# Hindi: Devanagari letters क्ष , त्र , ज्ञ



## tarkshya

I have always wondered why does standard devanagri script provide following three letters - क्ष , त्र , ज्ञ. If my understanding is correct, क्ष can easily be written as क् ष, त्र as त् र and ज्ञ as ज् ञ .

Generally speaking, Devanagri is pretty scientific, which is evident in its ordering of letters. (Letters are arranged as per their place of articulation in the mouth). It also has a rich repository of vowels. It is somewhat odd for such a scientific script to have redundant letters.

Is it possible that these 3 letters really represent unique sounds? If not, what could be the possible reason to introduce redundant letters in the script?


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## mundiya

Someone might be able to provide you with a more definitive answer, but in my opinion it's more convenient (and aesthetically pleasing) to write क्ष, for example, than क् ष.


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## HZKhan

If I may ask, what is the correct pronounciation of the the letter ज्ञ? It is mostly transliterated as jña, but as far as I can tell, I've heard the word विज्ञान pronounced as 'vigyaan' by the native speakers of Hindi.


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## marrish

For I am not able to answer this question right away, I would like to note that those symbols are not strictly speaking 'letters' but 'ligatures' of letters (or symbols, which contain the inherent final schwa in the case of Marathi, Sanskrit and sometimes Hindi, I don't know anything about Nepalese). There are many more ligatures like this which are used for Sanskrit and the other languages but Sanskrit due to phonetical accurateness requires them in order to represent the correct pronunciation of a word. The word जानना which is Hindi for 'to know' would have to be written in Sanskrit as जान्ना or जान्ना . As can be seen, there are two variants of the ligature nn(a) as presented above. The same goes for "tra" त्र and the other form which can't be reproduced on this system but which includes the full त with an inside "r" symbol. These ligatures, as dozens of others, have been devised and evolved with time perhaps due to the factors of the means the scribes used to write them down, their acceptability and being distinguished from other shapes. I remember having learnt another form for "kSHa", Na, jha. These three, that is tra, jn'a and kSHa, have been retained in the computer systems because they are needed for New Indic languages in the loanwords from Sanskrit. I don't think Sanskrit sounds were ever written without these and other ligatures taking refuge in the viraama since the time Sanskrit writers adopted Devanagari script so that may be the reason for their retainment. When a loan-word is adopted into a language using the same script, the way of writing is likely to be followed.


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## littlepond

Pakistani Khan said:


> ... but as far as I can tell, I've heard the word विज्ञान pronounced as 'vigyaan' by the native speakers of Hindi.



That is the correct pronunciation in modern Hindi ("gya").


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## HZKhan

^^Thank you.


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## Gope

littlepond said:


> That is the correct pronunciation in modern Hindi ("gya").


If the word occurred in a Hindi text, it would be pronounced as vigyaan. But if it occurred in a Sanskrit text, the pronunciation of vigyaan would be pronouncing it incorrectly. Sanskrit pronunciation has to be accurate!


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## mundiya

Gope said:


> If the word occurred in a Hindi text, it would be pronounced as vigyaan. But if it occurred in a Sanskrit text, the pronunciation of vigyaan would be pronouncing it incorrectly. Sanskrit pronunciation has to be accurate!



In Hindi vigyān is correct, in Sanskrit vijñāna.  I don't know about Marathi, Nepali, and others.


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## gagun

I thought that *क्ष* is *qSHa* not kSHa



mundiya said:


> In Hindi vigyān is correct, in Sanskrit vijñāna.  I don't know about Marathi, Nepali, and others.



would you like to pronounce *ज्ञ(gNhya)* as "*gya"(ग्य)* in Hindi text?


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## Gope

gagun said:


> I thought that *क्ष* is *qSHa* not kSHa



It is not so.


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## mundiya

gagun said:


> would you like to pronounce *ज्ञ(gNhya)* as "*gya"(ग्य)* in Hindi text?



Yes, both are pronounced "*gya".*


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## tarkshya

Hi Marrish and Mudiya, I read both of your replies. You seem to be saying that these letters do not represent unique sounds, but are there because of convenience and aesthetic reason.

