# Hindi: बिंदु और चंद्रबिंदु



## Maharaj

Hello,

Kya koi mujhe ye bata sakta hai ki Hindi mein बिंदु aur चंद्रबिंदु mein kya fark hai?


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## desi4life

*bindu *(also called *anusvaar*) can be used for homorganic nasal consonants or for nasalized vowels.

*chandrabindu *(also called *anunaasik*) is used for nasalized vowels only.


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## Maharaj

@desi4life Could you explain the difference with the help of examples?


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## Simple1234

*in my opinion, the bindu used in the first "chand" is chandrabindu and in the second is bindu. You might need to zoom it to see it properly

1. चाँद *
*2. चांद
*


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## desi4life

@Simple1234 I think @Maharaj wanted to know when to use bindu and when to use chandrabindu but probably knows how the two symbols look like.


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## desi4life

desi4life said:


> *bindu *(also called *anusvaar*) can be used for homorganic nasal consonants or for nasalized vowels.
> 
> *chandrabindu *(also called *anunaasik*) is used for nasalized vowels only.



I want to add that *chandrabindu *is preferred for nasalized vowels, except in cases where there is a limitation of space above the horizontal line in Devanagari. When that occurs, *bindu *is recommended instead.


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## desi4life

Maharaj said:


> @desi4life Could you explain the difference with the help of examples?



maiN has a nasalized vowel but is spelled मैं (bindu) not मैँ (chandrabindu) because of the limitation of space I mentioned. Similar case with other words such as meN, pheNknaa, and jhiiNgaa which have nasalized vowels but are spelled में/फेंकना/झींगा (bindu) not मेँ/फेँकना/झीँगा (chandrabindu) .

For other situations with nasalized vowels, chandrabindu is recommended but in casual use people will often use bindu instead. For example, चाँद, मुँह, हँसना, दाँत, डाँट, महँगा, गाँव, बूँद, टाँग, ढूँढ़ना, पूँछ, and ताँबा all have nasalized vowels and chandrabindu is preferred.

For homorganic nasal consonants, bindu is always used. Therefore, चंद्र, बंद, रंग, हिंदी, गंगा, जंगल, समुंदर, पंथ, गुंडा, and पंखा all have bindu.

Although it's not always the case, chandrabindu is more common with long vowels, and bindu is more common with short vowels.

In some words, many people pronounce the nasalized vowels as homorganic nasal consonants or vice versa, and it may vary from region to region.


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## Maharaj

Thank you @desi4life


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## aevynn

Maybe I'll elaborate a little bit on @desi4life's excellent answer.

In case people haven't seen the term before, a "homorganic nasal stop" is a nasal consonant pronounced immediately before another consonant with the same mouth position. Try to pronounce the words जंगल, गुंडा, and हिंदी very slowly and carefully, focusing on where your tongue is when you pronounce the nasal sound represented by the bindu. You'll notice that your tongue is in 3 different positions in these 3 different words — in each of these three words, the nasal sound is pronounced with the tongue in roughly the same position that it needs to be to pronounce the consonant that comes right after the nasal. There are two options in Devanagari for denoting a homorganic nasal stop: either using the appropriate half nasal letter (eg, जङ्गल, गुण्डा, हिन्दी), or using the बिंदु on the previous vowel (eg, जंगल, गुंडा, हिंदी). The latter is much more prevalent.

A "nasalized vowel" is a vowel which involves releasing some air through your nose. For example, this is the case in the final vowel in all of the words हाँ, मैं, में, लड़कियाँ, पत्तों… As far as denoting nasal vowels in Devanagari, there are two cases. If the मात्रा goes above the शिरोरेखा, then you always use the बिंदु (eg, मैं, में, पत्तों). Otherwise, when the मात्रा doesn't go above the शिरोरेखा, sometimes people use the बिंदु (हां, लड़कियां, हूं), and other times people use the चंद्रबिंदु (हाँ, लड़कियाँ, हूँ).

What I've noticed is that there are two conventions.

Convention 1 (commonly used on many news websites) is to use the बिंदु for both homorganic nasal stops and for nasalized vowels uniformly, so the चंद्रबिंदु isn't used at all.
Convention 2 (used in a lot of literature) is to use the चंद्रबिंंदु for nasalized vowels when the मात्रा doesn't go above the शिरोरेखा, and to otherwise use the बिंदु (for both homorganic nasal stops, and for nasalized vowels when the मात्रा does extend above the शिरोरेखा).
Convention 2 seems to have a more ardent group of proponents, and they often mention the following two reasons why they think Convention 2 is superior to Convention 1.

