Representing Hindi Sounds in English

You might have noticed at this point that we have a potential problem. Devanagari differs from the English alphabet in that Devanagari letters stand for particular sounds, while English letters might stand for several sound in different circumstances, or even combine with other letters to make completely different sounds, which in themselves are not even guaranteed. For example, we've seen that c can make a k, s, or sh sound, but if you combine it with an h you get another set of sounds, such as those found in champion, Charlotte, and chord.

How then can I communicate how a Devanagari letter sounds using the English alphabet? The only solution is to decide ahead of time which English letters I'm going to use for which Devanagari letters, and specify which sounds they make. Therefore, I'm going to use English letters as normal when writing English words, but I'll use our special agreed-above usage when referring to Hindi words.

For example, I've already discussed the a sound, as in, majority . I'll continue using a to refer to that sound. However, what happens when I want to convey the sound that occurs in part ? I'm going to use the same letter with a bar over the top: ā. I won't list all of the representations here, but rather introduce them as needed. For now, we have went over two:

Remember that I mentioned transliteration? Agreeing upon a representation of Hindi sounds with English letters will allow us to transliterate Hindi words and sentences. That is, we'll be able to represent exactly how a word written in the Devanagari script sounds using only English letters.

So who decides what the English representation is? In these lessons, I will be using ISO 15919, an international standard for displaying Devanagari using Latin characters. In the original version of these lessons, I borrowed from several methods for representation that I felt comfortable with and were easily displayed on the World Wide Web. In the years following not only have the representations become more standardized, the available fonts and browser renderings have improved dramatically, so switching to the ISO 15919 seemed appropriate, although there were other options to choose from.. But just be aware that if you go to the bookstore and buy some kind of book on learning Hindi, the representation may be slightly different. Going from one representation is not that difficult, especially after you have finished this set of lessons. But by then you should be able to read the Devanagari script itself, anyway! The point is that there is no inherently correct transliteration scheme; although it is obviously useful to standardize on one method, each system has been invented by someone.