Re: Pali-Burmese Phonology & Orthography

Dear Eisel,

Thanks a lot for this useful study. There is one small point that might
need correction:

" 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."


The monk in the recording actually chants  "bissayo", because p > b,  as
you state above. I will try to get some chanting from a monastery in Mon
State.

Best wishes,
                     Nyanatusita




Eisel Mazard wrote:
> 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.
> --------------
> [...]
> 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-").
> -------------
>
> E.M.
>
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