Re: Niggahiita in IPA?

Thank you all for your answers on the niggahiita. There's
just one I would like to comment on....

Ole Pind:
>> Buddhaghosa appears to describe contemporary pronunciation,
>> which according to him involves not articulating any other
>> sound by suppressing or checking the organs of articulation
>> (the karanaani) and producing the nasal through the nose
>> without the mouth being open.

Rett:
> Wouldn't this be the equivalent of the gutteral nasal? So
> that one could use:
>
> "[n with leftward hook at right]" for the niggahita in
> isolation?

Ah yes, I did consider that possibility, but then came across an
article on the anusvaara by Shriramana Sharma, whose theory
strikes me as very plausible and if correct would mean that
the IPA simply doesn't have any character to represent the
anusvaara. http://www.sanskritweb.net/sansdocs/anusvara.pdf

[quote]
The anusvara .m is described in the `Sik.saa `Saastra as being a
voiced sound having only one 'place of articulation' - the
naasikaa or nasal cavity. In other words, it is a 'pure nasal'
and distinct from oral or oro-nasal sounds. Now what does this
mean, in physical terms?

Oral sounds are those in which the air carrying the sound does
not undergo nasalization, or resonance within the nasal cavity,
which is what causes the distinct characteristic in a sound of
being nasal. In oral sounds, the air is 'modified' only within
the oral cavity, and not in the nasal cavity. In oro-nasal
sounds, the air is 'modified' in both the oral and nasal
cavities. So logically, a sound must be a 'pure nasal' only if it
is 'modified' only within the nasal cavity and not at all in the
oral cavity. This is, however, physically impossible, since air
cannot pass into the nasal cavity without passing through, and
getting affected by, at least a part of the oral cavity. So what
does 'pure nasal' mean then?

The answer is that though no sound can be strictly called a pure
nasal by the above definition, the tradition still calls the
anusvaara a 'pure' nasal because it does not involve any
'impurities' which here means articulations that are used in
creating other (nasal) sounds such as [angma] [n with leftward
tail on left] [n with rightward tail on right] [n with subscript
bridge] or [m]. This means that there is no stricture in the oral
cavity.

This *does not mean* that there is an open stricture, since that
would cause only a nasalized vowel. So what *does* this mean? The
answer must come only from tradition, which tells us to simply
*close* the mouth, without forming any particular stricture. This
may seem a ridiculously simple answer, but it is the truth. When
the mouth is simply closed, the air does not *pass through* the
oral cavity, although it does, unavoidably, *come into contact*
with the oral cavity, and then passes through the nasal cavity.

A question: is this not equivalent to the bilabial nasal [m]
then? No. Though many people erroneously pronounce the anusvaara
as identical with [m] or even [n], the proper pronunciation is
quite different, although it is closer to [m] than to [n]. This
is obvious from the diagrams. It may be hard to believe that the
minor difference in the articulation of [m] and [.m] painted
above will really cause a difference in pronunciation, but that
is just like saying that there is no difference in quality
between the long [i:] and short [I] in English – difficult to
know for anyone who has not learnt the pronunciation from a
native speaker.
[endquote]

(from: A Monograph on the Anusvaara of the Taittiriiya K.r.s.na
Yajur Veda. You will need to download the pdf file to see the oral
diagrams)

Best wishes,
Dhammanando