The adhak is a very important, though subtle device, as two letters without an adhak give rise to completely different meanings. In some cases another vowel sound may come in between the two letters, but the adhak still affects the second letter, for example in the word ਬੱਚਿਓ (bacciō), the a dhak comes before the sihari vowel but still affects the letter ਚ (c), so it is pronounced chch. For example, in the Punjabi word for boundary ਹੱਦ (hadd), the adhak affects the letter ਦ (d) changing the sound of the word from had to hadd. Therefore, when the adhak occurs between two letters, it is the second of the two, that is to be repeated. It should be placed above the preceding letter that is to be read twice, however, in practice it is placed between the two letters. The function of ਅਧਕ (adhak) is to allocate a double sound to the particular letter that it is assigned to. Its sound is same as 'n' in punch, lunch. It is not used upon 'a' (instead bindī is used with this letter) and last letter of a word. Tippee is used with muktā, sihārī, auṅkaṛ, dulaiṅkar only. It serves to add a nasal sound to a particular vowel. Its sound is the same as 'n' in band, grand, slang, grant. Bi ndi is used with kannā, lāvā, dulāvā, bihārī, hōṛā and kanauṛā and the independent forms of vowels where 'a' is the bearer. Nasal Signs a) ਬਿੰਦੀ (bindī)īindi serves to add a nasal sound to a particular vowel. There are five nasal consonants in Gurmukhi:Īuxiliary Signs 1. There are only three commonly used subjoined letters and to distinguish them from their normal forms the word ਪੈਰੀਂ (pairīṃ), which means belonging to the foot, is attached under the letter.įor the purpose of transliteration there is no special sign for the subjoined character so you will have to pay careful attention to the Punjabi spelling. The second consonant is written under the first as a subscript. Some Punjabi words require consonants to be written in a conjunct form, which takes the shape of a subscript to the main letter. There are two main reasons for this, first their pronunciation is quite similar and second, they are used to differentiate borrowed words from other languages, the knowledge of which is decreasing in East Punjab. Many Punjabi speakers do not make a distinction between ਖ ਖ਼ ਗ ਗ਼ and ਫ ਫ਼. These letters are named by adding the words ਪੈਰ ਬਿੰਦੀ (par bindī) to the name of the letter, so ਸ਼ is called ਸੱਸੇ ਪੈਰ ਬਿੰਦੀ (sassē par bindī), which literally means sassaa with a dot in its foot. It is also important to note the distinction between plain letters and those letters which are marked by a dot, as shown below: Aspirated consonants are accompanied by an audible expulsion of breath, whereas non-aspirated consonants are those produced with minimal breath.
It is important to note that two phonetic features of all North Indian Languages are the system of contrasts between aspirated and unaspirated consonants and the contrast between retroflex and dental consonants. It is more accurate to call the Punjabi writing system a syllabary because each character represents a syllable. It is quite possible to learn the characters of the Gurmukhi script and sounds of the language at the same time as, by and large, Punjabi is a phonetic language. Three Zones Of Letters In Gurmukhi Script The lower zone represents the area below middle zone where some vowels and certain half-characters lie in the foot of consonants. The upper zone denotes the region above the head line, where the vowels reside, while the middle zone represents the area below the headline where the consonants and some sub-parts of vowels are present. A letter in Gurmukhi script can be partitioned into three horizontal zones. The characters are connected mostly by this line called head line to form a word. It can also be noted that most of the characters have a horizontal line at the upper part. So they don't represent any sound independently except ਅ as mukta vowel. The shape, name and sound of Gurmukhi alphabet is as above: More recently, an extra character ( ਲ਼ ) was introduced. This need arose because many lone words are used in Punjabi. At one time there were only thirty-five letters in the Gurmukhi script, but later, five more letters were added in order to accommodate other sounds correctly. Sanskrit may have been one of the first languages to group the letters according to their sounds.
Every letter has a particular shape, particular name and it represent a particular sound. All letters of a script have three aspects.