Thread by @NGKabra

As a child, I always wondered why Indian words like राम always got written as "Rama" in English. To me "Ram" seemed like a much better fit for the pronunciation. I thought it was because of British arbitrariness.

Only recently I learnt the real reason for this. /1

Consider गम. How would you pronounce it? Like the English word "gum" right? As a Hindi/Marathi speaker, I can't imagine any other pronunciation.

But, for a Sanskrit speaker, things are different. गम् is pronounced "gum". In गम the full म is pronounced, so it becomes "gum-uh" /2

The extra "-uh" sound which is the difference between गम and गम् is called a schwa

And modern Indian languages like Hindi and Marathi all have an (unwritten) rule that the schwa at the end of a word isn't to be pronounced

This is called schwa deletion en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa_del… /3

In Sanskrit, all the schwas at the ends of words must be pronounced. If they want you to not pronounce it, they will indicate it by having a half letter there.

So, संस्कृतम् does not have a schwa at the end but राम does. So the correct pronunciation of राम is raam-uh not raam
/4

This is the reason why योग is written "yoga" and not "yog". The correct Sanskrit pronunciation is neither "yogaa" nor "yog". It is "yog-uh"

However (experts correct me if I'm mistaken), I think the correct Hindi/Marathi pronunciation is "yog". /5

I still remember @bibekdebroy's correct Sanskrit pronunciations of महाभारत and योग and other words when gave a talk at @BhandarkarI on the mahabharat*a*. Something we rarely hear these days. /6

https://twitter.com/aparanjape/status/643304015367811073

And now, because of twitter, you know an extra piece of information that will probably make no difference to your life at all. 😀

People in this thread are asking why "u" is pronounced as "a" in some English words. Here is a long explanation english.stackexchange.com/questions/1451… (which, as anything in English, boils down to: English loves borrowing words from all over the world and making a khichadi of it)

As @pathaksudh points out, modern Indian languages have schwa deletion in the middle of letters also.

पु ल fans will remember भडक मकर vs भड कम कर

https://twitter.com/pathaksudh/status/1310820130008395776

Discovering a whole bunch of repercussions of schwa deletion that I hadn't really thought about earlier:

e.g.

https://twitter.com/PallavPSinha/status/1310825016397721600

In general, it appears to me (based on the replies to the thread) that South Indian languages kept the schwa, while North Indian languages deleted it. Marathi falls somewhere in between so it keeps some schwas and deletes others

https://twitter.com/randomvichar/status/1310820697011224577

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Here he goes much deeper into schwas than I did:

https://twitter.com/avtansa/status/1310961410768281600