Morphological effects on Pali gemination: A preliminary study

Around the turn of the 20th century (Childers, 1879; Müller, 1884; Whitney, 1889; Gray, 1899; Duroiselle, 1906), neogrammarians began studying the Pali language and its grammar. One area of particular interest was the phonological process of assimilation. Pali evidences both progressive and regressive assimilation and it is generally the case that a consonant geminate is formed (Krishnaswamy, et al., 2019). Recent studies (Junghare, 1979; Suzuki, 2002a,b; Gupta, 2003; Schmeiser, 2008; Dutta, 2017) have attempted to explain base-medial consonant gemination in phonological terms. Though these accounts have furthered our understanding of Pali base-medial consonant gemination, very few studies have considered morphological effects on Pali gemination. The current study, though exploratory in nature, suggests that a problem arises in phonological analyses of Pali geminates in that Pali words evidence different cluster realizations based on morphological factors. In short, the study analyzes the effects of affixes on Pali gemination and suggests that an explanation based solely on syllable structure or sonority is insufficient and calls for further research.