Hello!
First of all I would like to give a sincere thank you to the creators of this online course, it such a wonderful opportunity to be able to learn this language online.
My question has arisen mostly out of curiosity because the concern from which it stems does not prevent me from going further in my learning experience. When given audio examples of the proper pronunciation for the consonants, we are told that the vowel "a" is added to carry the sound. However, the vowel heard is neither the a we heard in the preceding example nor any of the other vowels. Why is this? And what is the identity of this vowel? Is it simply a transformed version of the "a"?
Thank you very much,
With love,
Jonathan
Hi Jonathan,
Your query is understandable.
But as you may know from other languages as well, the pronunciation of consonants within the context of words may be different than in the context of the alphabet.
So B as “be”, C as “ce”, D as “de” etc needs the vowel E as pronunciation aid, but this letter sounds different when it appears in words like ball, baby, bridge; or clock, content, choice; or derive, drink, dog respectively.
So I think we have to understand, that the pronunciation of consonants by themselves can just give an idea of the movement of the organs of the mouth rather than letting us get confused by those merely supporting vowel - which is completely different than when that same very vowel is used in the function of vowel itself.
When pronouncing the words as they appear in the suttas (ETP) your difficulty should get easily resolved.
Much metta,
Klaus
Sorry, I forgot to mention, that if you made use of the vowel E with the consonants i.e. "el", "em" or "en", the pronunciation of E would sound differently here as well - just to stick to the example of English. W.Metta, Klaus