Vowels

The vowels of the devanagari script with their word-initial devanagari symbol, diacritical mark with the consonant प् (/ p /), pronunciation (of the vowel alone and of / p /+vowel) in IPA, equivalent in IAST and ITRANS and (approximate) equivalents in Standard English are listed below:

Additional points:

• There are some additional vowels traditionally listed in the Sanskrit/Hindi alphabet. They are :
  • अं (called anusvāra), pronounced as / əŋ / (IAST: ṃ). Its diacritic (the dot above) is used both for nasalizing the vowel in the syllable and for the sound of a vowel-like / n / or / m /. (पं).
  • अः (called visarga), pronounced as / əh / (IAST: ḥ). Actually it is a consonant.
  • The diacritic ँ (called chandrabindu), not listed in the alphabet, is used interchangeably with the anusvāra to indicate nasalization of the vowel (पँ).
• If a lonely consonant needs to be written without any following vowel, it is given a halanta/virāma diacritic below (प्).
• The vowel / ɑː / in Sanskrit is more central and less back than in English. The schwa (/ ə /) is always short in Sanskrit.
• All vowels in Hindi, short or long, can be nasalized. All vowels can have acute, grave or circumflex pitch accent (in Vedic Sanskrit).
• In Hindi, ऋ is pronounced as / ri /. The last three vowels in the table above do not occur in Hindi at all.
• Note that the ancient Sanskrit grammarians have classified the vowel system as velars, retroflexes, palatals and plosives rather than as back, central and mid vowels. Hence ए and ओ are classified respectively as palato-velar (a+i) labio-velar (a+u) vowels respectively. But the grammarians have classified them as diphthongs and in prosody, each is given two mātrās. This does not necessarily mean that they are proper diphthongs, but neither excludes the possibility that they could have been proper diphthongs at a very ancient stage. These vowels are pronounced as long / e / and / o / respectively by learned Sanskrit Brahmins and priests of today. Other than the "four" diphthongs, Sanskrit usually disallows any other diphthongs—vowels in succession, if occur, are converted to semivowels according to predetermined rules.
• In the devanagari script used for Sanskrit, whenever a consonant in a word-ending position is without any virāma (ie, freely standing in the orthography: प as opposed to प्), the neutral vowel schwa (/ ə /) is automatically associated with it—this is of course true for the consonant to be in any position in the word. Word-ending schwa is always short. But the IAST a appended to the end of masculine noun words rather confuses the foreigners to pronounce it as / ɑː /—this makes the masculine Sanskrit/Hindi words sound like feminine! e.g., shiva must be pronounced as / ʃivə / and not as / ʃivɑː /.
• In Sanskrit and in some other dialects of Hindi (as well as in a few words in Standard Hindi), the vowel ऐ is pronounced as a diphthong / əi / or / ai / rather than / e: /. Similarly, the vowel औ is pronounced in some words as the diphthong / əu / or / au / rather than / ɔ: /. Other than these, Hindi does not have true diphthongs—two vowels might occur sequentially but then they are pronounced as two syllables (a glide might come in between while speaking). Otherwise
  
  
  
  in Standard Hindi, ऐ (ai) is long near-open front unrounded vowel: / æ / as a in cat; औ (au) is long open-mid back rounded vowel: / ɔː / as au in caught.
• The short open-mid front unrounded vowel (/ ɛ /: as e in get), does not have any symbol or diacritic in devanagari script. It occurs only as an allophonic variant of schwa (in place word-middle a, determined only by convention) in certain words in the Standard kharoboli dialect of Hindi. E.g., the orthography dictates that रहना must be pronounced as / rəhənα: /, but it is actually pronounced as / rɛhnα: /. It also occurs in loanwords from English, where it might be accorded a new vowel symbol of ऍ (chandra: पॅ). The short open-mid back rounded vowel (/ ɔ /: as o in hot), does not exist in Hindi at all, other than for English loanwords. In orthography, a new symbol has been invented for it: ऑ (पॉ).
• Unicode transliteration scheme differs for some characters from IAST scheme. The differences are: ā→aa, ī→ii, ū→uu, ṛ→rr, ḹ→ll.

Consonants

The table below shows the traditional listing of the Sanskrit consonants with the (nearest) equivalents in English/Spanish. The parentheses give the corresponding transliteration (of the consonant alone) in IAST scheme—the most popular one. Each consonant shown below is deemed to be followed by the neutral vowel schwa (/ ə /), and is named in the table as such.

