Re: 'Saṁyutta' niggahīta pronunciation

Dear Dmytro,

It is hard to know with any certainty how the niggahīta was pronounced in
ancient times. As seen in your quotes, there are different opinions. For
another one, I quote from Warder's Introducton to Pali (1963), p.4:

“ the pure nasal is the humming sound produced when the mouth is closed but
air escapes through the nose with voicing (vibration of the vocal chords),
it is m without release (consequently without place of articulation except
the nose). ”

Aggavaṃsa (12th c.) gives an explanation of the niggahịta on p.606 (ed. H.
Smith) and there is more in other grammatical texts but hard to understand
what is actually meant. The rules allow the niggahīta to be replaced by a
vagganta or nasal consonant before another vagga consonant, eg, saṃgha and
saṅgha are both acceptable. But are they pronounced exactly the same? I'm
inclined to think that the -aṃ before gha is pronounced like a French
nsalized vowel and stops just short of sounding like -aṅ.

Best wishes,

Jim

----- Original Message -----
From: Dmytro Ivakhnenko aavuso@... [palistudy]
To: palistudy@yahoogroups.com
Sent: November 27, 2015 7:35 AM
Subject: [palistudy] 'Saṁyutta' niggahīta pronunciation





Dear Pali friends,

To ascertain how to transcribe 'Saṁyutta' in Ukrainian and Russian, I would
like to know the most reliable version of its niggahīta ancient
pronunciation.



Charles Duroiselle wrote:

"ŋ, (niggahīta), found always at the end of words is, in Burma, pronounced
like 'm' in, jam, ram; in Ceylon, it is given the sound of 'ng'  in, bring,
king"

A Practical Grammar of the Pāli Language
http://dhamma.ru/paali/durois/paligram.pdf



I have read in Wikipedia:

"In Vedic Sanskrit, the anusvāra (lit. "after-sound") is a sound that occurs
as an allophone of /m/ — at a morpheme boundary — or /n/ —
morpheme-internally—, if they are preceded by a vowel and followed by a
fricative (/ś/, /ṣ/, /s/ or /h/).

First, the anusvāra began to be used before /r/ under certain conditions,
then in Classical Sanskrit its use had extended before /l/ and /y/,
replacing earlier [l̃] and [ỹ]."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anusvara

Does this signify that pronunciation on Sri Lanka (Ceylon) has undergone
influence from Classical Sanskrit, while Myanmar (Burma) preserved an
earlier form?


E. Miller writes in his "Simplified Grammar of the Pali Language":

"Before a 'y' the anusvāra can remain, or the whole group can migrate into
'ññ', as e.g. saṁyoga or saññoga."

https://books.google.com/books?id=yxbHMM5sfpAC&pg=PA20&lpg=PA20
https://archive.org/details/simplifiedgramma00mulliala

What does this imply for ancient pronunciation?

Metta,
            Dmytro