* If a lone consonant needs to be written without any following vowel, it is given a ''halanta/virāma'' diacritic below ({{Unicode|प्}}).
* The vowel {{IPA|/aː/}} in Sanskrit is realized as being more central and less back than the closest English approximation, which is {{IPA|ɑː}}. But the grammarians have classified it as a back vowel. (Tiwari, [1955] 2004).
* All vowels in Hindi, short or long, can be nasalized. All vowels can have acute grave or circumflex pitch accent.
* Note that the ancient Sanskrit grammarians have classified the vowel system as velars, retroflexes, palatals and plosives rather than as back, central and front vowels. Hence {{Unicode|ए}} and {{Unicode|ओ}} are classified respectively as palato-velar (a+i) and labio-velar (a+u) vowels respectively. But the grammarians have classified them as [[:en:diphthong|diphthong]]s and in prosody, each is given two ''mātrās''. This does not necessarily mean that they are proper diphthongs, but neither excludes the possibility that they could have been proper diphthongs at a very ancient stage (see above). These vowels ''are'' pronounced as long /eː/ and /oː/ respectively by learned Sanskrit Brahmans and priests of today. Other than the "four" diphthongs, Sanskrit usually disallows any other diphthong—vowels in succession, where they occur, are converted to [[:en:semivowel]]s according to predetermined rules.
* In the devanagari script used for Sanskrit, whenever a consonant in a word-ending position is without any ''virāma'' (ie, freely standing in the orthography: {{Unicode|प}} as opposed to {{Unicode|प्}}), the neutral vowel [[:en:schwa|schwa]] ({{IPA|/ə/}}) is automatically associated with it—this is of course true for the consonant to be in any position in the word. Word-ending schwa is always short. But the IAST '''a''' appended to the end of masculine noun words rather confuses the foreigners to pronounce it as {{IPA|/ɑː/}}—this makes the masculine Sanskrit/Hindi words sound like feminine! e.g., '''shiva''' must be pronounced as {{IPA|/ɕivə/}} and not as {{IPA|/ɕivɑː/}}. Tiwari ([1955] 2004) argues that in Vedic Sanskrit, अ was simply short {{IPA|ɑ}}, and became centralized and raised in the era of the Prakrits.
