Its letters are generally rounded or square rather than triangular. Devanagari is pronounced like "Dave a nuggery." This is by far the most common and best known language with a line across its top. We can divide these languages into three completely unscientific sets based on how they look: those with a line across the top, those that use a lot of circles, and those with hooks or rings on their ends.ĭevanagari is the name of the alphabet it is used for Hindi, Sanskrit, and quite a few other languages. There are many languages in Indian and Southeast Asia that have distinctive writing systems, but they're all descended from the Brahmi script of some 2,300 years ago, and they all have the same general principle of a character standing for a consonant plus a vowel, with extra marks to specify what vowel.