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Now that you have
learnt the pronunciation of vowels, let us talk about consonants. As told
earlier there are 27 consonants in the Kashmiri language. For teaching purpose
these have been divided into 8 Programmes.
Before we introduce these Programmes let us tell you
about the general characteristics of consonant sounds.
While as vowels are pronounced by allowing the air
stream to pass through without any obstruction, consonants are pronounced when
air is made to stop somewhere in the oral cavity or allowed to pass through a
very narrow passage with friction.
The consonant phonemes are defined by distinctive
features like place of articulation, i.e. labial dental etc ., mode of
articulation like closure friction retroflexion and modificatory features like
voice aspiration, etc., all consonants in Kashmiri occur at all places in a
word.
Most of the consonants are similar to those of other
languages like Hindi or English, which you find easy to learn. However, there
are some peculiar ones like [ts] and [tsh] which require enough practice.
Kashmiri language does not have voiced aspirates as in
Hindi like [bh, dh, gh, jh]. Let us now study consonants as are grouped together
based on their common features in the forthcoming Programmes.
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