•Devanagari is phonetic. Each letter in the Hindi script has a unique sound that it makes. •Letters have no names like English letters. They are called by the sound they make, along with the sound, "a" as in "majority." •If you are refer to letter by itself, you can add "kar" (as in the English, "car") to the end. •Devanagari is a syllabary. Each letter makes up a syllable of the word. •Devanagari is written from left to right, with no uppercase or lowercase letters. So don't be confused by upper/lower cases in certain transliterations. Start with THE कRAZY कAT कAUGHT THE SकARED MOUSE THE KRAZY KAT KAUGHT THE SKARED MOUSE or THE CRAZY CAT CAUGHT THE SCARED MOUSE क is the first consonant and the first of the क-group of five sounds, which are produced by placing the toungue in ONE location, passing air differently. Same for next 4 groups.
I've been told that the accent falls on the third syllable in the name Devanagari and that the other two A's are almost completely elided. So it sounds more like dayv-NA-gri, only three syllables. Is this approximately correct in most Indian languages, or perhaps in Sanskrit pronunciation? Many of the other writing systems of southern and eastern Asia are derivations from Devanagari, including Punjabi and even languages of other families, such as Mongolic and Austro-Asiatic. The technical term for writing systems like Devanagari is an abugida rather than an alphabet. In an alphabet, in most cases each letter represents only a single phoneme. (English and French really push that limit but most of the European languages have more precise sound-to-letter correspondence.) In an abugida, each letter represents a combination of one consonant and (optionally in some languages) one vowel. Unlike the Japanese, Cherokee and other syllabaries, in which each symbol is unrelated to any other, an abugida has a paradigm for logically combining symbolic elements that consistently represent a specific consonant or vowel, so learning and interpreting text is not as difficult as Japanese hiragana and katakana syllables. The other widespread type of phonetic writing is the abjad. An abjad only has symbols for consonants; vowels are not recorded. Hebrew and Arabic are the most well-known abjads, but most of the Afro-Asiatic languages use them. The reason for this explains the unique nature of the abjad. In the Afro-Asiatic language family (which includes the Semitic as well as the Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian and Omotic branches) vowels are not phonemic. You can write a word using only the consonants, and everyone will know which one you mean, unlike English where bad bud bade bed bid bead bawd and bode are all different words. Abjads have been modified for use in non-Afroasiatic languages, such as Yiddish, in which vowels matter. As I understand it, even in Modern Arabic some of the symbols have been co-opted to stand for vowels, as has been done with the Hebrew abjad to turn it into a Yiddish alphabet.
Call it abiguda if you are more comfortable. In our language, Devanagari is a Lipi.लिपि Each swar aka consonant is a syllable. Please do not make the mistake of extrapolating roman script rules to Devanagari. This has five sounds, modified by what you call vowel extension. देवनागरी DEVANAAGARI. d is pitman thee. e following it is replaced by a symbol. a after v is for your convinience and is is silent [but mind you there are no silent letters in Hindi]. aa after n is replaced by a symbol, a after g is for you only, i after r is replaced by a symbol. A consonant can be used stand alone, like v here, no modifier symbol is needed. you wrote gri. No, it is gari, though a after is silent for you, does not exist for me as it does not combine with g to nodify the sounf of g. You have names for letters ie g is gee, spoken like jee. In devanagari, each symbol is stand alone, and is known by its symbolic sound. Once more. Each language is nearly unique, and so are there scripts. One theory for all is just not possible. Grammar is the heart and engine of Sanskrit and Hindi language. Urdu uses Hindi grammatical rules. Come on, even Persian grammar is heavily influenced by Sanskrit grammar. Other India languages have grammar derived from Sanskrit. Even Pali follows Sanskrit in grammar. Sanskrit has a unique feature. It has no dialects, while other Indian languages have. Even Hindi and have scores of them, changing every 10 miles. Lols. My mother is from a village just 9 miles away from mine. There beebee means sister, but here we use it for mother. But in general, beebee means respectful address for a woman, and includes mother, sister, daughter or any other woman, even a stranger BUT NOT wife. Why not have a look at Pitman? Can say pitman jay? Then Dev is theeplus ay as in jay. Piman has 40+ symbols, schema like Devanagari. PS: Have you heard? A significant break through ib deciphering the Indus script? It is by an Indian crypto analyst, who gave a go bye to the pre-existing notions and drew heavily from Indian languages. Language turns out to a Sanskrit like one!!
य and Y Fraggle, I can pretend that I can teach you Hindi prounciation. Best I can do is to try to sweep away some notions. य is a letter, which produces a sound very like, but not exactly, that of roman y. Remove to top bar, and य, curiously, looks like y, except that its left part is bent. That is why यOUR यARD HAS MANY यaMS, यET यOU यelp. Should be easy to pronounce and transcribe fully. Hope my mixing of letters helps to clarify. I am trying hard to mix them as seamlessly as possible. PS: Are you interested in Theory of Language to help you understand Sankrit better? Then Study the Gangesh Theory of linguist logic and grammar. Applicable to many languages, I assure you. As a linguist you should be interested.
