As of 1987, the "Goan Antruz dialect" in the Devanagari script has been declared Standard Konkani and promulgated as an official language in the Indian state of Goa.[1][2]Konkani in the Roman script is not mandated as an official script by law. However, an ordinance passed by the government of Goa allows the use of Roman script for official communication. This ordinance has been put into effect by various ministries in varying degrees. For example, the 1996 Goa Panchayat Rules[3] stipulate that the various forms used in the election process must be in both the Roman and Devanagari script.
Ancient
The earliest inscription in Konkani in Goykanadi script (extinct now) is of the Gupta period in the 2nd century CE found at Aravalem, Goa. It reads
śacipurācē śirasi
(On the top of Shachipura)
The famous inscription at the foot of the colossal Jain monolith Gomaṭēśvara (Bāhubali) Konkani: gomṭo - pretty masc., īśvar - God at Shravanabelagola of 981 CE reads,
śrīcāvuṇḍarājē̃ kara viyālē̃, śrīgaṅgārājē̃ suttālē̃ kara viyālē̃
At the foot of the Gommateshwara at Shravanabelagola there are two inscriptions. One on the right foot and one on the left. On the right foot the inscription is written in old Kannada. On the left foot it is in Devanagari.
Present
The rules for writing Konkani in the Devanagari script are elucidated in a book released by the Goa Konkani Academy titled kōṅkaṇī śuddhalēkhanācē nēm. While the rules for writing Konkani in the Roman script are elucidated in a book titled thomas sṭīvans koṅkaṇi kēndr Romi Lipi by writer Pratap Naik, released by Konkani singer Ullās Buyā̃v at Dalgado Konkani Academy and in Romi Lipient Konknni Kors.[5]
ॠ, ऌ and ॡ are rarely used in Konkani except to render tatsam words. e.g. कॣप्त (imagined-derivative of कल्पना)
अ, ओ and ऒ are rendered in the Roman script by o. Under Portuguese rule, the Konkani language was modified to fit the Roman syllabary system. As a result, Portuguese orthography has eliminated or deformed original Konkani sounds.[6] e.g.
अ - करता kartā is written as korta or even corta (sometimes it is nasalised to cortam)
ओ - दोन dōn is written as don.
ऒ - पॊरनॆं pornẽ is written as pornem
आ and ऍ are rendered by a and ê respectively in the Roman script.
आ - हांव hā̃v is written as hanv or Anv
ऍ - कॅनरा kænarā is written as Kanara or Canara.
Nasal vowels in certain cases are represented by a tilde (~) above the character e.g. pãy (foot).[5]
For explicit differentiation, closed vowels (ए and ओ) are represented with a circumflex (ê and ô), while open vowels (ऍ and ऑ) are represented by (e and o).[5] However, the circumflex is sometimes omitted if it is expected that the reader will know the correct vowel sound.
ಚ and ച in the Kannada and Malayalam scripts respectively, render two sounds, (c) and (t͡ʃ).
ಜ and ജ in the Kannada and Malayalam scripts respectively, render two sounds, (ɟ) and (d͡ʒ).
In the Roman script, a retroflex consonant is got by simply doubling the corresponding dental consonant; e.g. त - ta, ट - Tta.
Roman Konkani does not distinguish between श and ष. Both are written as Sha or Xa and pronounced as श.
Roman Konkani does not distinguish between फ and फ़. Both are normally written as F and pronounced accordingly. e.g. tomorrow फाल्लॆक (phāllek)- fallek (fāllek)
ن nūn in the Nawayati Konkani script not only is a separate consonant, but also performs the role of the anusvāra. It indicates a homorganic nasal preceding another consonant; e.g. رنگ raṅg, انڈو aṇḍo. It also undergoes nasalisation; e.g. ہانؤ hāṃv.
ع, 'ayin غ ghayin and ح he in the Nawayati Konkani script are used for incorporated Perso-Arabic words.
Joined characters are denoted with an apostrophe ('), e.g., mell'lo. m followed by an apostrophe at the end of a word indicates that the m consonant is to be pronounced, and that it is not a nasal vowel, e.g. kam'.[5]
Nasal consonants and nasalisation
In Konkani, the anusvāraंṃ is traditionally defined as representing a nasal stop homorganic to a following plosive,(anunāsika) and also vowel nasalisation. The precise phonetic value of the phoneme is dependent on the phonological environment.[7] Word-finally, it is realized as nasalization of the preceding vowel (e.g. bā̃yi[bãːyi], "a well"). It results in vowel nasalization also medially between a short vowel and a non-obstruent (tũvẽ[tʊ̃ʋe] "you (acc.)". It is pronounced as a homorganic nasal, with the preceding vowel becoming nasalized allophonically, in the following cases: between a long vowel and a voiced stop (tāṃbo[taːmbo] "copper", cāṃdī[tʃaːndiː] "silver"), between a long vowel and a voiceless stop (dāṃt[daːnt] "tooth"), and also between a short vowel and an obstruent (sāṃbayi-[saːmbay] "to support", The last rule has two sets of exceptions where the anusvāra effects only a nasalization of the preceding short vowel. Words from the first set are morphologically derived from words with a long nasalized vowel (mā̃s[mãs], "meat". In such cases the vowel is sometimes denasalized ([maːs]. The second set is composed of a few words like (pā̃vcẽ[pãʋtʃɛ̃], "to arrive".)
