Letter to Sound Rules

The scripts of Indian languages are phonetic in nature. There is more or less one to one correspondence between what is written and what is spoken. However, in Hindi the inherent vowel (short /a/) associated with a consonant is not pronounced depending on the context. This is referred to as Inherent Vowel Suppression (IVS) or schwa deletion. For example, the word kamala [lotus] is mapped to a sequence of consonant and vowel sounds /k/ /a/ /m/ /a/ /l/, ignoring the vowel associated with /l/.

A set of heuristic rules to detect IVS of a consonant character are noted below. These rules have been derived by observing a few hundred Hindi words, and the rule set may not be a complete description of the phenomenon.

1

No two successive characters undergo IVS.

2

Characters present in the first position of a word, never undergo IVS. IVS occurs only to the characters present in middle and final positions.

3

For characters in final position, the inherent vowel (/a/) is always suppressed.

4

For characters in word middle position, IVS occurs if the next character in the word is not the last character or the next character has a vowel other than /a/.