Re: [INDOLOGY] Pronunciation of jñ

[Hock, Hans Henrich]

The Sanskrit phonetic tradition characterizes j as a voiced, palatal stop (not as an affricate). As it turns out, voiced stops before homorganic (voiced) nasal are historically unstable, not just because they may (or not) be difficult to produce but more important, because their acoustic identity is masked by the following homorganic nasal. As a consequence, the prehistoric sequence dn became nn even in Vedic times (as in *sad-na- > san-na-). It is therefore not surprising that jñ should have undergone a similar change in Pali, where it turns into ññ, simplified in initial position (in fact, it could be considered surprising that jñ survived in Sanskrit). Once jñ was no longer an acceptable consonant sequence, substitutes had to be found, and the various realizations referred to by Chatterji are different solutions to the problem in contemporary varieties of Sanskrit.

Happy New Year,

Hans Henrich



On 17 Jan 2018, at 20:24, Harry Spier via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info<mailto:indology at list.indology.info>> wrote:

Thank you to Tim Lubin , Madhav Deshpande, , David and Nancy Reigle, and Dhaval Patel

Harry Spier

On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 7:43 PM, Dhaval Patel via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info<mailto:indology at list.indology.info>> wrote:
I floated similar query some years ago and the discussion and references therein may be of some use.

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!search/%E0%A4%9C%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%9E/samskrita/Qu5-mIvGLS4



_______________________________________________
INDOLOGY mailing list
INDOLOGY at list.indology.info<mailto:INDOLOGY at list.indology.info>
indology-owner at list.indology.info<mailto:indology-owner at list.indology.info> (messages to the list's managing committee)
http://listinfo.indology.info<http://listinfo.indology.info/> (where you can change your list options or unsubscribe)

_______________________________________________
INDOLOGY mailing list
INDOLOGY at list.indology.info<mailto:INDOLOGY at list.indology.info>
indology-owner at list.indology.info (messages to the list's managing committee)
http://listinfo.indology.info (where you can change your list options or unsubscribe)



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20180118/c41b569f/attachment.htm>