Avagraha (ऽ)
Konkani is one of the few modern Indo-Aryan languages to apply the avagraha beyond mere sustenance of an exclamation, cry or shout in speech. It is used by verbs in continuous tense. The avagraha is not used in Standard Konkani in the continuous tense. Its use is however popular and prevalent amongst the Canara Saraswats, both Gaud and Bhanap, writing in their native Amchigele dialect, in the continuous tense with the aim of conforming to the schwa deletion rule.[8]
The avagraha is also used to mark the non-elision of word-final inherent a, which otherwise is a modern orthographic convention: बैसऽ baisa "sit" versus बैस bais.
The schwa deletion or schwa syncope phenomenon plays a crucial role in Konkani and several other Indo-Aryan languages, where schwas implicit in the written scripts of those languages are obligatorily deleted for correct pronunciation.[9][10] Schwa syncope is extremely important in these languages for intelligibility and unaccented speech. It also presents a challenge to non-native speakers and speech synthesis software because the scripts, including Nagar Barap, do not provide indicators of where schwas should be dropped.[11]
This means the schwa ('ə') implicit in each consonant of the script is "obligatorily deleted" at the end of words and in certain other contexts,[12] unlike in Sanskrit. This phenomenon has been termed the "schwa syncope rule" or the "schwa deletion rule" of Konkani. In other words, when a vowel-preceded consonant is followed by a vowel-succeeded consonant, the schwa inherent in the first consonant is deleted.[13] However, this formalization is inexact and incomplete (i.e. sometimes deletes a schwa when it shouldn't or, at other times, fails to delete it when it should), and can yield errors. Schwa deletion is computationally important because it is essential to building text-to-speech software for Konkani.[13] Without the appropriate deletion of schwas, any speech output would sound unnatural.
Vowel nasalization
With some words that contain /n/ or /m/ consonants separated from succeeding consonants by schwas, the schwa deletion process has the effect of nasalizing any preceding vowels. Some examples in Konkani include:
jẽvaṇ => jẽvlo
Schwa rules
The final inherent अ is generally omitted. E.g. देव is dēv, not dēva.
Schwa is retained in single letter words. E.g. क is ka, not k.
Schwa is omitted if the next letter is a consonant conjunct. E.g. आमच्या is Āmcyā, not Āmacyā.
Schwa is retained in the second letter of a three letter word that ends अ. E.g. करप is karap, not karp.
Schwa is omitted from the second letter of a three letter word that ends with a vowel other than अ. E.g. चॆरकॊ is cerko, not cerako.
Schwa is omitted from the second letter of a word with four letters. E.g. करपाची is karpāci, not karapāci.
Schwa is retained in the third letter of a word with four letters, if the final letter ends with a vowel other than अ. E.g. आंगवणी is Āṅgvaṇī, not Āṅgvṇī.
Verb roots always end in a consonant even if they undergo declination. e.g. आपंव +चॆं= आपंवचॆं, hence one says āpãvcẽ not āpãvacẽ , आपय+ता=आपयता, hence we say āpaytā not āpayatā.
As a result of schwa syncope, the Konkani pronunciation of many words differs from that expected from a literal Sanskrit-style rendering of Devanagari. For instance, करता is kartā not karatā, आपयता is āpaytā not āpayatā', वेद is vēd not vēda and मिरसांग is mirsāṅg not mirasāṅga.
For instance, the letter sequence ळब is pronounced differently in मळब (sky) and मळबार (in the sky). In मळब, there is no schwa deletion for the letter ळ, since it is the second letter in a three letter word that ends with अ. Hence it is pronounced as maḷab. In मळबार, the letter ळ has schwa deletion since it is the second letter of a word with four letters. Hence it is pronounced as maḷbār.[12] While native speakers correctly pronounce the sequences differently in different contexts, non-native speakers and voice-synthesis software can make them "sound unnatural", making it difficult for the listener to grasp the intended meaning.
