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August 7

/ð/ in Sanskrit?

It is my understanding that Indo-Aryan languages, including Sanskrit, generally do not contain the /ð/ sound, and a quick look at Sanskrit grammar#Phonology appears to confirm this. However, the article Vijayadashami says, in the lede, that the name of the festival is pronounced [ʋɪʝəjəðəʃmɪ]], i.e. the "d" is pronounced /ð/. Could someone explain this to me? Thanks, M Imtiaz (talk · contribs) 04:03, 7 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The pronunciation was added in this edit in 2017 by an IP user who also added a pronunciation including /ð/ to Durga (removed by another editor the next day). The IP's other edits do not seem disruptive, so it looks as if for that speaker these words are genuinely pronounced with /ð/. I don't know whether that was an idiosyncrasy, or if there is a community (perhaps of speakers of a particular language?) who do that. --ColinFine (talk) 13:27, 7 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose that many people pronounce the word the way they would pronounce it if it was a native word in their mother tongue. Hindi speakers may then use a (laminal) voiced dental stop [d̪] instead of a voiced alveolar stop [d]. A stop is not a fricative, but someone not well-versed in phonology may recognize that the place of articulation is not alveolar but dental, and erroneously substitute the only voiced dental consonant they are familiar with. --Lambiam 21:56, 7 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]