Could anybody please tell me where I could find how to write the name “Chandra” in the Sanskrit language/symbols?
Knowing the letters of the Devanagari alphabet isn’t enough. You have to know how to combine the consonants into conjuncts. Each consonant comes with an inherent vowel after it. When a consonant is followed by another consonant, you have to combine them into a complex figure.
In the name candra there is a cluster of three consonants that have to be all combined into a single figure. The page that trabi linked to doesn’t explain how to do that.
Do not use the letter on that page called “cha” to write the name candra. The “cha” with an h represents the aspirated sound. The name candra (‘moon’) starts with the letter ca.
In standard Sanskrit transliteration, the letter c by itself stands for the sound that begins the word chocolate. The sound written with “ch” in English and Spanish. But in Indian languages the h indicates aspiration, and the plain and aspirated versions of a consonant are two entirely different letters.
The answer to your question is to download the free Itrans software. It’s really neat. You just type in the transliteration, click a button, and the Devanagari appears. If you don’t want to do that, I could make an image file of the name candra and e-mail it to you.
C. Johnson, check your mail.
P.S. If you want, you can download the ITRANS software and Sanskrit font from this site:
http://www.omkarananda-ashram.org
Hi C. Johnson. Check this page for a comprehensive list of free Indian language software and fonts. I don’t have the software loaded, so I can’t write it for you at this time, but if you don’t get a satisfactory answer I can write it for you. Or if you think you have the answer I can confirm it for you.
Basically, “Chandra” would be broken up as “ch-an-dr-aa” in Hindi.
Therefore, it would be written as:
From trabi’s link:
http://www.americansanskrit.com/athome/online01/alphabet.html#
The first letter would be “ch” which is the character in Row 5 Column 1 (incorrectly translitterated as “ca” on the site)
On top of that “ch” would be a dot denoting the “an”
Followed by that would be the “da”, which is Row 7 Column 3.
This “da” is converted to “dr” by adding a slant like the forward slash, 90 degrees to the slant already at the end of the “da” character.
Then you add the “aa” by adding another vertical line after the “dr” character. This is not shown on the site, just add a vertical line the same length as the other characters on the right of the “dr”.
You get “ch-an-dr-aa”.
Forgot to give you the link to the download page:
I’ve emailed you an image of the way chandra is written in Sanskrit.
You must not be aware of the standard transliteration of Indian alphabets, because if you were, you would not call that “incorrect.” In standard transliteration, the first letter in candra is indeed a plain letter c. The digraph ch stands for the aspirated sound. As in the chart we are looking at. That site is correctly following the standard transliteration.
The OP asked for Sanskrit information, not Hindi. To use the anusvara dot like that to replace the letter n in the middle of a word is typical of modern Hindi orthography. However, in Sanskrit the n in candra is written not with an anusvara but with a partial letter n. It looks like a horizontal spike sticking out of the left side of the d.
You added the long vowel â on the end. In the Sanskrit word for ‘moon’, which I took the OP to be asking for, it ends with a short vowel a, which is unmarked. The word candrâ, which means ‘night (the beloved of the moon)’, does end with the long vowel â. Perhaps the OP should clarify which word is intended.
Jomo Mojo, I’ll stand corrected. I was referring to the way the Indian name “Chandra” is written in Hindi, not Sanskrit.
Since you people seem so knowledgeable about this, I have some questions too.
If I wrote chandra with a ‘na’ instead of the anusvara dot in Hindi, would that be considered a wrong spelling?
And what is the rule for using a chandra bindi as opposed to a plain anusvara dot?
AFAIK, it would look old-fashioned or pedantic, perhaps, but couldn’t be considered wrong, since it is standard Sanskritic spelling.
The main point is that you can’t spell it with a full letter na, because that would include the following inherent short /a/ vowel. You have to use the conjunct consonant figures, because if you used the full letter forms, you would wind up with canadara, which isn’t a word.
The distinction isn’t very clear even to Sanskrit experts.
In case anyone is wondering what that question means, both these diacritics show the nasalization of the preceding vowel. They are pronounced the same. While anusvara is just a plain superscript dot, candrabindu is the dot ensconced within a crescent shape. (The word candrabindu means ‘moon and dot’.) The only difference I can see is that candrabindu is used in Sanskrit only at the end of a word. You can see it in the graphic for “OM”. While anusvara (‘after-sound’) can be used internally in a word, and as I noted above, modern Hindi uses it to replace any nasal consonant followed by another homologous consonant, whether n before t and d, ñ before c and j, or m before p and b. I suppose they did it to make typography easier, because conjunct consonants are a bother for typesetters.
Maybe anusvara in Sanskrit is meant to be the shorthand for a nasal consonant, while candrabindu is only for nasalized vowels. But the scribes of Sanskrit manuscripts do not seem to have applied this distinction consistently. Sanskrit scholars of today are not always quite sure which pronunciation was indicated by these signs.
Whitney’s 1889 Sanskrit Grammar, §73, says
Looks like what Whitney called “slovenly and undesirable” is now standard Hindi typography in the present day. IIRC, the dot is written for a final -m sound whenever a word follows, but at the end of a line of verse, the full letter m is written with the halanta mark, meaning that no vowel follows it, so m is the final sound. This would be the consonantal sound of m, not a nasalization. But I’m not sure.
Thanks to everyone for your help!