Proposed scripts
There have been various proposals to have a script specifically for Konkani. In 1965, S. V. Raykar from Sirsi in Karnataka devised a distinctive script for Konkani by combining features of the Devanagari and Kannada scripts.[14] Similarly, in 2020, Ronan Lewis from Udupi created a unique script for Konkani using alphabets from various languages including Arabic, French and Hebrew.[15] There is also a movement to revive the Goykanadi script and a proposal has been made to introduce a Unicode block for Goykanadi.[16] In 1993, Gajanana Ghantkar wrote the book History of Goa through Gõykanadi script, which has many historical Konkani documents written in Goykanadi, along with its Devanagari transliteration.[17]
↑ Goa, Daman and Diu Act, 1987 section 1 subsection 2 clause (c) defines "Konkani language" as Konkani in Devanagari script, and section 3 subsection 1 promulgates Konkani to be the official language of the Union Territory.
↑ On 20 August 1992 the Parliament of India, by effecting the 78th amendment to the Constitution of India, included Konkani in Devanagari script in the VIIIth Schedule of the Constitution of India.
↑ Chavundaraya was the military chief of the Ganga dynasty King Gangaraya. This inscription on the Bahubali statue draws attention to a Basadi (Jain temple) initially built by him and then modified by Gangaraya in the 12th century CE Ref: S. Settar in Adiga (2006), p 256
↑ Larry M. Hyman; Victoria Fromkin; Charles N. Li (1988), Language, speech, and mind, vol.1988, Taylor & Francis, ISBN0-415-00311-3, ... The implicit /a/ is not read when the symbol appears in word-final position or in certain other contexts where it is obligatorily deleted (via the so-called schwa-deletion rule which plays a crucial role in Konkani word phonology ...
↑ Indian linguistics, Volume 37, Linguistic Society of India, 1976, 1976, ... the history of the schwa deletion rule in Gujarati has been examined. The historical perspective brings out the fact that schwa deletion is not an isolated phenomenon; the loss of final -a has preceded the loss of medial -a-; ...
1 2 Monojit Choudhury; Anupam Basu; Sudeshna Sarkar (July 2004), "A Diachronic Approach for Schwa Deletion in Indo Aryan Languages"(PDF), Proceedings of the Workshop of the ACL Special Interest Group on Computational Phonology (SIGPHON), Association for Computations Linguistics, ... schwa deletion is an important issue for grapheme-to-phoneme conversion of IAL, which in turn is required for a good Text-to-Speech synthesizer ...
↑ Basty, Shashank Shenoy (20 August 2020). "Introducing the Goyakanadi Alphabet"(PDF). Unicode Technical Site (published 1 October 2020). Archived from the original(PDF) on 3 January 2021. Retrieved 9 February 2021.
An abugida, sometimes known as alphasyllabary, neosyllabary or pseudo-alphabet, is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary, like a diacritical mark. This contrasts with a full alphabet, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad, in which vowel marking is absent, partial, or optional – in less formal contexts, all three types of script may be termed "alphabets". The terms also contrast them with a syllabary, in which a single symbol denotes the combination of one consonant and one vowel.
Devanāgari or Devanagari, also called Nāgari, is a left-to-right abugida, based on the ancient Brāhmi script, used in the northern Indian subcontinent. It is one of the official scripts of the Republic of India and Nepal. It was developed and in regular use by the 7th century CE and achieved its modern form by 1000 CE. The Devanāgari script, composed of 48 primary characters, including 14 vowels and 34 consonants, is the fourth most widely adopted writing system in the world, being used for over 120 languages.
The Kannada script is an abugida of the Brahmic family, used to write Kannada, one of the Dravidian languages of South India especially in the state of Karnataka. It is one of the official scripts of the Indian Republic. Kannada script is also widely used for writing Sanskrit texts in Karnataka. Several minor languages, such as Tulu, Konkani, Kodava, Sanketi and Beary, also use alphabets based on the Kannada script. The Kannada and Telugu scripts share very high mutual intellegibility with each other, and are often considered to be regional variants of single script. Other scripts similar to Kannada script are Sinhala script, and Old Peguan script (used in Burma).
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa is a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol ⟨ə⟩, placed in the central position of the vowel chart. In English and some other languages, it usually represents the mid central vowel sound, produced when the lips, tongue, and jaw are completely relaxed, such as the vowel sound of the ⟨a⟩ in the English word about.
Anusvara is a symbol used in many Indic scripts to mark a type of nasal sound, typically transliterated ⟨ṃ⟩. Depending on its location in the word and the language for which it is used, its exact pronunciation can vary. In the context of ancient Sanskrit, anusvara is the name of the particular nasal sound itself, regardless of written representation.
