Talk:दृळ्ह

@Kwékwlos Do you have a source for your claim that this word was pronounced as dṛẓḍhá? I would be interested to read it. Most scholars agree that Sanskrit had no voiced fricatives (excepting maybe /ɦ/). -- Bhagadatta (talk) 01:52, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

@Bhagadatta My evidence is based on Masato Kobayashi's "Historical Phonology of Old Indo-Aryan Consonants". Page 79 of 244 mentions the treatment of ḍ (specifically also the aspirate ḍh) in the Rigveda as a cluster. It therefore makes sense that the original text was affected by a later change that prohibited voiced sibilants, causing ẓḍh to instead be realized as ḍh with compensatory lengthening of the previous vowel. The current recension we have dates back to around the 1st millennium BC and was written around the mid-1st millennium AD. Also, in M. Witzel's "Tracing the Vedic Dialects" on page 61 of 147 the geminate cch or ch is actually long, meaning that the pronunciation was actually śc. It does make sense that the actual form of the Rigveda is not the same as the recension. This is only my proposal based on these evidence. -- Kwékwlos 09:04, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

@Kwékwlos: This is very interesting to me. It is probable that the earliest oral versions of the Rigveda preserved the voiced-retroflex fricative-stop cluster. This kind of info will look better if shown in the pronunciation section rather than under the headword section and in the etymology. Similarly Skt monophthongs e and o are shown to have been ai and au in the pronunciation. Last year AryamanA (talk • contribs) and JohnC5 (talk • contribs) were trying to initiate a project to update Wiktionary's coverage of Sanskrit pronunciation, specifically reconstructed pronunciations such as these. @AryamanA, JohnC5 what do y'all think? -- Bhagadatta (talk) 17:28, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

ٰ@Bhagadatta, Kwékwlos: It is definitely possible that the cluster was indeed a cluster ẓḍh in early Rigvedic Sanskrit. (Kobayashi mentions it on page 69, not 79 btw) However, I think the case here is like that of the pseudo-laryngeals in Rigvedic Sanskrit, which while also discernible metrically are in the current pronunciation module ignored. I'm not sure if we should label that as Vedic Sanskrit in the pronunciation. If we want to add a pronunciation for dṛẓḍhá (and I think we should) it will have to be explicitly marked as reconstructed because we do not have direct textual evidence of that pronunciation, IMO. Maybe we need an Early Vedic label. —Aryaman^{A (मुझसे बात करें • योगदान)} 20:27, 22 August 2018 (UTC)