Lesson 11

BharatVani Transliteration System

BharatVani Online Hindi speaking and comprehension course for the students who wish to learn Hindi through the English medium of instructions, has been designed to use a method of transliteration which is slightly different from the methods commonly used in English literature about India and certain 'teach yourself' type books; and for a very good reason. Before we take you to our transliteration map, we strongly recommend that you read the following summary from our Guide to Pronunciation.

As we have said before, English is not a phonetic language. Its five vowels and 21 consonants are inadequate to represent the numerous sounds which Hindi speakers are able to produce. Moreover, we have to memorize spelling of each English word. Hindi, on the other hand, is a phonetic language. It is written as it is spoken. It has 12 vowels, 39 consonants and hundreds of compound letters. Understanding the usage of these extra alphabets is important for correctly pronouncing, reading and writing in Hindi.

The main function of vowels, in any language, is to modify the sounds of words in which they appear. This modification must be uniform and consistant under all situations. Hindi vowels perform this function more faithfully than their English counterparts.

The following chart shows five English vowels, the way they are pronounced, and three different ways they modify the pronunciation of words in which they appear:

Assuming the modification by English vowels used within the green words to be correct, at least five of the Hindi vowels are similar to English. For the sake of simplicity let us call them short vowels.

In addition to these short vowel sounds, Hindi has five long vowels which look and sound like:

Some Hindi teaching books put a ¯ line or ~ tilde sign over a vowel to show that it has a long sound. In every day use, though, putting a sign over a vowel becomes cumbersome. While writing a Hindi word in English, we have used the above spelling to show that a word has long sound. For example:

The last two vowels - nasal (A]) ‘.ng’ and compound (A:) ‘ah’ are not available in English. We have used 'a.n' and 'a.h' in transliteration. (Click here to review our Flash presentation and memorize the shapes and sounds of these vowels).

There are 39 consonants in Hindi. The first 25 can be placed in 5 groups of 5 consonants. Each group has: two primary (unaspirated), two secondary (aspirated) and one nasal sound consonant.

As all English consonants are pronounced without aspiration, some Hindi teaching books put a (.) dot or other sign under a consonant to show that it has an aspirated sound. In every day use, though, putting a sign under a consonant becomes cumbersome. While writing aspirated Hindi consonant in English, we have added ‘h’ to show that it has an aspirated sound. For example

Hindi has five nasal sounds which are easy to pronounce (as various forms of English 'n' and 'm'), but rather difficult to transliterate exactly in English. Most technical transliteration works use a tilde (~) over 'n' (ñ) to denote these sounds (some use a dot over or under 'n' to show the exact spelling). In the initial lessons we have arbiterarily spelled them as:

.gn (5th letter in group 1 - as n in ink)
.jn (5th letter in group 2 - as n in injury)
.dn (5th letter in group 3 - produced with tongue high on the palate)
n (5th letter in group 4 - ] as n in Nancy)
m (5th letter in group 5- ] as m in mother

In most cases the Hindi consonants have the same sound as in English, exceptions being:

1. g (g) is always hard as the first g in garage - second g is invariably pronounced as ‘j’ (j).
2. English consonants f, z, and q have no direct equivallent sound in Hindi. Many Hindi speakers pronounce them as pha, j and k (f has been used for Hindi sound of pha throughout this course). For the purpose of specialized literary works these have been adapted in Hindi by adding a dot (.) under f (pha), j (z) and k (q).
3. Hindi has soft ‘dental’ sounds of ‘ta’ and ‘da’ (as well as their aspirated versions ‘tha’ and ‘dha’). These four consonants are not available in English, but are used in Hindi very frequently. To highlight the different dental sounds these Hindi consonants have been spelled as:

tta (t), ttha (T), dda (d), ddha (D).

Some Hindi consonants have no equivallent English sounds available. For the purpose of BharatVani Hindi speaking course, we have assigned the following spelling to these consonants:

1. P = shha (an infrequently used cerebral sound almost similar to palatal S - Sha)
2. x = kshya (an infrequently used conjunct of k+sh+ya)
3. q = ttra (an infrequently used conjunct of dental t+ra)
4. Y = gya (an infrequently used conjunct of g+ya)
5. R = rda (slightly different from r as r+da)
6. ƒ = rdha (aspirated form of rda)
7. ¿ = rhi (an infrequently used variation of r+i)

(Click here to review our Flash presentation and memorize the shapes and sounds of these consonants).

To successfully transliterate Hindi words and sentences it is very important to remember that the sound of the vowel A (a) is always present in all Hindi consonants. Whenever a Hindi word requires a consonant without its inherent 'a' sound, it is written without its down-stroke (da.ndaa). It is popularly called half letter. For example p (pa) has an inherent 'a' sound but ¸ (p) does not have it. On a consonant which does not have the down-stroke, a 'hala.ntt' sign ( Ó ) is used to show that it does not have the inherent 'a' sound.

Printing industry and olden text has made use of the conjunct form of two or more consonants to show that the conjunct has its inherent 'a' vowel silenced. There are a number of ways in which any two consonants can combine to make a conjunct. However, about 60 per cent simply drop the down-stroke of the first member and join the remainder to the full form of the second member. The combined form of the remainder consonants depend upon their respective shapes. (Click here to review a list of conjuncts which you are likely to see in various lessons on this CD).

On the next page we have given our complete transliteration map. By following this map you will be able to write Hindi words and sentences in Roman script so that an IWrite32utility (included with this program) will be able to convert your text correctly using BharatVani Hindi fonts.

© 1996–1999 Shashi B. Advani, BharatVani Hindi Teacher