Magic of Romanaagarii and SARAL alphabets

English language is written in Roman script and has the following letters:
Small letters: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z.
Capital letters: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z.

In addition, various symbols for numbers, punctuation, arithmetic etc. are used.
Romanaagarii uses the Roman alphabet of English. However, to make it simple, only the small letters are used. One more symbol [‘] called apostrophe, is also used in writing phonemes for sounds not covered by single letters.

The letters used in Romanaagarii are the following:
a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z and '.
All phonemes in Romanaagarii are made by using these 27 characters only.

Hindi is usually written in Devanagari script that has 54 basic phonemes (Akshar maalaa). These phonemes are as follows:

 Devanagari is not truly alphabetic and follows a writing system called abiguda. This abiguda system is composed of signs (graphemes) denoting consonants with an inherent following vowel. For example, there is no basic sign representing the consonant [k]; rather the unmodified letter represents the syllable [ka]; the a is not marked on the symbol, and thus is the so-called inherent vowel. To make Devanagari alphabetic, we have to exclude the inherent vowel.

In Roman script, some sounds of Devanagari, not covered by single letters, are expressed by using two letters and the apostrophe symbol. The long vowels of Devanagari are represented by repeating the short vowel as /aa/ /ii/ etc.To cover the 54 basic characters of Devanagari (Varn'a maalaa), the Roman characters (small) are rearranged. They are separated in groups of vowels and consonants. The letters and the apostrophe symbol are used to make phonemes. To facilitate integration of Roman script with Devanagari, we make graphemes as follows:

[x], [a], [e], [i], [o], [u]
[k], [c], [t’], [t], [p], [y], [s], [n]
[g], [j], [d’], [d], [b], [m], [r], [l], [v], [h]
[f], [z]
[aa], [ee], [ii], [oo], [uu], [m’], [h’]
[kh], [gh], [ch], [jh], [t’h], [d’h], [ph], [bh]
[sh], [s’], [n’]
[r’], [r’h], [x’], [k’], [k’h], [g’], [v’]

[x] is the vowel base that is not used in Roman script based languages. Its importance will be known when transliterating Roman into SARAL scripts.

By rearranging the Roman characters on Devanagari pattern, we get the following Romanaagarii alphabet :

[x] (not explicit)
[a] [aa] [i] [ii] [u] [uu]
[e] [ee] [o] [oo] [m’] [h’]
[k] [kh] [g] [gh] [m’]
[c] [ch] [j] [jh] [m’]
[t’] [t’h] [d’] [d’h] [n’]
[t] [th] [d] [dh] [n]
[p] [ph] [b] [bh] [m]
[y] [r] [l] [v]
[s] [sh] [s’] [h]
[‘] [k’] [k’h] [g’] [r’] [r’h] [z] [f] [v’]

 To make consonant phonemes, vowel [a] is added to the basic grapheme.  Devanagari phonemes (Akshar maalaa) based on the Roman characters (small) are as follows:

a/ /aa/ /i/ /ii/ /u/ /uu/
/e/ /ee/ /o/ /oo/ /m’/ /h’/
/ka/ /kha/ /ga/ /gha/ /m’a/
/ca/ /cha/ /ja/ /jha/ /m’a/
/t’a/ /t’ha/ /d’a/ /d’ha/ /n’a/
/ta/ /tha/ /da/ /dha/ /na/
/pa/ /pha/ /ba/ /bha/ /ma/
/ya/ /ra/ /la/ /va/ /sha/ /s’a/ /sa/ /ha/
/‘a/ /k’a/ /k’ha/ /g’a/ /r’a/ /r’ha/ /za/ /fa/ /v’a/

This system of writing Devanagari phonemes in Roman letters is Romanaagarii!

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), is a character encoding based on the English alphabet. ASCII (English) characters used in computers are as follows:

To use ASCII for all phonemes of Romanaagarii, the capital letters are subsituted by phonemes made of more than one Roman character. The inherent vowel [a] is excluded. The phonemes in place of the capital letters in the ASCII of the computers used for Romanaagarii would be as follows:

A=aa; B=bh; C=ch; D=dh; E=ee; F=s’; G=gh; H=h’; I=ii; J=jh; K=kh; L=r’; M=m’; N=n’; O=oo; P=ph; Q=t’h; R=r’h; S=sh; T=th; U=uu; V=v’; W=d’h; X=‘; Y=k’h; Z=z’

As mentioned earlier, [x] as vowel base is not used in languages written in Roman script. The use of vowel base is required in all Indic scripts including Devanagari. Arabic also uses vowel base and vowel modifiers. We use [x] of ASCII in SARAL scripts for vowel base.

ASCII for Romanaagarii phonemes would be different from the ASCII for English. In the ASCII for Romanaagarii, the phoneme made of more than one character, is considered one single symbol and the fonts are made accordingly. For example, [kh] in Romanaagarii requires two strokes on keyboard but in SARAL Roman, it will require only one stroke. We call the new  Romanaagarii fonts as SARAL Roman fonts and the script as SARAL Roman script.

Romanaagarii uses the fonts commonly used in English, but SARAL Roman uses the fonts specially made for it. It may be noted that there is no difference in the appearance of Romanaagarii and SARAL Roman except the use of [x]. In SARAL Roman, [x] is there but almost invisible. SARAL Roman fonts are as follows:

A variation of SARAL Roman is SARAL Ingles (phonetic spelling of English in Romanaagarii like ingles in Spanish) in which the text is written as suggested by the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST). It is based on a standard established by the Congress of Orientalists at Athens in 1912. Those who are familiar with Sanskrit and Urdu texts with dots below the letters may like this format. SARAL Ingles ASCII/fonts are as follows:

To use the SARAL Roman ASCII format for Devanagari will be easy because all the phoneme bases and vowel modifiers are included in it. However, we have to alphabetize the Devanagari writing symbols and convert phonemes (Akshar) into graphemes (Varn’a). To make Devanagari script alphabetic like Roman script, we do the following:
-Use only one vowel base and twelve vowel modifiers;
-Make the vowel modifier [i] to follow the base like other vowel modifiers; and
-Remove the line over consonants to make them alphabetic graphemes from phonemic graphemes.

These measures are based on the suggestions of Hindi scholars and linguists. The set of Hindi alphabet symbols will have 55 characters or graphemes and would be as follows:

We arrange these symbols in the ASCII to construct SARAL Hindi fonts on the pattern of SARAL Roman. Hindi characters in this format of ASCII will be as follows:

To make phoneme (Akshar) from ASCII characters for Hindi, we add vowel modifiers to the vowel base and add vowel modifier [a] to the consonant bases. The set of 54 Hindi phonemes (Akshar maalaa) will be as follows:

These SARAL phonemes may be compared to Hindi that is usually written in Devanagari script and has 54 basic phonemes (Akshar maalaa) as shown earlier.
SARAL Roman and SARAL Hindi fonts are two different visual representations of one phonemic sound system. This implies that they are interchangeable. The text written in one SARAL font system can be transcribed into other SARAL font system. This is the magic of the Romanaagarii based SARAL scripts!

The technique of SARAL Hindi can be applied to any script provided it is alphabetized, made phonetic, based on phonemes and set in ASCII like SARAL Roman. What has been done for Hindi, can be done for Gujarati, Panjabi, Urdu etc. In case of Urdu, however, the difference will be that the text will be written from right to left instead of left to right and the consonant phonemes will br pronounced with the vowel modifier [e].

Following are the tables of phonemes (Akshar maalaa) of SARAL scripts and examples of one text appearing in different fonts: