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Hindustani phonology notes
[edit]Primary source: Ohala - Aspects of Hindi Phonology
- Author explicitly mentions they are discussing the spoken Hindi of Dehli and not the Sanskritezed variety of "Standard Hindi" (Urdu also derives from the Delhi dialect so this should be close even if not 100%).
- Based on Ohala's description, The actual phonemic realization of a "homorganic nasal" vs a "nasal vowel" is quite different from how Hindi writes अँ vs अं.
- Nasalized long vowels may appear before voiceless plosive consonants. However, nasalized long vowels before voiced obstruent consonants are almost exclusively followed by homorganic nasals.
- ā̃k and āṅg are the most common realizations of these clusters, but āṅk is rare and ā̃g never appears. (āṅk only appears in english loanwords and only at the end of words, such as بَین٘کْ (baiṅk))
- (k and g are stand-in's for any voiceless and voiced plosive consonant, ā is a stand-in for any long vowel)
- ā̃k and āṅg are the most common realizations of these clusters, but āṅk is rare and ā̃g never appears. (āṅk only appears in english loanwords and only at the end of words, such as بَین٘کْ (baiṅk))
- Short nasal vowels are predominantly followed by a homorganic nasal before plosive consonants. But freely occur unassimilated before other consonants.
- aṅk and aṅg are frequent, ãg never occurs. Whether ãk occurs is uncertain but it seems unlikely.
- Seems to not apply to voiceless affricates (c and ch), though it is not 100% clear. The author does not give examples of words recorded with this consonants.
- aṅk and aṅg are frequent, ãg never occurs. Whether ãk occurs is uncertain but it seems unlikely.
- Nasalization may pass through the consonants ṛ w y h (this mostly does not matter for transliteration as urdu will write a nasalized "w" and "y" as vowels)
- There is a (cross-linguistically rare) phonemic distinction between m and n before b.
Implementation into ur-translit:
- Consonants that always assimilate with nasal vowels: ب ج د ڈ گ
- Consonants that assimilate only if the nasal vowel is short: ک ٹھ تھ پھ
- hi-translit allows short nasal vowels before unaspirated ٹ ت, but Ohalas research suggests that is purely orthographic and that short nasal vowels would assimilate here. (This would be a small divergence from Hindi but it be more phonologically accurate).