Northern BrahmicDevanagari is part of the Brahmic family of scripts of Nepal, India, Tibet, and South-East Asia. It is a descendant of the Gupta script, along with Siddham and Sharada. Eastern variants of Gupta called Nagari are first attested from the 8th century; from c. 1200 these gradually replaced Siddham, which survived as a vehicle for Tantric Buddhism in East Asia, and Sharada, which remained in parallel use in Kashmir.
The use of the name Devanagari is relatively recent, and the older term Nagari is still common. The rapid spread of the term Devanagari may be related to the almost exclusive use of this script to publish sacred Sanskrit texts in colonial times. This has led to such a close connection between Devanagari and Sanskrit that Devanagari is now widely thought to be the Sanskrit script; however, before the colonial period there was no standard script for Sanskrit, which was written in whichever script was familiar to the local populace.
As a Brahmic abugida, the fundamental principle of Devanagari is that each letter represents a consonant, which carries an inherent vowel a [?].[1] For example, the letter ? is read ka, the two letters ?? are kana, the three ??? are kanaya, etc. Other vowels, or the absence of vowels, require modification of these consonants or their own letters
