Romanagari

Romanagari, a portmanteau of the words "Roman" and "Devanagari". This slang word was coined by Hindi bloggers. [ [http://narad.akshargram.com Hindi bloggers] ] It means to write (type) Hindi text in Roman script. Hindi is written in Devanagari script. Sometimes due to unavailability of tools to type Hindi on a computer or the Internet people use to the Latin alphabet to type Hindi.

Example

"Main romanagari mein likh raha hun. Mera vatan bharat hai, kitni achhi baat hai ki aaj hum yahan hain, apne vatan ki dharati par. is mitti ki khushbu kahin bhi chale jao mahsus hoti hai. jism chahe jahan bhi ho man hamesha vatan mein rahta hai."

This kind of Roman Hindi is used by those people on Internet which are not familiar with methods and tools for typing in Hindi. The second reason for this is that still a lot of Internet sites and services which do not support Unicode.

Difficulties

Now there are some drawbacks of writing Hindi in Roman. It is hard to read such text which needs a lot of time and effort for transliteration. All the letters need to be interpreted one by one which distracts the concentration on the topic.

Secondly Romanagari is a kinky way to express Hindi. It is not possible to perfectly write (transliterate) Hindi text in Roman script. Also Hindi text does not look nice in this form. In addition to this it is not beneficial from the point of view of Google and other search engines. Pages in Romanagari will neither come in English search nor in a Hindi search.

A lot of people believe that either Hindi should be written in Devanagari otherwise it is better to write in English because it is easy to read as well as looks better.

Now there is another reason to not write in Romanagari. Now-a-days there are a lot of phonetic tools available by using which one can write in Hindi by typing the corresponding roman equivalent keys. This process is called transliteration. It means one do not need to learn typing on a conventional typewriter to type in Hindi. One types in Roman and it is automatically converted (transliterated) to Hindi.

References

* [http://www.akshargram.com/sarvagya/index.php/ Romanagari Romanagari]
* [http://www.akshargram.com/sarvagya/index.php/ Phonetic Phonetic]

External links

* [http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic/ Indic Transliteration]
* [http://www.sikh-history.com/punjabi_roman.html Romanized Punjabi]