# Devanagari: Inherent vowels... not so inherent?



## Delvo

I only recently began to learn how to use Devanāgarī, and have run into a catch that doesn't seem to fit with the basic way it's usually said to work.

I just saw another thread in this forum talking about the word "माफ़", which was transliterated "māf" with no argument from anyone. Why isn't it "māfa", or, if "māf" more accurately reflects how it's said, why isn't the native spelling "माफ़्"?

Also, in the same thread, somebody included a link to this site, where this page contains this quote:





> the word "देवनागरी" can be transliterated as "Devanagari", "Devnagri" or "Devnagari". A good back-transliteration tool will convert all of these transliterations to "देवनागरी".


No examples are given of a letter without special vowel marks (where I would have expected the inherent "a" to always be there) which _can't_ have its inherent vowel dropped. What makes dropping the inherent vowel acceptable, at least sometimes? Is that always the case, or does it depend on circumstances? Is the inherent "a" pronounced so extremely short that it's generally similar in sound to a lack of a vowel anyway? Is the idea that it's acceptable to ever drop them at all just a side-effect of transliterating without a length indicator for the long vowel in "ना" (naa, nā)?


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## Wolverine9

Your questions will be answered if you read about schwa deletion.


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## Dib

Devanagari works completely regularly only for the orthography of Sanskrit, inherent vowel and all. For Hindi and other languages, there are some irregularities, including the issue of schwa deletion, you are facing here.


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## Delvo

Devanāgarī main page:





> A final consonant is marked with the diacritic ्, called the _virāma_ in Sanskrit, _halant_ in Hindi, and occasionally a "killer stroke" in English. This cancels the inherent vowel



Schwa deletion page:





> *Schwa deletion in Hindi*
> 
> Although the Devanagari script is used as a standard to write modern Hindi, the schwa ('ə') implicit in each consonant of the script is "obligatorily deleted" at the end of words...





I suppose that must mean Hindi has some words where it's deleted by default, and some where it isn't (but can be if you use a halant). Is there no mark like the opposite of halant, to make sure people _don't_ delete when the otherwise _would_?

Since the conventional rules on deletion are different in different languages, does this mean that if people speaking any of these languages are shown a new word/name to read, on outsider like me can't predict whether they'll delete schwas, or which ones are more likely to be deleted? Or does this only happen to schwas in words they already use a lot and are familiar with?


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## Dib

Delvo said:


> I suppose that must mean Hindi has some words where it's deleted by default, and some where it isn't (but can be if you use a halant).


 
Halant is, in reality, very rarely used in Hindi orthography. It's a part of the script, and people would generally know what it means (I assume ), but you'll rarely see it.



> Is there no mark like the opposite of halant, to make sure people _don't_ delete when the otherwise _would_?


 
Some languages (e.g. Maithili) have co-opted the avagraha-sign (ऽ) for this purpose. Ironically, this mark originally denotes a specific kind of schwa *deletion* in Sanskrit, i.e. after another vowel, to be exact. In any case, it is not used at all in standard Hindi orthography.



> Since the conventional rules on deletion are different in different languages, does this mean that if people speaking any of these languages are shown a new word/name to read, on outsider like me can't predict whether they'll delete schwas, or which ones are more likely to be deleted?


 
I think, strictly speaking, this is true. However, the rules may not always differ so much in practice. Just think of it like this - Albert, Martin, etc. are shared names between English and French, but pronounced very differently in the respective language. On the other hand, many other names are pronounced reasonably similarly, e.g. Paul, Anne, Victor, etc.



> Or does this only happen to schwas in words they already use a lot and are familiar with?


 
Nope, in my experience people apply their native schwa deletion rules across the board - familiar or unfamiliar, even to the extent of applying them to Sanskrit texts, unless they actually know Sanskrit well enough.


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## hindiurdu

Delvo said:


> Since the conventional rules on deletion are different in different languages, does this mean that if people speaking any of these languages are shown a new word/name to read, on outsider like me can't predict whether they'll delete schwas, or which ones are more likely to be deleted? Or does this only happen to schwas in words they already use a lot and are familiar with?



Is there a specific language you are interested in? In Hindi, schwa deletion almost always applies at the end of every syllable. बरबाद = बर+बाद = barbaad, not barabaada. पालतू = पाल+तू = paaltuu, not paalatuu. जगमग = जग+मग = jagmag, not jagamaga. सोमवार = सोम+वार = somvaar, not somawaara. Just learn the vC_Cv rule and you'll be correct almost always.

