Vowels

There are 11 “pure vowels” in Ahom called māe káp ngāo or basically the foundation (ngāo) that only make sense when it meets with the body māe (consonants).

We here use the Ahom consonant (māe) ‘𑜒’ to read them all

Eleven vowels (monophthongs) of Dai Ahom Language

	Vowel
	A (a)
	Aa (aa)
	Ai (i)
	AI (ii)
	Au (u)
	AU (uu)
	eA (e)
	eA] (ae)
	AUw (o)
	eAa (aw)
	AEw (er)

The ar, ur, er, or vowels

The long 'aa' is sometimes also written as 'ar', so Maan Tai can also be written as Marn Tai, and raza can be written as Razar. Note that 'r' is not a final consonant so it can never be pronounced.

The er (𑜒𑜢𑜤𑜈𑜫) vowel is very similar to the r-controlled vowels in English like cheater, doctor, bird, hurt. In none of the cases we are actually pronouncing the /ɹ/ sound at all. Just think of this as the schwa /ǝ/ sound. If you took the linguistic lessons seriously then you will understand this easily. Unlike other Tai languages, Ahom, Phake, etc don't have separate ို (ur) and ိူ (er), it only has 𑜢𑜤 which we pronounce as /ǝ/.

Because 𑜢 (i) and 𑜤 (u) are often written in same stroke they often appear joined which made so-called experts like JN Phukan to read this vowel as 'iu' turning words like Serkapha into Siukapha which is hilarious because Siu means a pimple in Tai language and Siukapha would translate to "the pimple (from) heaven." For more insight on this issue check the Sukapha vs Serkapha Article

Next comes the ‘o’ vs ‘aw’, the former o (𑜒𑜥𑜈𑜫) sound is more like the Hindi [o] (or ‘o’ as in go, so, etc) while the aw (𑜒𑜦𑜡) sound is more like the Assamese [ɔ] (‘aw’ as in saw, awesome, etc). It is also the same ‘aw’ in Aizawl, while the 'o' sound is like ‘o’ in Mizo.

We can also write ‘aw’ as ‘or’ as some Thai people actually do (khorp, norng, etc)

Finally the most complex still is the ‘e’ vs ‘ae’ vowel which might sound the same to you but are different. ‘e’ is the sound of e as in bed while ‘ae’ is the sound of a as in ham. But in actual spoken language we often just say ‘ae’ as ‘yeh’ or ‘ie’ (like myeh, lieng, sieng, etc). You might already know them from Hindi (ए vs ऐ) and words like mela (मेला) vs maila (मैला) - one means fair and other means dirty. It's the same phonemes in Tai as well.

Medial Vowel Signs

Extra graphemes for vowels in medial position

	Vowel
	A,- (aa)
	AC- (e)
	AV- (ae)
	AU- (o)
	Ao- (aw)
	AE- (er)

If you notice, then the same grapheme 𑜥 is used to represent two different vowels u (𑜒𑜥) and o (𑜒𑜥-) distinguished by its placement in medial and final position. If you do some word reading quizzes you will completely get it within few minutes.

Also if you know Thai, you must have noticed how there is no distinction between long vowels and short vowels in final position. This is because 𑜀𑜢 𑜀𑜤 𑜀 these are not even words. So phii 𑜇𑜣 can be written as phi, muu 𑜉𑜥 can be written as just mu, and kaa 𑜀𑜡 can be written as just ka. This makes Dai Ahom probably the most easiest Tai languages to learn especially when compared to Thai because you can learn the entire script in just ten-twenty minutes

The sign killer

In last lecture, I told you I will tell you how to write 'Asaam' correctly. We have the medial 'aa', but we still don't know how to remove the inherent 'a' vowel from 'saama' to make it 'saam.' Hopefully it isn't much complicated you just have to add sign-killer called pháet 𑜫 to the final consonant. It works same as virama in Devanagari. So 'Asaam' will be written as 𑜒𑜏า𑜉𑜫. This was a non-Tai word but for Tai words it is very important that you know the final consonants

Final Consonant

Only the following consonants can come in the final position of any syllable.

𑜀 𑜂 𑜃 𑜄 𑜆 𑜈 𑜉 𑜐

Exercise