japa

[sunyata07]

Thanks for the link, EM. And thanks for helping us to explore Sanskrit in a little more depth, Yajvan! What many treasures are taken for granted in these different names and akshara combinations...

Do you, native english speakers know how unnatural the TH sound of THINK is to those who don't speak english? I had to bend my tongue and almost bite it off to speak it properly.

Namaste Pietro,

Yes, it's a tricky little sound for non-native English speakers to get right. But it isn't in English alone. You'll find the "th" sound in Greek and Spanish, and they are much more emphatically pronounced in those languages. Done with enough gusto, it can sound like you're hissing at someone!

Om namah Shivaya

[Eastern Mind]

Vannakkam: Thanks, Pietro for an apt description of frustration with sounds. We truly are conditioned, mostly by aping our parents. On a side note, my son and daughter in law cannot decide if the one year old (my grandaughter) is actually sick or not, because the most of the time she coughs is just after her mother coughs.

Getting back to s, and sh, it is also a debate in the word sri; some say shri while others say sri. In English we have shr as in shrimp, but no sr that I can recall.

For the TH, in my limited knowledge from speech therapy, its so close to d. I find the most confusing thing a bout Tamil was the idea that a vowel changes when held for a longer period of time. So a Texas drawl versus a quick a quick speaking Englishman must be very confusing. At least Aum is more or less universal.

Aum Namasivaya

[Adhvagat]

• ṭha ठ - sounds like anthill, but sounding like this : an-thill
• yet there is tha थ and it sounds like nuthook , yet sounded out like this nu-thook

I must say I have been practicing, yet still have not approched these sound forms consistently or correctly.

praṇām

Yajvan, I fail to perceive the difference in sound between these two sillables. I have the basic knowledge that TH in sanskrit has this extended H after the consonant, but in both examples you list I perceive the same sound.

Namaste Pietro,

Yes, it's a tricky little sound for non-native English speakers to get right. But it isn't in English alone. You'll find the "th" sound in Greek and Spanish, and they are much more emphatically pronounced in those languages. Done with enough gusto, it can sound like you're hissing at someone!

Om namah Shivaya

When I was writing my post I even thought about greek having something like this since it's so exotic. But in Spanish? Really? Can you give me an example?

For the TH, in my limited knowledge from speech therapy, its so close to d. I find the most confusing thing a bout Tamil was the idea that a vowel changes when held for a longer period of time. So a Texas drawl versus a quick a quick speaking Englishman must be very confusing. At least Aum is more or less universal.

Aum Namasivaya

D? Yeah, that's more like it. But I'd still say it's a hybrid of S and F and now D as well! hahaha

Most brazilians that don't speak english that well pronounce TH as F. It's really funny how some languages completely lack sounds others have.

Thinking about it, I think NH and LH as spoken in portuguese don't have an english equivalent.

http://translate.google.com/#pt|en|galinha
http://translate.google.com/#pt|en|ervilha

There's a listen button below the portuguese box, click to listen.

[Eastern Mind]

Thinking about it, I think NH and LH as spoken in portuguese don't have an english equivalent.

http://translate.google.com/#pt|en|galinha
http://translate.google.com/#pt|en|ervilha

There's a listen button below the portuguese box, click to listen.

Vannakkam Pietro: Now isn't this fun? When I listened, the h was a y. So the nh was like how I would say nyama.

Some Eastern European and French replace the TH with d so the becomes du and that becomes dat. When doing phony accents, its one of the first things you learn. Some also replace the soft th as in thing with a straight t.

I was once at three year old's birthday party and heard 'three' mispronounced 4 different ways ... free, swee, fwee, and twee.
Another blend in Sanskrit, but not English is the sv as in svaha.

I wish we could all just sit down for coffee and listen to each udder for awhile. Then I'd just be an incoherent mumbler to all of you.

Aum Namasivaya

[sunyata07]

Namste,

I've been reviewing the aksharas in great detail over the last few weeks, and I am still having trouble trying to aurally differentiate the dental and the retroflex syllables (ठ and थ, and then there's ढ and ध). I'm so glad Sanskrit and the other Indian languages are not tonal like Chinese or Thai. It would make learning this complex language even more difficult to pronounce correctly!

This ability and inability for natives and non-natives to hear differences between phonemes completely fascinates me. It's one of the reasons why studying languages have become a hobby of mine I don't tell anybody about.

When I was writing my post I even thought about greek having something like this since it's so exotic. But in Spanish? Really? Can you give me an example?

You'll find the TH sound in Spain rather than any of the Latin or South American Spanish speaking countries. In the former case, the letters c or z have a distinct TH sound, while in Latin American Spanish these sounds are more sibilant and have the same pronunciation as the letter s. Strange how these dialectal differences emerge, isn't it?

As for Portuguese, it's incredible and a little jarring to hear how different the pronunciations can be when you are not used to the script! The mechanics of language around the world continue to amaze me.

