Lesson 9. A The next three sections may be considered as informational only; they are provided for completeness. 9.A.1 Vowels Accents Accent is the sounding of a vowel at a higher or lower pitch or tone (svara). There are three tones: raised (udatta), not raised (anudatta), and a combination of the two or moving tone (svarita). These are only marked in the Veda, for example: The horizontal bar under the syllable indicates anudatta; the vertical line above the syllable indicates svarita; and udatta syllables are not marked. In classical Sanskrit texts, the accent is not marked. Where these are marked in the dictionary in Roman transliteration, the udatta and svarita will be indicated by the acute and grave accent marks respectively. Thus the above example in transliteration would be: satyam jnanamanantam brahma In practice, the accent system is not as simple as illustrated above: firstly, in continuous speech the accent is affected by the accents on adjacent syllables; secondly, the marking system may be simplified so that many anudatta are also not marked; finally, the notation system differs among the various Vedas. (For a fuller treatment of the subject see ftp://ftp.nac.ac.za/wikner/accent.ps*) English has a stress accent system (e.g. listen to the 'to' syllable in 'photograph' and 'photographer'), but there is no stress system in Sanskrit (indeed there should be no stress at all in the study of Sanskrit!); Sanskrit is either sounded with the pitch accent described above, or in ekasruti, a neutral accentless tone. 9. A. 2 Variations in Devanagarl Alphabet Just as there are variations in the Roman alphabet (e.g. a and a), so there are variations in devanagarl: some of the less obvious ones are illustrated below: W This is an alternate form of 3T, and just as one has derivatives of the familiar form as 3TT 3TT 3JT, so one has WT WT Wt . V This is a variation of the form ^.
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