You have to split up the word. Its of Sanskrit origin Deva [देव, devá]= of god, divine Naagari [from nagar, नगर, nágara]= city So literally it means "writing of divine cities" You can listen to the pronunciation here: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:en-us-Devanagari.ogg
R and र It is easy to remember, pal. Remove horizontal bar fron र and vertical from R. They sound similar too, mostly, but not exactly. But र is written in five different ways, depending on the emphasis etc. One is not important, being rarely used. So four are left. One is normal use, of course. Other three appear as diacritics.
Usually, I either quote the person I am responding to or indicate by including their username. I was simply adding to the discussion here. I think hearing how a word is spoken is more useful than describing it.
It was OK, but the audio was not good enough even for me judge if the prnounciation was OK. In fact I suspect it was pronounced by some western toungue. I just could not catch swars, if you know what I mean. That is why Fraggle will not benefit. You are right that descrption alone is enough. But for an audio back up, longer sentences are needed. Description can be useful, IMO. Like d in devanagari is not Pitman dee, but thee. He might write it as thevanagari, and someone will pronounce it as Pitman ith. Of course, there are problems. Only solution is to learn to speak and read.
Hello Fraggle. Should I continue??? I can give many more ... Only I have to think a lot, so I get across to you!
I think Sam is right. It's impossible to teach pronunciation beyond the minimal elementary level, using written symbols. Even if you use the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), you're warned that the sounds are not pronounced absolutely identically in two different languages. I can't satisfactorily describe how we pronounce "written" in American English. I'd have to listen to you try to duplicate it, and then spend a couple of days figuring out how to tell you to change it to be more like my way. This is what happens when you try to teach me how to pronounce sounds like DH and GH.
You are right. Two languages cannot be pronounced by a single rule set. Each has its own way of prounciation. So a person steeped in one language will always have problems with another. In reality, IPA is just theory, good for a few languages, but cannot be universal. You are wrong that I am trying to teach how to say dh and gh. I pointed out how we handle them. gh and dh sounds are so common in Indian language. But apparently you do not have these. So Ghandi is no surprise to me, not now. Tranasliteration of a language into a script other than its native set, is fraught with pitfalls. When translating, the dangers are even greater. Indian languages are a bit peculiar, specially Sanskrit. Many, many words cannot just be translated into English properly. Many times a parallel meaning does not exist. Dharma is one such word. It has many contextual connotations, none of which means Religion. Dukha is another. I have seen about 30 meanings in English, none of which captures the spirit or feeling of what it is. A major blunder is done by translating Sanskrit yajna as sacrifice. NO. It is WRONG. sacrifice raises the visions of animals being slaughtered, blood and gore. It is not that. Yajna is a ritual in which sacred fire is lit and oblations, no flesh or meat, are offered. Oblations are a mixture of many items like grains, butter dry nuts etc and fragrant substances. In another context it is undertaking a major cause, as a matter of dharma. In villages, the marriage of a girl is treated as such. All villagers take it as a yajna and join in in various ways. Even those families chip in who are not on talking terms. They come, do their part silently and leave. But I am glad that you have seen that pure liguist theories do not go very far. I once learnt technical German. Enough to read and understand technical papers. Useless for enjoying a short story. I learnt just a sub set.
I don't think Fraggle needs to know how to reproduce the exact swar [note] or patti [scale] for you or me to understand the word Devanaagari - or even swar[sup]2[/sup] [vowels] matra [vowel modifiers] or vyanjans [consonants]!
You are right. Not necessary for him to know all the nuiances. But by now he must be knowing how different two languages can be so that the same rules are not applicable. How Indian languages are so different that European language standards are invalid here. Hence search for proto IE is fruitless excercise.
I will explain. Search for a proto IE is based on the linguist similarities in various disparate languages. It tries to ignore vast disimilarities. The pet words are father, mother etc. But Indian languages have vast range of specific kinship names while English has only generic ones. Then there are a large number of common substances like water, earth, air, fire, planets names like sun and moon. How does aam, aamra, resemble mango? How does draksha resemble grape? Why is there no native Sanskrit name for apple, native of Caucasus region [next door to India, so to say].? Next. IE attempts to create a single set of rules for all the languages. How does Vedic Sanskrit relate to Latin or archaic Greek? Next. The sounds in Sanskrit are many more compared to many of the languages sought to be made part of IE. Lastly, my first two quotes amply support the third.
Linguistics is not static. Languages evolve all the time. I'm not an expert but I think you are taking a much too simplistic viewpoint. I agree that reductionism is not an ideal way to approach linguistics, ie the assumption that proximilty and prolixity breed dialects which have a common origin, but one cannot use word comparisons of the result of thousands of years of language evolution as a basis for suggesting that they have no common origin. Both models are equally fraught with error, in my opinion
Who translates Dharma as religion? When a parallel word does not exist then then I think the person translating should use the non English word with a footnote that defines the word. Some words may need a lengthy explanation. Especially Transliterating into English. English needs about 15 more letters just to be clear on the pronunciation of English words. Then to capture Hindi sounds English would have to add more letters. I don't have much of a clue how many letters would be needed. Some of the Hindi sounds are very hard for American ears to distinguish between but they change the meanings of the words.
