Lesson 10. A 10. A. 1 Introduction to Sandhi Sandhi ('placing together') is the principle of sounds coming together naturally and harmoniously, which is to say without awkwardness or tongue-twisting. This is the principle behind the nasal substitution for the anusvara that was considered earlier, and for the various pronunciations of the English letter 'n' mentioned in that section (8. A. 3). Sandhi applies to other consonants besides nasals: for example, consider the English phrase 'cats and dogs', which is pronounced as 'cats and dogz'. Why should that be? Looking at it doesn't help; you need to sound it. Have you heard why it is so? Well, try swapping the sibilants around: 'catz and dogs'. Difficult, isn't it? So there is an English sandhi rule that a sibilant preceded by an unvoiced consonant is unvoiced, and preceded by a voiced consonant it is voiced (ghosa). It is quite natural, and for the ease of pronunciation. Sandhi applies to vowels too: consider how "he is" becomes "he's". When sounded — and that's the key — you will hear that both vowels have the same sound: certainly one has a short measure, and the other a long measure, but the sound is the same. So, when a long §? meets a short f?, they are both replaced by a long §?. (The apostrophe functions somewhat like the avagraha (-S"), inasmuch as it is not sounded.) Sandhi applies whenever two sounds come together — and this is the point: it is sounds coming together. In the written form, the letters are symbols representing the sounds: in Sanskrit the notation changes when the sound changes, and thus it has an inherently phonetic script; the English script does not do this, and this is one of the reasons that foreigners mutter darkly about English spelling! The rules of sandhi only make sense in sound and not in writing: thus it is important, when reading the written word, to sound it aloud (or in the mind at least), and to hear that sound. The rules of sandhi apply within a word as it is being developed from its elemental components to its fully inflected form: this is called internal sandhi, internal to an individual word. The rules also apply between words as they come together to form a sentence: this is called external sandhi, external to the individual words. The rules of internal and external sandhi are largely the same, but each has its own field of special cases and exceptions. We shall examine external sandhi broadly and
