showlang=false}}|್|

Odia language>Odia	lang=or	trans=hôḷôntô	showlang=false}}|୍|

Gujarati language>Gujarati	lang=gu	trans=hālānta|showlang=false}}|્|

hosonto	Bengali language>Bengali	lang=bn	trans=hôsôntô	showlang=false}}|্|

Assamese language>Assamese	lang=as	trans=hoxonto	showlang=false	lang=as	trans=hosonto	showlang=false}}|্|

Sylheti language>Sylheti	lang=syl	trans=hośonto	showlang=false}}| ◌ ꠆|

|pollu

Telugu language>Telugu	lang=te	trans=pollu	showlang=false}}|్|

|pulli

Tamil language>Tamil	lang=ta	trans=puḷḷi	showlang=false}}|்|

|chandrakkala

Malayalam script>Malayalam	lang=ml	trans=candrakkala	showlang=false	lang=ml	trans=viraamam	showlang=false}}|്|

|hal kirima

Sinhala language>Sinhalese	lang=si	trans=hal kirīma	showlang=false}}|්|

|a that

Burmese language>Burmese	lang=my	trans=a.sat	indicipa=ʔa̰θaʔ|showlang=false}}|်	Sat (Sanskrit)>nonexistence"

|viream

Khmer	lang=km	trans=vīrāma	showlang=false}}| ៑|

|toandokheat

lang=km	trans=toandokheat	showlang=false}}| ៍|

|karan, thanthakhat

Thai	lang=th	trans=kārạnt	showlang=false	การันต์ แปลว่าอะไร?	WEBSITE=LONGDO DICT, (:th:การันต์) / {{Indic	indic=ทัณฑฆาต	defaultipa=	ทัณฑฆาต แปลว่าอะไร?	WEBSITE=LONGDO DICT, (:th:ทัณฑฆาต)|◌์|Thanthakhat is the name of the diacritic, while karan refers to the character that was marked. These two terms are often used interchangeably. It is used to mark as silent vowels or consonants that were originally pronounced, but have become silenced in Thai pronunciation (mostly from Sanskrit and Old Khmer). This diacritic is sometimes used in loanwords from European languages to mark final consonants in consonant clusters (e.g. want as วอนท์).

|pinthu

lang=th	trans=pinthu	showlang=false|showhelp=false}}|◌ฺ	Pinthu is akin to Sanskrit Bindu (symbol)>bindu, and means "point" or "dot". It is used to mark a syllable as closed, and it is only used in Thai script when writing Pali or Sanskrit.

|nikkhahit|นฤคหิต / นิคหิต|◌ํ|Nikkhahit represents what was originally anusvāra in Sanskrit. Like pinthu, it is also only used when writing Pali or Sanskrit in Thai script. It marks a syllable as nasalized, realized in Thai as a nasal closed consonant following the vowel.

rahaam	Northern Thai language>Northern Thai (Lanna)	{{Indic	indic=ᩁᩉ᩶ᩣ᩠ᨾ	defaultipa=		ACCESS-DATE=30 JULY 2022, The Unicode Standard, |◌᩺|

Khün language>Tai Khün|◌᩼|

Tai Lue language>Tai Lue|◌᩼|

pangkon	Javanese language>Javanese	lang=jv	trans=pangkon	showlang=false}}|◌꧀|

Balinese language>Balinese	lang=ban	trans=pangkon	showlang=false}}|◌᭄|Also called adeg-adeg

|sukun

Maldivian language>Dhivehi	sukun| ް◌| Derives from Arabic "sukun"

|Srog med

Lhasa Tibetan>Tibetan|Srog med|྄|Only used when transcribing Sanskrit

Usage

In Devanagari and many other Indic scripts, a virama is used to cancel the inherent vowel of a consonant letter and represent a consonant without a vowel, a "dead" consonant. For example, in Devanagari,

1. is a consonant letter, ka,
2. ् is a virāma; therefore,
3. (ka + virāma) represents a dead consonant k.

If this k is further followed by another consonant letter, for example, ṣa ष, the result might look like , which represents kṣa as ka + (visible) virāma + ṣa. In this case, two elements k क् and ṣa ष are simply placed one by one, side by side. Alternatively, kṣa can be also written as a ligature , which is actually the preferred form.Generally, when a dead consonant letter C1 and another consonant letter C2 are conjoined, the result may be:

1. A fully conjoined ligature of C1+C2;
2. Half-conjoined—
   • C1-conjoining: a modified form (half form) of C1 attached to the original form (full form) of C2
   • C2-conjoining: a modified form of C2 attached to the full form of C1; or
3. Non-ligated: full forms of C1 and C2 with a visible virama.WEB, Constable, Peter, Clarification of the Use of Zero Width Joiner in Indic Scripts, Public Review Issue 37,weblink Unicode, Inc, 2004, 2009-11-19,

If the result is fully or half-conjoined, the (conceptual) virama which made C1 dead becomes invisible, logically existing only in a character encoding scheme such as ISCII or Unicode. If the result is not ligated, a virama is visible, attached to C1, actually written.Basically, those differences are only glyph variants, and the three forms are semantically identical. Although there may be a preferred form for a given consonant cluster in each language and some scripts do not have some kind of ligatures or half forms at all, it is generally acceptable to use a nonligature form instead of a ligature form even when the latter is preferred if the font does not have a glyph for the ligature. In some other cases, whether to use a ligature or not is just a matter of taste.The virāma in the sequence C1 + virāma + C2 may thus work as an invisible control character to ligate C1 and C2 in Unicode. For example,

• ka क + virāma + á¹£a ष = ká¹£a is a fully conjoined ligature. It is also possible that the virāma does not ligate C1 and C2, leaving the full forms of C1 and C2 as they are:
• ka + virama + á¹£a = ká¹£a is an example of such a non-ligated form.

The sequences ङ्क ङ्ख ङ्ग ङ्घ {{IPA|[ṅka ṅkha ṅɡa ṅɡha]}}, in common Sanskrit orthography, should be written as conjuncts (the virāma and the top cross line of the second letter disappear, and what is left of the second letter is written under the ङ and joined to it).

End of word

The inherent vowel is not always pronounced, in particular at the end of a word (schwa deletion). No virāma is used for vowel suppression in such cases. Instead, the orthography is based on Sanskrit where all inherent vowels are pronounced, and leaves to the reader of modern languages to delete the schwa when appropriate.Akira Nakanishi: Writing Systems of the World, {{ISBN|0-8048-1654-9}}, pp. 48.

See also

• Sukun, a similar diacritic in Arabic script
• Zero consonant

References

External links

• Blog: Sorting it all Out

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