"Halanta" is a technical term from Panini's famous grammar, the Astadhyayi
(Eight Chapters). It is a compound of "anta", "ending", and "hal". So,
it means "ending in hal". Now, "hal" is a Paninian code-word for
"consonants". I could explain how and why it's a code, but never mind the
details. "Hal-anta" is an exocentric adjective (bahuvrihi) compound
meaning, quite literally, "[an utterance] having a consonant as its end",
or "that which is consonant-final".
In Paninian grammatical texts, the expression refers to the linguistic
fact of an utterance ending with a consonant (not a vowel), and has
nothing to do with writing. At some unknown moment in history, certainly
centuries after Panini coined the term, the word "halanta" started being
used in the transferred sense of that little stroke that cancels the final
vowel in written Indic scripts deriving from Brahmi.
"Virama" means "a stop". It also refers to that cancellation stroke.
"Halanta" and "virama" are synonyms. "Virama" does not mean the vertical
stick-like punctuation mark that ends a sentence.
"Danda", literally "stick" is the vertical bar used as a punctuation mark.
It functions as a full-stop or a semi-colon, and it is sometimes doubled
to signal a stronger stop, like the end of a verse of poetry. It is
frequently used irregularly by scribes in pre-modern manuscripts, and it
is not a structural or grammatically necessary part of Indian writing
systems.
The "halanta" or "virama" stroke, by contrast, is actually part of the
spelling of a word. If it is used inappropriately, the word will be a
wrongly-spelt word.
Best,
Dominik
--
Dr Dominik Wujastyk
long term email address: [email protected]
On Wed, 1 Apr 2009, Zdenek Wagner wrote:
2009/4/1 Anshuman Pandey <[email protected]>:
ISCII-91 might give an indication regarding the position of CANDRA O in
the Hindi sort order:
http://varamozhi.sourceforge.net/iscii91.pdf
I have looked at the document and now I am a bit confused. I thought
that halant and viram are the same (iscii91.pdf reflects the current
Hindi pronunciation while the manual for devnag appends the terminal
"a"). However, in iscii91 the sign for suppressing the inherent "a" is
halant while viram is a sign ending the sentence which is called danda
in the devnag manual. Hindi Wordnet (developed by CFILT, IITB, Mumbai)
defines halant as: "suddh vyaMjan jis meM svar na milaa ho, Monier
Williams dictionary (http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/monier/)
says that halanta means "ending with a consonant". Word viraam(a)
means break/pause etc. according to English-Hindi and Hindi-English
dictionary developed by CFILT
(http://www.cfilt.iitb.ac.in/~hdict/webinterface_user/dict_search_user.php),
Hindi Wordnet, Monier Williams dictionary as well as by Hindi-Czech
dictionary (and viraam-cihn is explicitly the same as the meaning of
viram in ISCII-91). I tried to search for danda, I found .daM.daa in
Hindi-English dictionary by CFILT and in Hindi-Czech dictionary
(meaning stick, bar) and da.n.daa in Monier-Williams meaning
Hedysaruni lagopodioides. Charles Wikner uses the term halanta
(http://sanskritdocuments.org/learning_tutorial_wikner/P053.html) and
Chapter 9 in Unicode standard 4 says:
Absence of the inherent vowel, when that occurs, is frequently marked
with a special sign.
In the Unicode Standard, this sign is denoted by the Sanskrit word
virama. In some languages
another designation is preferred. In Hindi, for example, the word hal
refers to the
character itself, and halant refers to the consonant that has its
inherent vowel suppressed; ...
And to add to this confusion, Hindi-Czech dictionary says that halant
is an adjective meaning "ending with a viram".
Page 12 shows the order for vowels. CANDRA O is positioned after AU.
Best,
Anshu
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