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On Mon, 14 Jul 1997, Vicki Jerome wrote:
> 1. I notice that in Sanskrit, the letters m and n sometimes appear to be
> used interchangeably - e.g. Sanskrit/Samskrit, and recently in a posting
> someone referred to Ahinsa (non-violence, harmlessness) which I have always
> seen written as Ahimsa. Are they indeed interchangeable, or are there some
> rules? And how do you pronounce such words - with the lips closed (as for
> m) or apart (as for n)?
The use of nasal in Sanskrit is not at all interchangable. When Sanskrit
is Romanized the letter of the closest Roman phoneme is used to mark the
respective Sanskrit phoneme. There are five Sanskrit nasal consonants, and
perhaps two Roman consonants (orthographically). The beauty is
that all five nasals possess distinct characters as opposed to
the Roman. Romanized Sanskrit is hardly an adequate substitution for the
Devanagari script. A lot of the pronunciation is lost through poor
transliteration habits.
The five nasal consonants exist at the velar, palatal, dental,
postalveolar (retroflex), and labial places of articulation and fully
assimilate with their respective class consonants only. As for the nasal
in the word "Sanskrit" itself, it is pronounced as a dental "n". This is
because the following "s" is dental. As it does not fall into any of the
above five classes, it does not have a character, but is represented with
a superscript dot called "anusvaara".
The nasal in this word is refered to as a "true" nasal as it is,
theoretically, not of the consonantal classes. This "true" nasal occurs
before the semi-vowels, sibilants, and the halanta, and is produced at the
same place of articulation as the following element. As for the "m" in
"Samskrit", as stated above, it's actually an "n". The sound "m" only
occurs before the labial consonants in Sanskrit: pa, pha, ba, bha. But
when the word "Sanskrit" is Romanized with diacritics, the "anusvaara"
sound is represented by an underdot-m, and when it is published in
books or through electronic media which cannot support diacritics, the
underdot is dropped and only the "m" remains. So whenever you see an "m"
before y, r, l, v, 's, .s, s, and h, just remember that is pronounced as
an "n".
That's the long of it... ;->
Regards,
Anshuman Pandey
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