Sanskrit: Encyclopedia II - Sanskrit - Phonology and writing system

Sanskrit - Phonology and writing system

Classical Sanskrit distinguishes 48 sounds. Some of these, are, however, allophones. The number of phonemes is smaller, at about 35, see below.

The sounds are traditionally listed in the order vowels, diphthongs, anusvara and visarga, stops and nasals (starting in the back of the mouth and moving forward), and finally the liquids and fricatives, written in IAST as follows (see the tables below for details):

An alternate traditional ordering is that of the Shiva Sutra.

Sanskrit - Vowels

The tables below give the Devanagari and IAST notation of the Sanskrit vowels. Devanagari being an abugida script, non-word-initial vowels are expressed by diacritics, see Devanagari for details.

The long vowels are held about twice as long as their short counterparts. Also, there exists a third, extra-long length for most vowels, called pluti, which is used in various cases, but particularly in the vocative.

There are four diphtongs:

e and o continue Proto-Indo-Iranian [ai], [au], and they are phonologically (conceptually) /ai/ and /au/ still in Sanskrit, and are categorized as diphtongs by Sanskrit grammarians even though they are realized phonetically as simple long vowels.

Vowels can be nasalized: any nasal phoneme in pausa, and in some instances in composition, results in a nasalization of the preceding vowel. This is indicated with the anusvāra ṃ, Devanagari ं (bindu).

Sanskrit - Consonants

Devanagari and IAST notation is given, with approximate IPA values in sqare brackets.

Sanskrit - Phonology

The diphtongs e, ai, o, au are phonologically identical to /ai/, /āi/, /au/, /āu/. Long syllabic l (ḹ) is not attested, and is only discussed by grammarians for systematic reasons, and its short counterpart ḷ occurs in a single root only, kḷp "to order, array". Long syllabic r (ṝ) is also quite marginal, occuring in the genitive plural of r-stems (e.g. mātṛ "mother" and pitṛ "father" have gen.pl. mātṝṇām and pitṝṇām). i, u, ṛ, ḷ are vocalic allophones of consonantal y, v, r, l. There are thus only 5 invariably vocalic phonemes,

Visarga ḥ ः is an allophone of r and s, and anusvara ṃ, Devanagari ं of any nasal, both in pausa. The exact pronunciation of the three sibilants may vary, but they are distinct phonemes. A voiced sibilant [z] was inherited by Indo-Aryan but lost shortly before the time of the Rigveda. The retroflex consonants are somewhat marginal phonemes, often being conditioned by their phonetic environment; they do not continue a PIE series and are often ascribed to the substratal influence of Dravidian. The nasals ṇ, ñ, ṅ are conditioned allophones of n. There are thus 30 consonantal or semi-vocalic phonemes, consisting of five kinds of stops realized both with or without aspiration and both voiced and voiceless, two nasals, four semi-vowels or liquids, and four fricatives:

or a total of 35 unique Sanskrit phonemes altogether.

Sanskrit - Pitch

Vedic Sanskrit is a pitch accent language. Native grammarians define three tones (svara): udātta = 'raised', anudātta = 'not raised', and svarita = 'sounded'. The udātta syllable corresponds to the original Proto-Indo-European stress. The svarita is usually the next syllable after an udātta. Probably when the Rigveda was written down, the pitch of speech rose through the udātta and came back down through the following svarita. A svarita which is not preceded by an udātta is called an "independent svarita". In transliteration udātta is marked with acute accent (´) and independent svarita with a grave accent (`). Independent svarita occurs only where its udātta was lost because of vowel sandhi.

Classical Sanskrit is usually pronounced with a stress accent decided by the syllable length pattern of each word.

Sanskrit - Sandhi

Sanskrit has an elaborate set of phonological rules called sandhi which are expressed in writing (except in so-called padapatha). Sandhi refers to combination of words when they are spoken with each other without a gap. Since the word scheme is based on pronunciation, this is no exception. Sandhi rules define how the entire word or phrase sounds when two words are combined or merged. Almost always, the new word sounds like the two words spoken one after other except for euphonic changes at the point where the first word ends and the second one starts. This change depends on the sound with which the first word ends and the sound with which the second word starts. These sounds also form the basis of classification of sandhis. The effects of Sandhi have been carefully observed and described, leading to codified rules of combination. For example, when saying one word ending in i followed by another starting in u, these will be combined into yu. .

Sanskrit - Script

Sanskrit historically has had no single script associated with it. Since the late 19th century, the Devanagari (meaning "as used in the city of the gods") script has become the most widely used and associated with Sanskrit, yet this was by no means the case earlier. Each region adapted the script of the local vernacular, whether Indo-Aryan or Dravidian. In the north, there are inscriptions dating from the early centuries B.C. in the Brahmi script, also used by the king Ashoka in his famous Prakrit pillar inscriptions. Roughly contemporary with the Brahmi, the Kharosthi script was used. Later (ca. 4th to 8th centuries AD) the Gupta script, derived from Brahmi, became prevalent. From ca. the 8th century, the Sharada script evolved out of the Gupta script, and was mostly displaced in its turn by Devanagari from ca. the 12th century, with intermediary stages such as the Siddham script. The Bengali and other scripts were also used in their respective regions.

In the south where Dravidian languages predominate, scripts used include Grantha in Tamil speaking regions, Telugu in Telugu and Tamil speaking regions, Kannada, and Malayalam. Grantha, though modeled on the Tamil script, was used exclusively for Sanskrit and is rarely seen today. A recent development has been to use Tamil characters with numeric subscripts indicating voicing and aspiration.

Verbal learning occupied the pride of place in ancient India and bears an influence which can still be felt in Indian schooling today. Very high value was placed on large-scale memorization of texts, often using sophisticated mnemonic techniques. As such, propagation and learning through writing was correspondingly deemphasized and it is hypothesized that writing was introduced relatively late to India. Rhys Davids suggests that writing may have been introduced from the Middle East by traders, with Sanskrit remaining a purely oral language until well into India's classical age.

It is interesting to note the importance that Sanskrit orthography and Vedic philosophy of sound play in Hindu symbolism, as the varnamala, or sound-garland/alphabet, of 51 letters is also seen to be represented by the 51 skulls of Kali. In the Upanishads, the transcendent-immanent nature of Brahman is represented by the half-matra, or sphota of sound that is inherent to a beat of sound in the Sanskrit system.

Since the late 18th century, Sanskrit has also been transliterated using the Latin alphabet. Most commonly used today is the IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration), which has been the academic standard since 1912, and which is used in this article. ASCII based transliteration schemes have evolved due to difficulties representing Sanskrit characters in computer systems. These include Harvard-Kyoto and ITRANS, a lossless transliteration scheme that is used widely on the Internet, especially in Usenet and in email, for considerations of speed of entry as well as rendering issues. With the wide availability of Unicode aware web browsers, IAST has become common also for online articles.

For scholarly work, Devanagari in the 19th century was generally preferred for the transcription and reproduction of whole texts and lengthy excerpts also by European scholars; however, references to individual words and names in texts composed in European languages are usually represented using Roman transliteration, and from the mid 20th century, textual editions edited by Western scholars have also been mostly in romanized transliteration.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Phonology and writing system", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki