Return of the minimal pairs

[Vidhyanath Rao]

M. Tuver wrote:

> That, by the way, is a rule I was never taught.  I always had the spelling
> pronunciation [D] for <dh> words before I learned about Sanskrit.  (It took
> me a while to link [dArm@] with <dharma>...)  Even now I still have
> dental/interdental [d] in those words (instead of the regular alveolar or
> whatever), and in words like <dhole>, the [D] still persists.

Don't feel so bad. "dh" is interdental (stop not spirant though) in
modern Indian pronunciation, and was dental (i.e. tongue tip on teeth)
[or where the enamel meets the gum, according to some] in the ancient
pronunciation.

Preserving the place instead of the quality does not strike me as being
worse. But then the interdental spirants of English are realized in my
mouth (as in that of many Tamil speakers) as interdental stops [while
the alveolar stops become retroflex stops]. So your pronunciation will
sound perfectly OK while the typical pronunciation of dharma as dArma is
what I do when I make fun of (would be)Anglophones