While you are still learning to write the devanāgarī characters, read through this chapter. It offers more details on pronunciation and introduces you to some technical terminology concerning the sounds of Sanskrit. Our focus is on studying the Sanskrit language itself, yet you will see throughout your study why it makes sense to not just know which sounds Sanskrit contains, but also what the relationships between these sounds are.
For example, the traditional order of the devanāgarī signs as laid down by the ancient Sanskrit grammarians is based on those relationships.
This order of Sanskrit sounds works along three principles: it goes from simple to complex; it goes from the back to the front of the mouth; and it groups similar sounds together.
First come the vowels, then the consonants. Vowels are ‘simpler’ than consonants as they can easily be pronounced on their own, while consonants usually need the help of a vowel to be pronounced. Think of how you pronounce e and b: when you pronounce the vowel e, you just say e, whereas if you pronounce the consonant b, what you say will sound more like the word be, i.e. you add an e to the b-sound itself. That is why b is counted among the ‘consonants’, literally those ‘that sound along, whose sound is accompanied by another’. Among themselves, both the vowels and the consonants are ordered according to where in the mouth they are pronounced, going from back to front.
VOWELS
a is pronounced in the low back of the mouth, i is pronounced higher up, u then is pronounced with a rounding of your lips and thus, in a way, further to the front of the mouth. Next there are the vowel (or ‘vocalic’) forms of r and l, written in transliteration as ṛ and ḷ. Each sound is given first in its short, then in its long variant: a ā i ī u ū ṛ ṝ ḷ (ḹ). All these are known as the simple vowels.
They are followed by the complex vowels, e ai o au. At an earlier stage of the language, e and o actually were *ai and *au, and current ai and au once were *āi and *āu.
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