6
urdū grammar.
- The proper sound of the two letters zhe (ژ)—represented in Roman characters by zh—and ṅ (ں) as a final nasal, may be learned best from our Gallic neighbours, the former being the French J in 'jamais,' 'toujours'; and the latter a very weak nasal as in 'bon,' 'mon,' before initial consonants, as in 'bon jour!' 'mon Dieu!'
N is also sometimes quiescent, or very feebly pronounced, in the middle of words when immediately preceded by a long vowel, or immediately followed by a quiescent letter, e.g. āṅdhī, phaṅsnā, muṅh. And before b or p it is sounded as m: as sānp (سانپ), ʼanbar (عنبر), pronounced sāmp and ʼambar. - A few remarks must be made regarding the aspirated letters, or consonants conjoined with, or immediately followed by, an h. They are of two kinds: (1) Those in which, by the arbitrary junction of an h to another consonant, an additional letter or simple sound is inserted in the alphabet which it did not previously possess. These are, in the Urdū alphabet, the letters che (چ), k͟he (خ), zhe (ژ), and shīn (ش); and similarly in the Arabic alphabet the letter thā (ث)—sounded like th in 'thing,' but which in Persian and Hindūstānī is always pronounced as s, and called s̤e. The want of distinct forms to represent each of these sounds is a great defect in our own or any language. (2) The Deva-nāgarī (Hindī) alphabet contains a number of single letters representing aspirated consonants; in these cases the h is pronounced quite distinctly from the letter it aspirates; but no vowel-sound must intervene. Thus the single Hindi letters भ (represented by the two Roman letters bh), फ (by ph), and थ (by th) must be pronounced like those letters in 'Hobhouse,'
