Unpronounced Vowels

We know now that, in general, consonants that fall in the middle of a word and are not followed by vowels produce an inherent a sound. You have just learned about conjuncts, which remove the a sound by combining two consonant letters together. As with any language, there are exceptions, but luckily in the Nagari script there are few. This is one of them.

Sometimes two consonants are side-by-side in a word, but still do not produce an, a sound, even though they do not use their conjunct form. Most of the time, you will find that this occurs under the following conditions (Snell, 17).

  1. The word contains three or more letters.
  2. The last letter is an actual vowel letter; in other words, the word ends in a vowel other than the inherent a.

The first rule makes it clear that we never have to worry about unpronounced vowels in a word made up of two consonants.

The second rule says that we never have to worry about unpronounced vowels in a word that ends in a consonant.

For an example, let's look at the word Devanagari. This word contains three or more consonants, and it explicitly ends in a vowel other than the inherent, a. Sure enough, one of the inherent a sounds is silent: the one between the g and the r. This explains why, Devanagari is pronounced like nagri instead of nagari.

As I stated, this is one of the few pronunciation exceptions in Devanagari, so don't let it bother you too much. It pretty much follows the specific rules, outlined above. As you read more Hindi you'll begin to naturally recognize when the inherent a sound should not be pronounced.

Summary

When a word has three or more syllables, and contains the inherent a sound, just check to see if it ends in a vowel letter. If so, you might not pronounce the inherent a that is found in the middle of the word.

Of course, if there is no inherent a in the word in the first place (that is, every syllable has another vowel besides a), there are no silent vowels, because the inherent a sound is the only one that is ever unpronounced.