#I'm not 100% sure these are the actual syllables but hey the number checks out

[twilit-tragedy]

Yesterday, I geeked out in front of everyone about etymology, Irish initial mutations, the evolution of Romance languages from Latin, etc., in the middle of the workday. Assigned Languages Nerd at Coffee Break 😅 Today, because I am normal, I got home and decided to check if I still knew how to count syllables in a poem and if the Portuguese rules also apply to Latin. Behold:

It was this or reading papers about TCR stimulation, and I've already hit my STEM limit for the day, I guess. Why can't my thesis hold my attention like this, huh? Why is the world unfair?

[hindisoup]

So I decided I'm going to start a new post series (a bit like 100 days of productivity but this is hopefully not going to take 100 days and I am not going to post daily):

Hindi script

And what I'm going to do, is introduce each vowel and consonant, in (mostly) alphabetical order, including the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) and IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration) using my grammar books and Wikipedia as my primary sources.

For a person growing up in a country and continent where the majority of languages are written in Latin alphabet, wrapping my head around Devanagari didn't happen overnight. I started seriously practising the reading and writing Devanagari about 2-3 years ago and currently, I consider myself somewhat fluent, if maybe a bit slow-ish reader especially with new words - in case the font type is quite standard (miss me with those fancy movie headline or roadside advertisement fonts at this point, please). And here I mean fluency in technical ability to decipher what sounds each letter corresponds to, and not fluency in the language per se.

And still, I still occasionally confuse letters like घ and ध, or ई and र्ड or even न and ग when I'm tired or distracted enough, which to a native Hindi speaker may seem ridiculous. But I have really grown to love this script, it's beauty and logic (the two words I seem to mention each time I speak of my love for Hindi). So, please hang on and consider this series as my love poem for Hindi script. Here we go:

अ is the first letter of the Hindi script and the first of 14 vowels*. When writing words, it is inherent in consonants, so it doesn't have a distinct mātrā, ie. a short form. Hindi has a phonological contrast between short and long vowels and अ is a short vowel. In IPA it's represented by the mid-central vowel sign ə, also called schwa.

*We can disagree on the number of vowels later, bear with me.

There also exists a so-called classical or Uttara Devanagari variant of अ usually found in older texts (even in my Modern Standard Hindi textbook printed in 1994 so not that ancient) which looks like this:

Five words beginning with अ:

अक्षर [akṣar] - letter, syllable (masculine) अक्सर [aksar]- often (adverb) अगला [aglā] - next (adjective) अब [ab] - now (adverb) अरे [are] - hey (interjection)

Although most of the time Hindi letters are pronounced as they are written and there are no silent letters, the inherent अ has some exceptions. For example, it's usually not pronounced at the end of the word, except when the word ends in a conjunct consonant (उम्र [umra], छात्र [chātra]).

Sometimes, like in अगला or करना [karnā] the inherent vowel sound becomes suppressed even if the consonants are written separately. This usually happens in the second syllable in words where the third syllable has a mātrā attached to it (like ा in the two words just mentioned) or is followed by a fourth syllable (compare for example खबर [khabar] and घबराना [ghabrānā]).

The presence of the consonant ह can also alter the way the inherent अ behaves - if ह appears to be in the middle of two inherent अ-sounds, they are actually pronounced more like a short ए-sounds: पहला (more like [pehlā] than [pahlā]), बहन (more like [behen] than [bahan]), or महल (more like [mehel] than [mahal]).

And when there's a rounded vowel sound on either side of the ह, the inherent अ sounds more like a short ओ-sound, like in the word बहुत (more like [bohut] than [bahut]).

I'm sure there are plenty of books describing the linguistics and rules behind this, but you can learn a lot about these exceptions just by carefully listening to native speakers. Even Google Translate's text to speech robot voice is (maybe not flawless, but) a good place to start to check these things out when you encounter a new word if you don't have a native speaker at hand.