dina's sanskrit pronunciation guide & tips
DESCRIPTION
Dina Anukampana Das has specialized in teaching perfect Sanskrit Pronunciation using phonetics and what he calls 'Simplified Romanized Sanskrit'. This document here illustrates the key point in how to pronounce Sanskrit accurately and is especially helpful for English speaking people who love Sanskrit=======================Sanskrit Pronunciation Guide - for most people, like myself, it is simply fascinating to find out that Sanskrit is so *well designed' by our creator to fit with our heads!! (Sanskrit = sam + krt = samyak + krti = perfectly done/designed) In every way it is perfect - just read this fascinating article http://on.to/sanskrit-nasa-report to see how it is more perfect than any man-made computer language can ever hope to be.... yet mand-made computer languages CANNOT BE SPOKEN BY MAN!!!!! Yet sanskrit can be spoken and understood by men. It is divine! The 25 basic consonants of sanskrt are actually called SPARSHAS. Sparsha means our sense of touch. So instead of tying to hear the sounds (a beginner of any new language CANNOT HEAR what is correct or not - we are deaf to those sounds which lie outside the spectrum of our mother tongue - as proven by Dr Tomatis whose work is being continued at the Language Laboratory in Auroville, near Pondicherry, India. So instead of trying to hear what we cannot hear, simply feel where your tongue makes contact and then try to consciously control that movement. The experience of learning sanskrt pronunciation in the unorthodox way that I teach it is exactly like learning how to drive a car with manual transmission even though we already know how to drive an auto transmission car. (Generally, we all can speak, but the process of how our tongues move, how our ears hear etc is all done unconsciously, involuntarily but learning Sanskrit the kinaesthetic way helps us take control of it very easily and quickly through the simple exercises and special charts that I have developed with the help of an expert in Accelerated Learning and Neuro Linguistic Programming, Peter Ho (Padma Sambhava Das). Sanskrt is REALLY EASY TO PRONOUNCE, especially when we use the simple I.A.S.T. (see wikipedia) Romanized Sanskrit - with just 33 alphabets we can cover the full spectrum of Sanskrit sounds and bypass the need to learn 480+ devanagari characters! The IAST system is ingenious and it is absolutely loss-less and helps beginners see the patterns in the alphabets very easily. For example, regarding the 3 biggest pronunciation mistakes made by beginners:a) Mixing up short and long letters - we can SEE that all the long letters have a line on top of them (except for 'e' and 'o' which are always long - back in 1912 when this system was invented in Athens, it was expensive to make a new font, so since there was no short version, they did not make a new font with a line above it - the Library of Calcutta however has improved on IAST and added lines above long e and long o - this is because most other Indian languages do have short and long versions of e and o, therefore for computer software to process multilingually, the lines have to be added in. I have introduced a system I call Simplified Romanized Sanskrit, where we teach students to not only put a line above the long vowels but a slash after it too to keep it separate from , because that will make sure that they stress upon that vowel without 'touching' the next consonant - see www.srs-tips.on.to for my explanation of this concept of BREAKS after every long vowel - it explains VISUALLY what is the difference in sound between Sin and Seen, Bin and Been, Din and Dean, Bend and Band, Fit and Feet etc etc. If one masters this skill, to first visually distinguish all long and short vowels, then understand the difference, then consciously lengthen the long vowels and shorten the short ones, then he quickly comes to 70% accuracy in his Sanskrit pronunciation, and if he keeps practsing this daily for 3 weeks, his hearing will thenTRANSCRIPT
*
* the I.A.S.T. – International Alphabet for Sanskrit Transliteration adopted in Athens in 1912 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAST)
(Future edition of this book will have word-by-word synonyms in recitation format as shown in the sample on Pg 2 of this book along with a full word-by-word index of the Gita)
Déna-Anukampana Däsa, Editor
Srimad Bhagavad Gita Slokas For Daily Recitation
hè
kè khè gè ghè ìè
cè chè jè jhè ïè
öè öhè òè òhè ëè
tè thè dè dhè nè
pè
phè
bè bhè
mè
yè rè lè vè
çè ñè sè
LONG è