Tags
Did You Know –
‘Do chashmi he’ (a variation of the Urdu letter choti ‘he”) is a wonderful tool in the Urdu alphabet and language that can be attached to many other alphabets in the language, to give it a heaviness or aspiration. Aspiration is the release of breath following the pronunciation of a consonant. English has many aspirates but does not assign any unique characters to represent them. For example, the P in pot is an aspirate but the one in pie is not. (One can feel the exhalation in the former but not the latter.)
The Hindi language has separate letters in its alphabet for each of these sounds, but in Urdu, attaching the ‘do chashmi he’ to the unaspirated counterparts, lends the aspiration required. Urdu-Hindi counts eleven aspirated consonants. This is the only use of the do chashmi he. Its forms are:
urduwallahs 