Pali-Burmese Phonology & Orthography

Below, I provide firstly (in brief) bullet-point observations on how
Pali is pronounced/recited by the Burmese.  This is planned as part of
a relatively verbose overview of how Pali phonology & orthography are
very much intertwined in praxis --i.e., comparing "Burmanized Pali" to
"Laoicized Pali", "Thaicized Pali", "SInhalized Pali", etc.

The observations are largely owed to a set of recordings I was
provided with in Sri Lanka (by Ken & Vishakha); I do not know any
Burmese monks here in Vientiane.

Any feedback or controversy will be welcome, E.M.
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The Burmese pronunciation of Pali can be summed up in two aspects: the
fairly consistent consonant-substitutions, and the inconsistent,
context-sensitive vowel changes.

The consonant substitutions will not present any special difficulties
for the student, as they are perfectly arbitrary, and therfore make
perfect sense:

     * The Pali "c" is pronounced as "s" (& "ch" becomes "sh").
     * The Pali "j" is pronounced as "z" (& "jh" becomes "zh").
           * I note there is a nice coincidence here, as it may well
have been that 2,500 years ago the Pali "j" was pronounced as "z"; I
believe K.R. Norman suggested this on the evidence of comparing
Avestan to Vedic, and the earliest extant transliterations of Pali and
Prakrit words into Greek.
     * The Pali "p" is pronounced as "b"; there may yet be some audible
distinction from the the Pali "b" proper, but I am oblivious to it.
Geminates involving "b", "p" and their aspirates seem to be
mutually-indistinguishable.
     * The Pali "r" is inconsistently pronounced as "y". It may be that
sometimes an initial "r" is sounded out as "r", but a medial
(especially subscript) "r" seems inescapably consigned to being
reduced to a "y" sound.
     * The Pali "s" is normally pronounced as "t" or "d" (exceptionally
as "g", explained below). Most official sources seem report this as a
"t" sound only, but I most often hear "d"; it may be that I am
oblivious to some very fine distinction that sets this sound apart
from a proper "d" in the Burmese imagination.
           * The Pali "ss" is often pronounced like a "g"; the Burmese
seem to read this as a single, unique consonant sound, rather than a
double sibilant (F. Mason remarked on this, too, but in unclear
terms). This would be less confusing were the error absolute; but one
can still hear this as a double "s" sound from time to time.
           * Even the (single) initial Pali "s" is sometimes spoken as
"g" sound, especially where it follows after a complex sound/glyph,
such as a velar-n compound. In the recordings, words starting with
"Sam-" are frequently indistinguishable from "Gam-", and this seems
almost to be a form of vernacular euphony, following on the final
(anuswara) sound of the prior word.
     * It is needless to say that the Burmese rules for the
simplification of a final consonant sound could be erronenously
applied to a medial Pali consonant, but I have found this to be very
rare in the Burmese recordings, most likely because the Burmese/Mon
script so clearly shows the difference between a medial and final
consonant (whereas modern Thai script does not) --and a competent Pali
reader should be aware that the language has no final consonants
except the anuswara. I would expect that more errors of this kind are
made where the reader relies on a text in simplified modern script
that uses the "Thating" (Hal Akuru) as a substitute for the classical
ligatures and stacked glyphs (this sort of simplification is the
exception, rather than the rule, in Burmese editions of Pali texts, I
am pleased to say).

The vowel changes are inconsistent in that they arise from the
context, and follow the tendency (common to Burmese & Tibetan) of
eliding complex sequences of sounds; the logic of these
simplifications is internal to the modern language, and applied
inconsistently to the classical. In several recordings made of one and
the same Burmese monk chanting Pali, he will make some vowel errors
consistently in some suttas, but then not make the error even once in
reciting another sutta, likely reflecting that he learned them from
different masters. Initial and final vowels tend to be preserved, but
the medial vowels are transformed most adventitiously; of these, the
most striking are:

     * The Pali short "a" is pronounced as an "i"; especially when
interpreting the implicit vowel adjacent to a geminate (i.e., before
or after a geminate) or in any syllable involving the letter "c" (the
latter is, recall, itself mispronounced as "s"). The pronunciation of
"paccayo" as "pissiyo", and "gacchaami" as "gissami" are frequent
examples.
     * Both the Pali short "a" and the short "i" are sometimes
pronounced as a hard "e" sound; this seems to be most often the case
prior to a geminate, and does not seem to be directly determined by
the medial vowel's antecedent consonant.
           * The sequence "yi" is also very frequently spoken as a hard
"ye" sound.
     * The Pali short "a" is sometimes inserted between compound
consonants where there is none to be found in the text (e.g.,
"tasmi.m" read aloud as "tasami.m"; perhaps an especially significant
example given the frequency of the word, and the clarity of the
Burmese orthography on the subscript sequence "sm-").
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E.M.