1.A.4 The Other Simple Vowels: r 1 To get to the correct pronunciation of 1*3, begin by sounding a prolonged i3 and slowly raise the tip of the tongue so that it pointing to the top of the head, approaching but not touching the roof of the mouth. Do not try to hold the back of the tongue in the i3 position, nor try to move it out of that position: simply have no concern with what is happening at the back of the tongue, just attend to the tip of the tongue and listen. Repeat the exercise a few times until comfortable with the sound of 1*3, then practise directly sounding 1*3 for a full breath. Similarly for I3, start sounding with a prolonged i3 and slowly raise the tip of the tongue to behind the upper front teeth without touching them. Continue the exercise as for 1-3. These vowels appear to have vanished from popular speech, and the memory of how to pronounce them has faded. The pandit of today tends to pronounce r as if it were ri, and r even more improbably as rT; similarly 1 and I tend to be pronounced as lri and lri. This accounts for the transliteration scheme found in the dictionary. In fact the vocalic r is still present in Eastern European languages and you may come across surnames like Przybylski; it is also present in English in some pronunciations of the word 'interesting' as 'int'r'sting' or 'intrsting', or indeed in the American 'prdy' for 'pretty'. The long 1 is not used in the standard grammar, and 1 occurs only in one verb (kip, to manage, to be well ordered or regulated). In practice, when either of these vowels is followed by a consonant whose mouth position requires that the tip of the tongue be at a lower position, a vestigial i will emerge due to the bunching of the muscle at the back of the tongue when moving the tip downwards, for example rk tends to produce i^k, but a word like Krsna should produce no i sound at all. 1.A.5 The Compound Vowels: e ai o au a Let's examine what we have so far. We began with a and from this developed u and i to give the three primary vowels, and then the i gave rise to r and 1 . These u 1 five basic vowels, each having its own unique mouth position, define the five mouth positions used for the whole alphabet.
