Analysis of stop consonants in Devanagari alphabet

Abstract

The Devanagari alphabet, which is used by several Indian languages including Sanskrit and Hindi, has vowels and consonants are placed in tabular format, which are arranged according to how they originate. A part of this table is a 5 x 5 matrix and comprises of stop consonants, where different rows corresponding to velar, palatal, retro-flex, dental and labial consonants. In this paper, we have explored patterns that exist between different consonant sounds belonging to different rows and columns of this table. Toward this end, four sound samples from individuals have been recorded, and analyzed. Our analysis shows the existence of many interesting relationships, which exist between sounds populating different rows and columns of 5 X 5 matrix. One interesting observation which has been made is that the fundamental differences between 1st and 2nd/ 3rd or 4th member of each row are essentially the same in all the rows, but a few exceptions in the 5th row. For example, in all rows the 3rd member is a combination of a short-duration signal and the 1st member. Similarly, the 2nd member is 1st member with a nonzero mean pressure line. Further, the 4th member is found to be the combination of the other two (1–2 and 1–3) variations. In this paper, we present several such interesting relationships. These relationships may be potentially useful in several sound processing algorithms.