The Letter आ (ā)

This is the Devanagari letter which represents the sound ā as in the English word, part .

This letter shares some characteristics with a few other Devanagari vowels, which you will learn later. First, it has what appears to be an English numeral three, that oddly enough does not have the horizontal bar at the top. It has a little tail in the back, which connects it two the first of two vertical bars, both hanging (as you should expect by now) from a straight horizontal line.

If English used this vowel, you might find it beginning such words as art and awesome. Remember, however, that vowel sounds can either appear at the beginning of a sentence or somewhere else. If they are not at the beginning, they modify a particular consonant's sound. We made this distinction earlier, because each Devanagari vowel has two forms: one for when the vowel sound comes at the beginning of the word, and another when the vowel modifies the sound of a consonant.

You will see that the idea of having two forms of each vowel is not very difficult to use, because the two forms of each vowel are usually quite similar and easy to remember. If you can remember one, you can usually remember the other. The second form of a vowel, the one which changes the sound of a consonant, is called a mātrā (Shankar, 000matra.html).

The Mātrā ा (ā)

The mātrā of आ (ā) is very easy to remember: it is simply a straight line descending from the horizontal bar. ा (ā) is easy to remember because it is आ (ā) after we have removed the अ part. (The ा you see in your browser may have a dotted circle before it. This symbol not part of the letter; many fonts include this representation to indicate that the letter usually does not stand alone. The dotted circle thus indicates the position of some Devanagari consonant to which the letter will be attached.)

आ therefore stands for the ā sound at the beginning of a word. If you want the ā sound somewhere else in a word (that is, changing a consonant's sound from a to ā) remove the अ part to get ा, the mātrā of आ (ā).

Confusing? Let's state it a little differently: the Devanagari sound ā is represented by two forms: the first (आ) if the sound comes at the beginning of the word, and the second (ा) if it comes anywhere else in the word.

Remember that both of these letters make the exact same sound. In fact, they are both different forms of the exact same letter. The first form is used if the sound comes at the beginning of a word, and the second form (the mātrā) is used if the vowel is changing the sound of consonant.