Separate topic. Note the somvaar example. Western H-U speakers have allophony of v and w. They (strongly tend to) say 'v' at the beginning of a syllable and 'w' in the middle, which they use often as a u-aa glide. So, war → vaar. world → va(r)ld. worldwar → vald.vaar or val.duaar (when they do not know enough to know it is actually world+war). advance → adwance. In advance, you will see a lot of H-U speakers break it differently from English natives. (Eng) ad.vaans → (HU) a.duaans. If you make them say it like English, you will often see that 'uaa' turn into a 'v'.


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## Delvo

hindiurdu said:


> Is there a specific language you are interested in?


I'm not trying to learn any particular language, just the general linguistics & phonetics. Actually, the specific thing brought me here and got me started on the Brahmic alphabets is a somewhat strange story...

Many names of plants, stars, and constellations are very similar among a variety of unrelated languages, because they often get passed from one language to another. Also, Medieval herbal & astrological manuscripts tend to list more than one language's name for things. So, in any such manuscript in any language, there's a very good chance that the text associated with a drawing of any particular plant or astrological object will include a word that sounds similar to the same thing's name in some other language(s). That means, even if they use different alphabets, that the letters for mostly the same or similar sounds will appear in the names for those drawings in about the same order, so words that can be expected to sound similar can be used to work out the phonetic system of a previously unknown writing system. This is, for example, how Egyptian Hieroglyphics were figured out, starting with the names of famous people and cities instead of plants or stars/constellations. (After this is done, it's possible to recognize the sounds as comparable to a known language which can be used as a model for translation.)

I, along with some others, have been applying that process to a strange 600-year-old book (the Voynich Manuscript) with herbal, astrological, or other seemingly mystic/mythological drawings on most pages. When I first joined the project, I believe I made good progress with the alphabets I could read well enough at the time (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic). But there were also signs of an Indo-Iranian influence, and I couldn't sound out words in those alphabets, which hindered further progress. So I started adding to my alphabet collection. 

SO... on to some actual examples of words I've run into and now wonder about...

EGGPLANT: Hindi बैंगन
My first attempt at reading this would have been like "baiŋgana", with the first syllable as the diphthong "a-i". Terminal schwa deletion would yield "baiŋgan". What I've read about ऐ in another thread here tells me that the standard transliteration "ai" is an amazingly bad, misleading one, because it doesn't really sound at all like what anybody who natively uses the Latin alphabet would ever say for "ai". So, using the IPA symbol for what I'm told that vowel really sounds like, that gives me something more like "bæŋgan" (first vowel as in English "ban") for the actual pronunciation. OK so far?

POPPY: Hindi खसखस, Gujarati ખસખસ
The simplest reading would be "kʰasakʰasa". Terminal schwa deletion gives me "kʰasakʰas". I figure I'm supposed to also drop the second one, yielding  "kʰaskʰas". It seems to follow a pattern of alternating syllables, and it also is more similar to the word's counterparts in other languages, which tend to consist of a single syllable repeated. But if all I'd had to start with had been Latin-alphabet "khaskhas", how would I have known it didn't come from  खस्खस (ખસ્ખસ) instead of खसखस(ખસખસ)?

GRAPE VINE: Hindi अंगूर, Nepali अङ्गुरको, Punjabi ਅੰਗੂਰ
Hindi & Punjabi both as "aŋgūr" because they both drop the "a" that would otherwise be after the "r", Nepali as "aŋgurako" because Nepali doesn't do so much deleting? But then, since Nepali apparently does delete at least _sometimes_, how can I be sure that it doesn't _this time_, which would make it "aŋgurko"? There just isn't any way, is there? And again, if I'd seen "angurko" in the first place, would there be no way to tell whether the original spelling had been अङ्गुरको or अङ्गुर्को (or अंगूरको/अंगूर्को) ?

PERSIMMON: Hindi ख़ुरमा, Nepali खुरमा, Bengali খেজুর
Simplest readings: xuramā, kʰuramā, kʰējura. Bengali becomes "kʰējur", I expect. I expect the Nepali one not to change because deletion is uncommon in Nepali, but can't be sure, can I? If I'm getting Hindi's rule on deletion in the middle of a word right, it would happen here, yielding "xurmā" instead of "xuramā". But there is ultimately no way to know without being told by a native speaker, right? (And this one could be treated differently from most anyway because it's a foreign import, based on that non-Hindi initial consonant.) Also, if it is "xurmā", if I had only seen that transliteration first, how would I tell whether the original spelling had been ख़ुरमा or ख़ुर्मा?

