Date: Sat, 25 May 2002 10:36:45 +0930 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> Cc: Marc Ramirez <mrami@mrami.homeunix.org>, Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Aryan and Dravidian (was: French, Flemish and English (was: cvs commit: src/sys/alpha/alpha clock.c)) Message-ID: <20020525103645.A52737@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <20020524173331.A5683@lpt.ens.fr> References: <20020522182914.I45715@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20020524110009.T21090-100000@mrami.homeunix.org> <20020524173331.A5683@lpt.ens.fr>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Friday, 24 May 2002 at 17:33:31 +0200, Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > Marc Ramirez said on May 24, 2002 at 11:12:40: >> If we're talking about repeating a spoken word, it again goes through two >> filters: 1) what sounds am I used to differentiating, and 2) what sounds >> am I used to making. To demonstrate #1, my Dad cannot hear the difference >> between Sri Lanka (pronounced 'sree') and Sri Lanka (pronounced 'shree'). >> He is not used to trying to tell the difference, because that is not a >> minimal pair in his ideolect of American English, the only dialect he >> speaks. Therefore when he says Sri Lanka, it always comes out 'shree', >> which is one of the many differences from what a native would say. > > I don't know how Sri Lankans say it, but most people in India would > say "shree". In the devanagari script (which is used for Sanskrit, > which is where the word originates) the corresponding letter is one > of the two "sh" letters to which I referred earlier (the "s" letter > is different). In the Tamil script, the same letter serves for "s", > "sh", and "ch" (though there is are special letters sometimes used > for "s" and "sh" in words imported from Sanskrit), and Tamil > speakers tend to use the three sounds interchangeably. I don't know > about Sinhalese, which uses a quite different script, though > (visually, at least) closer to Tamil than to Devanagari. My understanding was that Singhalese is an Aryan language, whereas Tamil is Dravidian. It doesn't have to have much bearing on the matter, but it would make it more plausible that Singhalese would pronounce it the Aryan way. FWIW, "Sri" in Malay is pronounced with an s, not an sh. Malay contains a large number of words ultimately derived from Sanskrit, and often has difficulty adapting, so "Sri" is often spelt "Seri", with an unaccented e (schwa). Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20020525103645.A52737>