Dear All,

Anton is entirely right that these are no more than regional variations
without semantic other significance.

Another point is that many speakers - including Thai and English - find it
difficult to enunciate a voiced aspirate. That is to say, we can do /d/ and
/j/ easily and more or less correctly, but when we try to say /dh/ or /jh/
it tends to come out as /th/ and /ch/, or we leave a short gap between the
two elements, making it sound like a /d/ followed by a very short vowel,
then the /h/. As far as I know - and comments and corrections will be
welcomed - nowadays only native speakers of northern Indian languages
descended from the Prakrits (i.e. Hindi, Marathi, Bengali etc.) can do it
entirely naturally. (Maybe Sinhalese too?) Incidentally, /h/ as an
independent consonant is a voiced consonant in the northern Indian
languages. We know it was voiced in Vedic and Sanskrit, since it invariably
behaves as a voiced consonant in sandhi. It still is in modern Hindi.

Metta,
James Whelan

-----Original Message-----
From: Pali@yahoogroups.com [mailto:Pali@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Anton
Bjerke
Sent: 14 February 2010 06:48
To: Pali@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Pali] pronunciation of jj in sambojjhanga

Dear Frank,

Whithout basically any knowledge of Pali whatsover, I think that your
guess that the variation has arised due to (Thai or other) accent is
absolutely true. The Pali recordings I've heard (to the extent that I
can judge phonetically) show great regional variation, which seems very
logical, since there really are very many different peoples using Pali.
So my guess is that the phonemes /j, jh/ do not have any "etymological"
alternations (allophons), but only regional. Also the IPA transcription
on the audio site linked to uses the sign for a voiced palatal stop (a
kind of j-like d), not an affricate (like twice in English <judge>).
By the way, if I haven't introduced myself earlier, I'm a Phd-student of
Helsinki University (Altaic linguistics), with an interest in Buddhist
thought and language in a broad sense.

Best wishes,
Anton Bjerke


frank skrev:

>
> Thanks for the comments, Patrick and Bryan.
> As a beginner,
>
> I'm looking for consistent simple rules I can rely in, and it sure was
> confusing to hear so many different sounds made with "jj" depending on
> the context.
> for reference:
>

http://studies.worldtipitaka.org/audio_alpha?page=1&op0=starts&filter0=v%C4%
ABriya

>

<http://studies.worldtipitaka.org/audio_alpha?page=1&op0=starts&filter0=v%C4
%ABriya>

>
>
> is it 4 different contexts? The four words in question all are just
> slight variations of "viriyasambojjang", but the jj sounds vary .
>
> I still don't know the answer to whether the "jj" sound in those 4 words
> supposed to all sound the same, or slightly different because there's a
> context that's too subtle for a beginner to see? Is the variation due to
> a Thai accent in the speaker?
> Apologies to Bryan if your post explained the answer but I was unable to
> comprehend it. I assumed Bryan's explanation referred to words that
> varied more radically than very minor variations of "viryasambojjhanga"
>
> -Frank
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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07:35:00

>
>

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