BRYONY: Sanskrit "baja", Hindi "bajguriya"
The former is simple enough to figure out as बज. The latter looks like a compound word, in which the second vowel is deleted because now we're in Hindi instead of Sanskrit. I figured that final "a" on "guriya" must be an unmarked "ā", so I tried गुरिया at an online translator and got "bead". (गूरिया, गूरीया, and गुरीया yielded nothing but suggestions that I might have really meant गुरिया.) So apparently the plant's Hindi name is its Sanskrit name plus a modifier, like "beaded baja" or "bead-producing baja" or "baja beads". But that gives me no clue whether the Devanāgarī spelling is  बजगुरियाor  बज्गुरिया.

HELLEBORE: Hindi "khorasani-kuti"
There are 128 ways I could read this, using different assumptions about length for all of the vowels and deletion for the second & third. My only clue to even start narrowing it down is that I'm pretty sure one "a" should be deleted and not the other (meaning the original spelling for that syllable would use no special vowel marks, as if a default short "a" were there), but which one is which?

Also, here's something that came up in another thread around here:





> ...another tribe called Asuras (असुर in modern Hindi)...


Of course the "s" is just an English pluralizer, but why is the otherwise-final "a" present? Do Hindi speakers add deleted vowels back in for words referring to history from long enough ago?


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## Englishmypassion

I don't know anything about why that happens, Delvo, but we do write Lord Rama, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, Lord Buddha, Lord Yama, etc, which seems like the practice of anglicizing the spellings while writing in the Roman script. The same thing seems to have happened with the English words derived from Sanskrit/Hindi, e.g. raga.


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## hindiurdu

Delvo said:


> I'm not trying to learn any particular language, just the general linguistics & phonetics. Actually, the specific thing brought me here and got me started on the Brahmic alphabets is a somewhat strange story...



Very interesting. Yes, the fact is that Hindi does not use the alphabet phonetically when it comes to schwas. The reason is probably because of the way schwas operate in Hindi. The classic example is lapaT (flame) = लपट. Now what should the plural be written as, lapTeN. You can now halantify the प but then this makes the word look different. My guess is that a pretty disorganized process led to लपटें, which keeps the central part consistent. This just is the way it is. It is also possible that this tendency already existed in the prior lettering (prior to Devnagri, I mean), but that is just me guessing again.


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## mundiya

Englishmypassion said:


> I don't know anything about why that happens, Delvo, but we do write Lord Rama, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, Lord Buddha, Lord Yama, etc, which seems like the practice of anglicizing the spellings while writing in the Roman script. The same thing seems to have happened with the English words derived from Sanskrit/Hindi, e.g. raga.



It's because the words entered English from Sanskrit, so Sanskrit's final -a was retained in the English spelling.


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## Englishmypassion

Thanks a lot for the kind information, mundiya ji. Since 'raga' became an English word in the _late_ 18th century, I thought it was borrowed from Hindi, in which it is written as raag.


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## mundiya

No, English has been borrowing words from Sanskrit ever since the English/British arrived in India, which I believe was in the 16th or 17th century.


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## Englishmypassion

Thank you very much, mundiya ji.


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## Dib

Delvo said:


> What I've read about ऐ in another thread here tells me that the standard transliteration "ai" is an amazingly bad, misleading one, because it doesn't really sound at all like what anybody who natively uses the Latin alphabet would ever say for "ai".


