2.1 Discussion

As mentioned in the introduction, Hindi is an abugida. In practice, what this means is that every consonant has an inherent vowel, short a, which sounds like the a in the English word sofa, or the u in the English word but. There are 11 vowel letters in Hindi (स्वर svar), and they each have two forms: an independent form, and a dependent/diacritic form or मात्रा mātrā. The independent form of the vowel is used:

1. a) when a vowel is a whole word on its own
2. b) when a word begins with a vowel
3. c) when a vowel follows another vowel (more on this later)

The mātrā appends to a given consonant to create a single syllable with the shape consonant+vowel. This mātrā may attach to the consonant character at the top, bottom, left, or right side. Here each box represents a syllable unit, and inside it the consonant (c) and vowel (v) combination can be arranged in any of these ways:

A word is made up of a string of boxes, and within those boxes the consonant is always pronounced first, no matter what the position of the mātrā. This textbook introduces the vowels gradually; we will start with the first four Hindi vowels to illustrate how consonants and mātrās combine.

Devanāgarī character + stroke order			Transliteration	IPA symbol	Sounds like	Mātrā	Example with क
			a	ə	short a as in sofa or apart	none, inherent vowel	क
click to hear
			ā	aː	long a as in park	ा	का
click to hear
			i	ɪ	short i as in bit	ि	कि
click to hear
			ī	iː	long ee as in teeth	ी	की
click to hear

While the mātrās for ā and ī come after the consonant (to its right, because Devanāgarī is read left to right like English), the mātrā for इ actually is written before (to the left); however as described above, this doesn’t mean that the vowel sound is written first. Within a syllable the consonant is always pronounced first no matter how the mātrā is positioned. So कि is not pronounced ik, but rather ki. Also, note that the basic shape of the letters इ and ई is the same “s”-like shape that we saw in the velar nasal ङ ṅ. This shape forms the basis for a few more letters moving forward.

For another example of how consonants and vowels work in Devanāgarī, consider the word īkh (sugarcane). Because the word begins with a vowel, we must use the independent form of ई and then add ख: ईख. (Remember that typically in Hindi inherent vowels are not pronounced at the end of words.) However, if we wanted to write khī, खई would be incorrect; this is read with the inherent vowel as khaī. Here we need the mātrā for ई, which is appended to the ख; खी is the correct spelling for khī.