Nuqta


Nuqtā, also spelled Nuktā, is a term for a diacritic mark that was introduced in Devanāgari and some other Indian scripts to represent sounds not present in the original scripts. It takes the form of a dot placed below a character. Also, in another sense deriving from the Arabic script itself, there "are some letters in Urdu that share the same basic shape but differ in the placement of dots or nuqta" in the Urdu script: the letter ع ain, with the addition of a nuqta, becomes the letter غ g͟hain.

Use in Devanāgarī

Examples from Devanāgarī, the script used to write Hindi, are: क़ qa, ख़ ḵẖa, ग़ ġa, ज़ za, ड़ ṛa, ढ़ ṛha, फ़ fa, झ़ zha, modifying क ka, ख kha, ग ga, ज ja, ड ḍa, ढ ḍha, फ pha, झ jha, respectively. The term nuqtā नुक़्ता itself is an example; other examples include :wikt:क़िला|क़िला qilā "fortress", and आग़ा ख़ान Āgā Khān and a Turko-Mongolic honorific, now the title of the leader of the Nizari Ismaili sect. Examples of more common words are बड़ा "big", पढ़ना "read", पेड़ "tree", अंग्रेज़ी "English", or करोड़ "crore".
The nuqtā, and the phonological distinction it represents, is sometimes ignored in practice, i.e. क़िला qilā can simply be spelled as :hi:किला|किला kilā. Manisha Kulshreshtha and Ramkumar Mathur write in the text Dialect Accent Features for Establishing Speaker Identity that "A few sounds, borrowed from the other languages like Persian and Arabic, are written with a dot. Many people who speak Hindi as a second language, especially those who come from rural backgrounds and do not speak conventional Hindi, or speak in one of its dialects, pronounce these sounds as their nearest equivalents." For example, these rural speakers will assimilate the sound ɣ as ɡ.
With a renewed Hindi–Urdu language contact, many Urdu writers now publish their works in Devanagari editions. Since the Perso-Arabic orthography is preserved in Nastaʿlīq script Urdu orthography, these writers use the nuqtā in Devanāgari when transcribing these consonants.

Encoding in Unicode

Nuktā is important for accurate transliteration of scripts and representation of speech sounds. Indic scripts with nuktā include Devanāgarī, Grantha, Kannada, Gujǎrātī, Bengali, Gurmukhī, and more.
Currently, the Telugu script lacks nuktā. This results in inaccurate transliteration of Telugu. The encoding of Telugu nuktā would enable the transliteration of Perso-Arabic consonants.

Works cited