Phonology

Some remarks on the orthography

a. Devanagari

Since Khaling is a language of the Tibeto-Burman language family whereas Devanagari is a script for Sanskrit-based languages, there are difficulties in writing Khaling accurately. The Devanagari was therefore adapted to make Khaling easy to read. Since Khaling is different from Nepali, therefore, there is no need to make Khaling words look like Nepali words.

From the beginning, linguists at Tribhuvan University took an interest in writing Tibeto-Burman languages in Devanagari. Puzzling over how to write the frequent “umlaut” in Khaling, Dr CM Bandhu suggested to use the “low dot” which is no longer used for consonants to write “umlaut”, rather than following the Nepali convention by writing  [half consonant + य] as is done for English words like “bank” in Nepali. Writing the sequence [half consonant and य+vowel] makes Khaling very cumbersome to read – moreover, it poses problems when we write the umlaut following [य] because we have contrasts between [य+ clear vowel] and [य+ umlauted vowel]. Dr Bandhu’s suggestion has proved very useful and helpful for new Khaling readers. We gratefully acknowledge his contribution here.

b. Pronunciation

The pronunciation in square brackets uses Roman letters and is an approximate transliteration rather than an accurate phonetic representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

-S I Toba