got milk?

[Haridas C]

Mr. Freund,

daza dAdimAni SaD apUpAH kuNDam ajAjinam palalapiNDaH
adharorukam etat kumAryAH sphAyakRtasya pitA
pratizInaH

I am not sure if I really got the point of your post.

Are you suggesting that your Estonian friend who is
supposedly fluent in the English (I assume you mean
one of the many dialects of English spoken in the USA,
as opposed the 'British' or 'Canadian" varieties
English) and the American Sanskritists are in the same
boat in that each one cannot properly and
unconsciously pronounce the "l" in a given respective
language and should thus be considered as "not
fluent"?


thank you


> For the Sanskrit teachers amongst you, another
> somewhat bizarre way that
> Americans mispronounce Sanskrit has recently come to
> my attention.
> Perhaps everyone knows this, but I've never heard it
> discussed before.
>
> There are four semivowels in Sanskrit, ya, ra, la,
> and va, representing
> half-contact for the palatal, retroflex (arguable,
> of course), dental, and
> labial points of contact.  In English, there is
> apparently a fifth
> semivowel, an l which is pronounced with the glottis
> at the back of the
> throat.  This occurs whenever l is followed by k, as
> in the common word
> "milk".  The l in milk is not a dental--as an
> Estonian friend of
> mine--quite fluent in English-- discovered to his
> chagrin when he could
> not make his desire for "milk" understood to a
> waiter because he was
> mispronouncing the guttural l!
>
> In Sanskrit, an l before a k occurs in words like
> Yajnavalkya, words which
> are inevitably mispronounced by Americans who
> unconsciously substitute
> their guttural l for the proper dental l.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Peter Freund


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