 
This problem arises because you made Hindi your primary target language for interpretation of the script and transliteration, while the intended primary target is (Classical) Sanskrit, whre "a" is always a schwa and "ai" a schwa followed by a non-syllabic "i". Of course, for your specific purpose you cannot limit yourself to Sanskrit alone. But as you can understand easily, the more languages are considered, the more diverse their phonetics becomes, and it is really hard to transcribe them in a single system. However, fortunately, pretty much all Indian scripts have a common structure, making it possible to use a common transliteration, as long as it is understood that it is not intended to be good transcription of the pronunciation. But of course, such pure transliteration is limited only to scholarly contexts, common popular usage mixes elements of the "standard" transliteration scheme (basically IAST) with attempts at being more phonetic (thus, omiting word-final schwas, etc.). The problem becomes more pronounced with languages like Bengali, where the pronunciation can indeed be very far from the spelling. Personally, I believe, Bengali spelling system is pretty much as inconsistant as English's, if not more. But, Hindi is not all that problematic. Usually each Sanskrit sound (and hence IAST "letter", e.g. "ai") is realized in Hindi as one specific sound (e.g. "æ(y)"). The only really problematic point is schwa deletion, but even there Hindi is fairly regular (not always though, e.g. jag-magaa, vs. Tapak-naa).




Delvo said:


> PERSIMMON: Hindi ख़ुरमा, Nepali खुरमा, Bengali খেজুর


 
I believe it is not "persimmon", but "date (palm)". I am sure about the Bengali word, and fairly sure about the Hindi.



> Bengali becomes "kʰējur", I expect.


 
Right. But Bengali (and other Eastern IA languages) have no vowel length distinction. So, you can simply write "kʰejur". Even those IA languages which do have vowel length distinction, do not usually contrast length in e and o, and thus IAST simply uses e and o, even though they are normally long. Bengali, btw, does not always delete the final schwa. Very often it is realized as a closed "o", in Sanskrit borrowings as well as native words, and unfortunately I don't know any rule to predict the outcome. "kʰejur" does have a deleted schwa though.



> If I'm getting Hindi's rule on deletion in the middle of a word right, it would happen here, yielding "xurmā" instead of "xuramā". But there is ultimately no way to know without being told by a native speaker, right?


 
"xurmā" is correct. In case of Hindi, you can be reasonably sure, as its schwa deletion rules are quite consistent, a few exceptions notwithstanding (as mentioned above).



> And this one could be treated differently from most anyway because it's a foreign import, based on that non-Hindi initial consonant.


 
Normally, Hindi does apply its schwa deletion rules also on foreign borrowings. But beware, that prescriptive standard Urdu mandates retaining all Persian/Arabic original schwas, though it's debatable how widely people actually follow those "mandates". Thus Arabic 3arabī is "arbī" in Hindi, and probably also to most common Urdu speakers, but 'arabī in prescriptive Urdu standard.



> HELLEBORE: Hindi "khorasani-kuti"
> There are 128 ways I could read this, using different assumptions about length for all of the vowels and deletion for the second & third. My only clue to even start narrowing it down is that I'm pretty sure one "a" should be deleted and not the other (meaning the original spelling for that syllable would use no special vowel marks, as if a default short "a" were there), but which one is which?


 
Never knew of this flower before. Thanks for posting. The "khorasani" part, I believe is most likely "xurāsānī" with no schwa in the standard transliteration. It comes from the name of the province in Iran. The "o" in the first syllable may be due to Persian influence (where short u and short o are allophones, o being dominant), influence from another language (e.g. Bengali which has "khorasan" due to native vowel harmony rules, as well as Persian allophony; or English Khorasan) or even some native Hindi/Urdu vowel allophony. This certainly is not easy. I feel for you here. 



> ...another tribe called Asuras (असुर in modern Hindi)...
> 
> 
> 
> Also, here's something that came up in another thread around here:Of course the "s" is just an English pluralizer, but why is the otherwise-final "a" present? Do Hindi speakers add deleted vowels back in for words referring to history from long enough ago?
Click to expand...

 
Like mundiya pointed out, the English forms of the words related to classical Indian culture usually represent Sanskrit pronunciation, not Hindi.


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## Dib

hindiurdu said:


> Very interesting. Yes, the fact is that Hindi does not use the alphabet phonetically when it comes to schwas. The reason is probably because of the way schwas operate in Hindi. The classic example is lapaT (flame) = लपट. Now what should the plural be written as, lapTeN. You can now halantify the प but then this makes the word look different. My guess is that a pretty disorganized process led to लपटें, which keeps the central part consistent.


 
This is, of course, a very good explanation, and maybe even THE correct explanation. "Morphological integrity" (if I may call it so) is indeed a powerful factor crosslinguistically for many orthographical inconsistencies. But there is another possibility. It maybe that when Hindi (and here I include classical Braj, Awadhi, etc. becasue they belong to the same written cultural tradition, regardless of whether you consider them separate languages or not) was first written down, the schwas were not yet deleted in pronunciation. It happened later, but the orthography didn't evolve to reflect that. Cross-linguistically this trend of "traditional spelling" is also a very common reason for orthogrpahic inconsistencies.


