Urdu is a beautiful language but I do get frustrated by multiple letters for one single sound.
Example
For the sound 's', in Urdu there is say, seen, suad. For the sound 't', there is tay and toey.
For the sound 'z', there is zaal, ze, Zoey, zuad.
Is there any rule for when to use which letter for s given sound? Or do I just have to memorize every word?
And what about names that aren't normal in Urdu? Just like mine Ramneet. Do I get to choose which letter for t I want to use? Tay or toey?
Thank you!
To find out where a word in Urdu might come from, it might help to look at following letters indicating their most probable origin:
Hindi : ٹ ڈ ڑ or any combination with an aspiration, like بھ پھ تھ ٹھ دھ ڈھ ڑھ جھ چھ کھ گھ
Hindi or Persian: پ چ گ or majhūl vowels
Persian: ژ
Persian or Arabic: خ ذ ز غ ف
Arabic: ث ح ص ض ط ظ ع ق ء
there is no rule to judge the origin of word, but you can buy following simple tips
1. a word don't have letter " T / P / G(hard G) / Ch " suppose to come from Arabic as Arabic language has not these letters
2. I get to choose which letter for t I want to use? Tay or toey? "we don't use "Toye" a lot, it mostly use for nouns not the verbs (not 100% but almost we don't use "Toy" for verbs but only nouns and there are very specific nouns we write with "Toye") Therefore better you use "Tey" which is most common
3. to write your name, you should use "Tey" not "Toye" رمیت
4. For the sound 'z', there is zaal, ze, Zoey, zuad. we don't use "Zuad" a lot, its only use where you need to make a heavy sound of "Zhh" and there is only few words in Urdu we write with "Zuad" like as "old man" = ضیدف
5. For "S" sound, we mostly use "Seen / س" not "Suad / ص " and we have another letter which is "Say ث" we mostly use "Say" to write names like as Saqib / Samar / Samreen etc. in my mind, we have only one noun started with "Say" which is "Samar" means Fruits
Hi Raamneet,
Your name is normal in Urdu. And it should be written as رامنیت or probably better as رام نیت
Letters like ط ظ ق ع ض ص ث are used in Arabic words only. And because these letters, originally representing different sounds, were imported into Urdu through Persian, they were mostly imported with their Persianised pronunciation.
I am going to write a little bit more about this later, when I have more time.
When a word is borrowed from Arabic, it is written with the same letter as in Arabic I think.
But maybe when a word is of local Indian origin, they just use ت or ٹ , according to the sound?
I don't know if this is true, but this makes sense, and would explain why your name has tay. I don't know Urdu though, and can't be sure.
In Arabic "te" is used for t, "sin" for s, "ze" for z. So it would be logical to use 'te' for native Indian words.
"Se" is for th as in English thin and "zal" for th as in English this. There are not such sounds in Persian or Indian lnaguages, so in Urdu they are pronounced as s and z:-/
Toe, zoe, zuad and suad are for sounds that are absent form European languages too:=\
Yes. Those both /t/ sounds are same. Well. I literally couldn't figure out what the heck is 'toey' sound (I checked Urdu alphabets but still). However, if you meant by /t/ and /ʈ/ sounds then it's difficult to know the right sound unless either you know the word beforehand or you use original language script to write these words. Reason being Sanskrit based languages were never meant or can't be written using English alphabets precisely. That's more than 50 sounds(as well as letters) for 26 letters. It makes not much sense for a phonetic language, does it? People, who use the English alphabet for this, are supposed to know the correct pronunciation. I suggest you check out their IPA representation or use some dictionary in order to find the correct letter(and hence the sound).
Edit: I suspect that my lack of written Urdu knowledge might have driven this answer in some direction not related to the upper part of the question.
