'hophouse,' and 'lighthouse.' And when they occur at the end of a word the aspirate must be added on to the preceding b, p, or t, but pronounced simultaneously with it. Thus the word hāth (हाथ) 'a hand,' is to be pronounced in one syllable—not like the English word 'hath,' but like 'hat'—with a blowing or aspiration added to the t.[1]
So with the aspirated cerebrals (three in number), viz. ṭh (ठ ٿھ), dh (ढ ڐھ), and rha (ढ़ ڙھ), which should be pronounced like these letters in 'courthouse,' 'woodhouse,' and 'furhouse.' In the Romanized compound chh (چھ, छ), the tyro must not imagine that he sees a doubly aspirated letter; چ or च (ch) not being itself an aspirated letter, this is the only way its aspiration can be expressed in Roman characters. Thus the common Urdū word achchhā, i.e. 'good,' could not be accurately Romanized in any other way. Achā would not give the proper sound, nor represent the native word correctly.
When a letter is repeated in the middle of a word both must be distinctly and separately sounded, e.g. battīs (32) should be pronounced bat-tīs; muddat ('a space') mud-dat, zarra ('a little') zar-ra. A double letter at the end of a word merely intensifies the sound—as in digg, radd, bilkull.
8. Though not necessary for the reading of Urdū in the Roman character, a brief explanation of the Persi-Arabic vowel-system may be useful and acceptable to our readers—especially in further illustration of the threefold division already referred to as pervading Semitic Grammars, from
- ↑ That the student may not forget the remark, we have generally, in this work, distinguished these conjunctions by a diacritical tick between the letters, as hāt,h, lāb,h, b,hīr, p,hir.
