From owner-freebsd-chat Fri May 24 21: 8:42 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from postfix2-1.free.fr (postfix2-1.free.fr [213.228.0.9]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D360737B405 for ; Fri, 24 May 2002 21:08:33 -0700 (PDT) Received: from bluerondo.a.la.turk (nas-cbv-9-62-147-160-171.dial.proxad.net [62.147.160.171]) by postfix2-1.free.fr (Postfix) with ESMTP id D918320E for ; Sat, 25 May 2002 06:08:31 +0200 (CEST) Received: (qmail 1460 invoked by uid 1001); 25 May 2002 03:25:13 -0000 Date: Sat, 25 May 2002 05:25:13 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey Cc: Marc Ramirez , Brad Knowles , chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Aryan and Dravidian (was: French, Flemish and English (was: cvs commit: src/sys/alpha/alpha clock.c)) Message-ID: <20020525032513.GA1425@lpt.ens.fr> References: <20020522182914.I45715@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20020524110009.T21090-100000@mrami.homeunix.org> <20020524173331.A5683@lpt.ens.fr> <20020525103645.A52737@wantadilla.lemis.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20020525103645.A52737@wantadilla.lemis.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.27i X-Operating-System: FreeBSD 4.6-PRERELEASE i386 Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Greg 'groggy' Lehey said on May 25, 2002 at 10:36:45: > 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. It's however also quite likely that the pronunciation has evolved/changed significantly in Sinhalese. Many Hindi speakers today have problems saying "sh" and convert it to "s"; they also have problems with two consonants succeeding each other. So they not only convert English words like "school" to "ischool", but also Sanskrit-origin Hindi words like "stree" ("woman") to "istree" -- somewhat like Spanish speakers perhaps, except that they will still write it "stree" and sophisticated speakers will pronounce it that way too. Most amusingly, "station" often becomes something like "tesan." And a name like "Krishna" becomes "Krishan", "Kishan" or even "Kissan". Bengali speakers on the other hand cannot say "s" but always convert it to "sh" (and have a whole range of other peculiarities in speech). There is a tendency in India to be contemptuous of all this and say that the Sanskrit pronunciation is the "true" pronunciation, but I think that's a bit elitist; in fact, after looking at European languages, each of which thoroughly distorts Latin words in a different way (especially French, which makes them nearly unrecognizable sometimes), I think Indian languages have stayed comparatively true to "pure" Sanskrit. Anyway, if the Sri Lankans pronounce it "Sri" and not "Shri", I'm willing to accept that as the "correct" pronunciation for their country... - Rahul To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message