The Other Consonants

The  Other consonants in this group are somewhere in between vowels and consonants. Semivowels are produced by blowing out air from the mouth. On the contrary, we produce them by suppressing the flow of air.

Letter	Approximation
ya	“y”  in  “yellow”
ra	–
la	“l”  in  “lose”
va	v   in   “vase”

 

The semi-vowel r here has the same pronunciation as vowel r

However, each of the semi-vowels here has different points of pronunciation, the sound “ya” comes from the hard palate,” ra’” is a retroflex consonant as in it uses the tongue, “la” uses the teeth,” va”  mainly uses the lips, but also requires the use of teeth.

The “s”-sounds

The sounds of consonants in this group is similar to the hissing sound. Almost like the semivowels that we have learned so far, the “s”-sounds too in this group are pronounced by suppressing the flow of air at the point of pronunciation. (sa, sa , *sa)

Letter	Approximation
sa	–
sa	–
sa	“s”  in  “see”

The “h”-sound

Letter	Approximation
ha	Voiced h

The sound h is a voiced sound and is very easy to pronounce. When you breathe out with a sound you will hear a sound such as “haaa…” that sound is nothing but the h sound in Sanskrit. The sound h is pronounced at soft palate.

However, in order to understand the sounds in a better way, we need to categorize them into classes or as in Sanskrit “varga”, which means “class”, “category”, or “division”

Letter	Varga (class)
ka kha ga gha ṅa	kavarga
ca cha ja jha ña	cavarga
ṭa ṭha ḍa ḍha ṇa	ṭavarga
ta tha da dha na	tavarga
pa pha ba bha ma	pavarga
ya ra la va	yavarga
śa ṣa sa ha	śavarga

One thing to notice that even though ha sound appears in savarga class, it is not similar to the sounds of that class. For instance, the ha is sound is both voiced and aspirated, whereas, the sa sound is both unvoiced and unaspirated.

One last thing to remember is that when we talked about adding a vowel a to the consonant to make a proper sound, we generalized it considering that it’ll work on all words. However, there are exceptions too, for instance when we add ja to udaj we get a word that means something like this; “water born” or “lotus”.