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A vowel present until cancelled.
Also known as: Inherent schwa, Implicit a
The Devanagari convention giving every bare consonant letter a following short a that is not written.
Supplies a short a after any consonant letter written without a vowel sign or virama.
Contexts: Language and transcription
Makes Devanagari an abugida rather than an alphabet, which is the classification that separates the Brahmic scripts from both the Latin alphabet and the Arabic abjad. The virama exists only to cancel it.
Contexts: Language and transcription
In modern Hindi the inherent vowel is frequently not pronounced at the end of a word — the schwa-deletion rule — so the written form and the spoken form diverge in a way Sanskrit's did not.
Schwa deletion is a Hindi rule and does not apply to Sanskrit.
Contexts: Language and transcription
Nothing visible: the vowel is carried by the plain consonant letter itself, and its absence is what has to be written, using the virama.
The virama exists to cancel the vowel this record describes.