iti and iva

To wrap up our study of uninflected words, let's study two very common words: iti and iva.

iti

The word iti is both common and powerful. Generally, iti used like a quotation mark.

• गच्छामि गजम् इति मन्यते

  gacchāmi gajam iti manyate

  "I go to the elephant," he thinks (or, he thinks that he is going).

However, iti is more powerful than an ordinary quotation mark. Michael Coulson puts it best when he writes that iti frequently expresses an attitude of mind or the grounds on which something is done.

• स वीर इति गच्छन्ति

  sa vīra iti gacchanti

  Thinking that he is a hero, they go.

• इति गच्छन्ति

  iti gacchanti

  Thus thinking, they go.

As you can see, iti "marks off" a specific idea and lets the rest of the sentence refer to it. Among the old Indo-European languages, only Sanskrit has this feature. However, the Dravidian and Munda languages families feature a word used like iti. For that reason, it's likely that this use of iti was borrowed from those languages.

iva

The word iva means something like "like," "as if," or "it seems." Like ca and vā, iva must follow the word it refers to. It is usually used with nouns.

• वीर इव वदति

  vīra iva vadati

  He speaks like a hero (or, as if he were a hero)

• नर इव बालो मां नयति

  nara iva bālo māṃ nayati

  The boy leads me as if he were a man.

• नरम् इव बालो मां नयति

  naram iva bālo māṃ nayati

  The boy leads me as if I were a man.

Note the distinction between nara iva and naram iva in the examples above.

Devanagari

The other vowels

Here are the rest of the Devanagari vowels.

देवनागरी

IAST

ई

ī

ऊ

ū

ॠ

ṝ

ऐ

ai

Notice that each of these longer and stronger forms comes from attaching the corresponding vowel mark to the shorter and weaker ones.

The ॐ symbol is created from three parts: the "3"-shaped part of अ, the hook on ऊ, and the candrabindu ँ that we used to indicate a nasal vowel in -n sandhi.

Punctuation in Devanagari

These three punctuation marks are used in Sanskrit:

देवनागरी

Purpose

ऽ

marks where a vowel was lost due to sandhi

।

marks the end of a sentence or half-verse

॥

marks the end of a paragraph or verse

Some modern texts may also use more familiar punctuation, like the comma ( , ), the question mark ( ? ), or the exclamation mark ( ! ).