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## hindiurdu

Dib said:


> It maybe that when Hindi (and here I include classical Braj, Awadhi, etc. becasue they belong to the same written cultural tradition, regardless of whether you consider them separate languages or not) was first written down, the schwas were not yet deleted in pronunciation. It happened later, but the orthography didn't evolve to reflect that. Cross-linguistically this trend of "traditional spelling" is also a very common reason for orthogrpahic inconsistencies.



Yes, very possible. I agree.


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## eskandar

Englishmypassion said:


> Since 'raga' became an English word in the _late_ 18th century, I thought it was borrowed from Hindi, in which it is written as raag.





mundiya said:


> No, English has been borrowing words from Sanskrit ever since the English/British arrived in India, which I believe was in the 16th or 17th century.


Seems you are both right. According to the OED, the English word is borrowed from Sanskrit (not Hindi), but it's not attested for until 1788. Many British Orientalists studied Sanskrit but didn't necessarily know any Hindi, so that could explain why they opted for raga over raag.


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## tonyspeed

Dib said:


> This is, of course, a very good explanation, and maybe even THE correct explanation. "Morphological integrity" (if I may call it so) is indeed a powerful factor crosslinguistically for many orthographical inconsistencies. But there is another possibility. It maybe that when Hindi (and here I include classical Braj, Awadhi, etc. becasue they belong to the same written cultural tradition, regardless of whether you consider them separate languages or not) was first written down, the schwas were not yet deleted in pronunciation. It happened later, but the orthography didn't evolve to reflect that. Cross-linguistically this trend of "traditional spelling" is also a very common reason for orthogrpahic inconsistencies.



I was off the understanding that with few exceptions Farsi script was used to write Braj and Hindi until the 1800s. I doubt schwa deletion took place in the 1800s. 

I guess this could apply to Khariboli and not Braj.


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## Delvo

hindiurdu said:


> Yes, the fact is that Hindi does not use the alphabet phonetically when it comes to schwas.


It looks more like it uses it phonetically, just with different phonetic rules from Sanskrit's. (Several separate European langauges are known for being quite consistently phonetic, with different phonetic rules from Latin and each other, but that doesn't make them non-phonetic; it just means a description of the alphabet in terms of only its use for Latin would be inadequate.) Having consonants sometimes just be consonants instead of a consonant plus an implied vowel doesn't seem like a big deal to me; I just need to know when it's like that and when it isn't.



Dib said:


> This problem arises because you made Hindi your primary target language for interpretation of the script and transliteration, while the intended primary target is (Classical) Sanskrit


I didn't pick a target. I'm at the whim of whatever foreign words have been entered at my source websites.



Dib said:


> I believe it is not "persimmon", but "date (palm)".


Google Translate gives me words generally like "kʰejura/kʰajura" for "date" in Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Nepali, and Urdu. But it also gives me exactly the same Bengali word again for both "persimmon" and "prune", exactly the same Hindi word again for a tree in the genus Schleichera (with no English name), a phrase using the same Hindi word again preceded by the word for "American" (thus "American date") for "persimmon", and the same Urdu word plus two more letters at the end for "persimmon".

A separate set of words with an "m" after the "r" instead of a "j" before it shows up at Google Translate for "persimmon" in Hindi, Nepali, and Persian. But in Persian, like in Urdu, "persimmon" is "date" plus two more letters at the end; the difference is that Urdu has that relationship with two words of the J-group (which mostly mean "date") and Persian has it with two words of the M-group (which mostly mean "persimmon").

So what it looks like is that the J-group came from an original word for "date" and the M-group came from an original word for "persimmon", but the two groups of words have done some crossing over and interfering with each other (and also spread out into a couple of other plants). This kind of thing is actually fairly common in plant names.

And, since I brought up Hindi's "American dates": अमरीकी = "amrīkī", not "amarīkī"?



Dib said:


> Bengali (and other Eastern IA languages) have no vowel length distinction. So, you can simply write "kʰejur"...
> 
> "xurmā" is correct...
> 
> The "khorasani" part, I believe is most likely "xurāsānī" with no schwa in the standard transliteration. It comes from the name of the province in Iran.


