Indian Antiquary Vol 42

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 51

FEBRUARY, 1913.]
ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF SANSKRIT
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ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF SANSKRIT. BY P. T. SRINIVAS IYENGAR, M.A.; VIZAGAPATAM.
It is frequently urged, as one of the excellences of Sanskrit, that its alphabet is scientific and perfect, unlike the English alphabet, which is both superfluous and defective. But it is not so well-known, that while the spelling of Sanskrit words is fixed for all time, its pronunciation varies so much from province to province that there are comparatively few letters whose values are the same all over India. When this is pointed out to a Hindu, his first impulse is to maintain that his pronunciation, i. e., that of his district, is the correct, ancient one of Pâniņi and the Rishis that preceded him, and that all others are wrong. I have heard a Tamil Brahman (and a professor in a Government College who has passed a high Examination in the Science of Language) maintain that the Tamil pronunciation of Sanskrit is the only perfect thing, though the Tamil land is several thousand miles far from that where Sanskrit was first evolved, and though Sanskrit did not reach the Tamil land until many hundred years after it was born. On the other hand I have known Hindi gentlemen, great Sanskrit scholars, believe that the confusion in speech between sh and prevalent in North India was part of the original perfection of the Sanskrit (perfected) tongue! As a matter of fact there is no right or wrong in these matters. As every flower has a right to exist and the one with narrow petals is not more correct than the one with broad ones, all forms of pronunciation are correct, each in the district or caste or clan where it prevails, and no one form is superior to another. Pronunciation, like other manifestations of life, changes in accordance with individual environment.
Firstly as time goes on the sounds of a language change. It has been proved that Sanskrit has levelled down original Indo-Germanic a, e and o into one uniform a, whereas the original sounds have been preserved in Greek, Latin and other languages. Cf. Sans. pañcha, janas, Gr. pente, genos: Sans. cha, Lat. que; Sans. chal, A. S. hweol; in all which cases the Sanskrit a is a later formation than the e or o of the other languages. That Sanskrit long e and long o are developments of ai and au is well-known to our Grammarians, but this is only a case of Indo-Germanic ai, ei, and oi becoming first ai and then longe in Sanskrit and au, eu and ou first becoming au and then long o. Compare Gk. aithos, Sans. édhas, Gk. teichos, Sans. déha; Gk, oida, Sans. veda; Lat. aug-ere, Sans. ôjas; Gk. reuma, Sans. srô-tas. While Sanskrit has wandered farther from the parent Indo-Germanic in its vowel system than its sister-languages, it has preserved the original consonant system better. But even here, there have been wide changes. In the Indo-Germanic there were two sets of k sounds, as to-day Arabic has, a velar and a palatal. These as well as the labialized velars were fronted, when followed by front vowels e, i. ; thence arose in Sanskrit the sounds of i,j, h, k, ch, eto, Thus the roots ií, jtv, har, kal, chal represent an earlier kei, gwei, gher, qel, qwel.
Most of these changes from the Indo-Germanic to the Sanskrit have been revealed by the historical study of languages conducted by modern investigators. The method of Sanskrit Grammarians was purely analytical; it consisted in tracing forms to their roots (real or imaginary) and it is obvious that this method cannot be lead to laws of word formation, which may be practically useful but are not true as facts of history. The study of the growth of man based on anatomical considerations and intelligent inferences from the dissection of a number of corpses as to how man's body must have been put together may lead to very interesting results, but these results are likely to be very different from the real story of man as revealed by Comparative Zoology and Embryology. Psychology, till recently, analysed the grown man's mind into faculties and proceeded exactly like Pânini's grammar; and as the growing science of Comparative Psychology has upset the old Psychology, so Comparative Grammar has upset the older Sanskrit. Grammar. Thus in 6-ti, the e representing ei of. Indo-Germanic is surely not derived from i, the so-called root, The k of multa, rikta, is not a modification of oh as Pânini says, because the Indo-Germanic analogue of their so-called roots much, rich, are meuk, leikw; similarly the gh of ghrants is more primitive than the h of hanti..