#caravanlanguages

Hindi is written in Devanagari, and the arrangement of all the letters is called Varnamala (garland of letters). There’s no letter case, meaning there’s no distinction between upper and lower case. It looks something like this: वर्णमाला

Above the actual letters, there’s a line that string them all together (like a garland!), and the words hang off the lines instead of resting on them, like in English.

For this lesson, let’s cover the vowels. These are called स्वर (svar). Hindi uses an abugida script, which means the vowels have secondary form called a मात्रा maatraa that is used in combination with consonants. For example, while ई would be used when it isn’t preceded by a consonant, and its maatraa, ी, is used when it IS preceded by a consonant.

Here are the svar!

The little circles represent the consonants’ position. For example, क+ी = की.

You may have noticed that अ doesn’t have a maatraa. This is because consonants inherently have the अ sound. For example, क has no written maatraa but is pronounced ka [kə].

Also, some of these don’t seem like vowels, specifically ऋ, अं, अः and अँ (similar function to अँ). However, this is just how they’re arranged and how natives learn them, so it’s best to include them when you’re learning vowels.

And those are the svar!

When we did these in school, most teachers used the following words to make the learning process easier. While we already know these words even before we learn how to read and write, and they aren’t very common or useful for beginners, but it could be interesting to know how natives learn their own language.

Don’t worry about consonants, we’ll get there soon!

अनार anaar - pomegranate

आम aam - mango

इमली imlii - tamarind

ईख iikh - sugarcane

उल्लू ulluu - owl

ऊन uun - wool

ऋषि riṣi - sage

एड़ी eṛii - heel

ऐनक ainak - glasses

ओखली okhali - mortar

औरत aurat - woman

Consonants in Hindi are called vyanjan and they’re mostly arranged according to the manner and place of articulation, making it easy to remember the order.

Manner essentially refers to the way in which different parts of your mouth interact to create a sound, and place refers to where this interaction happens. In this lesson, we’ll cover 5 rows of vyanjan, which is 5 PLACES of articulation.

क ख ग घ ङ

च छ ज झ ञ

ट ठ ड ढ ण

त थ द ध न

प फ ब भ म

Each row goes from unvoiced to voiced (with an unaspirated and aspirated version of each) to the nasal.

Aspirated consonants are consonants followed by a little burst of air, kind of like the way the letter p is pronounced in the word "pin" in English.

Row 1 consists of VELARS, which are pronounced near the back of the mouth, around the area you'd pronounce k or g in English.

Row 2 consists of palatals, which are pronounced near the middle of the roof of the mouth, like ch in English.

Row 3 consists of retroflex consonants, which are pronounced near the roof of the mouth as well, but the tongue is curled backwards. This doesn't have an exact parallel in English, but I suggest looking them up and trying to pronounce them since these are very common sounds in Hindi.

Row 4 consists of dental consonants, which are pronounced with the tongue up against the upper teeth. Think th in “the” but with your tongue actually touching your teeth.

Row 5 consists of labial consonants, which are pronounced with the lips against each other, like m or b in English.

Let's look at these rows in detail!

To end this lesson, here are a few words that use both these consonants and the vowels from the previous lesson. These words may not seem very useful, but they’re easy to pronounce and figure out.

कलम - pen (this word has another spelling, but we’ll get to it later)

खाना - food

गंदा - dirty

घंटा - hour

चुपचाप - quietly

छाता - umbrella

जादू - magic

झंडा - flag

टोपी - cap

ठीक - fine, proper

डाँट - scolding (noun)

ढक्कन dhakkan - lid (oh what’s that weird double letter? perhaps this will be covered in the future ;))

ताकत - strength

थका - tired

दाँत - teeth

धोना - to wash

नई - new

पेट - stomach

फेंकना - to throw

बदबू - bad smell

भूख - hunger

hi! we are a project working for creating more resources, lessons, and awareness for west asian languages.

if you have some knowledge of linguistics, and are willing to stay committed and write up content bimonthly, shoot us a message!

language natives we are looking for: - persian  - hebrew - arabic - turkish

Sorry for the long break. College and life and things kept happening but this project is something that we’re not letting go of.

