--- In cybalist@..., "petegray" <petegray@...> wrote:
> > My Classical Snaskrit textbook states /r/ is a retroflex
> > ("cerebral") sound in Sanskrit. It's rather unclear from the
> > passage, whether it's a reconstructed value or the value
> > preserved by Indian tradition.
>
> In Sanskrit /r/ makes a following n or /S/ retroflex.
> This is a fairly big clue.
H. H. Hock (I don't remember the precise bibliographic details,
but I believe in the volume edited by Jan Houben) disagrees.
We need to be wary of Sanskrit grammar books. They tend to
repeat things that a close analysis has shown to be doubtful
if not wrong. The earliest phonetic descriptions describe /r/
as being produced at behind the top teeth, or as an alveolar.
Its positioning as a retroflex seems to be found only in
latter writings with a bias towards a filled orthogonal table.
[Another to be wary of is the description of /v/ as labio-dental
spirant.]