"I am a girl."
Translation:मैं एक लड़की हूँ।
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549
ड has a retroflex d sound.
ड़ has a retroflex r sound, which seems to have Persian origins. The letter was not part of the original Devanagari alphabet.
358
Nope, the retroflex flap ड़ /ɽ/ and breathy-voiced retroflex flap ढ़ /ɽʱ/ are later Midde Indo-Aryan developments. In Prakrits, the retroflex stops ड /ɖ/ and ढ /ɖʱ/ were intervocalically (between the vowels) realized as flaps /ɽ/ and /ɽʱ/ respectively. They weren’t phonemes yet, but as Prakrits evolved into Modern Indo-Aryan languages, they got the status of a phoneme. So, to represent these two new phonemes, people modified the letters ड and ढ with a dot below and we got our ड़ and ढ़. This is not unique to Hindi and Devanagari, many other Indo-Aryan languages did the same with their scripts. Bengali has ড় and ঢ় for instance.
These sounds never occur at the beginning of a word, only intervocalically and word-finally, because the allophony didn’t exist word-initially.
Here’s how some Hindi words with ड़ /ɽ/ and ढ़ /ɽʱ/ developed from Sanskrit to Shauraseni Prakrit to their modern form:
Sanskrit घोटक gʰoṭaka → Shauraseni घोडग gʰoḍaga → Hindi घोड़ा gʰoṛā “horse”
Sanskrit शाटी śāṭī → Shauraseni साडी sāḍī → Hindi साड़ी sāṛī “sari”
Sanskrit पठति paṭʰati → Shauraseni पढदि paḍʰadi → Hindi पढ़ना paṛʰnā “to read”
Sanskrit वृद्धि vr̥ddʰi → Shauraseni वड्ढि vaḍḍʰi → Hindi बाढ़ bāṛʰ “flood”