Re: Old Languages

In modern Hindi, I think that's pronounced /S/.  I'm not sure how the
Sanskritists do it, though.

There is another 's' that is supposedly retroflexed (which looks the
same as the Devanagari letter for 'p', only it is stretched a little more,
and has a slash across the open part); that one is also pronounced
/S/ by most Hindi speakers.

On Tue, Oct 09, 2001 at 12:30:13PM -0400, Roger Mills wrote:
> B.P.Jonsson wrote:
>
>
> >At 04:13 2001-10-05 -0400, Amber Adams wrote:
> >
> >>I don't know why Devanagari gets such a bad reputation...
> >
> >Because when they write Sanskrit not all word boundaries are marked.
>
>
> Yes.  Final and initial consonants become ligatures; like short vowels
> become long; a-i, a-u become e, o etc.  Old Javanese writing follows the
> same conventions.  Eyestrain, mindstrain. (Laziness?)   In some type-faces,
> it's really hard to make out some of the characters, though that's probably
> just a learner's problem.  Indians seem to have devised little tricks....for
> ex., (our Skt. course did not get into the script), an Indian student asked
> "Is that written with '21 s'?"  (that's either the retroflexed or palatal
> one, which does indeed look like "21").

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