Is "kuti" a name for a plant? (If hellebore is the kuti from Xurasan, then there should also be kutis from elsewhere.) All I got at GT was an animal, but I know some plant names are just too obscure to get included in a general translator, and "kuti" could be several different words depending on transliteration issues.

And if "kʰorasani" had been a word without vowel marks in the middle, such as खोरसनि, would that have meant the first one goes, or the second? (kʰorsani/kʰorasni) Or use a real example words with multiple consecutive schwas like that instead of this fictional one; I just don't know of one right now and don't know how deletion works in cases like that. Do you delete alternating schwas through a long multi-schwa word starting with the second one, or with the one closest to the end, or some other such pattern?

Also, what about the other words I posted, for eggplant, poppy, grape, and bryony? And a few others that slipped by me the first time:
Marsh mallow: Punjabi ਕਾਰ੍ਕ: "kārk" instead of "kārka"?
Eggplant: Bengali বেগুন: "begūn" instead of "begūno"?
Rushfoil: Marathi क्रोटोन: "kroʈon" instead of "kroʈona"?
Wheel/circle: Punjabi ਚੱਕਰ "čakkar" instead of "čakkara" *or "čakkra"*?
Wolf: Punjabi ਬਘਿਆੜ "bakìāɽ" (from bagʰiāɽ) instead of "bakìāɽa" (from bagʰiāɽa)?



Dib said:


> This certainly is not easy. I feel for you here.


If it were simple, it wouldn't be fun!


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## hindiurdu

Delvo said:


> Google Translate gives me words generally like "kʰejura/kʰajura" for "date" in Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Nepali, and Urdu. But it also gives me exactly the same Bengali word again for both "persimmon" and "prune", exactly the same Hindi word again for a tree in the genus Schleichera (with no English name), a phrase using the same Hindi word again preceded by the word for "American" (thus "American date") for "persimmon", and the same Urdu word plus two more letters at the end for "persimmon".



I may be misunderstanding your question. However, خرما / ख़ुरमा is correct for date, although it feels archaic to me a little (though still very understandable). Usually, a lot of idiomatic references is where this shows up. For example, when making a hard decision with two positive things of which only one can be picked, "xurmaa chaahiye yaa xudaa" (strangely worded I know but not uncommon). کهجور / खजूर is what I hear more commonly now. The term for Persimmon that I am familiar with is تیندو / तेन्दू. It has an absolutely vast number of varieties but most of them are used for medicine in the Indian plains at least. Persimmon, as known in the west is becoming more common too but I've heard it also being called tenduu or simply persimmon. I checked and saw the Persian term xurmaaluu (خرمالو / ख़ुरमालू) - it makes sense, of course, but I have not really heard it in H-U. Part of the reason might be related to the differing meaning of aaluu in the subcontinent.



Delvo said:


> And, since I brought up Hindi's "American dates": अमरीकी = "amrīkī", not "amarīkī"?



Yes, you are correct. Sorry this is causing you such issues. It really is pretty regular once you get the hang of it.



Delvo said:


> Is "kuti" a name for a plant? (If hellebore is the kuti from Xurasan, then there should also be kutis from elsewhere.) All I got at GT was an animal, but I know some plant names are just too obscure to get included in a general translator, and "kuti" could be several different words depending on transliteration issues.



I am not familiar with this plant (flower?). But you know, there are other examples of this phenomenon of only one thing being named for a place. Aaluu buxaaraa, which is because aaluu came to mean potato in H-U. Technically, yes, it should be aaluu zamiinii, but no one calls it that anymore. MiTTii vs multaanii miTTii is another example.



Delvo said:


> And if "kʰorasani" had been a word without vowel marks in the middle, such as खोरसनि, would that have meant the first one goes, or the second?



