It’s a bit of a tangent, but linguistically, that’s quite interesting. How do those “redundant” (in western comprehension) sounds differ? Or is it just that there are explicit characters for each pronunciation (e.g. “cede” vs “can”)?
Try makind a d sound with your tongue right behind your teeth. Now try making it with it deeper in your mouth, touching the top of your mouth. There’s multiple tongue positions in the mouth that can make d sound. While making the d sound you can also change the amount of air you expel to make the d sound.
This is how a lot of the multiple letters for a single Latin letter work in most indian languages. Explicit characters for each position and often two letters at each consonant position, one for low stress sound at that position and one for high stress.
Sanskrit is a parent language for most Indian languages, like how Latin is a parent for most European languages. There are some differences between the modern language alphabets, similar to how German, Spanish, and English pronounce “j” differently. Umlauts and/or accents addded to vowels in some european languages, but not others, etc. But the majority of the letters are the same. South Indian (Dravidian languages, as opposed to north India’s indo-European languages) have alphabets that look very different but the letters have mostly a 1 to 1 relationship with the north Indian ones.
odium@programming.dev 1 month ago
The real way to spell it would be in the Hindi script. This is just the most common approximation in the English version of the Latin script.
You can’t get a very accurate version in the Latin script because the Hindi alphabet (devanagiri) has 4 different Ds, two different CH sounds, etc.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
It’s a bit of a tangent, but linguistically, that’s quite interesting. How do those “redundant” (in western comprehension) sounds differ? Or is it just that there are explicit characters for each pronunciation (e.g. “cede” vs “can”)?
odium@programming.dev 1 month ago
Try makind a d sound with your tongue right behind your teeth. Now try making it with it deeper in your mouth, touching the top of your mouth. There’s multiple tongue positions in the mouth that can make d sound. While making the d sound you can also change the amount of air you expel to make the d sound.
This is how a lot of the multiple letters for a single Latin letter work in most indian languages. Explicit characters for each position and often two letters at each consonant position, one for low stress sound at that position and one for high stress.
Found this website for pronunciation of the Sanskrit alphabet: oursanskrit.com/…/pronunciation-of-sanskrit-lette…
Sanskrit is a parent language for most Indian languages, like how Latin is a parent for most European languages. There are some differences between the modern language alphabets, similar to how German, Spanish, and English pronounce “j” differently. Umlauts and/or accents addded to vowels in some european languages, but not others, etc. But the majority of the letters are the same. South Indian (Dravidian languages, as opposed to north India’s indo-European languages) have alphabets that look very different but the letters have mostly a 1 to 1 relationship with the north Indian ones.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
That is cool. I learned something today, and I learned it from you. Thank you, genuinely.