Devanaagari

courtesy: Sri.PK.Ramakrishnan

Devanagari (lipi)
 
Many still refer to this as Nagari lipi.
It was first used in a place called Nagar.
'Nagar was formerly a princely state which had existed for 1200 years.The two grandsons of shri bidat ruler of hole Gilgit Maghlot became the king of Nagar and Kirkis became the king of Hunza after death of shri bidat independently. The people of Nagar were ruled by a local Tham/Mir for more than 1200 years, until the states were dissolved in 1974.'
It was therefore called Naagari.
Nagar is a place in old India now in Pakistan.
Naagari was used for writing Sanskrit.
Sanskrit was called Deva-bhasha.
So Naagari became Deavanaagari.
 
There could be other places having the name nagar.
But it must be related to the type of writing which
originated there.
 
There are several lipis in which Sanskrit can be
written.  One such is Grantha.
 
So Devanaagari refers to the type of writing.
 
In Nagar the material on which this writing was
done was the bark of birch tree.  It is called
bhuurja tvak  भूर्जत्वक् in Sanskrit.
The material by which the writing was done was
mashi मषि or ink.
A piece of wood was used to take out the ink
and apply it on the bark.
This produced a thick line both vertical or horizontal.
l or ___ producing letters like प or क.
This lipi was accepted by those who wanted to write
Maraatti and Hindi.
Others modified this to write Gujarati, Bengali etc.
To write Odiya the form was modified a bit since
birch bark was not available in Odissa but only palm
leaves.  The following is a comparison between writing
on birch bark and palm leaf.
jayadeva  जयदेव devanagari
jayadeva  ଜଯଡଭ oriya.
The same is the reason why grantha lipi is used in
Tamil Nad instead of Devanagari.
Both Tamil lipi and Grantha lipi were written on palm leaves.
This means – the medium decides the script.