Single Touch

Namaste and welcome back. It's been great fun doing these letters with you. We started seeing how they sound like, then we wrote them out and then we started combining them. We did the consonants with the vowels and now we are going to see how consonants behave with other consonants when they come together. If you remember the alphabet, they look differently or we have the line on top and they combine differently in the way they relate to that line at the head. So what we will do now is look at the set of letters that have a one point touch to the overhead line that exists. Quickly to go through it, we have the ch, the j, the n, all three being palatals. Then we have two dentals, the t, the n, then we have the labial, b, the v, which is a semi vowel and then two conjunct consonants, tr and jnya. So now let's see what they do when they come in contact with another consonant. This one is actually quite easy. I'll demonstrate it with the letter the and just to refresh a little bit, we have the letter the which is actually a combination of the. The moment we put this line below it, it becomes a the and the vowel a. This gives us the the. I'll write it for you in transliteration as well. We have the the which is a combination of the plus a. Now, if we cut off the in each, we would be left with just half the sound the. This when it comes in contact with another consonant drops the stick. So as I said, this particular series is very simple to remember when there is a single stick with a touch point and it combines with another letter, just drop the stick and add it onto the next letter. So the the as a half looks like this. Drop the stick and we just have the first part of it. Yeah. Now, I'll give you an example. We take the word Satya. Satya. So that is the. And then we hear the sound. So we put that in. That's the. And we have the. Which means truth as you all know. OK. Now, I'll write it out for you in transliteration. It's sir. And yeah. So there we have it. Satya. All right. Now, if we didn't put a half the it would sound like sir. Yeah. So when we put this symbol here, it makes it Satya. OK. So like in everything in life, there's always an exception. So this one has its exception as well. And here it is. Before that, I think this one needs to be a green. Yeah. That's fine. So the exception is when we combine the letter with itself. And this is what happens. So we have the letter. I'll just put the half for now. So that's the. And then when it combines with another full. This is what happens. You retain the full. And the first half just becomes a straight line on that. So if I was writing it, I would probably start with that line, then go down on that and then put the stick like that. All right. And now this is a word that in the yoga world, you would all be very familiar with. It's the word Vritti. Patanjali talks about it as the most important definition of yoga. He says yoga is when the Vrittis of the mind have stopped. Yogashchitta Vritti nirodha. So Vritti is a very, very important thing for us to all keep in mind. And it has this particular letter. So I will write that out for you. We have the Vritti. I have put that in advance for the E. You remember we need to prepare for the short E in advance. So the E has to be placed before and there we have the T. So we have the Vritti and it also has two dots at the end normally. That's Vritti. All right. We will write it in transliteration as well. So we have the T plus the full T and that gives us the half T and the full T. And when you put it in the word, it is Vritti. The vowel R which has the dot below.

Then the half T and the T. Vritti. So in Sanskrit it really is very important to respect those half letters. You can't just run over them. All right. You have to say Vritti. You say it and you feel that pause in yourself as you say it along. It's good fun. Try it out. So that's Vritti. So for the T, you have this line to represent the half sound. But you know in some cases, in some prints, you might also find it as the half T like we saw in this case. So I guess it really depends on what print you're looking at. But just so that when you look at this letter somewhere, you're not confused about what it is. Yeah. It's the Tittu. Right. And next we have another possibility when we are writing this letters which have just one stick. I'll show it to you. Again in the yoga world, a very very important word that everybody knows is Patanjali. Now Patanjali is a very good example to show how you can have a complete alternative way of writing this combined consonants. So we have the letter N in Patanjali. I think what I will do this time is write Patanjali for you in transliteration and then we write it in the Devanaguri. All right. So here we go. What are the sounds now? So that's your half N. See that? So now let's see what it looks like. So we have the per and then we have the th full. Then we have a half nya. So that becomes, we'll write it in the regular way. So we first write it like that. Nya. And then we get the ja. And then because it has a short e, we prepare in advance. You get Patanjali. All right. So we have the half letter that just attaches itself to the consonant, the next consonant. But like I said, there is an option for this. And in the option we could also write it as per th. They can actually get quite cosy one on top of the other, not necessarily by the side. All right. So we give them a nice cosy position. And then we get the ja. See that? They're on top of each other. And then you have the li. So there we are. We have Patanjali written in different ways. Like in the yoga Sinas, you can do things which are side by side or you can do things which are more complicated. Depends what you're more comfortable with. There we are. Thank you. So I look forward to seeing you for more combinations.