| । | |
|---|---|
Daṇḍa | |
| U+0964 ।DEVANAGARI DANDA |
InIndic scripts, thedaṇḍa (Sanskrit: दण्डdaṇḍa "stick")[a] is apunctuation mark.[2] Theglyph consists of a single vertical stroke.
The daṇḍa marks the end of a sentence or line, comparable to afull stop (period) as commonly used in theLatin alphabet, and is used together with Western punctuation in Hindi and Nepali.
The daṇḍa and double daṇḍa are the only punctuation used in Sanskrit texts.[2] No distinct punctuation is used to mark questions or exclamations, which must be inferred from other aspects of the sentence.[2]
In metrical texts, a double daṇḍa is used to delimit verses, and a single daṇḍa to delimit apada, line, or semi-verse. In prose, the double daṇḍa is used to mark the end of a paragraph, a story, or section.[2]
TheDevanagari character can be found atcode point U+0964 (।) inUnicode. The "double daṇḍa" is at U+0965 (॥). The Unicode standard recommends using this character also in otherIndic scripts, like Bengali, Telugu, Oriya, and others.[3] Encoding it separately for every Indic script was proposed,[4] but this has not been implemented.
Danda and similar characters are encoded separately for some scripts in which its appearance or use is significantly different from the Devanagari one. These include forms with adornments, such as theRgya Gram Shad.[1]
ISCII encodes daṇḍa at 0xEA.
