Chandrabindu
The Chandrabindu ( Sanskrit : चन्द्रबिन्दु candrabindu “moon and point”), also anunasika ( अनुनासिक anunāsika “nasalization”), is a sign in the Indian scriptures that indicates nasalization . The Chandrabindu is not an independent letter, but a diacritical mark , which can only appear in combination with another letter. Graphically, it consists of a semicircle and a point above the consonant. In scientific transliteration , the Chandrabindu is represented either by an overlaid tilde or by ṁ .
use
In Sanskrit , the Chandrabindu occurs only in conjunction with the consonant ल् l to express a nasalized l . This sound is the result of a comparatively rare Sandhi process in which the final n and the initial l merge. So the words तान् tān and लभते labhate combine to form ताल्लँभते tāl̃labhate .
In many modern Indo-Aryan languages , the Chandrabindu denotes a nasal vowel , e.g. B. Hindi चाँद cā̃d "moon" Bengali দাঁত dā̃t "tooth". In transliteration, the Chandrabindu is indicated either by a tilde or by ṁ . It should be noted that, for reasons of space, the Chandrabindu loses its crescent-shaped element if the vowel mark protrudes above the horizontal line, e.g. B. Hindi मैं maĩ “I”. In this case, the Chandrabindu is graphically indistinguishable from the Anusvara . Sometimes the Chandrabindu is consistently replaced by Anusvara, so चांद cā̃d can also be written चांद cāṃd .
Realization of the Chandrabindu in the Indian scriptures
The Chandrabindu is realized in the different Indian scripts, a semicircle and a point above the consonant. The following table shows the Chandrabindu character, the example syllable kã and the Unicode code point of the Chandrabindu character for the individual Indian scripts . For the southern Indian scripts Kannada , Malayalam and Telugu , the Chandrabindu was only defined with the Unicode standard 7.0.0.
| font | character | example | Unicode |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bengali | ঁ | কঁ | U + 0981 (2433) |
| Devanagari | ँ | कँ | U + 0901 (2305) |
| Gujarati | ઁ | કઁ | U + 0A81 (2689) |
| Gurmukhi | ਁ | ਕਁ | U + 0A01 (2561) |
| Kannada | ಁ | ಕಁ | U + 0C81 (3201) |
| Malayalam | ഁ | കഁ | U + 0D01 (3329) |
| Oriya | ଁ | କଁ | U + 0B01 (2817) |
| Telugu | ఀ | కఀ | U + 0C00 (3072) |