This is all well and good, and even I believe these letters are not really distinct phonemes, but simply short cuts for mixed consonants. But my question is, why are they present in the standard set of Devanagri alphabets. There are other shortcut ligatures which are used in Hindi/Marathi/Nepali etc, but they do not form part of the standard listing of Devaganri alphabets. (Example  श्र, which is basically श् + र). So is there anything special about these letters?


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## Dib

tarkshya said:


> But my question is, why are they present in the standard set of Devanagri alphabets. There are other shortcut ligatures which are used in Hindi/Marathi/Nepali etc, but they do not form part of the standard listing of Devaganri alphabets. (Example  श्र, which is basically श् + र). So is there anything special about these letters?



As far as I have noticed, in alphabetical orders in dictionaries, these ligatures are decomposed into their constituents, just like all other ligatures, and are not assigned any special ordering. So, what do you mean by them being considered "part of standard listing of Devanagari alphabets"? I guess, I am missing something here.


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## tonyspeed

tarkshya said:


> Hi Marrish and Mudiya, I read both of your replies. You seem to be saying that these letters do not represent unique sounds, but are there because of convenience and aesthetic reason.
> 
> This is all well and good, and even I believe these letters are not really distinct phonemes, but simply short cuts for mixed consonants. But my question is, why are they present in the standard set of Devanagri alphabets. There are other shortcut ligatures which are used in Hindi/Marathi/Nepali etc, but they do not form part of the standard listing of Devaganri alphabets. (Example  श्र, which is basically श् + र). So is there anything special about these letters?



More than likely two of them were created for Sanskrit as they are only found in Sanskrit-origin words. The "tra" doesn't even show up correctly on my computer...so I am unsure of what shape you have in mind.


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## tarkshya

Dib said:


> As far as I have noticed, in alphabetical orders in dictionaries, these ligatures are decomposed into their constituents, just like all other ligatures, and are not assigned any special ordering. So, what do you mean by them being considered "part of standard listing of Devanagari alphabets"? I guess, I am missing something here.



I just meant that when learning Hindi, the alphabets always formed the last 3 letters of alphabets. I am not sure if they are also present in other Indic scripts like Bengali, Gujarati etc or not.


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## Au101

I don't know anything about this, I really don't, but it could be that most ligatures in Devanagari are more or less obviously derived from their component characters according to regular rules. त्स, for example, is obviously त् + स, म्प is obviously म् + प. Even in the case of really complicated ligatures, like the famous ddhrya ligature, there is a fairly clear rhyme and reason to them and it's usually possible to deduce what they represent with practice. The same can obviously not really be said of क्ष, which does not seem based on क or ष at all and, if it is, then all remnants of them have become masked over time. The same can also pretty much be said of ज्ञ in some styles. Although the ज is usually apparent, the addition of ञ to it to form ज्ञ does not follow any standard rule or pattern.

It's much harder to make such a case for त्र though and, to be honest, I'm just speculating, it may have more to do with linguistic, historical or cultural reasons.

For example, I happen to know that in the Tamil script there are generally no ligatures. Sanskrit words are not as common in Tamil as most other South Asian languages and the Tamil language is very different from that of Sanskrit. Historically, the Tamils wrote Sanskrit with a separate script (called Grantha), from which the Tamil script seems to have derived. The Tamil script is very ill-suited to writing Sanskrit, but is well-adapted for literary, high-register Tamil. Thus the Tamil script was traditionally used only for the Tamil language, with Grantha being used for Sanskrit. However, in more recent history, people are preferring to write Sanskrit using the Tamil script and, also, many Tamil names are derived from Sanskrit and have Sanskrit sounds in them, so a handful of loan characters from Grantha are used more commonly these days. They also allow English to be written more faithfully in Tamil. Now, the point of this mini-lecture is that, in spite of this tendency towards using the Tamil script for Sanskrit, very few modifications have been made to the Tamil script to accommodate Sanskrit phonology and, as far as I know, compromises have to be relied upon, though I'm no expert. There is, however, one ligature - besides śrī which has its own unique ligature all to itself - and that is kṣa - the only ligature (except śrī) that I know of which is ever used in Tamil, even in writing Sanskrit. It functions as though it were a single character. (Both the śrī and kṣa ligatures are derived from Grantha, which does form ligatures as complex and rich as those of Devanagari - and as regular, too. In Grantha, the kṣa ligature is regularly formed and not unique).


