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Concept
Virama
Summary
Virama (विराम/हलन्त ्) is a Sanskrit phonological concept to suppress the inherent vowel that otherwise occurs with every consonant letter, commonly used as a generic term for a codepoint in Unicode, representing either
halanta, hasanta or explicit virāma, a diacritic in many Brahmic scripts, including the Devanagari and Bengali scripts, or
saṃyuktākṣara (Sanskrit: संयुक्ताक्षर) or implicit virama, a conjunct consonant or ligature.
Unicode schemes of scripts writing Mainland Southeast Asia languages, such as that of Burmese script and of Tibetan script, generally don't group the two functions together.
The name is Sanskrit for "cessation, termination, end". As a Sanskrit word, it is used in place of several language-specific terms, such as:
In Devanagari and many other Indic scripts, a virama is used to cancel the inherent vowel of a consonant letter and represent a consonant without a vowel, a "dead" consonant. For example, in Devanagari,
क is a consonant letter, ka,
् is a virāma; therefore,
क् (ka + virāma) represents a dead consonant k.
If this k क् is further followed by another consonant letter, for example, ṣa ष, the result might look like क्ष, which represents kṣa as ka + (visible) virāma + ṣa. In this case, two elements k क् and ṣa ष are simply placed one by one, side by side. Alternatively, kṣa can be also written as a ligature क्ष, which is actually the preferred form.
Generally, when a dead consonant letter C1 and another consonant letter C2 are conjoined, the result may be:
A fully conjoined ligature of C1+C2;
Half-conjoined—
C1-conjoining: a modified form (half form) of C1 attached to the original form (full form) of C2
C2-conjoining: a modified form of C2 attached to the full form of C1; or
Non-ligated: full forms of C1 and C2 with a visible virama.
If the result is fully or half-conjoined, the (conceptual) virama which made C1 dead becomes invisible, logically existing only in a character encoding scheme such as ISCII or Unicode. If the result is not ligated, a virama is visible, attached to C1, actually written.
Official source
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