Re: Exercise in orthographic aesthetics

> I see the word 'caror' -- could it be a Hindi loan (_k@ror_
> 'ten million')?
I know nothing about linguistic notations etc etc but _caror_ 's second r is
not an r. It's a d (retroflex) with a dot under it, which is usually
transliterated as rh. The sound is made quite similar to the d but the
tongue just barely touches the palate. I once asked a Hindi-speaking friend
of mine to say it. It's a fairly common sound - coming in words like girl
(l@rhki) and wood (l@krhi). Finally I could make out the difference but
there was no way I could exactly replicate it, to his liking anyway. And of
course, there is an aspirated version, coming in words like paRhna (to
read/study).
It's usually very difficult for non-Hindi speaking people to remember this,
and at school, we usually omit the dots (which I imagine is a quite terrible
thing to do, linguistically). But in Urdu, the two letters are shown quite
differently. Retroflex _d_ as a _twa_ over the _dal_, and _rh_ as a _twa_
over the _re_ (showing I suppose that it's closer to r)

Well, I think I've broken enough notational conventions for one post.

Lijesh