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## Au101

On the pronunciation of jña in Sanskrit:

The two most common pronunciations that I've met are [ʒɲa] and [gna]. This source recommends (I think it does anyway, it doesn't use the IPA!) [ʒɲa], which seems like a plausible rendering and it explains it, I think, quite nicely. [gna] (like ग्न) is also very common and *may* (though it's been far too long for me to be able to say so with any sort of authority) reflect the historical origins of ज. Mind you [gna] could just be the result of Sanskrit pronounced with an excessively English accent, but it certainly sounded like [gna] to me!


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## marrish

Re. tra and ksha: they don't appear so mysterious either as especially in the older version of ksha which I can't reproduce here with Unicode and in fact I can't reproduce anything in this way to illustrate my point and while lengthy and inaccurate descriptions of shapes would be counterproductive,I'm sharing here what appears to my mind (as in Urdu there are different styles of calligraphy and certain shortcuts and simplifications!) It has always looked like it was the reason for the sake of ease in writing for the scribes.


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## Au101

marrish said:


> Re. tra and ksha: they don't appear so mysterious either as especially in the older version of ksha which I can't reproduce here with Unicode and in fact I can't reproduce anything in this way to illustrate my point and while lengthy and inaccurate descriptions of shapes would be counterproductive,I'm sharing here what appears to my mind (as in Urdu there are different styles of calligraphy and certain shortcuts and simplifications!) It has always looked like it was the reason for the sake of ease in writing for the scribes.
> 
> View attachment 14979



That's a very good point, looking at that makes it easy to see how the ligature could have arisen. I would maintain, though, that to anybody newly learning Devanagari, क्ष would surely stick out as an odd one, it's very hard to work out, naïvely, where it comes from. I would say it's definitely an exception, like learning irregular verbs, you kinda have to learn क्ष on its own, you can't really generate it from regular rules.

I guess it's a bit like the symbol & in Roman Script. Historically, it is a ligature of et (the Latin for and) and in some styles it still looks a bit like a ligature of e and t. However, it was a long time before I learnt where it came from and, though I can see how it came about, I don't really see any traces of et in the symbol &. I just have to think of it separately. The same isn't true for the much-less-used æ and œ ligatures, both of which are now very rare, but can be found.


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## marrish

I can only offer my apologies because I wrote it in haste. I am with you about the ligature "and" because it is so close to the one of Nagari. Au101, the coming days some questions about Sanskrit might be coming because I will have a rehearsal about them within two weeks so but I was totally detached from this stuff so I will work intensively.


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## Au101

No I don't think you've got anything to apologise for. In fact, I'd never even considered how क्ष could've come about and you offered an extremely credible derivation. 

Best of luck, marrish!


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## Dib

tarkshya said:


> I just meant that when learning Hindi, the alphabets always formed the last 3 letters of alphabets. I am not sure if they are also present in other Indic scripts like Bengali, Gujarati etc or not.



Ok, I see. As far as Bengali script is concerned, "tr" and "jñ" are somewhat irregular, but "kSh" is very irregular - that much is same with Devanagari. However, they are not counted as part of the modern alphabet. However, your statement reminded me that I had read somewhere that kSh (and probably jñ - don't remember exactly) were once counted part of the alphabet. But they lost that status after a reformation - probably by Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar (again, speaking from a somewhat hazy memory).

Similarly, following the reformation, anusvAra, visarga and chandrabindu are not counted among vowels in Bengali alphabet teaching, but are placed at the end of the consonants (following the dotted D, Dh for R, Rh and the uniquely Bengali dotted y), though chandrabindu is strictly speaking a diacritic and not a consonant. This re-arrangement of the alphabet is, however, only inconsistently followed by dictionaries, if at all.


