Pronunciation of Sanskrit words
Bhagwan Sri Sathya Sai Baba gave hundreds of public discourses and personally wrote a series of spiritual texts called Vahinis, primarily in His native language Telugu. The discourses and Vahinis have been translated into multiple languages in print and digital versions. He occasionally used Sanskrit or Indic terms which do not readily translate into other languages. Many of later print translations include either glossaries or short explanation of terms, but the older print versions do not. The Glossary includes names of avatars, saints, heroes, villains and famous spiritual teachers who bring to life ancient stories of the Lord and His devotees.
Below, we provide a short explanation of the phonetic spelling. However, keep in mind that Sanskrit has more phonemes than other languages, while English has only 26 letters, so pronunciation based on English spellings will be deficient. Still, it's better than nothing!
Vowels
The most frequent short and long vowels are spelled and pronounced as follows.
For example, the spelling aanandha (bliss) alerts the reader to the fact that the first syllable is long, as in father, so that the accent is on the first, and not the second, syllable.
Consonants
Phonetic spelling of Sanskrit consonants is difficult, because there are more consonants (as well as vowels) in Sanskrit than in English. Also, there are several d's, s's, and t's in Sanskrit, which are aspirated differently.
In the examples of consonants given below, the examples for bh, dh, and th are slightly misleading, in that they may give the impression that two sounds are said separately when they are not. The idea of the examples is to make it clear that the h is distinctly aspirated.
In the glossary, some Sanskrit compounds have been hyphenated between their constituent words to aid those who want to analyze the meanings of individual words.