Nuqta
The nuqta (Hindi: नुक़्ता, Persian: نُقطه, romanized: noqte Urdu: نقطہ, romanized: nuqtā; from Arabic: نقطة, romanized: nuqta, lit. 'dot'), also spelled nukta, is a diacritic mark that was introduced in Devanagari and some other Indian scripts to represent sounds not present in the original scripts. It takes the form of a dot placed below a character. Also, in another sense deriving from the Arabic script itself, there "are some letters in Urdu that share the same basic shape but differ in the placement of dots(s) or nuqta(s)" in the Urdu script: the letter ع ain, with the addition of a nuqta, becomes the letter غ g͟hain.[1]
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Use in Devanagari
Examples from Devanagari, the script used to write Hindi, are क़, qa; ख़, k͟ha; ग़, ġa; ज़, za; झ़, zha; ड़, ṛa; ढ़, ṛha; and फ़, fa. Respectively, these letters modify क, ka; ख, kha; ग, ga; ज, ja; ड, ḍa; ढ, ḍha; फ, pha; and झ, jha. The term nuqtā (नुक़्ता) is itself an example of the use of the nuqta. Other examples include क़िला (Urdu: قلعہ), qilā, 'fortress'; and आग़ा ख़ान (Urdu: آغا خان), Āġā K͟hān: a combination of a Perso-Arabic (āġā) and a Turko-Mongolic (k͟hān) honorific, now the title of the leader of the Nizari Ismaili sect. Examples of more common words are बड़ा, baṛā, 'big'; पढ़ना, paṛhnā, 'to read'; पेड़, pēṛ, 'tree'; अंग्रेज़ी, Aṅgrēzī, 'English'; and करोड़, karōṛ, 'crore'.
The nuqta, and the phonological distinction it represents, is sometimes ignored in practice; e.g., क़िला qilā is simply spelled as किला kilā. In the text Dialect Accent Features for Establishing Speaker Identity, Manisha Kulshreshtha and Ramkumar Mathur write, "A few sounds, borrowed from the other languages like Persian and Arabic, are written with a dot (bindu or nuktā). Many people who speak Hindi as a second language, especially those who come from rural backgrounds and do not speak conventional Hindi (also called Khariboli), or speak in one of its dialects, pronounce these sounds as their nearest equivalents." For example, these rural speakers will assimilate the sound ɣ (Devanagari: ग़; Urdu: غ) as ɡ (Devanagari: ग; Urdu: گ).[2]
With a renewed Hindi–Urdu language contact, many Urdu writers now publish their works in Devanagari editions. Since the Perso-Arabic orthography is preserved in Nastaʿlīq script Urdu orthography, these writers use the nuqta in Devanagari when transcribing these consonants.
Encoding in Unicode
The nuqta is important for accurate transliteration of scripts and representation of speech sounds. Indic scripts with a nuqta include Devanagari, Grantha, Kannada, Gujarati, Bengali, and Gurmukhi.
Currently, the Telugu script lacks a nuqta. This results in inaccurate transliterations into Telugu. The encoding of the nuqta would enable the proper transliteration of Perso-Arabic consonants into Telugu.[3]
References
Works cited
- Govindaraju, Venu; Setlur, Srirangaraj (Ranga) (25 September 2009). Guide to OCR for Indic Scripts: Document Recognition and Retrieval. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 165. ISBN 9781848003309. Retrieved 20 November 2014.
- Kulshreshtha, Manisha; Mathur, Ramkumar (24 March 2012). Dialect Accent Features for Establishing Speaker Identity: A Case Study. Springer Science & Business Media. pp. 19–. ISBN 9781461411376. Retrieved 20 November 2014.
- Rajan, V., Sharma, S., & Kolichala, S. (2019). "Proposal to Encode Telugu Sign Nukta".
Bibliography
- Vajpeyi, K. D. (Kishorī Dās Vājpayī; किशोरीदास वाजपेयी), Hindī shabdanushāsan हिन्दी शब्दनुशासन (1957, 1958, 1973, 1976, 1988).