Candrabindu

Candrabindu (the first letter makes the same sound as, "champion") is a sign written above a vowel to indicate that the vowel is nasalized (Snell, 11).

When discussing the consonants , "ma," and , "na," I stressed the fact that these letters are always nasal — to pronounce these two letters, you must force air up through the nose.

Most of the Devanagari vowels can either be nasalized or unnasalized. To see the difference, first say the English word, "hawk." Now, say the English word, "honk." Say them together: "hawk honk." The difference is that in the first word, "hawk," virtually no air is forced up through the nose. However, with, "honk," you instinctively allow much of the breath to pass through your nasal cavities. Thus, the "aa" sound in, "honk" is nasalized, while it is not in, "hawk."

Don't think that nasalization simply means the presence of the letter, "n," because the vowel in "honk" is nasalized without pronouncing the "n" at all. I simply provide the word for you to practice making a nasalized, "aa" sound. In fact, you should be able to pronounce the first part of "honk" withouth pronouncing "nk" at all (that is, without your tongue ever touching the top of your mouth) and still be able to hear the difference between the sounds of the nasalized and unnasalized vowel sound. A nasalized vowel does not mean that you end it by making the English, "n" sound with your tongue.

A nasalized vowel, then, sounds exactly like the normal vowel except that air is forced through the nose. To indicate a nasalized vowel, the sign , or candrabindu is placed above the horizontal line from which the vowel "hangs." Thus, if the vowel of our two English words were to be transliterated into Hindi, the words would appear as "hk" and "h aa nasal nk," which means that the maatraa , "aa," has been nasalized by adding a candrabindu, making .

If the letter above which the candrabindu is placed already has marks above its horizontal line, a modified form of candrabindu is used: , a single dot. For example, to show the nasalized form of the letter , "au," we would add a single dot above the horizontal line, creating au nasal . Either form of candrabindu means the same thing: the vowel is pronounced by forcing the breath through the nose.

In this tutorial, I have chosen to indicate vowels that have cadrabindu by using capital letters. There are several common ways to indicate nasalized vowels, including the use of a tilde or a dot, but I have chosen capital letters because they are easiest to implement on a wide variety of platforms on the World-Wide-Web. Thus, we will transliterate as "aa" and aa nasal as "AA."

Remember, then, that in these tutorials a capital English vowel means that the vowel should be nasalized.