niceties may be omitted. If it be required sometimes to indicate it, I shall write it ạ, as I write ụ the nearly u.
What I said, that no Konkani word may end in a pure consonant, is true if we write Konkani according to Kanarese. But if we do not take this into consideration, we may say that in Konkani words may occur ending in a pure consonant, as in European languages. Of course at the end of each word ending in a consonant, a kind of half vowel is, I may say, naturally pronounced; but this is not a thing peculiar to the Konkani language. This is one of tho reasons why the Kanarese alphabet, following the Kanarese rules, is not perfectly suitable to Konkani.
The consonants are the same as in Latin, except that
1. d, dh, n, l, t, th may have two sounds, i.e. either as in Latin (about dh, th see below) or a sound which is got by turning the tip of the tongue upwards, so as to touch the roof of the mouth far away from the front teeth. For this reason they may be called cerebral consonants. I shall mark these cerebral consonants with a dot under them, e.g. ṭ. The best way to pronounce, at least approximately, the cerebral sound of ḍ and ḍh is to pronounce it like the English r, viz. not full as in Latin, but half only. Yet this ḍ and ḍh do not always take such a sound, i.e. of the English r. Use will teach you.
2. k or c hard, g hard (as g in gallus), g soft (as g in genus, or as the English j), č soft (like c in cinis) t, ṭ, d, ḍ, p have two sounds, i.e. either as in Latin (and ṭ, ḍ, as explained above) or aspirated, as if there were an aspirated English or German h after the consonant, to be sounded distinctly from the preceding consonant, e.g. d'h. It is nearly expressed in the Irish pronunciation of the word which. I shall mark these consonants with an h written after them, e.g. th.
3. The Latin c and g may change in the same word, the soft sound into a hard sound : e.g. ager, agri; g, in the Nominative is soft, in the Genitive is hard. Not so in Konkani. If g in the Nominative has a soft sound, it keeps it in all cases; and if it has a hard sound, it keeps it in all cases. The same must be said of c hard or k and c soft. For the sake of dis-
