Cursive (or italic) script designates retroflex in this table, as opposed to normal script designating dental (a simpler handritten way of indicating retroflex is to put a dot under the retroflex letter). Actually hearing these differences will happen more slowly. At first it’s necessary to pay attention to where you put the tip of your tongue when speaking "t" or "d", and little by little your pronunciation will start to resemble that of Marathi speakers. The d's and t's in the dental row parallel similar sounds in the retroflex row they are differentiated from each other by the placement of the tip of the tongue. Practice might be required to pronounce aspirates correctly (eg, pronounce bhau by first saying bahau, then deleting the a the others can be treated similarly). An "h" is added like a puff of air to the consonants in the "unaspirated" columns, to form the consonants in the "aspirated" columns. Fortunately, most of them resemble English, and need not be specially learned. They each have different sounds according to whether they are voiced or unvoiced, aspirated or unaspirated. Aspiration is the production of an audible huff or puff of air with the consonant (the h-sound).Īside from the nasals and the row of semivowels & combos, there are just 5 groups of consonants, which are subdivided mainly by tongue placement. Voicing is produced by vibration of the vocal cords. Retroflex: tip of tongue against center of palate (it is flexed somewhat backwards).
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Palatal: middle of tongue against palate. Labial p ph b bh Semivowels & combos: y r l w sh sīack: back of tongue against back of palate. Consonants: these are best examined in a table. Marathi also has 2 diphthongs (combinations of the vowels ai & au), pronounced in sequence, somewhat merged together. There are 2 other vowels given separate letters in Marathi: the "i" in a few Sanskrit loan-words like rishi, and the "æ" in a few English loanwords like tæxi. (Note that many underlinings got inadvertently dropped in this text) 3. The correct choice (long vs short) isn’t critical, but for the student the long vowels have been underlined to differentiate them here: i & u. The "i" vowel & the "u" vowel can be pronounced either long or short. The italic “e” vowel on the end of some words though generally pronounced (“uh”) like the “a” vowel, may also (as in written Marathi) be pronounced “eh”. The italic "a" vowel mustn’t be confused with the "a" vowel. Spelling consistency: It is important when learning, to always use the same symbol to designate each significantly different sound. u is pronounced as in "put" (short), u as in “boot" (long). i is pronounced as in "pit" (short), i as in "beet" (long).
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a/e a i u e o a is pronounced as in "but" (terminal “uh” is written: e). Vowels: there are 6 important Marathi vowel sounds. Marathi Primer simplified from the text “Learn Marathi in 30 Days” by Sanjay (for learning spoken Marathi) This book was simplified from Sanjay’s text by eliminating the use of Devanagari script, thus hopefully saving many days of initial hard work, and making the process of learning spoken Marathi considerably easier.