Wednesday, July 1, 2020

☸🦍 pali pronunciation, quick and easy, 4 simple rules, memorize 16 steps of breath meditation

Gorilla (guerrilla) quick rules of thumb that will help you to not only survive but to thrive in the jungle quickly and easily. 

1. pronounce every letter you see
2. know the difference between 'long' and 'short' syllables and vowels. A short syllable is half the amount of time it takes to pronounce a 'long'. Think of it that way, rather than a long syllable takes twice as a long as a 'short'. I will explain the reason for that later.
2b. multiple consonants should be treated like speed bumps - you slow down and come to a full stop. Example 'satta': Pronounce every letter you see, 't' pronounced twice, with a speed bump and a full stop in between. 
(Romanized pali exception with aspirate character will be discussed in a more advanced guide). 
2c. pali pronunciation guides will often tell you that a long vowel sounds like such a way, and a short vowel has a different sound. Ignore those instructions! They work sometimes, but often not, and then you'll be totally confused when you follow their instructions and it sounds wrong when you chant along with  an expert.

Here's the simple rule: Only learn the correct sounds for 'long' vowels, and pay no attention to what the pali rule books say the 'short vowel' version of the sound should be. 
Just pronounce all vowels with the 'long sound'.
But when you pronounce a short vowel, since it takes half the time of a 'long sound', so the full sound of the 'long' gets truncated and may end of sounding slightly differently. So that's the natural gorilla way of producing a 'short vowel' sound. Just pronounce every letter you see with the right timing difference between long and short, and it will automatically come out about right. 

3. pali is a weakly accented language. In fact, don't try to accent any syllables at all when you're pronouncing words. By following rule #1 and rule #2, the 'long' syllable will tend to stand out as a 'weak accent' in contrast to the short vowels and syllables in the word.

4. listen to correct proper pali pronunciation often, like Ven. Jiv's recordings on lucid24.org. 
Here's an example of him chanting 16 steps of breath meditation:

4b. And as much as possible, don't listen to Burmese and Thai chanting, it will mess you up. I had recordings of Thai chanting to use when I was first learning pali pronunciation, and it almost drove me insane, because there didn't seem to be any rules that were being consistently followed, and the same vowels would sound different for no reason and changing seemingly randomly. Burmese has even worse problems. 

Having correct samples of audio with proper pronunciation is a miracle. Just listen to it often, chant along with it reading the text, and in no time you'll be able to pronounce correctly.

 Here are the words to go with Ven. Jiv's impeccable pali pronunciation of breath meditation:

(note: the pali script here is based on burmese version, Ven. Jiv is pronouncing according to Sri lankan version of sutta, where many of the words differ in the double consonants preceding "patisamvedi" for example. I will need to modify this text later to match Ven. Jiv's sri lankan sutta version). So don't freak out when you wonder why it seems like his long and short syllable is not matching the sutta text in a few places)

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