Very interesting point. The answer is that there is usually some convention guiding how the word is broken-up or H-U speakers inconsistently pick. In this case for this contrived/fictional word, I would do xor.sani instead of xoras.ni, unless xoras meant something. I think this is because xor acutally has a semantic meaning and is a familiar chunk, though completely irrelevant to this fictional term. There is something important to be grasped here. Schwa deletion is actually a bit independent of the script itself. The rhythm of H-U demands it quite independently of what script you use. When H-U speakers violate these rhythms, they expend energy. So, to give you a different rhythm in H-U, CaCaC (C=consonant, a=schwa) is a standard pattern that fits with H-U natural flow. CaCC is something HU speakers can do, but it takes effort. So, hazm, janm, jashn, karm are all doable, but vulgarly these all become hazam, janam, jashan, karam. This is schwa-insertion (has exceptions, like everything else). vCCv is also a pattern that H-U instrinsically prefers, so it will try its best to kill medial schwas there, i.e. vCaCv > vCCv. You've shown many examples of this. What you have above though is CvCaCaCv. This can be broken as vCaCa or aCaCv, and depending on how it's parsed one of the medial schwas will be killed. You can make any number of words like this: How about the fictitious baajakaraa (बाजकरा / باجکرا). This is going to become baajak.raa or baaj.karaa for the vast majority of H-U speakers. I am certain that there are many actual English words like this on which H-U speakers might stumble. Why is CaCC > CaCaC regarded as vulgar when vCaCv > vCCv is not? The answer is blowing in the wind afaik - just historical trend, I suppose - maybe someone else can enlighten us.


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## mundiya

tonyspeed said:


> I was off the understanding that with few exceptions Farsi script was used to write Braj and Hindi until the 1800s. I doubt schwa deletion took place in the 1800s.
> 
> I guess this could apply to Khariboli and not Braj.



Pre-1800s, Farsi script was _one _of the scripts used, but a substantial number (probably the majority) of Braj and Awadhi literary works, and some Khariboli literary works, have always been in Devanagari.

Schwa deletion is in the entries of Platts' dictionary, which is from the 1800s.


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## Delvo

hindiurdu said:


> I may be misunderstanding your question.


The part you quoted there wasn't a question. It was a response to a statement that a word meant one kind of plant, not another, by making a case that sometimes a word is used for more than one plant (at least in different places or under different circumstances, and that that one appears to be an example.



hindiurdu said:


> خرما / ख़ुरमा is correct for date, although it feels archaic to me a little (though still very understandable).


Ya, sometimes this project has yielded English names I'd never heard of before. But plant names can easily be obscure or unnatural to non-botanists, and archaic is OK for the purpose of confirming that a particular plant identification based on a drawing and an attmpted phonetic reading of a word associated with that drawing appear to match and support each other.



hindiurdu said:


> It has an absolutely vast number of varieties but most of them are used for medicine in the Indian plains at least.


That actually improves my case about that page of the book. Medieval herbal manuscripts generally focus on medicinal plants rather than just plain food plants.



hindiurdu said:


> Sorry this is causing you such issues.


It's really not creating "issues". I just want to double-check stuff to make sure I'm doing it right (and find any subtle complications that might not have been mentioned yet). I'll take the lack of corrections on my other examples as a sign that I did them right, especially since most of them weren't really in much doubt anyway.



hindiurdu said:


> The answer is that there is usually some convention guiding how the word is broken-up or H-U speakers inconsistently pick.


If inconsistency is the reality, then that's what I need to know.


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## Delvo

hindiurdu said:


> CaCC is something HU speakers can do, but it takes effort. So, hazm, janm, jashn, karm are all doable, but vulgarly these all become hazam, janam, jashan, karam. This is schwa-insertion (has exceptions, like everything else).


Does this extend to "correcting" Sanskrit to Hindu's preferences, by adding a syllable even where a Sanskrit word's spelling explicitly says there isn't one (with consonants ligaturized together)... and is this more likely to happen when the second consecutive consonant is य? I see that the Gāyatrī Mantra contains two Sanskrit words which contain य ligaturized with the preceding consonant, and in both cases, one of the two transliterations I've seen adds a vowel: तत्स॑वि॒तुर्वरे॑ण्यं॒ (tát savitúr váre*niy*aṃ) and दे॒वस्य॑ (deva*say*a). But the other doesn't; "tat savitur vare*ny*am", "devá*sy*a". For that matter, all but one of the ligatures in that mantra are either examples of that, or places where one Devanāgarī word correlates with separate Latin-alphabet words. Is ligaturizing across the gap from one word to another a way of indicating the lack of a terminal schwa without using virāma?

And what's with the horizontal lines below some letters in those words from the mantra, and the small vertical lines above others? Both of the two Latin transliterations I've seen seem to ignore the former and one of them ignores the latter. For the latter, in one transliteration, the Latin vowel just _before_ the equivalent consonant has a slanted accent mark, but I don't know what that accent mark means either in this case. (Based on a recitation I've heard set to music, it seems like the vertical marks above the letters could loosely indicate something about how to recite it: timing, volume, breathing, or such.)


