Revision
We have now completed learning all the Assamese Alphabets and few additional symbols. From here on, for the rest of the course we will practice reading texts using the alphabets and symbols.
Buddies & Brothers
You might have noticed this trend in the Assamese alphabets while going through this course. We have few pairs or groups of letters that almost sounds similar and few groups where one letter is just a harder sound of the other. We can think of these groups as buddies & brothers.
Brothers
In English, many of the alphabets have a soft & hard pronunciation. In Assamese, we normally have separate alphabets:
ক (ka) => খ (kha) => ক্ষ (khya)
গ (ga) => ঘ (gha)
জ (ja) => ঝ (jha)
ত & ট (ta) => ঠ & থ (tha)
দ & ড (da) => ধ & ঢ (dha)
প(pa) => ফ (pha)
ব(ba) => ভ (bha)
ৰ(ra) => ঢ় (rha)
Buddies
For the similar sounding letters, Assamese owes their origin to the ancient Indian language Sanskrit where they are more pronounced. Though they are pronounced almost similarly, there are specific grammatical rules about which letter to use in what cases. These rules define spellings of words that uses these letters. You will get familiar as you read more. For now, you just try to remember the letters. Here are the similar sounding alphabets in Assamese:
sa : চ, ছ
ja : জ, য
ta : ত, ট
tha : থ, ঠ
da : দ, ড
dha : ধ, ঢ
na : ন, ণ
xa : স, শ, ষ
ra : ৰ, ড়
u : উ, ঊ, ও
ee : ই, ঈ
Order of the Assamese Alphabets
In this course, we learnt the letters in lessons that grouped them by their shape. Actually the letters are arranged in a particular order in Assamese as per their relation to each other. In Assamese, the vowels are listed separately from the consonants. Here is the actual chart of the letters in proper order.
The Vowels
The numbers
The Consonants
