Dear Yong Peng, Gabriel, Christine and others

Thank you for an interesting discussion - and one which has a fair bit of
potential for some more research.

I wonder if part of the problem lies not in the pronunciation of the
labio-dental itself but in what people think they hear - since people always
associate what they hear with the nearest sound they are familiar with (this
is the principal source of "accent" one hears in a non-native speaker of a
language - and also one reason for the wei of wei-sai (the other is, of
course, meaning)).

In some western European languages (not lust Indo-European ones either) the
contact between the lip and the teeth is quite strong although the exact
location of contact varies so the acoustic effect varies a little. The
other sound is the "w" sound which is produced bilabially. In other
languages, including many languages of southeast and east Asia, there are
not two sounds but one where the contact is very slight and in some
languages there is essentially no contact at all - but the important point
is that the mode of production can be either labio-dental or bilabial with
very little difference in acoustic effect. What one person (say one with a
very strong "v" sound) actually hears is a "w" whereas one used to a weak
bilabial sound hears a "v". The occasions when a sound may appear to be
different (the vata example) from what is otherwise heard may be due to the
environment in which the word is placed - just as sandhi affects the
pronunciation/hearing of vowels. So, what I am saying, I guess, is that
there is not actually only two sounds but a whole continuum of variants, so
the duality of v/w is not quite the answer.

Since harmony is a key element in chanting the appropriate approach should
be to use whatever pronunciation is in local use (apart from courtesy, a
discordant pronunciation would be inappropriate wouldn't it?) This suggests
that the "correct" pronunciation is local usage and the "original"
pronunciation is irrelevant for this purpose - however much it is of
significant linguistic historical interest. Did the Buddha not somewhere
suggest that local linguistic usage was proper? (OK - I know he was talking
about local languages and dialects, but I suspect the same principle
applies)

My own usage is interesting because I use a fairly strong "v" sound in most
Paali except in words I use regularly in other languages such as Vesak
(which I always pronounce more nearly as Wesak with a very weak final k
because that is how it happens to sound to me in Khmer (and Thai for that
matter) yet I always use a harder "v" for words like Vessantara. This
doesn't make it right, but it doesn't seem to upset people either.
Conversely I always use "v" for Sanskrit and anything else sounds wrong to
my ear.

The "original" pronunciation seems largely insoluble because even the
commentaries and grammars which say specifically it is a labio-dental do not
say how much force should be in the contact and since they are also rather
late in composition they don't necessarily tell us how early Paali may have
been spoken. We know a lot about vowel sounds from poetry but little about
most consonants in most positions in a word.


Metta

Robert Didham

>From: "Ong Yong Peng" <ypong001@...>
>Reply-To: Pali@yahoogroups.com
>To: Pali@yahoogroups.com
>Subject: [Pali] Re: pronunciation of Pali "v"
>Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2003 04:20:01 -0000
>
>Dear Dr. Bittar, Christine and friends,
>
>allow me to summarise that it is common in Theravada countries that
>the Pali letter v is pronounced w, hence Vesak is pronounced Wesak.
>In East Asia, Vesak Day is more popularly known as Buddha Day. It
>would be interested to know that in Chinese (Mandarin) the v sound is
>also missing and there is also no "wee". Instead, Vesak is Wei-Sai
>(or "way-sak") to the Chinese.
>
>metta,
>Yong Peng
>
>--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, christine_forsyth wrote:
> > A friend living in Kuala Lumpur has sent me as email attachments
>three .WAV files for Dhammapada verses 197, verse 198 and verse 199.
>They contain the Pali recitation/chanting of these verses as done by
>Dr. K. Sri Dhammanada. He pronounces all v's as v - except for the
>word 'vata' which is pronounced as a soft'w'.
>

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