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chunk 91: lettergroups
List of lettergroups.
The
The
Letters are the things in the
Stops are the
alphabetical order
Serious are all
funny are
shorts are
longs are
Lengthen, shorten mean replace with long, short.
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A lettergroup, or
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(See
The letter
(1) aN'' usually means the six letters
(2) The
(Do not confuse this aN'' lettergroup with the taddhita affix aN.)
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By Adirantyena, the iN letters are all from
and of course
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Technical note. As the letter
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Or, in other words, the jhar are the jhay ( stops) and the zar (sibilants).
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Some people call these letters "semivowels". I like yaN better, it's shorter.
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These are mentioned at --
ekAco bazo bhaS jhaS-antasya s;dhvoH.
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The
These are mentioned at yaro 'nunAsike 'nunAsiko vA ff.
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The hal, a.k.a. consonants, are --
The sounds H and M are not in this list, but they are hal anyway by sthAnivad, because they always replace one of
The word halanta means "what ends in a hal".
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The five letters
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In other words, all letters are az except the thirteen khar.
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The compound ugit is a longhorn, and means "what has an uk as a label". It is used at ugidacA.
Rule zryukaH affects affixes that follow an uk letter.
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The zivasUtra, together with Adirantyena, say that these are ac --
and rule aNuditsa says that the
See also
This video isquite good --
Devanagari (Sanskrit) Pronunciation and Transliteration
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The word al (" letter", "sound") is a technical term of grammar. There are exactly forty-six al sounds, of which thirteen are ac ( vowels) and thirty-three are hal ( consonants).
The thirteen ac are --
and the thirty-tree hal are --
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Indian readers should be aware that the word "al" does not mean "akShara". According to the old grammarians, a word such as "kham" is made of three al, namely the sound
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and also
The aT' letters are mentioned at aT;ku;pv;AG;num;vyavAye. That rule mentions the aT' ku pu letters, which are all letters except
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The ik vowels are
(of those,
and
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You may call these thirteen " unvoiced consonants" if you like, but " khar" is shorter.
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The ak vowels are all vowels except the ec.
There are nine of them. They are
The five short vowels, namely
and the four long vowels
The zivasUtra says that the ak letters are
A curiosity. No words of the real language have the sound of lengthened
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The ic letters are
They make kric work.
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The Rk vowels are
See also --
The
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Back to pronunciation of vowels .
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Some people call these four "diphthongs". That's a real bad idea, because
eG means
aic means
ec means
Pronouncing Sanskrit
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There are twenty stops. In alphabetical order they are --
They are called stops because they stop the flow of air completely.
They are also called
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Or expressed in another way, the Jay are the ku, cu, Tu, tu and pu.
In the zivasUtra, the twentyfive Jay start at
In alphabetical order they are arranged from the back of the mouth to the lips --
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The alphabetical order used in dictionaries starts with the vowels --
which is same as the zivasUtra except that
After that we have
then the twentyfive Jay in order from back of the mouth to the front --
And then the remaining eight consonants --
When sorting alphabetically, and the letter M is before a Jay, paper dictionaries place
You don't need to learn this alphabetical order until you need to use a dictionary arranged according to it. So as long as you keep to online dictionaries , yer cool, but the moment you want to use MMW's book on
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The twenty-four jhal letters (also called serious letters) are the twenty stops, from jha to
and the four zal, from
I call them serious because they are not funny.
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These nine consonants are properly called yam (by Adirantyena), but I like to call them funny, because they are sort of fluffy and vowellike (
The consonants that are not funny are serious.
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In other words, a valAdi starts with a consonant that is not
What is not a valAdi starts with
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The val are all the hal except
What is not a val is a yac (either
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The ral letters are all the hal except
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The zar are the three sounds
These three are also called sibilants. Which is HiFaLatin for "whistlies" or "hissies".
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You might call these "voiced unaspirated stops". But jaz is shorter. Well, come to think of it, even
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These ten letters are also called " voiced stops".
Of them, the jhaS are mahAprANa --
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These are also called " unvoiced stops".
Of them,
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These haz come in three groups --
(A) The
(C) The ten jhaz (aka voiced stops")
The haz are also called " voiced consonants".
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The taG are the nine affixes of list tiptas from ta to
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There are five short vowels --
and eight long vowels --
See UkAlojjhra.
Tradition says that longs take twice as much time to say as the shorts. See mAtrA.
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There are five short vowels --
and eight long vowels --
See UkAlojjhra.
Tradition says that longs take twice as much time to say as the shorts. See mAtrA.
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Sometimes I use the words " lengthen" and " shorten" in the translation of a rule, to translate the "replace with long" or "replace with short" of the original rule.
As "shorten" means "replace with short", shortening
These words only affect vowels.
Examples --
shortening
shortening
shortening the
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chunk 91: lettergroups