They mention that, if you don't use the चंद्रबिंदु, you can't distinguish the words हँस and हंस. 

They insist that it's a better convention because it's phonologically accurate.
Personally, I don't really find either of these reasons particularly convincing.

For the first point, it is possible to devise "grammatical" sentences where the meaning would change if someone swapped out the चंद्रबिंदु with a बिंदु — eg, वह हँस उठा (he started laughing) versus वह हंस उठा (that swan got up). But to me the latter sentence here feels quite artificial — and in any case, even if it's possible to find a less artificial minimal pair.... if human beings are even capable of enjoying nonsense verse, they can _definitely_ figure out from context whether "laugh" or "swan" is intended in a particular sentence.

The second point isn't really quite accurate either. Even if there was a sharp phonological distinction between homorganic nasal stops and nasalized vowels, the distinction is orthographically neutralized on roughly half of Hindi's vowel inventory under Convention 2 (ई, ए, ऐ, ओ, औ all have मात्राs that extend above the शिरोरेखा). But it's not even clear that there is a sharp phonological distinction between these two phenomena. In many words, the choice of चंद्रबिंदु instead of the बिंदु is motivated more by historical development rather than accurate transcription of modern pronunciation. Here are two relevant linguistic phenomena that I know about:

Contextual nasalization: vowels surrounding nasal consonants undergo "assimilation" and become nasalized in many languages. I don't have a solid reference that this happens in Hindi, but I can notice it in my own pronunciation, for whatever that's worth.
Nasal epenthesis: it's been pointed out that in a sequence consisting of a nasalized vowel followed by a voiced consonant (eg, चाँद), there's a tendency in (some dialects of) modern Hindi to insert a homorganic nasal stop before the voiced consonant (so चाँद is actually pronounced /tʃãːnd/, as opposed to /tʃãːd/ as the orthography might suggest). The paper I've linked to doesn't seem to collect a lot of data, but their observations do seem to fit my own speech...
Putting these two facts together, it seems to me that there isn't really a good _phonological_ reason to be writing चाँद instead of चांद, even though it is traditional under Convention 2 to use the चंद्रबिंदु in this word. There probably is a real phonological reason to be writing दाँत, though, since it doesn't rhyme with शांत. In any case, it seems that if we were trying to arrive at a phonologically accurate transcription of modern Hindi, we would either have to eliminate the चंद्रबिंदु in many words where it is traditional to use it, or else we'd have to add it to many words where it is traditional _not_ to use it. But we'd also have to commit ourselves to revising orthography _constantly_, since (if I may permit myself to misquote Ben Franklin) in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except Death and Language Change.

Point is, I'm not really convinced by either of these arguments that Convention 2 is actually superior to Convention 1. There is a bit of a downside to Convention 2 in that it's difficult to decide whether the चंद्रबिंदु or the बिंदु is "correct" in some situations based purely on the pronunciation — you kinda just have to memorize it. On the other hand, Convention 1 does have some nice minimalism going for it, and I've personally never found a news article to be confusing because it didn't use the चंद्रबिंदु... The downside with Convention 1, of course, is that you'd have to memorize that दांत and शांत don't rhyme. I don't know. Probably it's just a matter of aesthetics and there isn't any objective reason to prefer one convention over the other.

PS. There's also a special use of the बिंदु in तत्सम words like स्वयं and एवं where it denotes an m sound — this is neither a homorganic nasal stop nor a nasalized vowel. But this is quite uncommon in Hindi...


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## desi4life

Great explanation @aevynn. I like your usage of the technical terms मात्रा and शिरोरेखा.


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## desi4life

aevynn said:


> There probably is a real phonological reason to be writing दाँत, though, since it doesn't rhyme with शांत.



For those who pronounce दाँत with a homorganic nasal consonant, it would in that case rhyme with शांत because दाँत would then be दान्त just as शांत is शान्त. It will be intriguing to find out if poets play around with the rhyming of these words in Hindi poetry.


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## Maharaj

@aevynn Thank you very much buddy.


