284. G. A. Grievson— On the Kagmiri Vowel-System. [No. 3; 
In monosyllabic words ending in an aspirated consonant, a takes 
nearly the sound of the @ in hat, thus m€@ krikh, a noise, but mer 
krak*, noises. @B_kdth, a ram, gen. sg. He a kat* sand“. This diffe- 
rence is not marked in writing. I shall represent it by @. 
A final a is very lightly pronounced, and is therefore written above 
the line, as in krak*, above. With regard to final ya, vide post (page 304). 
This lightly pronounced ¢ also occurs between consonants: In such 
cases, in the Carada character, the two consonants are compounded, and 
the vowel neglected. We thus get seemingly impossible combinations, 
such as the word €¥ or literatim ish, which cannot be possibly pronounced 
as written. The word is really pronounced tseh, and means ‘thou.’ So 
also in many other words, e.g., = (which I prefer to write Ya) pronounced 
hint, he has swollen ; x (aa) din, he shook out; & (aq ) k2t, he was 
wet; w (<a) r2¢, spite ; Tz (1s) gth", he ground: @xe dad%:%, the 
edible part of a cucumber ; qqe babtr®, a flower; ames gat%, clever 
(fem.) ; HAT phol2r,! a basket. The sound of this letter is very obscure 
and closely resembles that of the obscure vowel in the English termination 
ble, usually called the neutral vowel. It is liable to modification by 
a following 7-, w-, or &-matra, but its sound is so short, that only an 
acute ear can distinguish its various shades. Wade illustrates this @ as 
well as the a modified by u-matra, by a@, a system which lends to end- 
less confusion, unless some clue is given to the modifying vowel. 
Tewara-kaula in his Kagmiri Dhatu-patha, also notes a modified a, 
which is not followed by a matra-vowel. It is pronounced slightly 
more labially thanan ordinary a: i.e., a tinge of o is given to it; and itis, 
apparently, the short form of @ (6). It closely resembles the ordinary 
sound of a in Hastern Bihari, which is not nearly so broad as the 
corresponding sound in Bengali, but is still somewhat broader than the 
usual a of Benares-Hindi, The difference between @ is however, so 
very slight that it would pass unheeded by an ordinary ear. The 
sound occurs in the following verbal roots (including their causals, 
which I omit). It will be seen that with the exception of the root 
gee prakhtt, which is hardly an exception, in every single instance the 
ais followed by a compound consonant the last member of which is *. 
1 Tewara-kaula spells all these with compound consonants. I prefer, deliber- 
ately, to write them with virdma, and shall do so-in future. Mr. Hinton Knowles, 
whose authority is undoubted, would transcribe these words hun, dunt, kutst (there 
is a difference of opinion as to the correct form of the part of the root fis. I. K. 
makes it kt), 7i¢ and guh#. This well illustrates the indefinite nature of the sound 
which, in the Garada character, is represented by wirama, or absence of any vowel 
whatever. 