We’re making a few changes:

@notyetapolyglot​ is going to be co-running this project with me ( @mino-lingual​), be nice to them

we’re going to be working on consistency rather than scale. what does this mean? this means we’re going to be reducing the number of languages we’re actively, regularly producing content for. this means you’ll still get posts on smaller languages say armenian, but they’ll be fewer and far between. we’re a volunteer-based project, so if you want to contribute, shoot us a message!

Hello everyone! We’re going to be covering verbs very soon in Farsi, and I ended up making a list of:

- the most 65 most common verbs in persian (complete with memorisation charts) - suffixes for the simple past, present perfect and simple perfect tenses (and exceptions) - conjugation charts that you can print out

Here’s the link! As another really good resource for persian verbs, check out the tumblr @persian-verbs run by a member of our farsi team!

Turkish is an agglutinative language, but this is most obviously seen in its verbs as there are a number of infixes and suffixes that we can use with them. These infixes and suffixes can be for tense, aspect, person, etc.

In this lesson, we will be starting with the most common present tense, şimdiki zaman, or the present continuous tense.

The present continuous tense is used like this:

Ne yapıyorsun? - ‘What are you reading’, where ‘ne’ means ‘what’ and ‘yapıyorsun’ is the verb ‘yapmak’, which means ‘to do’, in its present continuous form.

A possible reply is “kitap okuyorum”, where ‘kitap’ means ‘book’ and ‘okuyorum’ is the verb ‘okumak’, which means ‘to read’, in its present continuous form.

Conjugating a verb in the present continuous tense can be done as follows:

Take the verb in its infinitive form (the basic form of a verb that doesn’t assign it a specific tense or subject), which can be recognised by the ending mak/mek. The ending is either ‘-mek’ or ‘-mak’ based on major vowel harmony.

Get rid of the ending, and replace it with iyor/ıyor/uyor/üyor (e, i = iyor, a, ı = ıyor, o, u = uyor, ö, ü = üyor). The ‘o’ in iyor does not change.

Refer to Lesson 3 for the endings (um, sun, etc) in the “Present Tense ‘to be’” table, and add them to the verb. The only exception is third person, which does not require an ending when it’s singular and uses the ending ‘-lar/ler’ when it’s plural. These endings always use the vowel ‘u’ for the sake of vowel harmony, as the vowel before it would be the ‘o’ in ‘iyor’.

Basically: (verb without mak/mek) + (iyor, according to vowel harmony) + (personal ending)

If you go back to the initial example, you will not notice that the word ‘yapıyorsun’ consists of ‘yap’, ‘-ıyor’ and the second person singular ending ‘-sun’ and that the word ‘okuyorum’ works the same way, but with the first person singular ending, ‘um’.

Here’s an example using the verb ‘yazmak’, which means ‘to write’:

Ben yazıyorum

Sen yazıyorsun

O yazıyor

Biz yazıyoruz

Siz yazıyorsunuz

Onlar yazıyorlar

Cases in Turkish are expressed with suffixes. They follow vowel harmony just like any other suffix, though sometimes there are a few more rules. The following are two very important cases used in relation to location.

The locative case is used to indicate a location. Basically, it is similar to the English prepositions “at”, “on” or “in” in that it tells us WHERE something is. It is formed with the suffix “-da/de”, which differs based on the last vowel of the word it is attached because of vowel harmony.

It follows two-way vowel harmony:

a ı o u = da

e i ö ü = de

For example: Oda (room) + da (because the last vowel is a) = odada (in the room) or Ev (house) + de ( the last vowel is e) = Evde (in the house)

Another thing to keep in mind is that the ‘d’ turns into a ‘t’ after some consonants (voiceless consonants specifically), like t, ç, ş, k and p.

For example: kitap (book) + ta (because the last consonant is p) = kitapta (in the book)

The ablative case is used to answer the questions from where or from which. This means that it’s main functions include expressing movement away from something or somewhere, the material something is made of or the cause for something happening. This is similar to English.

The movement function works like this: location + dan/den, which means “from location”

The material function: (made) material + dan/den, which means “(made) from material”

The cause function is like this: cause + dan/den, which means “because of cause”

It can be translated as ‘from’ in English.It is formed with the suffix “-dan/den”. If you master the locative case, you can usually just add an ‘n’ to form the ablative.

For example: Oda+dan= Odadan (from the room) or Ev + den (last vowel is e) = Evden (from the house)