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## Au101

aevynn said:


> What I've noticed is that there are two conventions.
> 
> Convention 1 (commonly used on many news websites) is to use the बिंदु for both homorganic nasal stops and for nasalized vowels uniformly, so the चंद्रबिंदु isn't used at all.
> Convention 2 (used in a lot of literature) is to use the चंद्रबिंंदु for nasalized vowels when the मात्रा doesn't go above the शिरोरेखा, and to otherwise use the बिंदु (for both homorganic nasal stops, and for nasalized vowels when the मात्रा does extend above the शिरोरेखा).


For those who follow convention 2, I was just wondering what the official line was on those words (usually (always?) from Sanskrit) where the _bindu_ does not precede a stop. You mentioned हंस in your original post. Should I take it that this is pronounced with a nasal stop articulated in the same place as the _s_ (probably alveolar, maybe dental) even though _s_ isn't a stop. The reason I ask is that in English-classroom-Sanskrit (which may not be ideally authentic), _anusvāra_ before the sibilants is pronounced ङ (or so I recall).

That's the easy case, the one I'm most interested in is _bindu_ before ह which in my experience seems to become ङ्घ (ṅgh) - am I correct?

Again, I ask because most statements of convention 2 imply that _bindu_ will be found only when either there is no room for _candrabindu_ or before the plosives (क ख ग घ ... ... प फ ब भ) where it represents the "class nasal". But obviously that isn't true.


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## Qureshpor

aevynn said:


> Maybe I'll elaborate a little bit on @desi4life's excellent answer.
> 
> In case people haven't seen the term before, a "homorganic nasal stop" is a nasal consonant pronounced immediately before another consonant with the same mouth position. Try to pronounce the words जंगल, गुंडा, and हिंदी very slowly and carefully, focusing on where your tongue is when you pronounce the nasal sound represented by the bindu. You'll notice that your tongue is in 3 different positions in these 3 different words — in each of these three words, the nasal sound is pronounced with the tongue in roughly the same position that it needs to be to pronounce the consonant that comes right after the nasal. There are two options in Devanagari for denoting a homorganic nasal stop: either using the appropriate half nasal letter (eg, जङ्गल, गुण्डा, हिन्दी), or using the बिंदु on the previous vowel (eg, जंगल, गुंडा, हिंदी). The latter is much more prevalent.
> 
> A "nasalized vowel" is a vowel which involves releasing some air through your nose. For example, this is the case in the final vowel in all of the words हाँ, मैं, में, लड़कियाँ, पत्तों… As far as denoting nasal vowels in Devanagari, there are two cases. If the मात्रा goes above the शिरोरेखा, then you always use the बिंदु (eg, मैं, में, पत्तों). Otherwise, when the मात्रा doesn't go above the शिरोरेखा, sometimes people use the बिंदु (हां, लड़कियां, हूं), and other times people use the चंद्रबिंदु (हाँ, लड़कियाँ, हूँ).
> 
> What I've noticed is that there are two conventions.
> 
> Convention 1 (commonly used on many news websites) is to use the बिंदु for both homorganic nasal stops and for nasalized vowels uniformly, so the चंद्रबिंदु isn't used at all.
> Convention 2 (used in a lot of literature) is to use the चंद्रबिंंदु for nasalized vowels when the मात्रा doesn't go above the शिरोरेखा, and to otherwise use the बिंदु (for both homorganic nasal stops, and for nasalized vowels when the मात्रा does extend above the शिरोरेखा).
> Convention 2 seems to have a more ardent group of proponents, and they often mention the following two reasons why they think Convention 2 is superior to Convention 1.
> 
> They mention that, if you don't use the चंद्रबिंदु, you can't distinguish the words हँस and हंस.
> 
> They insist that it's a better convention because it's phonologically accurate.
> Personally, I don't really find either of these reasons particularly convincing.
> 
> For the first point, it is possible to devise "grammatical" sentences where the meaning would change if someone swapped out the चंद्रबिंदु with a बिंदु — eg, वह हँस उठा (he started laughing) versus वह हंस उठा (that swan got up). But to me the latter sentence here feels quite artificial — and in any case, even if it's possible to find a less artificial minimal pair.... if human beings are even capable of enjoying nonsense verse, they can _definitely_ figure out from context whether "laugh" or "swan" is intended in a particular sentence.
> 
> The second point isn't really quite accurate either. Even if there was a sharp phonological distinction between homorganic nasal stops and nasalized vowels, the distinction is orthographically neutralized on roughly half of Hindi's vowel inventory under Convention 2 (ई, ए, ऐ, ओ, औ all have मात्राs that extend above the शिरोरेखा). But it's not even clear that there is a sharp phonological distinction between these two phenomena. In many words, the choice of चंद्रबिंदु instead of the बिंदु is motivated more by historical development rather than accurate transcription of modern pronunciation. Here are two relevant linguistic phenomena that I know about:
> 
> Contextual nasalization: vowels surrounding nasal consonants undergo "assimilation" and become nasalized in many languages. I don't have a solid reference that this happens in Hindi, but I can notice it in my own pronunciation, for whatever that's worth.
> Nasal epenthesis: it's been pointed out that in a sequence consisting of a nasalized vowel followed by a voiced consonant (eg, चाँद), there's a tendency in (some dialects of) modern Hindi to insert a homorganic nasal stop before the voiced consonant (so चाँद is actually pronounced /tʃãːnd/, as opposed to /tʃãːd/ as the orthography might suggest). The paper I've linked to doesn't seem to collect a lot of data, but their observations do seem to fit my own speech...
> Putting these two facts together, it seems to me that there isn't really a good _phonological_ reason to be writing चाँद instead of चांद, even though it is traditional under Convention 2 to use the चंद्रबिंदु in this word. There probably is a real phonological reason to be writing दाँत, though, since it doesn't rhyme with शांत. In any case, it seems that if we were trying to arrive at a phonologically accurate transcription of modern Hindi, we would either have to eliminate the चंद्रबिंदु in many words where it is traditional to use it, or else we'd have to add it to many words where it is traditional _not_ to use it. But we'd also have to commit ourselves to revising orthography _constantly_, since (if I may permit myself to misquote Ben Franklin) in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except Death and Language Change.
> 
> Point is, I'm not really convinced by either of these arguments that Convention 2 is actually superior to Convention 1. There is a bit of a downside to Convention 2 in that it's difficult to decide whether the चंद्रबिंदु or the बिंदु is "correct" in some situations based purely on the pronunciation — you kinda just have to memorize it. On the other hand, Convention 1 does have some nice minimalism going for it, and I've personally never found a news article to be confusing because it didn't use the चंद्रबिंदु... The downside with Convention 1, of course, is that you'd have to memorize that दांत and शांत don't rhyme. I don't know. Probably it's just a matter of aesthetics and there isn't any objective reason to prefer one convention over the other.
> 
> PS. There's also a special use of the बिंदु in तत्सम words like स्वयं and एवं where it denotes an m sound — this is neither a homorganic nasal stop nor a nasalized vowel. But this is quite uncommon in Hindi...


