Page:A grammar of the Teloogoo language.djvu/82

16 43. Each of the long vowels should be pronounced full and broad, and the voice should dwell upon them twice as long as upon the short vowels, which should be sounded as short as possible.

44. When the sound of the vowel i comes after another vowel, it is expressed by the consonant  y, (written without the  u,) and that of  by the character ; thus,  rai, a stone;  bōee, a palanqueen-bearer.

45. The long vowel and its connected form  ē in some cases, which must be learned by practice, as they can scarcely be embraced by any rule, instead of the pronunciation before mentioned as that generally attached to them, take a sound nearly approaching to  ya, and some what resembling the final sound produced by the bleating of sheep; hence, perhaps  mēku, a sheep; thus also,  nēlu, the ground, and  nērumoo, a crime, are pronounced nearly as if written as  nyalu, and  nyarumoo; and, in the common dialect, they are often so erroneously written.

46. The sound above assigned to the vowels roo,  roo, and  loo, as well as to their connected forms,  roo,  roo, and  loo, is that which properly belongs to these characters in the Teloogoo language; and which is invariably given to them by all the natives in the northern provinces of the Peninsula. In the middle provinces, the r and l are pronounced with the tongue mormore [sic] curved towards the roof of the mouth, and the oo less distincly, with an inclination to the sound of the French u, and to the southward, these letters assume the sounds of ri-ree- and lee- given to them by Sanscrit Grammarians.

47. It is chiefly in the pronunciation of the consonants that difficulty is experienced. kꞕu, gꞕ,  chꞕ,  jꞕ,  tꞕ,  dꞕ,  dꞕ,  pꞕ, and  bꞕ, the ten aspirated consonants, peculiar to Sanscrit derivatives; are not, at the commencement of a word, familiar to an English ear; but they occur frequently in our language in the middle of compound terms; the sound of the h flowing, in an easy gentle manner, immediately after that of the k, g, d, &c., which precedes it, without the least articulation intervening; thus,