--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "shivkhokra" <shivkhokra@...> wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Trond Engen <trond@> wrote:
>> Are there (still) local varieties of Pali that are spoken natively (or
>> from childhood in certain classes) in SE Asia? If so, those will of
>> course be heavily influenced by local phonology.
Educated monks are supposed to be able to converse in Pali, and boy novices are still to be found in Thailand. Ratchasap (the form of language used for conversing with and about royalty) is heavily larded with Pali, both in Thailand and Cambodia. The Thai dubbing of 'Lord of the Rings' reportedly made heavy use of ratchasap.
> But does this explain why Thais, Burmese and Cambodians not learn retroflexes?
Note that the Thais and Burmese do not distinguish unaspirated and aspirated Indic voiced stops either. (The Cambodians do - both voiced and unvoiced Indic aspirates are represented by aspirated stops in Khmer, with the voicing difference represented in the vowel.)
Now, it was only in modern times that the Thai script came to be used for Sanskrit and Pali - Thais previously used the Cambodian or the Tham script for Pali, and presumably also Sanskrit. However, the Thai script keeps the retroflex consonant letters, and has not reassigned them to other uses, unlike Cambodian. It is therefore conceivable that educated Thais did once learn to distinguish retroflex consonants.
Curiously enough, Thai also has an extra consonant for what would hypothetically have been a preglottalised retroflex stop. Initial Indic /p/ and /t/ can become implosive in Khmer, and Thai borrows these as the reflexes of its old preglottalised stop, namely /b/ and /d/. There is one example of the same process with word-initial Indic /t./.
(One can argue that the extra consonants are not for modern /b/ and /d/, but for modern /p/ and /t/.)
Another interesting fossil is what should be syllable final /h/ in Thai, found in Indic loan words. Unlike Khmer, a strong influence on Thai, native Thai phonology does not permit final /h/, but if it did, I would expect it to be treated like a final occlusive, rather than like a final resonant. In words that should have final /h/, which is silent in modern Thai, the Indic words have the tone that one would expect for a final occlusive, and not the tone one would expect for an open syllable. What should be final /h/ also influences a preceding implicit vowel. Similarly, although final orthographic <r> is pronounced /n/, it affects the preceding implicit vowel differently to <n>. A possible explanation is that final <h> and <r> were once pronounced differently to other finals, but have now become silent (or glottal stop) and /n/ respectively.
I thus find it conceivable that educated Thais once pronounced Indic retroflexes differently to dentals, but that the distinction has been lost because it has no counterpart in common speech.
Richard.