At the end of the traditional table of alphabets, three cosonantal clusters are also added: क्ष /kʃə/ (in Hindi), त्र /t̪rə/ and ज्ञ /gjə/ (in Hindi). Other than these, sounds borrowed from the other languages like Persian and Arabic are written with a dot (bindu or nukta) beneath the nearest approximate alphabet. They are not included in the traditional listing. Many native Hindi speakers, especially those who come from rural backgrounds and do not speak really good khariboli or Urdu, confused these sounds (except /ɽ/ and /ɽ^ɦ/) and pronounce them as the nearest equivalents in Sanskritized Hindi (listed in column 4). These are:

Additional points:

• The "r" of Sanskrit is as in Standard American English. In modern Sanskrit pronunciation, the vowel "ṛ" is pronounced as / ri /. In Hindi, / r / is as pronounced in Spanish perro.
• There is no retroflex flap in Sanskrit. In modern Hindi and other Indo-Aryan languages, they have sprung up as the allophonic flap variants of Sanskrit's simple voiced retroflex plosives. The / ɳ / (ṇ or ण) in Sanskrit is not a flap but a simple nasal stop, although it is pronounced by modern pundits while chanting as a nasal variant of the voiced retroflex flap. Hindi has two proper retroflex flaps.
• Aspiration is actually a puff of breath that may follow a plosive consonant. English speakers could try pronouncing the words "kite", "take", "chip" and "pat" with a greater-than-usual puff of breath after the first consonant. The corresponding unaspirated plosives must be pronounced with no significant puff of breath at all.
• For practicing the voiced aspirates, one could try: "drag him", "said him", "enrage him", "grab him". The voiced aspirated plosives (also called as murmur stops) are extremely important and frequent in Sanskrit. Sanskrit (and its daughters) is the only language that has faithfully preserved these original Proto-Indo-European stops.
• The dental consonants in Sanskrit are as in Spanish or French. They can be pronounced by pronouncing / t / and / d / (of English) by pressing the tip of the tongue against the back of the teeth rather than against the back of the alveolar ridge as done by English speakers. The normal "t" and "d" in IAST transliteration are the dental stops; and they occur much, much more frequently than the retroflex stops.
• The retroflex consonants are the most difficult to pronounce. They are pronounced by curling the tongue such that its tip touches the roof of the mouth, like how the Americans pronounce their "r". The retroflex flaps are pronounced in a similar way, by bringing the tongue's tip to the roof of the mouth and giving it a sharp flap downwards. However, bringing the tip of the tongue a bit above the normal alveolar ridge would also work fine. The normal alveolar plosives of English / t / and / d / do not exist as such in Sanskrit/Hindi.
• The palatal plosives of Sanskrit/Hindi do not have a sharp frictional sound following them, as what happend in English chips and jam. These are more of pure plosives than affricates.
• Sanskrit/Hindi has no / v /. Its nearest equivalent is / ʋ /, which is very close to / v /, but does not a friction or buzzing sound associated with it. But in consonant clusters, this may allophonically change to / w /.
• The palatal sibilant of Sanskrit (IAST: ś) is very close to like the English sh in ship (although the Sanskrit phoneme is the voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative / ɕ /) while the English phoneme is the voiceless postalveolar fricative / ʃ / with lip rounding). Today, speakers of Sanskrit vary the palatal fricative from / ɕ / to / ʃ /. In Hindi, it is always pronounced as in ship.
• The retroflex sibilant / ʂ / is pronounced like / ʃ /, but with the tongue curled upwards towards the roof of the mouth. In Mādhyandini branch of Yajurveda, this phoneme is allowed to be pronounced at certain places as / kh /. In Hindi, this is pronounced as the English sh in ship.
• The Sanskrit / ɦ / is a voiced allophone of the normal h. In Hindi, it is pronounced as in home.

Another consonant is ळ is not used in Hindi. It is retroflex, and used in Vedic Sanskrit, and Marathi.

Ligatures

Consonant clusters of two or more phonemes are realized by combining the aksharas into ligatures. Typically, the preceding akshara loses its vertical stroke and is put in direct contact with the succeeding one. In cases of aksharas that do not have vertical strokes in their independent form, the following aksharas are usually placed underneath the preceding one. In some cases, the ligatures take forms not readily recognizable as composed of the individual aksharas (e.g. ). Consonant clusters involving are treated as a special case: preceding is realized as a right-facing hook above the following akshara, and following <-r> appears as a slanted stroke attached to the vertical stroke of the preceding akshara. Similarly for a cluster /XYZa/, both X and Y would be "halved". There are many variants for this consonant cluster writing in devanagari script. The most common system is shown below for the traditional table. Here the second vowel is taken to be /n/, followed by the schwa.

Accent marks

Vedic Sanskrit is written with pitch accent marks, svarita and udatta.

Numerals

See also Indian numerals.

See also: Brahmi numerals, Hindu-Arabic numeral system.

Devanagari in Unicode

The Unicode range for Devanagari is U+0900 . U+097F.Gray blocks indicate characters that are undefined.

Devanagari Keyboard Layouts

INSCRIPT

Typewriter

Phonetic

See

Software

• Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging - Macintosh
• Graphite - open source (SIL)
• Pango - open source (Gnome)
• Uniscribe - Windows
• WorldScript - Macintosh, replaced by the Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging, mentioned above

Electronic resources

• , a site by the Indian National Centre for Software Technology

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