Consonant letters carry an inherent vowel which can be altered or muted by means of diacritics or matra.Script family: Proto-Sinaitic, Phoenician, Aramaic, Brāhmī, Gupta, Siddham, Nāgarī, Devanāgarī.
The name is variously translated as 'script of the city', 'heavenly/sacred script of the city' or ' city of the Gods or priests'. The name Devanāgarī is made up of two Sanskrit words: deva, which means god, brahman or celestial, and nāgarī, which means city. This script was starting to resemble the modern Devanāgarī alphabet by the 10th century, and started to replace Siddham from about 1200. Developed from eastern variants of the Gupta script called Nāgarī, which first emerged during the 8th century.
