The Power of Phonotactics
This is a lightly edited transcript of an interesting WhatsApp conversation on 3rd June, 2023 on phonetics, prestige registers and sound conservation in linguistics, that I should bring to this moribund blog. Conversant in italics. Hello sir. A question I’m asking out of laziness since I found it convenient to ask you directly [This is something I regularly face. The skipping of Google, not the emoji.] Do any of the Marathi grammatical texts/ works explicitly talk about when n where to pronounce the two forms of च ‘s , ज’s & झ’s ? In my personal experience, I’ve never seen any of my school Marathi teachers explain these aspects w.r.t pronunciation. I guess, native Marathi speakers are already familiar with this phonology since they are taught from childhood & this phonology might be an unwritten rule I reckon which may not need any explicit explanation. In my case, Marathi isn’t my mother tongue & I’ve had a hard time in figuring out when & where to pronounce the c