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## hindiurdu

Delvo said:


> Does this extend to "correcting" Sanskrit to Hindu's preferences, by adding a syllable even where a Sanskrit word's spelling explicitly says there isn't one (with consonants ligaturized together)



Absolutely. And indiscriminately (ie for words of any origin). नस्ल (nasl, breed/race/generation) > नसल (nasal). प्रधान (pradhaan, prime/main) > परधान (pardhaan). Again, for some reason, this specific CaCC > CaCaC is considered vulgarized in H-U, whereas schwa deletion is not. Be cautious of nasalized vowels though, which are preserved. So, रंग (rang,color) won't ever become ranag (that would be incomprehensible to H-U speakers).



Delvo said:


> ... and is this more likely to happen when the second consecutive consonant is य? I see that the Gāyatrī Mantra contains two Sanskrit words which contain य ligaturized with the preceding consonant, and in both cases, one of the two transliterations I've seen adds a vowel: तत्स॑वि॒तुर्वरे॑ण्यं॒ (tát savitúr váre*niy*aṃ) and दे॒वस्य॑ (deva*say*a). But the other doesn't; "tat savitur vare*ny*am", "devá*sy*a". For that matter, all but one of the ligatures in that mantra are either examples of that, or places where one Devanāgarī word correlates with separate Latin-alphabet words. Is ligaturizing across the gap from one word to another a way of indicating the lack of a terminal schwa without using virāma?



Well, yes, "halantized" letters are often combined with the one after. However, what you're pointing to is word-compounding. In this Sanskrit is like German, and very different from H-U. Apparently, the longest word ever used in world literature means "_In it, the distress, caused by thirst, to travellers, was alleviated by clusters of rays of the bright eyes of the girls; the rays that were shaming the currents of light, sweet and cold water charged with the strong fragrance of cardamom, clove, saffron, camphor and musk and flowing out of the pitchers (held in) the lotus-like hands of maidens (seated in) the beautiful water-sheds, made of the thick roots of vetiver mixed with marjoram, (and built near) the foot, covered with heaps of couch-like soft sand, of the clusters of newly sprouting mango trees, which constantly darkened the intermediate space of the quarters, and which looked all the more charming on account of the trickling drops of the floral juice, which thus caused the delusion of a row of thick rainy clouds, densely filled with abundant nectar._" which is expressed in a single Sanskrit word in some 15th century text. Compound-words can validly be decomposed, just like German. I do not know Sanskrit, so that's where my knowledge on this ends.



Delvo said:


> And what's with the horizontal lines below some letters in those words from the mantra, and the small vertical lines above others? Both of the two Latin transliterations I've seen seem to ignore the former and one of them ignores the latter. For the latter, in one transliteration, the Latin vowel just _before_ the equivalent consonant has a slanted accent mark, but I don't know what that accent mark means either in this case. (Based on a recitation I've heard set to music, it seems like the vertical marks above the letters could loosely indicate something about how to recite it: timing, volume, breathing, or such.)



Sanskrit, especially Vedic Sanskrit, is "_generally considered the most archaic, reflecting fairly faithfully the position of the original PIE (proto Indo European) accent_". That's what you're seeing there. Hindi, Urdu and other modern Indo-Aryan languages have lost this. You can learn more about the Vedic accent on Wikipedia.

Hope this is helpful. Also, hope someone who actually knows this stuff in some depth (instead of improvising like I am) jumps on here.


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## Dib

I have very erratic internet access. So just a quick note. As hindiurdu pointed out, those small horizontal and vertical lines in vedic texts denote pitch accent. Note that the earliest (Vedic) Sanskrit texts were composed some 1000 years or longer before Classical Sanskrit was formalized, and the language was
never written down before that. So the received Vedic texts shows lot of archaic features but some of them are hidden by classicizing spellings.


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## Dib

One of those instances is varen(i)yam, which is invariably 3 syllables in classical skt but in vedic there is good reason to believe that it was (often) 4 syllables long. The written texts uae the classical 3-syllable spelling But transcriptions may variously follow either that or a more faithful 4-syllable vedic pronunciation.


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## Dib

I amnot sure about devasya. I am away from my sources.


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