Patterns of Vowel Production in the Speakers of Sanskrit Language

Sanskrit is a lexically productive language that undergoes euphonic assimilation of phones at word boundaries. It exhibits variations in pronunciations and spelling conventions. This paper introduces the Vowel Triangle plot of Sanskrit vowel-sounds pronunciations using their F1-F2 values generated from PRAAT software. The work was conducted on spoken word utterances (single utterance) of eight male and eight female subjects, fluent in speaking Sanskrit Shlokas. The paper also presents visible and notable similarities and differences in the spoken Sanskrit and Hindi vowel systems through their Spectrogram-based Vowel Triangle System analysis. Since there has been a developing cultural trend of treating Hindi as the sole inheritor of Sanskrit because of religious ideologies, it is often assumed that the language structure of both the Sanskrit and Hindi languages is the same or similar in most cases. However, in the context of a Speech community, linguistic research has shown considerable differences in the phonetic and phonological views of the languages, even between spoken Hindi and Sanskrit. This study can further help in future studies of under-resourced language and speech recognition approaches, considering their phonetic and phonological insights. These inferences demand an extensive study of phonemic and intonational Sanskrit language due to their originating influence in the realistic environment.