We end up having to approximate some of the Sanskrit sounds since we don’t necessarily have them in English. Also a system of marks, like accents, lines and dots (called diacritics), has been developed to clarify the sounds of the Sanskrit language. If we don’t read these marks correctly, we can end up pronouncing a word wrong.
Let’s look at two commonly mispronounced yoga words: shavasana and chakra.
SHAVASANA
Shavasana means Corpse Posture, since the word shava means corpse. The first letter of the word is श, pronounced sha. When it is written in English, the word usually gets a little accent mark over the “s”, śavāsana. This is the official, scholarly way to write the word. But as you can see, if you don’t read the accent, the word looks like “savasana“, with the “s” sounding like “sedan” instead of “sh” like “shirt”. So the word is commonly mispronounced as savasana, when the proper pronunciation is shavasana.
CHAKRA
Chakra means wheel. In the yoga world it often refers to visualizations or energy centers of a “subtle body”. The first letter of the word is च, pronounced cha, with the “ch” sound like “chair”. It often gets mispronounced as shakra, with an “sh” sound like “shout” or “chandelier”. The same is true of the common Sanskrit word chandra, which means “moon”. It is commonly mispronounced as shandra, but the correct pronunciation is cha-ndra with the “ch” like chair.
Sometimes it is suggested that the pronunciation can vary, like toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe. Or that a different pronunciation suggests a different meaning. That is not the case here, where the mispronunciation happens as a result of translating the Sanskrit sounds into English letters, and then reading them. The sound and spelling of these words in Sanskrit is quite clear.
