English to Punjabi Typing

Punjabi is written two ways by two populations: Gurmukhi in Indian Punjab, Shahmukhi — a Perso-Arabic script — in Pakistan. This tool produces Gurmukhi, and there is no setting that changes that.

Worth knowing in the first paragraph rather than after a page of typing. The spoken language is largely shared; the two writing systems look nothing alike.

Punjabi shows the difference between a stored spelling and a rule conversion more starkly than most. changa is a known word and gives ਚੰਗਾ, with the nasal written as a tippi exactly where it belongs. changaa — a reasonable-looking variant — falls through to the rules and gives ਚਨ੍ਗਾ, spelling the nasal out as a full consonant.

The lesson is not to spell more carefully. It is to spell more ordinarily: the plainest version of a word is the one most likely to be recognised. sat sri akal gives ਸਤ ਸ੍ਰੀ ਅਕਾਲ.

Punjabi carries lexical tone, unusually among Indo-Aryan languages, and there are no tone marks. The tone rides on the historically voiced-aspirate letters — ਘ ਝ ਢ ਧ ਭ — which you reach by adding an h.

So dropping the h is not a small spelling shortcut; it selects a different letter and a different word.

The nasalisation marks are a different matter: the rules do not produce ਂ or ੰ, which is why changa only works as a stored word. Both are in the vowel-signs row of the Punjabi keyboard, so the reliable habit is to type the word and then place the mark.