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## kartheeque

tarkshya said:


> I have always wondered why does standard devanagri script provide following three letters - क्ष , त्र , ज्ञ. If my understanding is correct, क्ष can easily be written as क् ष, त्र as त् र and ज्ञ as ज् ञ .
> 
> Generally speaking, Devanagri is pretty scientific, which is evident in its ordering of letters. (Letters are arranged as per their place of articulation in the mouth). It also has a rich repository of vowels. It is somewhat odd for such a scientific script to have redundant letters.
> 
> Is it possible that these 3 letters really represent unique sounds? If not, what could be the possible reason to introduce redundant letters in the script?



They are listed separately as the conjunct forms cannot be interpreted as a combination of its constituent sounds (त्र probably can be). Also, hindi may not employ all the devanagari conjuncts and these maybe the most common ones - another reason for their listing out separately. But as mentioned before, dictionaries dont treat them as separate letters for listing out words.


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## Englishmypassion

'Jna' is Sanskrit and tatsam Hindi, 'gya' is tadbhav Hindi. In Hindi the usual pronunciation has been 'gya' for hundreds of years. In Gujarati also it is pronounced 'jna' (I read it in a dictionary).


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## kephalian

Pakistani Khan said:


> If I may ask, what is the correct pronounciation of the the letter ज्ञ? It is mostly transliterated as jña, but as far as I can tell, I've heard the word विज्ञान pronounced as 'vigyaan' by the native speakers of Hindi.


There is a short na in between "Vingyaan". Na with a sukoon.


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## marrish

kephalian said:


> There is a short na in between "Vingyaan". Na with a sukoon.


This is new to me. Which language are you talking about?

I can add to Englishmypassion that in Marathi which I love the most, it is pronounced somewhat as _dn'ya_. With a palatal n as in Tamil and Skrt and Slavic languages. I am curious how it is delivered in Bengali or in Bengali Sanskrit pronunciation (Dib babu jaan?)


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## Dib

marrish said:


> I am curious how it is delivered in Bengali or in Bengali Sanskrit pronunciation (Dib babu jaan?)



In Bengali it is essentially "g[y]~", pretty similar to Hindi, but there are important differences in the surface realization. By ~ I mean that the following vowel is nasalized (this is probably what kephalian also meant by his/her "na with a sukoon"), except that the nasalization contrast in vowels is neutralized around nasal consonants in Bengali. So, in case of विज्ञान/বিজ্ঞান this nasalization is not salient, as it occurs before a nasal consonant, "n".

The [y] is more complicated, as Bengali doesn't really have a phonemic "y". But Bengali treats this phantom "y" in the same way as it treats other real "y"-s in Sanskrit words in comparable environments, i.e. it geminates the preceding consonant if possible, and sometimes (regularly, if in the first syllable of the word, sporadically otherwise) colours a following "a" (corresponding to long "aa" of Sanskrit) into "æ", and the "y" itself is dropped. The "Consonant+y" also normally colours a preceding "ɔ" - corresponding to a Sanskrit short "a" - to an "o" (subject to certain exceptions ), but I could not find any nontrivial example with ज्ञ/জ্ঞ, where such a situation occurs.

Basic examples (I'll show vowel nasalization by putting ~ BEFORE the corresponding vowel to remain consistent with the description above):
বিজ্ঞ/विज्ञ (wise, erudite - in Bengali this word is very often sarcastic) => bigg~o [y dropped. g geminated.]
জ্ঞান/ज्ञान (knowledge) => g(~)æn [No gemination at the start. a > æ in the first syllable. Nasalization neutralized before n.]

More complicated examples:
*বিজ্ঞান/विज्ञान (science) => bigg(~)an or bigg(~)æn* [gemination. a>æ sporadic in non-first syllable. nasalization neutralized.]
অজ্ঞ/अज्ञ (ignorant) => ɔgg~o   [There is no colouring of ɔ > o in the first syllable, as the negative/privative prefix ɔ- is usually resistant to it.]
প্রজ্ঞা/प्रज्ञा (profound wisdom) => progg~a [There is a seeming ɔ > o shift in the first syllable, but it is a trivial example, as almost all morphemes ending in ɔ (i.e. Sanskrit short "a") turns it into an o if not dropped outright. It is the same reason why "bigg~o" and "ɔgg~o" end in o, and not ɔ]


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