Om namah Shivaya

[Jainarayan]

There is a common argument over the 's' sound in Shiva or Siva, and Yajvan explained a lot of it. To add further to the explanation or varied ideas, I'll add one more. I was discussing the s versus sh with my Tamil speaking friend in Chidambaram who is quite up on his Tamil. (I wouldn't at all be surprised if the pronunciation differs slightly from Tamil to Sanskrit.) He explained it to me as 'Neither is correct. It is actually (his words, not mine) a ch sh blend. So the ch as in chunk blended with the sh as in shop. Of course this blend does not appear in English at all, so it's really quite difficult. Any blend just happens so fast in time, it often gets slurred as well.

I'm late to the discussion but I might add that you're correct about the difficulty in the sh v. s phoneme. Greek has the same issue. Some Greeks will say a clear s, while for others it is a slight blending of s and sh. And they will argue about it!

Russians and French cannot pronounce the th sound because it doesn't exist in Russian or French, so it comes out as z. English speakers cannot pronounce Nguyen properly in Vietnamese. That's languages for you!

[Jainarayan]

Namste,

I've been reviewing the aksharas in great detail over the last few weeks, and I am still having trouble trying to aurally differentiate the dental and the retroflex syllables (ठ and थ, and then there's ढ and ध). I'm so glad Sanskrit and the other Indian languages are not tonal like Chinese or Thai. It would make learning this complex language even more difficult to pronounce correctly!

This ability and inability for natives and non-natives to hear differences between phonemes completely fascinates me. It's one of the reasons why studying languages have become a hobby of mine I don't tell anybody about.



You'll find the TH sound in Spain rather than any of the Latin or South American Spanish speaking countries. In the former case, the letters c or z have a distinct TH sound, while in Latin American Spanish these sounds are more sibilant and have the same pronunciation as the letter s. Strange how these dialectal differences emerge, isn't it?

As for Portuguese, it's incredible and a little jarring to hear how different the pronunciations can be when you are not used to the script! The mechanics of language around the world continue to amaze me.

Om namah Shivaya

How about the click consonant languages of Africa, like San?

I am a linguistics hobbyist also. It will be our little secret.

True about European v. Latin American Spanish. Most Spanish in Spain has the interdental (the th). But in the south, it's not used. And that's where most of the immigration came from to the New World. So that's why Latin American Spanish has no th sound. Interdentals are extremely unstable in language.

In fact only four or five Indoeuropean languages have full interdentals... English, Icelandic, Greek, Spanish, and possibly Armenian. Latin had no th sound, so maybe it came from the remnant Iberian languages. After all, Spanish is Latin as spoken by Romans and native Iberians in Hispania.

You had to get me started!

[Amala]

when i chant om namah shivaya, i have problems with pronouncing it comfortably. have you ever waded through water? it feels very uncomfortable and sluggish when i do this

and the sharp "she" sound in shivaya also bothers my ears

does anyone have advice?

thanks

Namaste truthseeker,

It's not "she" as in our personal pronoun; it's "shi" as in shin. I must say, although my pronunciation is very good, I too feel this mantra does not come naturally off my tongue. You could rearrange the word order: Om s'ivaaya nama: or as you write it, om shivaya namah. Not sure how much you know about Sanskrit, but since the roles of the words are contained within each word, the order is flexible. I have just tried that order several times and I find it gentler.

[saidevo]

namaste.

I am a late entrant to this thread: this is with reference to EM's post #3.

According to SaMskRta sandhi rules (quoted by Thomas Egenes in his book 'Introduction to Sanskrit'), when a word ending in the visarga--ha is followed by one that begins with 'sh, Sh, sa, ka, kha, pa, pha', the visarga of the preceding word is retained in the sandhi. Thus,

namaH + shivAya becomes [b]namaHshivAya[b]
where the H in namaH is not pronounced fully, so it practically becomes 'namasshivAya'.

But then if it is shivAya + namaH, the visarga is pronounced fully, so it becomes 'shivAya namaha'.

Since there is no 'sh' in Tamizh, only 'ch', and there is no 'ha' either, as part of the regular Tamizh alphabet, the combination in that language is 'nama + chivAya = namachchivAya'.

[Amala]

Namaste,

I asked my teacher about this. He said you are part right. When you apply the consonant sandhi rules, things get a little complex. It would not be namasshivAya, but namashshivAya.

I'm so glad you posted that; it flows much more readily for me that way.

I also have the Egenes book, but my teacher suggests that his pacing is very unusual; that he introduces concepts that are too advanced for beginners, so I've stopped using it. Most of our materials come from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

namaste.

I am a late entrant to this thread: this is with reference to EM's post #3.

According to SaMskRta sandhi rules (quoted by Thomas Egenes in his book 'Introduction to Sanskrit'), when a word ending in the visarga--ha is followed by one that begins with 'sh, Sh, sa, ka, kha, pa, pha', the visarga of the preceding word is retained in the sandhi. Thus,

namaH + shivAya becomes namaHshivAya
[b]where the H in namaH is not pronounced fully, so it practically becomes 'namasshivAya'.

[b]But then if it is shivAya + namaH, the visarga is pronounced fully, so it becomes 'shivAya namaha'.

Since there is no 'sh' in Tamizh, only 'ch', and there is no 'ha' either, as part of the regular Tamizh alphabet, the combination in that language is 'nama + chivAya = namachchivAya'.