Avagraha
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Avagraha (ऽ) is a symbol used to indicate prodelision of an अ a in many Indian languages as shown below. It is usually transliterated with apostrophe in roman script, in case of Devanagari, as in the Sanskrit philosophical expression शिवोऽहम् Śivo’ham (Śivaḥ aham), which is a sandhi of (शिवः + अहम्) ‘I am Shiva’. The avagraha is also used for prolonging vowel sounds in some languages, for example Hindi माँऽऽऽ! for ‘Mãããã!’ when calling to one’s mother, or when transliterating foreign words in instant messaging: for example, 'cool' can be transliterated as कूऽल.
In case of Hindi, the character is also sometimes used as a symbol to denote long or heavy syllables, in metrical poetry. For example, the syllables in the word छंदः chandaḥ ‘metre’ (in nominative) can be denoted as "ऽ ऽ", meaning two long syllables. (Cf. other notations in entry "Systems of scansion".)
Avagraha in Unicode
The avagraha symbol is encoded at several Unicode points, for various Indic scripts that use it:
| Character | Unicode character number | Full Unicode name |
|---|---|---|
| ऽ | U+093D | Devanagari sign avagraha |
| ꣱ | U+A8F1 | Combining Devanagari sign avagraha |
| ꣷ | U+A8F7 | Devanagari sign candrabindu avagraha |
| ঽ | U+09BD | Bengali sign avagraha |
| ઽ | U+0ABD | Gujarati sign avagraha |
| ଽ | U+0B3D | Oriya sign avagraha |
| ఽ | U+0C3D | Telugu sign avagraha |
| ಽ | U+0CBD | Kannada sign avagraha |
| ഽ | U+0D3D | Malayalam sign avagraha |
| ᮺ | U+1BBA | Sundanese sign avagraha |
| 𑓄 | U+114C4 | Tirhuta sign avagraha |
| ྅ | U+0F85 | Tibetan sign paluta |
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