Pronunciation Guide

pronunciation

Guides to the pronunciation of names and terms can be found on the “background information” page for each author/work. The following is a general guide to the pronunciation of words in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Tamil. For the purposes of pronunciation, I will use the signs of the International Phonetic Alphabet. On this website, names and titles are transcribed according to the ISO-15919 guidelines. I give the slightly more popular IAST transcription as an alternative.

Some general guidelines:

• South Asian languages distinguish between long and short vowels. Hence rāma- “Rama” and ramā- “woman” should be pronounced differently!
• It is also important to pronounce double consonants differently from single consonants, unlike in English. mata- “thought” and matta- “drunk” are pronounced differently.
• The accent is typically like that of Latin: if the penultimate or next-from-last syllable is heavy (i.e., either the vowel of that syllable is long, or it is followed by two or more consonants), then the accent falls on that syllable (e.g., ma-YŪ-ra); otherwise, the accent falls on the antepenultimate or third from last (e.g., BHĀ-ra-vi, ma-hā-BHĀ-ra-ta, rā-MĀ-ya-ṇa). Longer words, and compounds, generally have a secondary accent (e.g. PA-ra-ma-ma-HĒ-śva-ra).

For Tamil names and titles:

• The letter c is usually pronounced as [s].
• A final letter u is pronounced as a very short neutral vowel [ə].
• The sounds k, ṭ, t, and p are “softened” to the equivalent of g, ḍ, d, and b when they have a vowel on their right side and either a vowel or a nasal consonant on their left side. Hence aṉpu is pronounced as [ʌnbə]. (When it comes between vowels, k is pronounced more as [ɦ] or [ɣ].)