Forming Words with Devanagari

Now that we've learned four Devanagari letters already, let's look at how we can put them together into actual words.

You should be pretty comfortable with the fact the Devanagari is phonetic, by now. You've seen how each letter has a unique sound that it makes in a word. Remember also how we talked about Devanagari being a syllabary; that is, each letter makes up a syllable of the word. The letter क makes not the k sound by itself, but the entire ka syllable. Similarly, य makes the ya syllable, र makes the ra syllable, and म makes the ma syllable.

I should point out now that the last letter of each word does not usually make a complete syllable. To illustrate this, let's use the English letters, bb. If all the letters made syllables, this would sound something close to the English bubba. Since we now know that the last letter does not make a complete syllable sound, we see that the English letters, if they were Devanagari, would sound something like, bub.

Similarly, still using English letters, tb would not be tubba, but just tub. rb would not be rubba, but rub. rt would sound something like rut, not rutta. This is not hard to understand: just don't put the a sound after the last letter. This will quickly become natural.

Now, let's try these concepts out with the letters we have learned. Try to determine the English words that have been formed by the Devanagari letters, below:

• रम ☑ Answer
• मक ☑ Answer
• यम ☑ Answer

You're actually reading Devanagari now!