Devanagari is an Indic script used for many Indo-Aryan languages of North India and Nepal, including Hindi, Marathi and Nepali, which was the script used to write Classical Sanskrit. There are several somewhat similar methods of transliteration from Devanagari to the Roman script, including the influential and lossless IAST notation. Romanized Devanagari is also called Romanagari.
Konkani is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Konkani people, primarily in the Konkan region, along the western coast of India. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages mentioned in the Indian Constitution, and the official language of the Indian state of Goa. It is also spoken in Karnataka, Maharashtra, Kerala, Gujarat as well as Damaon, Diu & Silvassa.
Saurashtra is an Indo-Aryan language spoken primarily by the Saurashtrians of Southern India who migrated from the Lata region of present-day Gujarat to south of Vindhyas in the Middle Ages.
Virama is a Sanskrit phonological concept to suppress the inherent vowel that otherwise occurs with every consonant letter, commonly used as a generic term for a codepoint in Unicode, representing either
halanta, hasanta or explicit virāma, a diacritic in many Brahmic scripts, including the Devanagari and Bengali scripts, or
saṃyuktākṣara or implicit virama, a conjunct consonant or ligature.
In an alphabetic writing system, a silent letter is a letter that, in a particular word, does not correspond to any sound in the word's pronunciation. In linguistics, a silent letter is often symbolised with a null sign U+2205∅EMPTY SET. Null is an unpronounced or unwritten segment. The symbol resembles the Scandinavian letter Ø and other symbols.
Hindustani has been written in several different scripts. Most Hindi texts are written in the Devanagari script, which is derived from the Brāhmī script of Ancient India. Most Urdu texts are written in the Urdu alphabet, which comes from the Persian alphabet. Hindustani has been written in both scripts. In recent years, the Latin script has been used in these languages for technological or internationalization reasons. Historically, Kaithi script has also been used.
Mal Paharia is a language spoken by 51,000 of 110,000 ethnic Mal Paharia in the states of Jharkhand and West Bengal in India, and regions of Bangladesh. The language is also known as Mal Pahoria, Malto, Malti, Paharia, Parsi, and Mal Pahariya. It has been variously regarded as a Bengali–Assamese language, a dialect of Malto, and a mixed Dravidian–Indo-Aryan language. There is a generally positive attitude among speakers of the language towards it, but it is considered vulnerable as some speakers have shifted to Bengali. Mal Paharia uses the Devanagari script and rules for its writing, reading, and speech.
Tamil phonology is characterised by the presence of "true-subapical" retroflex consonants and multiple rhotic consonants. Its script does not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced consonants; phonetically, voice is assigned depending on a consonant's position in a word, voiced intervocalically and after nasals except when geminated. Tamil phonology permits few consonant clusters, which can never be word initial.
The phoneme inventory of the Marathi language is similar to that of many other Indo-Aryan languages. An IPA chart of all contrastive sounds in Marathi is provided below.
Hindustani is the lingua franca of northern India and Pakistan, and through its two standardized registers, Hindi and Urdu, a co-official language of India and co-official and national language of Pakistan respectively. Phonological differences between the two standards are minimal.
Schwa deletion, or schwa syncope, is a phenomenon that sometimes occurs in Assamese, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Gujarati, and several other Indian languages with schwas that are implicit in their written scripts. Languages like Marathi and Maithili with increased influence from other languages through coming into contact with them—also show a similar phenomenon. Some schwas are obligatorily deleted in pronunciation even if the script suggests otherwise.
The Hunterian transliteration system is the "national system of romanization in India" and the one officially adopted by the Government of India. Hunterian transliteration was sometimes also called the Jonesian transliteration system because it derived closely from a previous transliteration method developed by William Jones (1746–1794). Upon its establishment, the Sahitya Akademi also adopted the Hunterian method, with additional adaptations, as its standard method of maintaining its bibliography of Indian-language works.
Konkani is a southern Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Indo-European family of languages spoken in the Konkan coastal region of India. It has approximately 3.6 million speakers.
Balabodh is a slightly modified style of the Devanagari script used to write the Marathi language and the Korku language. What sets balabodha apart from the Devanagari script used for other languages is the more frequent and regular use of both ळ /ɭ/ and र्. Additionally, Balbodh style has ऍ/ॲ and ऑ as adaptations to pronounce [æ] and [ɒ] in English-based words. Another distinctive feature is the use of Anusvara over trailing अ, denoting lengthening of the trailing vowel.
A is a vowel of Indic abugidas. In modern Indic scripts, A is derived from the early "Ashoka" Brahmi letter after having gone through the Gupta letter . Bare consonants without a modifying vowel sign have the "A" vowel inherently, and thus there is no modifier sign for "A" in Indic scripts.
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