Devanagari Lesson 3 Review

In this lesson you learned how vowel letters can change the sound of words. You learned two vowels, along with several new consonants.

Vowels

Devanagari vowel sounds can start a word or come elsewhere in the word.
Most Devanagari vowel letters have two forms:
- One form represents vowel sounds that begin a word.
- A second form, called the vowel's maatraa when they represent sounds that occur elsewhere in a word.
A maatraa changes the inherent, "a" sound of a consonant to another vowel sound.
Many Devanagari vowel maatraas are formed by removing the, "" part of the vowel character.
makes the "aa" sound at the beginning of a word, while its maatraa, , makes the, "aa" sound elsewhere in the word.
makes the "a" sound at the beginning of a word; it has no maatraa as such, although each consonant acts as if it is followed by the maatraa of , "a," if not followed by another vowel.

Consonants

makes the "pa" sound.
makes the "sa" sound.

Now read a short dialogue (which the same characters from Snell). The dialogue is the sameas in the previous lesson, except that our new letters have been added.

Note that some English speakers pronounce the English word, "a," as in, "a resume" as if it rhymed with, "hay." In the above sentence we use , "a," to represent this word, assuming that the pronunciation is the same as the first sound in, "above."