Thank you for this excellent summary, aevynn. Much appreciated.
The crux of your write up seems to me to be is that the bindu and the chandrabindu are not always used as per convention two. So, if the bindu was used as an "all purpose" symbol, unless one "knows" whether it is the nasal vowel being depicted or the nasal consonant, one would be at a loss. I suppose, some people may say, does it really matter? I personally would not necessarily "know" if the word for "intestine" was "antaRii" or "aNtarii"!

You go to say that if one was to follow convention 2, the current pronunciations of words with nasal vowels has shifted somewhat towards the chandrabindu pronunciation, i.e chaaNd > chaand. Have I understood your correctly? I have thought about chaaNd > chaand and wondered whether I too pronounce it as chaand!

With regard to स्वयं and एवं, is it the same for संसार (the world)? I have always thought of it as "sansaar". I assume one just needs to remember these kinds of words? Is there a phonological reason behind this? Also where do words like "lanbaa/lambaa", "chanbelii/chambelii", "chanpaa/champaa" etc fit in within the scheme of things?


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## Qureshpor

Au101 said:


> For those who follow convention 2, I was just wondering what the official line was on those words (usually (always?) from Sanskrit) where the _bindu_ does not precede a stop. You mentioned हंस in your original post. Should I take it that this is pronounced with a nasal stop articulated in the same place as the _s_ (probably alveolar, maybe dental) even though _s_ isn't a stop. The reason I ask is that in English-classroom-Sanskrit (which may not be ideally authentic), _anusvāra_ before the sibilants is pronounced ङ (or so I recall).
> 
> That's the easy case, the one I'm most interested in is _bindu_ before ह which in my experience seems to become ङ्घ (ṅgh) - am I correct?
> 
> Again, I ask because most statements of convention 2 imply that _bindu_ will be found only when either there is no room for _candrabindu_ or before the plosives (क ख ग घ ... ... प फ ब भ) where it represents the "class nasal". But obviously that isn't true.


