Re: Niggahiita in IPA?

I keep my comments brief and delimited by my small measure of
competence.  As I've said before, I'm linguistically jejune, and have
mostly approached Pali from a background in philosophy (rather than
phonology).

> No, it wouldn't.  The velar nasal ('gutteral' has a 19th century aura
> in modern phonetic discussion) ...

I am surprised that several current (American) dictionaries do not
even list this meaning for "gutteral", although it is still a current
usage in (e.g.) British publications.  Obversely, "velar" and "dorsal"
seem to be confused by some authors (or, are used in a confusing
manner by them) --so "gutteral" might still be a useful adjectie.

> [The velar nasal] is the final
> consonant in the standard English pronunciation of -sing- ...

The problem is that virtually all Pali textbooks I've seen claim that
this is the correct pronunciation of the anuswara itself (Narada,
etc.); I think I'm still "sitting on the fence" as to how to describe
it in my own work.  Perhaps I'll be a cowardly scholar and just quote
Buddhaghosa without venturing my own opinion.

> (how does one close the
> mouth without using any of the organs of articulation?).

By using your fist.  (That was a joke.)  As with the comments alluded
to from Sk. sources, this may be a "linguistic ideal" that can only
exist in metapysics, not spoken language.  It is certainly possible to
make a nasal sound without altering the position of the mouth from the
way it was left after the prior sound --e.g., nasalizing a vowel with
the mouth open or partly closed, as the prior vowel left it.  Even
this is a bit of a leap from B.G.

> > So that one could use:"[n with leftward hook at right]" for the
> niggahita in
> > isolation?
>
> You could do this (as IPA) only if you could show that niggahiita was
> invariably pronounced as a velar nasal. [...]

As Jim lamented to me off-list, the correct IPA form for the velar
nasal (viz., the "ng" ending the first line of the Pali alphabet) is
currently used to represent the anuswara (e.g., in the English-Pali
dictionary, etc.) --so to follow the IPA convention here would cause
more confusion than it solves.  Indic scholarship has never made much
use of the IPA --and it would probably be better to evolve the
standard yet further away from it, to avoid over-lapping symbols.  So
far, I have not lived up to this ideal myself; I recently worked out a
Romanization system for Lao, using the IPA as far as was possible, but
found many more problems than Pali presents, etc. (FYI to Justin:
David Wharton is currently reviewing my current work on Lao tones,
phonology and syntax --I'll send it on to you at some point in future)

> He replied
> with the same point he brings up in this discussion, that the use of
> dots for other than retroflex consonants is phonetically unmotivated
> and inconsistent.  Of course he is quite right about that.  But I think
> he misses the point, because his alternative is equally unmotivated and
> inconsistent.

Well, "dot above" and "tilde above" are alternatives that were
historically used by Pali and Sanskrit scholars until quite recently
--e.g., in Senart's Kaccayana.  For all I care we can use "hook
above", or "strikethrough n" --the latter might well illustrate that
it is a "nasal nullity".

> The PTS standard is not preferable to his because it is
> more phonetically motivated, but rather simply because it is the
> standard.

But the PTS standard has been especially problematic in precisely this
respect, viz., the issue of breaking off compound words with the velar
/'n/ into a sequence of words ending with anuswara, and even
destroying combinations where /.m/ becomes /m/ due to euphony, etc.  I
would further say that the PTS is influential only with a small circle
of scholars in England who continue to put out un-edited and
un-corrected re-issues (similar to Xerox copies) of 100 year old texts
for the edification of a small circle of subscribers.  Despite the awe
that the PTS inspires with so many in Sri Lanka, their orthographic
conventions have not been (nor are now becoming) universal there.
Whatever standard the new Royal Thai edition uses will likely be more
influential in the next 100 years than the PTS has been in the past
100; I know that for myself the standards followed by Sinhalese and
Indian editions (i.e., Romanized editions from these places) have been
more influential than the PTS standard.  I have not seen the new Thai
Romanized edition --I assume that it is largely similar to the PTS
standard, but perhaps with some small modifications?

> Finally, I have missed in our discussion to date any reference to I. Y.
> Junghare 'Topics in Pâli Historical Phonology'...

Before you joined the list there were a few references to it.  I read
it some years ago, and did not find much of use there --on most of the
issues I was interested in Junghare just surveys the earlier
authorities.

> In any case,
> my interpretation is not as unprecedented as Eisel Mazard says.

It was the suggested innovation in orthography that I praised as
unprecedented, i.e., putting a tilde above the vowel, etc. --although
I say again, that we'd might as well adopt the "dot" directly into
roman script, and thus borrow the anuswara entire, with all its
phonetic ambiguities.

E.M.