Re: pronunciation of jj in sambojjhanga

Sorry - I should have said '... semantic or other significance'.

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%40yahoogroups.com>
[mailto:Pali@yahoogroups.com <mailto:Pali%40yahoogroups.com> ] On Behalf Of
Anton
Bjerke
Sent: 14 February 2010 06:48
To: Pali@yahoogroups.com <mailto:Pali%40yahoogroups.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
<http://studies.worldtipitaka.org/audio_alpha?page=1&op0=starts&filter0=v%C4
%25> &op0=starts&filter0=v%C4%
ABriya

>

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

> &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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