Dear Venerables; Hi Group;

WARNING: Just some "untraditional thinking" from one guy who is *not* an
expert in Pali and *not* and expert in languages!

Dear Dimitry;

I had this same question about stress and emphasis when I started my Pali
studies. I am not satisfied by the current thinking about Pali
pronunciation, so I did a mini-analysis. I have not yet taken the time to
formalize my thinking in a systematic way. Here are a few notes and a few
questions I've had for some time.

Premises:
a) Pali would be very easy for any human being to pronounce. A Buddha would
not teach in a language which was hard for any human being to speak
"out-loud". He knew that the teaching would move to different languages and
cultures. 2,500 years ago, most people were illiterate and they used
speaking for teaching and learning. Pali would have to be able to move
easily with the teaching.
b) Whoever created the romanized Pali transcription system would have
included *all* of the information necessary to pronounce the Pali word
correctly (including stress and emphasis).

Clues:
a) the underdot m that is so commonly used at the end of words
b) Pali word order
c) the use of the letter "h"
d) the doubling of hard and soft consonants.
e) word inflection redundancy

General Stuff:

I'm not really an "expert" in languages. I only speak English (various
centuries), French, German (a couple of centuries), Italian and Spanish. I
know some Pali, and at various times over the years I've studied a tiny tad
of Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Thai. Still, I think it would be fair to
say that I do have a good "overview" of the construction and pronunciation
of human languages.

I also enjoy composing music. Basically, it is my (limited) knowledge of
formal musical notation that is the root of my thinking about Pali
pronunciation.

In the context of figuring out Pali pronunciation I would say this:
a) The easiest and most fun language to speak that I know is Italian. The
*sounds* are very easy to pronounce and they fit easily together.
b) German is interesting because of word order. Since the word order is very
formal and verbs (in anything more than a simple sentence) will occur at the
end of a sentence, a person needs to speak slowly and very clearly. The
listener needs time to keep track of all the bits and pieces of the
sentence. Then, at the *end* of a sentence, the listener will also need a
short moment to "put it all together and think about it".
c) Most Asian languages are interesting because they are tonal, making them
"harder" to pronounce.
d) word inflection redundancy is typical of very old languages - where
people spoke many regional dialects; most people were illiterate; books were
expensive luxuries; and teaching was done by speaking (not reading). The
inflectional redundancy would help people figure out what the speaker was
trying to say (Example: the inflection of the adjective should agree with
the inflection of the noun. If the speaker messed this up, there would be
enough information in the sentence for the listener to figure out what the
speaker was trying to say.)

My Current Working Hypothesis:

a) The overdot and underdot marks are *not* used to change the pronunciation
of the character. They are used as stress and emphasis marks. A specific
case: the underdot-m (.m) at the end of a word. I see no need for this to
have the rather annoying and difficult "ng" sound - again and again and
again - in a sentence. I think that this is simply means "pronounce m - and
emphasize it a bit and wait a split-second to make it easy for the listener
to note that this is the end of the word before you roll into the next word.
The listener needs a split-second to become aware of the inflected ending,
figure out what it might imply, and mentally note it for use when the verb
finally shows up later in the sentence."
b) In English, we have long vowels and short vowels. We also have aspirated
vowels (like "happy"). The "h" character is used in Pali to create an
aspirated vowel anywhere in a word. Again, this aspirated vowel is used more
as a mechanical device so that the pronunciation of the word has correct
*timing*, stress and emphasis. I think it is more
c) The doubling of consonants. Obviously, the doubling of a hard consonant
is a "timing and emphasis" mark. You don't "pronounce it twice". (Example:
dukkha. You don't say duK-Kha. You say doo-Kha.) Which means that romanized
Pali is *not* perfectly phonetic, where every character is pronounced. The
doubling of soft consonants (Example: dhamma.) is also a stress and emphasis
mark.

To create a fictious example: duka, dukka, dukha, dukkha - according to my
current theory, where's the timing, stress and emphasis? du-ka, du-Ka,
du-kHa, du-Kha.

Another fictious example: dama, damma, dhama, dhamma - da-ma, da-Ma, dHa-ma,
dHa-Ma.

Another fictious example: rata, ratta, ratha, rattha / ra.ta, ra.t.t.a,
ra.tha, ra.t.tha - ra-ta, ra-Ta, ra-tHa, ra-Tha / rat-a, RAT-a, rat-Ha,
RAT-ha

Putting it all together (another fictious example): dama.m, damma.m,
dhama.m, dhamma.m - da-mam da-Mam, dHa-mam, dHa-Mam.

The overdot n ("n) works to tie the n to the following consonant and avoid
triple consonants. A triple consonant would make it impossible to tell where
the emphasis went. Example: sa"ngha. This is pronounced sang-gHa. If it was
written sanggha we could have san-Gha as our pronunciation. To confirm this,
I used my software to looked all of the words using the "n character in the
Paliwords dictionary. There are 587 basewords that use "n. None of them have
triple consonants. (ie "ngg, "nbb, "nkk, etc.)

Fictious exampels: sangha, sa.ngha, sa"ngha - san-gHa, SAN-gHa, san(g)-gHa

I think the only character that has a different "sound" as a result of an
inflection mark is ~n, where I think the "nyuh" sound commonly used is
correct.

I do not think that Pali uses "tonality" at all.

Questions:

a) What was the nationality of the person who created romanized Pali?
b) What year did that person create it?
c) What form of English (British, American, India) did they know?

WARNING AGAIN: Just some "untraditional thinking" from one guy who is *not*
an expert in Pali and *not* and expert in languages!

thanks and peace from

Andy




-----Original Message-----
From: Дмитрий Алексеевич Ивахненко (Dimitry A. Ivakhnenko)
[mailto:sangha@...]
Sent: Sunday, June 09, 2002 9:20 PM
To: Robert Eddison
Subject: Re[2]: [Pali] Accent in Pali


RE> What do you mean by accent? Are you referring to pronunciation or
RE> to stress/emphasis?

Stress/emphasis - where it is placed in Pali words?

Best wishes,
Dimitry



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