Sanskrit & Pāli Languages
Just a few promised notes on pronunciation of some of the words I'm putting in these pages with letters/diacritics that many people might not be familiar with. I have just begun learning these in the past two months myself as part of Sanskrit but my explanations should be accurate enough that you can at least read the words in your head.
The letters/markings you see are from the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST). There is no "Sanskrit alphabet" -- Sanskrit was passed down via oral tradition (like the Buddhist scriptures themselves for centuries). It evolved into a bunch of dialects called Prakrits before writing started to take form in the area of India. As writing systems were introduced, Sanskrit transliterations have been adapted to various different ones and to keep this short, we'll just say Devanagari (aka Nagari) stuck. You'd probably at least recognise this script, being used for standard Hindi for instance.
I'll just state for the record that I don't know if the Pāli pronunciations are the same, I've just been assuming they're at least similar. Sometimes the languages themselves seem so similar I can see how two different words are the same thing, like the Sanskrit "nirvāna" and the Pāli version "nibbāna" ...a tapped r and soft v can almost just as well be two b's!
Anyway, to the point of this post. I found this video of just under 10 minutes to be very helpful on this matter: Sanskrit Vowels: Pronunciation and Transliteration. In looking for some more text-oriented references to add to the post for people reading, I found this site also useful (click on the bottom "Vowels" to go through each section, starting with that one).
Here are a few useful ones from that site for these purposes:
You can see quickly that the vowels with lines over are just longer versions of the same vowel. I've observed that these longer vowels are usually accented syllables, though I'm not certain that's a rule. I've been speaking ṝ as a trill and ṛ as a tap (uh-oh, linguistics nerd alert!) but have also heard vastly differing accents depending on the native tongue of the speaker.
The letters ś and ṣ are both "sh" sounds, but with your tongue in different positions. The example in the above linked video was excellent, since as the narrator says, they naturally put your mouth in the right position to say it properly:
The ṅ is pronounced like the "ng" in "ping", and the ñ as the "ny" in the Russian word "nyet" ...for lack of better examples. Edit: actually, I thought of one! I think one could say the ñ is like the first n in "onion"!
This should at least let you read these bits and pieces posted here more confidently. I'm learning this stuff on my own -- if anyone reading this actually has credentials and sees something here warranting correction, please speak up :)
The letters/markings you see are from the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST). There is no "Sanskrit alphabet" -- Sanskrit was passed down via oral tradition (like the Buddhist scriptures themselves for centuries). It evolved into a bunch of dialects called Prakrits before writing started to take form in the area of India. As writing systems were introduced, Sanskrit transliterations have been adapted to various different ones and to keep this short, we'll just say Devanagari (aka Nagari) stuck. You'd probably at least recognise this script, being used for standard Hindi for instance.
I'll just state for the record that I don't know if the Pāli pronunciations are the same, I've just been assuming they're at least similar. Sometimes the languages themselves seem so similar I can see how two different words are the same thing, like the Sanskrit "nirvāna" and the Pāli version "nibbāna" ...a tapped r and soft v can almost just as well be two b's!
Anyway, to the point of this post. I found this video of just under 10 minutes to be very helpful on this matter: Sanskrit Vowels: Pronunciation and Transliteration. In looking for some more text-oriented references to add to the post for people reading, I found this site also useful (click on the bottom "Vowels" to go through each section, starting with that one).
Here are a few useful ones from that site for these purposes:
a -- "a" in "alive"
ā -- "a" in "star"
i -- "i" in "bit"
ī -- "ee" in "teeth"
u -- "oo" in "good"
ū -- "oo" in "mood"
e -- "a" in "mane" (constant sound)
ai -- Combination of a and i
o -- "o" in "go" (constant sound)
au -- Combination of a and u
You can see quickly that the vowels with lines over are just longer versions of the same vowel. I've observed that these longer vowels are usually accented syllables, though I'm not certain that's a rule. I've been speaking ṝ as a trill and ṛ as a tap (uh-oh, linguistics nerd alert!) but have also heard vastly differing accents depending on the native tongue of the speaker.
The letters ś and ṣ are both "sh" sounds, but with your tongue in different positions. The example in the above linked video was excellent, since as the narrator says, they naturally put your mouth in the right position to say it properly:
ṣ -- Krishna (Kṛṣṇa)
ś -- Shiva (Śiva)
The ṅ is pronounced like the "ng" in "ping", and the ñ as the "ny" in the Russian word "nyet" ...for lack of better examples. Edit: actually, I thought of one! I think one could say the ñ is like the first n in "onion"!
This should at least let you read these bits and pieces posted here more confidently. I'm learning this stuff on my own -- if anyone reading this actually has credentials and sees something here warranting correction, please speak up :)