Hi Rajen Da,
Your observations on the language are really interesting, but I do beg to differ in a few points...
Since I am unequal to the task of a full length study of the Assamese language I would like to be brief....
First of all I would like to caution all readers that this post is pretty uninteresting. I say nothing which has not been said before or which increases our understanding of the language. I am just ruminating on the nature of the Assamese language in general.
Rajen da, Your whole concern on the topic in your previous three posts seems to rest on the fact that you consider Assamese to be a orthographic language rather than a phonetic language. Now let us first decide what is the differece between an orthographic language.
The pronunciation of a word in a orthographic language has nothing to do with the letters used and varies with the change in combination..E.g., 'paper' is not pronounced as 'pa' and 'per' said together..'fashion' is not pronounced as 'fash' and 'ion' said together...
But unlike English I believe Assamese is a VERY phonetic language. All Devanagari languages are phonetic. Since the point has been raise I would like, at the cost of irritating the readers, to delve a little deeper into the language. To quote an Indian linguist, Indian languages are phonetic in nature and hence the letters represent unique sounds. In Sanskrit as well as in other Indian languages, proper pronounciation of the words is quite important. Hence it is necessary to learn the sounds associated with the letters of the language.
The word "alphabet" is not usually applied to Sanskrit or other Indian languages. There is a subtle difference between the notion of "alphabet" and the "aksharas" as the Devanagari letters are called. When we think of the word "alphabet" we normally think of the letters of the language and a name given to each letter to identify it. In most languages the letters of the alphabet have names which may give a clue to the sound associated with the letter. In Sanskrit and other Indian languages, there is no specific name given to the letters. The sound the letter stands for is actually the name for the letter. In a phonetic language reading becomes easy since the reader will be reading out the letters by uttering the sound associated with the akshara.
Unlike English language if you hit me with any word, how ever complex, I am pretty I will be able to break it down to the individual pronunciation of the constituent letters. But before I launch into this exercise I would like to clarify another point so that the already dirty dont get muddier ! It is something we all learnt in middle school. The said point relates to the GENERIC form of the Assamese consonants.
I might sound really redundant or mayb be a nitwit/stupid when I am talking Middle School stuff here but I am really doing it so as to clear the confusion relating to whether Assamese is a phonetic language or not. Let us look at the first consonant 'ka'. the generic form of 'ka' is 'k,'... The nether stroke " ," is attached below the letter 'ka'. Now the familiar form of a consonant in Assamese is the form when it is sounded with the first vowel 'a'. Therefore,
k, + a = ka
But everywhere the consonants are introduced wheere the first vowel forms the syllable with the generic form of the consonant......
Now keeping it in mind we can go ahead and break any Assamese word into its constituent letters..
e.g.,
bihu = b, + i + h, + u
( note that any vowel can form a syllable with the generic form )
Thus I guess we may very safely conclude that Assamese is a VERY phonetic language...
You have raised another point that the standard IPA symbols are wrong (I guess you mean by this that IPA cannot be used to express Assamese sounds). I agree that some bare vowel/consonant sound of the IPA expressed in my system might sound a little different from the actual but it can be corrected by using the correct 'diacritic' A diacritic is a mark near or through an orthographic or phonetic character or combination of characters indicating a phonetic value different from that given the unmarked or otherwise marked element. I am not sure which diacritic to use on which sound.....and thats what this discussion is all about !
Now as far as my personal opinion goes, there should be three topics of discussion on the transliteration system I proposed...
1. Debate on the best possible transliteration values of the Assamese alphabets.
2. Debate on the phonetic IPA value I humbly assigned to each assamese alphabet.
3. Suggestions on how to optimise the transliteration system so that it can support a software development which I think is an imminent necessity for all of us.
If we concentrate on the above I guess we can very soon develop a pretty strong system of transliteration which is so important.....
Thanking you for all your suggestions,
Syamanta Saikia
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