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Comment by sieve | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem with a lot of northern languages is the awful schwa deletion. Even the Marathi of Maharashtra is subject to it. Strangely, the Marathi of Thanjavur has far, far less of it from what little I have heard of it.

Sanskrit does not do schwa deletion. So engines must map the phonemes to Kannada/Telugu (which support the full complement of Sanskrit sounds) if they want to get somewhere. A lot of this can be solved if the backend supports ipa.

But this is for classical Sanskrit. Vedic recitation is too complex (and I know too little about it) to handle without a LOT of work.

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It's pretty funny reading comments on social media by north Indians whenever something on Sanskrit is posted. 'It's Ram, not Rama, it's yog, not yoga'... And they have no idea what schwa deletion is.

> It's Ram, not Rama, it's yog, not yoga'... And they have no idea what schwa deletion is.

It is neither.

The fundamental issue is that there is no way to represent the schwa sound in English[1]. All of a,e,i,o,u have been used to communicate the schwa (or schwa-like) sound in English.

  - The `a` in about
  - The `e` in taken
  - The `i` in cousin
  - The `o` in button
  - The `u` in upon

1 - https://ashishb.net/linguistics/schwa/

I wouldn't say 'neither', because by your own example, 'a' in English can represent ⟨ə⟩. That every other vowel letter also can is English's low level of phoneticism with respect to the script it uses. Many other languages using the Latin script (German, Italian, Finnish) don't have this problem, what you see is what get.

Oddly enough amongst the Indic languages, Tamil has precisely the same problem: க, ப, ட may be voiced or voiceless plosives depending on context. Sanskrit loanwords in Tamil are typically pronounced very differently compared to their original in Sanskrit, or even in Telugu.

Personally when transliterating any Indic language I tend to use ISO-15919, and in that scheme, it is Rāma, and 'a' represents the schwa. Or Rāmaḥ, Rāmam, Rāmē, or Rāmasya, whichever grammatical attachment is appropriate.

> That every other vowel letter also can is English's low level of phoneticism

The level of phoneticism between English language and its latin script is not evenly spread.

For example, the letter "c" might mean /s/ or /k/ sound. However, the letter "k" almost certainly means /k/ sound.

In some ways, the schwa sound in English the worst as there is no symbol which is committed even partially towards it.

> it is Rāma, and 'a' represents the schwa.

Sure, but if my name is Rāma, I have to choose either "Ram" or "Rama" or "Raama" for my passport name. Or legal name in most places, non-alphabetic symbols do not work with all modern systems.

> Many other languages using the Latin script (German, Italian, Finnish) don't have this problem, what you see is what get.

English imports spellings from other cultures and adds its own layer of pronunciations. Other languages probably don't do it as often.

> In some ways, the schwa sound in English the worst as there is no symbol which is committed even partially towards it.

> English imports spellings from other cultures and adds its own layer of pronunciations. Other languages probably don't do it as often.

English is almost unique in how inconsistent its orthography is especially with respect to vowel sounds, and loanwords are only the latest manifestation of this problem. Even consonants aren't spared. Consider the digraph 'th'. This can be a voiced or voiceless dental fricatives. English used to have letters for each: ð and þ. 'ough' has nine pronunciations—plough, though, through, thorough, cough, rough, bought, lough, hiccough.

English has experienced contact with such a wide variety of unrelated foreign languages to an extent few others ever have.

Wikipedia has an interesting page on "Brahmin Tamil" which is the Tamil dialect spoken by Brahmins in Tamil Nadu and consists of Classical Tamil with a lot of Sanskrit influence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmin_Tamil

Luckily a lot of research has gone into Vedic recitation from an academic perspective if someone would take up the mantle.

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