How to read Sindhi script
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Sindhi is an easy to learn language. Although it is an indic language from Indo-European family of Aryan languages, presntly, it has many words from Persian, Arabic, and English. However, it is easy to read because its alphabet, borrowed from Arabic, is almost phonetic. In fact, it is a modified Arabic alphabet that is written from right to left. We shall start with the Phonology of the language before we can understand its spelling and pronunciation rules.
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[edit] Phonology
The language has 18 vowels. There are 8 monothongs and each of those has a nasal variant. It makes 16 vowels in adition to its 2 diphthongs. Sindhi has a large number of consonants, i.e. 36. It includes plosives, implosives, glottals, palatals and bilabials. The only difficulty a learner (usually from Indo-European origin) may have is in pronouncing Sindhi implosives which probably find their origin in the dravidan roots of the language before non-aryan period.
[edit] Vowels
There are 18 vowels. We shall discuss all those categorically.
[edit] Non Nasal Monothongs
First we shall discuss 8 non nasal monothogs. These can be further categorized into Long and Short vowels. Short vowels are those which are shorter in duration. These are not specified by any character in the set of 52 characters in the alphabet; rather, one uses diacrtical marks for their representation. Usually, as a normal practice, even diacrtical marks aren't used to represent the short vowels that are understood and read with the help of the context. The context usually helps disambigate the correct pronunciation from the many possible pronunciations in the absence of the diacrtical marks. However, while in the learning process, one always goes through the text that is well coded with the diacritical marks.
The three diacritical marks used to represent the three short vowels are called ZABAR, ZER and PESH. The ZABAR is a small line segment over a character to represnt the half-open vowel that is reprensented by the phontic code . It is qute close to the english vowel .
[edit] External Links
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