INDOLOGY FAQ. Re. Varanasi

[Benjamin Slade]

All of the speakers I'm familiar with who produce "f", produce it as a labiodental fricative (as in English). Many Nepali speakers don't produce "f" at all (but rather "ph"), but those who do again seem to produce it as a labiodental.

If it is the case that "ph" for some speakers is becoming a bilabial fricative, this would indeed be distinct from "hypercorrection".


--B. 


From: Christian K. Wedemeyer <wedemeyer at UCHICAGO.EDU>
To: INDOLOGY at liverpool.ac.uk
Sent: Thu, 18 February, 2010 10:41:53
Subject: Re: INDOLOGY FAQ. Re. Varanasi

On Feb 17, 2010, at 2:15 PM, Benjamin Slade wrote:

> The pronunciation of "f" for "ph" is a wide-spread phenomenon among (some) speakers of Indo-Aryan languages; e.g. Hindu/Urdu _phal_ "fruit" is sometimes rendered by native Hindi speakers as _fal_, _phir_ "then" as _fir_, _phul_ "flower" rendered as _ful_ (Hindi films like to play with the resulting homophony with the English borrowing _ful_ "fool"...).As far as I can tell, these are all hypercorrections:


(I'm not a linguist, so excuse any clumsiness:)

But, are these labiodental fricatives, like the English f, or bilabial (as, for instance, in Japanese)? I would suspect the bilabial version (which is what I have heard, I believe, in Northern India and Nepal), which is similar in articulation to a voiceless aspirated labial. In that case, rather than "hypercorrection," might this perhaps be due to a more general, systemic phonetic change (possibly stimulated by contact with Perso-Arabic speakers)? Or is this not a useful distinction?

(Sorry, I'm with Allen...gotta get some more coffee...)





--
Christian K. Wedemeyer
Assistant Professor of the History of Religions
University of Chicago Divinity School
1025 E 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
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