Date: Sat, 25 May 2002 05:25:13 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> Cc: Marc Ramirez <mrami@mrami.homeunix.org>, Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>, 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> In-Reply-To: <20020525103645.A52737@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <20020522182914.I45715@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20020524110009.T21090-100000@mrami.homeunix.org> <20020524173331.A5683@lpt.ens.fr> <20020525103645.A52737@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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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
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