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Oct. 29, 2009 What I did not mention in Part 1 of this article is that the letters that I described as consonants were really syllables originally and are so even now in most cases. It would appear that the ancient Indians did not appreciate that a syllable like ka or ma consists of two letters, a consonant and a vowel. Apparently they considered it an indivisible unit. This is not surprising, since this feature is found also in the unrelated alphabets of Hebrew and Arabic. So the letters I have called n, g and r, when joined in that order, form a word nagara, the a's being 'short' a's. There is also a 'long' a, sometimes transcribed as aa. In Hindi, in most cases, a final short a has fallen silent, so that the above word is now pronounced nagar. Many familiar words pertaining to Indian religion have lost this final a: karm, dharm, yog, mandal, ved instead of karma, dharma, yoga, mandala, veda, Final short a may be retained, if reduced, in certain words, like vishva and suurya. Non-final short a may be pronounced or silent, depending on its phonetic environment and grammatical considerations. For example, lagnaa for laganaa, in which one short a remains and one has vanished. In fact, it is not always clear from the conventional spelling which short a's are affected, and this is one of the main dubieties of Hindi orthography. In some cases, so-called conjuncts are used when consonants are clustered without vowels, but usually this is an historical development, rather than a writer's option. It is usually said that Hindi has 11 vowels, but this is misleading from a phonetic standpoint. At any rate, using a sort of hybrid transcription, we have: a, aa, i, ii, u, uu, e, ai, o, au, ri. The doubled vowels are really neither double nor long, but I've called vowels 'long' or 'short' for simplicity's sake. This is just a transcriptional device. The vowels all vary from one another by quality. Each is pronounced approximately like the vowel in the American English word that follows it: a (but), aa (pot), i (bit), ii (beet). u (put). uu (boot), e (bait), ai (bank). o (boat), au (bought), ri (brig). The 'ri' is a fossil of an earlier syllabic r, and does not occur in a great number of words. Each of these vowels, except short a, if associated with a consonant and therefore superseding inherent short a, is represented by a vowel sign written above, below, left or right of the consonant. The most irritating feature of Hindi is that i is written on the left of the consonant that it follows pronunciation-wise, though Hindi writing goes left to right, like English. If you visit the page linked below, you will see, in an unfortunately cramped little table, the foregoing Hindi vowels. Note that, except for short a, there are two symbols for each vowel. The symbol in the lower row is the one that is used when the vowel is linked to the consonant preceding it in pronunciation. The upper symbol is used when a word or a syllable begins with a vowel. Remember that the inherent a is always potential, so if we use the lower i symbol with ka, we get ki, but if we use the upper symbol with ka, we get ka-i. Of course, short a itself has only one version, since it is the default vowel in any case. This table shows alternative transcriptions, one or the other agreeing with the transcriptions I have used. http://www.hindilearner.com/hindi_alphabet_vowels.html A superposed dot alone or dot in a semicircle is a sign of vowel nasality, like that of French or Polish. If the "nasalized vowel" precedes a plosive, it decomposes into an unnasalized vowel and a nasal consonant of the same point of articulation as the plosive. Otherwise, in certain contexts, it may be a genuine nasal vowel, not susceptible of decomposition. So it would be more accurate to say that Hindi has 20 vowels, not counting the ri-fossil. l A word-final "colon" denotes a pronounced short a followed by voiceless h, an heirloom found in words adopted from Sanskrit. Sometimes syllable-final r is treated as akin to vowels, with a special superscript hook pointing to the right. This also is very annoying, since it appears to the right of the consonant that it precedes in pronunciation. Here is a specimen page from Wikipedia: http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/गुरु_नानक The title reads: Guru Naanak (the first guru of the Sikh religion.) ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Visit my website here. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! 
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