a long vowel, and this may be used to illustrate the difference between for example, pa and pha: attend to the 'p' breath when pronouncing the two English words 'pick' and 'peek' — hold the finger tips close to the mouth to feel the difference. This difference needs to be greatly increased to distinguish between the alpaprana and mahaprana consonants, but the common error is to use so much breath that a vestigial vowel is inserted, particularly for the ghosa consonants; for example, bha can be incorrectly pronounced as 'b a ha'. Because English pronunciation is acquired by imitating indistinct sounds which are not precisely described, problems occur with the centre three mouth positions. One effect is that 'd' and 't' are pronounced somewhere between the dental (dantya) and cerebral (murdhanya) positions; another effect is that many speakers do not use the palatal (talavya) position for the stops, so that ca is pronounced as 'tsha', and ja as 'dza'. It may help to consider the palatal stops as a modification or softening of the gutturals so that ca is a softer ka, ja a softer ga, and so on. Some English consonants are similar to those in Sanskrit, and may be used to give a very rough guide to the Sanskrit pronunciation, however, as mentioned earlier, English does not distinguish between dental (dantya) and cerebral (murdhanya). k — kiss, kiln, back kh — bunkhouse ('bung-khouse' g — good, give, bug gh — loghouse ('log-ghouse') n — sing, long, tongue t/t — tub, tap, cart th/th — anthill ('an-thill') d/d — day, dog, god dh/dh — redhead ('red-dhead') n/n — gentle, hand, gain c — cello, chair, church ch — coach-horse ('coa-chhorse' j — just, jolly, joy jh — hedgehog ('hej-jhog') n — enjoy, canyon, pinch p — pick, pat, tap ph — uphill ('up-phill') b — be, cab, imbibe bh — clubhouse ('club-bhouse') m — amble, mumble When in doubt, the previous section has the authoritative description. There is a tradition that pronounces pha as 'fa', i.e. makes use of both the teeth and lips (dantosthya): the rules of sound and grammar will be easier to understand if pronounced purely with the lips (osthya).