I am sure @aevynn will respond to your queries but I just wanted to say something about your question about bindu before ह becoming ङ्घ. I assume you have the word सिंह (Singh- almost invariable used as a proper name- I understand it means "lion") in mind. Well, if it is any "consolation" to you, my late father never pronounced this as "singh", as is the norm. I am not sure if I can accurately depict how he pronounced it, in Roman, but I can safely say it represented सिंह much more so and NOT सिङ्घ.


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## aevynn

Au101 said:


> For those who follow convention 2, I was just wondering what the official line was on those words (usually (always?) from Sanskrit) where the _bindu_ does not precede a stop.



I don't know that there is an "official line," this may be the kind of thing that varies a lot from person to person. I think, though, that most people do still assimilate the nasal indicated by the _bindu_ to the place of articulation of what follows, even if what follows is not a stop, but I too have some confusion about what's going on when what follows is ह.

A _bindu_ preceding a symbol for a sibilant is not at all uncommon, even in non-_tatsama_ words. The Hindi-Urdu sibilants are basically all somewhere in the vicinity of alveolar, so the nasal indicated by a _bindu_ before a symbol for a sibilant is realized as something in the vicinity of alveolar: हंस ↔ [həns], इंसान ↔ [ɪnsaːn], अंश ↔ [ənʃ], मंशा ↔ [mənʃaː], मंज़िल ↔ [mənzɪl], संसार ↔ [sənsaːr], etc.

A _bindu_ preceding a symbol for an approximant or a liquid seems to mostly be the result of the prefix सं-. These words aren't very commonly spoken out loud, so it's a little hard to make assessments, but I think assimilated nasals are the norm in this case too: संविधान ↔ [səɱvɪd̪ʱaːn], संवाद ↔ [səɱvad̪], संयुक्त ↔ [səɲjʊkt̪], संरक्षण ↔ [sənrəkʃəɽ̃], etc. 

And finally, as I mentioned, I too am a little fuzzy on what's going on with a bindu preceding ह. It may be the kind of thing some phonologist needs to hook up some machinery to figure out for sure, and I suspect that even if they did they'd find some variation. @Qureshpor does point out the word सिंह, which I have always associated with the pronunciation [sɪŋɡʱ] (and mentally classified as yet another aberrantly spelled _tatsama_ loan, like स्वयं), but maybe some people don't fully realize the [g] and just say [sɪŋɦ]...? Another word involving a bindu before a ह that comes to mind is नरसंहार, which I think can be realized with some nasal that's far back in the mouth (possibly velar again, as [nərsəŋɦaːr] or [nərsəŋɡʱaːr] or something of the sort...?), but also with a dental/alveolar [n] (ie, something along the lines of [nərsənɦaːr]).



Qureshpor said:


> Thank you for this excellent summary, aevynn. Much appreciated.
> The crux of your write up seems to me to be is that the bindu and the chandrabindu are not always used as per convention two. So, if the bindu was used as an "all purpose" symbol, unless one "knows" whether it is the nasal vowel being depicted or the nasal consonant, one would be at a loss. I suppose, some people may say, does it really matter? I personally would not necessarily "know" if the word for "intestine" was "antaRii" or "aNtarii"!



You're very welcome!

You're right that, if one were to use the bindu as an all purpose symbol, one would not be able to see directly from the spelling of a word how to pronounce that word. But the same is true in many other languages too: there's no reason that an orthographic system must contain complete phonological information about all words. 

The anglophone world survives just fine without distinguishing the variant pronunciations of "ough" in words like _though_, _enough_, and _ought_.  For English learners, there is phonological information in dictionaries that can teach people that _though_ is /ðoʊ/, _enough_ is /ɪˈnʌf/, etc. For native English speakers, this is never a problem. And even when there are situations where English orthography may pose problems even for native speakers, it's unclear how much it really matters. I got through my entire childhood thinking that the verb _prophesy_ was homophonous with the noun _prophecy _(I thought they both ended in /si/). No one had ever said the word to me, I had only run into it in books (mostly fantasy books), and the entire time the voice in my head was mispronouncing the word whenever I ran into it. Finally, a few years ago, I was reading something involving the word _prophesy_ out loud, someone who was listening corrected me, and that was that: every time it's come up since, the voice in my head has said it correctly. It was a bit surprising to learn that I'd been mispronouncing the word in my head this whole time (which is why I remember the incident), but it wasn't a particularly traumatic experience.

