Gunnar,

Thank you for your informative response to my questions. You
were correct, my references were completely based on Hindi. It
hadn't occured to me that Sanskrit would be different.

// The term retroflex, or supradental, means, as I see
// it, that the tongue is folded backwards towards the
// ceiling of the mouth, unlike the ordinary dentals,
// where it is placed at the front teeth. When I
// pronounce either a nazalized vowel or an "ng" sound, I
// keep the tongue low, so I don't see how a symbol
// reprezenting either could be a retroflex.

That makes sense to me. When practicing the pali sounds, I tend
to notice where I feel a vibration rather than where my tongue
is placed. Often, it's roughly the same.

When pronouncing a, i, u the vibration goes from lips to throat.
I have little idea how well I pronounce the niggahiita, but my
version at least is not nose-nasal so much as a closing of the
passage way (around my tonsels I think) and I get an internal
head-massage. The location of my tongue seems to depend on the
vowel rather than the nasal, the tension is definitely in my
throat but the vibration is pretty central (sinuses?). In all
honesty, however, I tend to separate the vowel from the nasal
soung -- is it really possible to make a vowel independantly
nasal?

Are terms: retroflex, supradental, cerebral, and
head-born (muddhaja) referring to the same things?

//// Perhaps, it is more logical
//// to drop the M and place a
//// dot below the vowel

// That would be a good idea, if we were starting from
// scratch. As it is, however, there is the problem of
// historical continuity. The present system has been
// used since the end of the 19th century, and most books
// in Latin letter Pali or Sanskrit, which new learners
// must use, make use of it, so I am afraid we will have
// to put up with it.

I fully agree with you regarding 98% of the characters,
but the niggahiita seems to have always been the odd-ball.
The PED (at least my version) uses an eng. I've seen, and
much appreciate, the m-eng (m with a lower hook), and of
course we have m's with lower and upper dots.

The dot under the m seems most popular, not just for pali,
but transliterations of most Indian scripts. I haven't been
able to read the ISO standard nor any record from Geneva
1894. The closest I've seen of an official ISCII chart
(India's 8-bit encoding) is from the Indian military and
IITM University:

http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/

Which has a number of handy demos, which convert from ITRANS to
numerous scripts. These below create an image in Sanskrit,
Tamil, etc, or 'IPA' (Roman with diacritics):

http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/translit_demo.html
http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/demos/unicode_testview.html

Interestingly enough, aM iM uM produces anusvara (dots above) in
both Sanskrit and Hindi, and dots below an m in IPA (roman).
ta.N creates the candrabindu (cresent with dot) in Devanagari,
but the same m with a dot below in roman script.

Alex




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