A reader, after reading my book Our Heritage Revisited : A glimpse
into ancient Indian Texts has raised the point about the right /
recommended way of mentioning Sanskrit words. He said that generally
Vedas, Puranas, Moksha, Karma are used but, in the book it was Ved, Puran,
Moksh, Karm which may sound correct in spoken Hindi, but is not commonly seen
in texts. And in Sanskrit, usually the words are spoken with vowel at the
end so, he thought, the words ending in 'a' may be closer to the original
Sanskrit word sounds.
His point was genuine - I do feel that in spellings, the matter is
debatable. Hanuman ends with a halant and hence never becomes Hanumana. If
it had, instead of giving it the sound of the whole consonant 'n', we would
have added the 'aa' maatra on our own and pronounced it as
Hanumanaa the way we have started saying Ramaa.
Let me try and explain, using some examples, why I have preferred
different spellings in my book. Take Dharm or Dharma. The latter spelling is
right, if you consider the first 'a' in 'Dha'. But by spelling the word as
'Dharma' the pronunciation has become 'Dharmaa' which is incorrect.
Now let us take what I consider a good example. The word in Sanskrit is पुराण. Using the IAST style, the correct spelling is purāṇa. Here notice the diacritical mark above the first ‘a’ but not above the second (thereby clearly indicating that each 'a' has a different pronunciation), and notice the mark below ‘n’. If these marks are omitted, which is frequently seen these days, the spelling becomes ‘purana’ and the pronunciation distorted to पुराना or ‘purānā’ - since both "a" have the same pronunciation, both now would have the mark above in this pronunciation, and the sound of 'n' has also changed. Similar distortions take place due to the absence of the diacritical marks (the dot below the ‘s’) in Shiv and Vishnu etc.
Now let us take what I consider a good example. The word in Sanskrit is पुराण. Using the IAST style, the correct spelling is purāṇa. Here notice the diacritical mark above the first ‘a’ but not above the second (thereby clearly indicating that each 'a' has a different pronunciation), and notice the mark below ‘n’. If these marks are omitted, which is frequently seen these days, the spelling becomes ‘purana’ and the pronunciation distorted to पुराना or ‘purānā’ - since both "a" have the same pronunciation, both now would have the mark above in this pronunciation, and the sound of 'n' has also changed. Similar distortions take place due to the absence of the diacritical marks (the dot below the ‘s’) in Shiv and Vishnu etc.
Another recognised style of writing the words in English is the
ITRANs transliteration where a different sort of difficulty is faced. Here
again Veda is correct but Garud Puran becomes garuDapuraaNa, Smriti becomes
smRRiti, Vedang is vedaaN^ga, Krishna is kRRiShNa.
So IAST spellings distort pronunciation, unless diacritical marks
are ensured. And ITRANs does not make for smooth reading. Both thus had their own
issues. I preferred to keep it simple for the reader and as close to the Indian
pronunciation as possible and so gave the Hindi/Sanskrit words alongside.
Incidentally, on International Yoga Day, on TV, I heard David Frawley, whose pronunciation was good. I also heard an Indian expert who used the more common spelling 'asanas' to pronounce the word as 'asanaas".
How much can we
distort our own Indian words?
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