Note on Devanagari transliteration - Definition and Overview

In the traditional Devanagari transliteration scheme, many words and names have a final "a" appended to them, derived from the original Sanskrit. This "a" is still pronounced in modern Sanskrit derived Indian languages, however it is often more of an "uh" sound than an entirely additional syllable. In Sanskrit, measures of the length of syllables were made in strokes. The long "aa" ('far')sound has two measures, the short "a" ('put') one, and the half 'a' (the short syllable after the 't', sounding like 'uh', in 'cut'). Thus, for most Indians speaking modern languages that derive sound structures from Sanskrit such as Hindi, Bengali or Gujarati, transliterations often omit the final "a" resulting in alternative spellings for many Sanskrit words and names. In these cases, Wikipedia uses the spelling with the appended "a", as it continues to be more common in writing even though it is inconsistent with common pronunciation of many modern languages. This is especially so with many names and terminologies of Hinduism (e.g. Rama/Ram, Mahabharata/Mahabharat, Siva/Shiva/Shiv, etc).

Where the letter "h" appears after a plosive consonant in Devanagari transliteration, it always indicates aspiration, thus "ph" is pronounced as the p in "pit" (with a small puff of air released as it is said) never as the ph in "photo". On the other hand "p" is pronounced as the p in "spit" with no release of air. Similarly "th" is an aspirated "t", neither the th of "this" or the th of "thin".