I feel compelled to comment with my very rusty knowledge of linguistics I gained in a past life when I did my BA in Sanskrit & Linguistics. Please indulge me and beware it's been a little while, but I think it's worth clarifying a few points.
I'm sure many of you are aware of the concept of a
phoneme. The phonemes of a language are those sounds that the speakers of that language recognise as separate sounds which can be used to distinguish different words. It's about how sounds are perceived. It's about the differences that the speakers of a language would consider meaningful and relevant. The classic example would be the English phoneme /t/. At the start of a word /t/ is usually moderately aspirated: [tʰ]. There is a slight puff of air after the
t-sound. A good example would be
top [tʰɒˀp]. After /s/ the /t/ is not aspirated: [t], as in
stop [stɒˀp]. In English this difference is not
phonemic. We do not consider [t] and [tʰ] to be separate sounds, just different versions of the same sound (if we even notice there's a difference at all). It's not a difference that matters to us. If somebody says
stop with an aspirated [tʰ] (as in [stʰɒˀp]) it wouldn't sound like a different word to us. In fact, if you're being emphatic you might well find that there is some aspiration of the /t/ in STOP!! We say [t] and [tʰ] are
allophones of the phoneme /t/. In Hindi, this difference is phonemic. It does matter. त
t and थ
th are different sounds, as different as त
t and द
d (however the distinction between 'voiceless' and 'voiced' stops in English is a bit different to the difference between them in Hindi and the presence or absence of aspiration has a complicating role to play in that, but let's not overcomplicate things!) There are more allophones of /t/, though. At the end of a word, particularly in American English, /t/ may be unreleased: [t̚], as in
cat [kʰæt̚]. In careful British pronunciation it is usually pre-glottalised at the end of a word: [ˀt], as in [kʰæˀt]. This gives rise to the allophone /ʔ/: the
glottal stop. This one's really interesting, as it's a perfectly acceptable allophone of /t/ in some places even in very careful British English, e.g.
football [ˈfʊʔbɔːɫ]. However, if you pronounce
better as [ˈbeʔə] in Britain people will notice. They will not think you're saying a different word. They will just think (potentially, if they're a teacher for example) that you're speaking sloppily. American English, meanwhile, is known for its heavy use of
flapping, which exists in British English a bit, but to nothing like the same degree. In certain places in American English, for example intervocalically, /t/ can be pronounced [ɾ], e.g.
better [ˈbɛɾɚ]. In general, the allophones of /t/ in English are restricted in where they can occur. Most British English accents do not substitute a glottal stop for /t/ at the start of a word. The aspirated allophone meanwhile only occurs at the start of a word (and in fact
marks the start of a word), unless you're being emphatic. A two-year-old having a temper tantrum might well say STHOP ITHUH! (stop it!), but otherwise they're restricted in where they occur. Some allophones in some languages, however, exist in what we call
free variation where there are much fewer restrictions. I gather that truly free variation where you could literally use any one of the allophones in any and all positions is not really 'a thing', however. Generally where you have free variation it would be in a specific place. So for example, at the end of a word [t̚], [t], [ˀt] and [ʔ] are in free variation in British English.
With that in mind
@MonsieurGonzalito the very purpose of "slash brackets" in the IPA is to mark broad transcription. It's not necessarily about 'careless' transcription, although it may be used for simplicity or when you're only talking about a single language. For example, since Hindi doesn't distinguish between dental and alveolar plosives we might not bother marking all the dentals with a dental diacritic and we might just use /t/ for त, rather than [t̪]. However, broad transcription can be very deliberately used for phonemic transcription, where a linguist is specifically trying to represent only the features and distinctions that speakers of a language would consider meaningful. Indeed it would probably be considered
wrong to specify the allophones of /n/ within slash brackets. If you're going to distinguish allophones (which can be very important if you want to describe the phonology of a language or you're doing dialect training, but can be unbelievably and unnecessarily cluttered and pedantic in other contexts) then you should be using square brackets as I have so far tried to do in this post.
So with all that in mind, to
@El Ganador's question:
So the anusvaara represents (in Hindi):
ङ before क ख ग घ and ह
ञ before च छ ज झ and श and य
ण before ट ठ ड ढ ङ ढ़ and ष and र
न before त थ द ध and स and ल
म before प फ ब भ and व
Out of curiosity, what does it represent in foreign sounds क़ ख़ ग़ ज़ झ़ फ़?
Let me try my understanding:
क़ --> voiced uvular nasal (which doesn't exist in Hindi, but then what is the anusvaara in इंक़लाब)
ख़ --> ङ
ग़ --> ङ
ज़ --> न
झ़ --> ञ (note that this letter -झ़- is extremely rare, but I added it for consistency)
फ़ --> voiced labiodental nasal (which doesn't exist in Hindi, and I can't think of any examples)
Please fix any errors I made, since I'm confident I made some.
I edited the message to follow #11.
The
anusvāra in Hindi represents a nasal "homorganic" (produced in the same place) with the following stop (unless it stands in place of
candrabindu because there is no room for it, as in हैं or in a few Sanskrit words like स्वयं where it represents
m). That is the general state of things as you have described there. It is very easy to see how such
saṃdhi would come about. It's quite naturally of course that a nasal sound before a
p will be pronounced in the same place as that
p due to the mechanics of saying a
nasal stop +
p. This is not only an Indian thing. In English we see the same thing with the prefix
in-, as in
impossible but
indirect. These are borrowed from Latin and are spelled as pronounced. With the Germanic
un- however (which is the equivalent of
in- and also the equivalent of Greek
a-/an- (as in
asexual, amoral, anhydrous, anarchy, anaesthetic) and Sanskrit
a-/an- (as in
amṛta, ahiṃsā, anudātta)) we have something quite interesting. In spelling, words are written with
un always unchanged, e.g.
unbelievable. In pronunciation, however, they may be said with the same
assimilation, or with [n], thus [ˌɐnbəˈliːvəbɫ̩] or [ˌɐmbəˈliːvəbɫ̩]. But people don't necessarily realise this unless you point it out to them, and even then they might not believe you that they say
umbelievable. (This is precisely the point about allophones!) But notice something here. The pronunciation of
unbelievable with a
n is perfectly possible as
n uses the tip of the tongue and
b the lips. There is no barrier to pronouncing one immediately followed by the next. This is also true, in fact, of
k/g.
Unclear may be pronounced
unclear [ˌɐnˈklɪə̯] or
ungclear [ˌɐŋˈklɪə̯]. And this is fine because the
n uses the tip of the tongue and the
k the back of the tongue so they don't
have to interfere with one another. You
can say
n and then immediately
k.