So... I don't know. I think probably I am one of those people who would say "does it really matter?" It seems to me that, for most people, the use of the _bindu_ vs the _chandrabindu_ in fact won't matter. Even if orthographic confusion regarding these two symbols did lead someone to mispronounce a word, someone listening might correct them, and that would be that. It seems to me that, more useful than having either a completely consistent or a perfectly phonemic orthography would be just having a phonological dictionary based on aggregate data about what Hindi-Urdu speakers actually say. 



Qureshpor said:


> You go to say that if one was to follow convention 2, the current pronunciations of words with nasal vowels has shifted somewhat towards the chandrabindu pronunciation, i.e chaaNd > chaand. Have I understood your correctly? I have thought about chaaNd > chaand and wondered whether I too pronounce it as chaand!



Yes, that does seem to be what's going on.



Qureshpor said:


> With regard to स्वयं and एवं, is it the same for संसार (the world)? I have always thought of it as "sansaar". I assume one just needs to remember these kinds of words? Is there a phonological reason behind this? Also where do words like "lanbaa/lambaa", "chanbelii/chambelii", "chanpaa/champaa" etc fit in within the scheme of things?



The linguistic phenomenon you may be asking about goes by the name of (nasal) assimilation. The position your mouth is in when you pronounce _n_ is fairly different from that when you pronounce _p_, which makes saying something like _chanpaa_ awkward. There's a tendency, that runs across languages, that makes words like this shift in pronunciation so that the mouth does not have to do these awkward acrobatics. In the case of _chanpaa_, since the sound _p_ is pronounced "at the lips," the tendency would be to shift the pronunciation of a word like _chanpaa_ to _champaa_ to make it easier to say (notice that _m_ is also pronounced "at the lips," so when you finish pronouncing the _m_, your mouth is already ready to pronounce the _p_). This is also the reason why the Latin the prefix _con_- becomes _com_- when it precedes a sound like _p_, as in the words _component_ or _compatible_. Outside the Indo-European family, the same kind of thing also happens with the Japanese moraic nasal.


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## Au101

Another excellent post - thank you very much for all your help over these past few days!


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## aevynn

You're very welcome!


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## desi4life

aevynn said:


> I don't know that there is an "official line," this may be the kind of thing that varies a lot from person to person. I think, though, that most people do still assimilate the nasal indicated by the _bindu_ to the place of articulation of what follows, even if what follows is not a stop, but I too have some confusion about what's going on when what follows is ह.



For सिंह the pronunciations are /sɪŋɡʱ/, /sɪŋɦ/, or /sĩɦ/, and for संहार the pronunciations are /səŋɡʱaːr/, /səŋɦaːr/, or /sə̃ɦaːr/. And as you mentioned /sənɦaːr/ would be another. The pronunciation variants involving _bindu _and ह only apply to _tatsama _words. A _tadbhava _word such as मुंह, for example, is invariably मुँह.


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## littlepond

aevynn said:


> @Qureshpor does point out the word सिंह, which I have always associated with the pronunciation [sɪŋɡʱ] (and mentally classified as yet another aberrantly spelled _tatsama_ loan, like स्वयं), but maybe some people don't fully realize the [g] and just say [sɪŋɦ]...?



सिंह is always pronounced as "siNh" (no "g" involved).


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## desi4life

littlepond said:


> सिंह is *always *pronounced as "siNh" (no "g" involved).



Always? I would have to disagree. "singh" i.e. /sɪŋɡʱ/ is a very common pronunciation as indicated above, and is the norm in my experience.


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## littlepond

desi4life said:


> Always? I would have to disagree. "singh" i.e. /sɪŋɡʱ/ is a very common pronunciation as indicated above, and is the norm in my experience.



Interesting. In which contexts/regions have you heard सिंह as "singh"? I would like to know.


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## desi4life

littlepond said:


> Interesting. In which contexts/regions have you heard सिंह as "singh"? I would like to know.



In names, for example, सिंह is usually pronounced /sɪŋɡʱ/.


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## littlepond

^ Ah, ok, I was not thinking of names: of course, in names, it's "singh" in pronunciation commonly. I was thinking of सिंह as word, for example, for lion. I have never heard the "singh" pronunciation when सिंह is not a name.


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