> Congratulations, you can now pronounce (almost all of) Telugu (and almost any Devanagari script using this same play book). It is because these scripts are deterministic, and there is a single pronunciation unlike English and many other languages.
weeeellllll, not exactly. For example, spoken Marathi differs considerably from written Marathi, with vowels turning into other vowels, etc. My favorite example is the word लहान which is spelled "lahaan" but is often pronounced pronounced "lhaan" OR "laahaan".
Almost all Indic language experience schwa deletion -- you will say the word "kanpur" with no vowel between the n and p even though it is spelled "kanapur". Anusvars have a range of pronunciations that depend on the word being used -- they can nasalize a vowel, or add a nasal consonant like n or m.
However, these scripts are definitely way more phonetically consistent than English. These differences are minor.
I would say the reason is due to people changing the pronunciation over time rather than it being part of the actual grammar.
Take for example Hyderabad. Looking at the Hindi spelling, it should be pronounced Hy-der-aa-bad. But it it pronounced more like Hai-dra-bad.
What I'm saying is that people made those changes which we got so used to in our day to day lives that most now regard them as the 'correct' pronunciation, but it isn't how they were supposed to be.
This isn't any different from what happens to pronunciation in English. The difference between English and Indic languages is simply that this has happened a lot more with English (also English kinda gets its words from all over the place)
Pronunciation changes over time. Things which may have been highly phonetic may lose this property over time.
weeeellllll, not exactly. For example, spoken Marathi differs considerably from written Marathi, with vowels turning into other vowels, etc. My favorite example is the word लहान which is spelled "lahaan" but is often pronounced pronounced "lhaan" OR "laahaan".
Almost all Indic language experience schwa deletion -- you will say the word "kanpur" with no vowel between the n and p even though it is spelled "kanapur". Anusvars have a range of pronunciations that depend on the word being used -- they can nasalize a vowel, or add a nasal consonant like n or m.
However, these scripts are definitely way more phonetically consistent than English. These differences are minor.