Danda

In Indic scripts, the daṇḍa (Sanskrit: दण्ड daṇḍa "stick") is a punctuation mark.[1] The glyph consists of a single vertical stroke.

This article is about the Brahmic punctuation character. For other uses, see Danda (disambiguation).

Use

The daṇḍa marks the end of a sentence or line, comparable to a full stop (period) as commonly used in the Latin alphabet, and is used together with Western punctuation in most modern Indic languages.

The daṇḍa and double daṇḍa are the only punctuation used in Sanskrit texts.[1] No distinct punctuation is used to mark questions or exclamations, which must be inferred from other aspects of the sentence.[1]

In metrical texts, a double daṇḍa is used to delimit verses, and a single daṇḍa to delimit a pada, line, or semi-verse. In prose, the double daṇḍa is used to mark the end of a paragraph, a story, or section.[1]

Computer encoding

The Devanagari character can be found at code point U+0964 (।) in Unicode. The "double daṇḍa" is at U+0965 (॥). The Unicode standard recommends using this character also in other Indic scripts, like Bengali, Telugu, Oriya, and others.[2] Encoding it separately for every Indic script was proposed,[3] but as of 2020, this proposal has not been implemented.

Danda and similar characters are encoded separately for some scripts in which its appearance or use is significantly different from the Devangari one.[4]

ISCII encodes daṇḍa at 0xEA.

See also

References
  1. A.M., Ruppel (2017). The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit. New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 33. ISBN 978-1107088283.
  2. The Unicode® Standard Version 13.0 – Core Specification (PDF). Mountain View, CA: The Unicode Consortium. 2020. p. 278. ISBN 978-1-936213-26-9.
  3. "Public Review Issue #59". www.unicode.org. Retrieved 2020-11-26.
  4. "UTN #33: Dandas and More Dandas". www.unicode.org. Retrieved 2020-11-26.
  • The dictionary definition of danda at Wiktionary
  • The dictionary definition of दण्ड at Wiktionary


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