The first is closest.
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<speak><prosody rate="-20%" pitch="0%"> Raveena says
1. <phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="ʄhɑna">Cūḷadukkhakkhandhasutta</phoneme>.
2. <phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="ʄʰɑna">Cūḷadukkhakkhandhasutta</phoneme>.
3. <phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="ʄɑna">Cūḷadukkhakkhandhasutta</phoneme>.
</prosody></speak>
Thank you. So shall it be ʄhɑna. 
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This is a common phenomenon in the pronunciation of Indo-Aryan speakers. The English alveolar /t͇/ sound is actually alveolar, i.e. it is pronounced with the tip of your tongue at the so-called alveolar ridge, that bumpy thing between your upper teeth and the edge of you hard palate. The interdental /θ/, commonly spelt as ‘th’ in English, is pronounced with the tip of your tongue between your teeth.
The Indo-Aryan languages do not have these sounds, instead they have the dental /t/ with the tip of your tongue at your upper teeth and the retroflex /ʈ/, commonly written in the romanization of Indo-Aryan languages as ‘ṭ’ and pronounced with the tip of your tongue slightly curved back and put roughly between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate.
These four sounds, the alveolar /t͇/, interdental /θ/, dental /t/, and retroflex /ʈ/ are four completely different sounds. So, when Indo-Aryan speakers learn English, they frequently try to find the closest phonological approximations to the sounds they use in their native languages and start resorting to them in their English pronunciation. This is why they commonly use the retroflex /ʈ/ sounds instead of the English alveolar /t͇/ and the dental /t/ sounds instead of the English interdental /θ/, which results in pronunciations like ‘ṭoot’ (‘tooth’), ‘healt’ (‘health’), etc. Keeping that in mind, it is actually easy to imitate an Indo-Aryan accent 
It is also important to note, that there is nothing wrong with such phonological approximations, e.g. people speaking Slavic languages do them all the time too, using their rolling r’s and dental t’s and whatnot. Heck, I do it all the time when I speak English!
However, in the Sinhala tradition people are mostly unaware of these phonological distinctions, so they really believe that the English ‘th’ sound is equivalent to the Sinhala and Pali dental ‘t’, hence erroneous spellings like ‘meththa’. The truth is they are not, and the story of that Sri-Lankan group believing that people got the meaning of ‘atta’ (‘aththa in their spelling’) and half of other doctrinal terms all wrong because of the spelling shows us that this Romanization had better be avoided to prevent confusion in both the Pali and Sinhala context 
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Please choose which of these four is closes to Pali as spoken by Raveena. Some choices may sound identical because of AWS Polly limitations.
1. <phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="metta"/>.
2. <phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="met͇t͇a"/>.
3. <phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="meθθa"/>.
4. <phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="meʈʈa"/>.
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I am no great specialist, but I liked the third one best. The probable reason for this is that, suprisingly, there is no specific character used for the alveolar consonants in the IPA, so they are generally written identically with the dental ones. The /t͇/ character I used is from the extended IPA and it is not used widely at all.
Raveena, using the English phonological system, naturally interprets the /t/ and /t͇/ characters and the alveolar ones and pronounces them accordingly. Therefore, the closest approximation to the dental ‘t’ is for my Russian ear the interdental /θ/ as in /meθθa/.
Funnily enough, all four variants of ‘t’ are pronounced as heavily aspirated by Raveena, which, as far as I know, is not the case in Pali. Anyway, whatever, it is not the end of the world 
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Very well. Raveena shall say “θ” for “t” unless there are other proposals to try.
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Could you try /met̪t̪a/? The /t̪/ character is sometimes used in the IPA when there is a need to distinguish dental sounds from alveolar ones. Maybe it’s gonna work, I don’t know.
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Sadlly, that produced exactly the same sound file. I think met̪t̪a is not implemented and they fell back to “t”.
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By the way, I am conducting all my interactive research using the AWS Polly console. This is available at no cost with an AWS account. It is quite fascinating to poke and prod the robots and see what they utter.
https://us-west-1.console.aws.amazon.com/polly/home/SynthesizeSpeech?region=us-west-1
I am no linguist, but I also have learned that there is a general lack of online IPA text to speech out there, so this console may be of some value. AWS Polly is currently better than Watson, which has a similar console and even more issues. In the future, I would expect Google to surpass both of these services. It will be quite the race to witness. We can also expect to tune up the SuttaCentral voices as needed. All of our custom pronounciations will be in words/voices.json
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The Sinhala language uses θ for metta (‘meθθa’).
Note that pali is phonetic and the θ was written down using Sinhalese script, when it was initially transcribed on to Ola leaves.
θ = dental ත = 0DAD = ta = [t̪a]
with metta මෙත්තා,
Okay, let’s go deeper down this rabbit hole
There are different ways of classifying consonants. One of them is their place of production, e.g. dental, alveolar, labial, etc. Another defining characteristic is their way of production: plosive, affricate, sonorant, fricative, etc.
The British /θ/ as it is taught in the video you linked is indeed a dental sound, however it is a dental fricative sound. Fricative sounds are , obviously enough, sounds that involve friction in their production, e.g. /s/, /f/, /v/, /ʒ/, and, yes, /θ/. They are radically different from the so-called plosive consonants (aka stops) in that they do not feature a single release of a blocked air stream . Good examples of plosive sounds are the Sinhala /p/, /k/ and the Sinhala dental voiceless plosive /t̪/ (it is indeed a dental voiceless plosive as you can see here).
Summing it all up, the British /θ/ and Sinhala /t̪/ have the same place of articulation but completely different modes of articulation. Other similar examples include /b/ and /w/ (here you could consider the development of ‘vv’ to /bb/ in Pali, which may be a sign that ‘v’ at some point was pronounced as /w/), /k/ and /x/ (here you make consider the phonological development in the German macken /makn̩/ > machen /maxn̩/), etc. Put even more shortly, /θ/ and /t̪/ are two different sounds.
Just in case, using approximation when speaking a foreign language is totally okay, this is a legitimate way of struggling with a foreign phonology. I do it all the time when I can
As the Pali consonantal inventory does not even feature a voiceless dental fricative (or, for that matter, neither does the Sinhala consonantal inventory) and /θ/ and /t̪/ are different sounds, the traditional Sinhala Romanization of /metta/ as meththa is erroneous and misleading.
Anyway, compared to how the Americans butcher Russian family names such as Gurdjieff in their pronunciation, it is a merely trifling thing, but I would recommend avoiding it in the future in any possible context.
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While we are discussing Sinhala pronunciations, is the change of an “a” at the end of a word into what sounds to me like an “er” another Sinhahala innovation, or is that in the Pali?
E.g. Sambuddhasa -> Sam-bud-dha-ser
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I am afraid I have no idea about that. My conjecture would be that it probably is, since there is no /a/ reduction in other positions, but don’t quote me on that.
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Some nice replies on this thread, thanks all!
Indeed; it certainly doesn’t stop you from becoming a Buddhist professor, for I have heard several pronounce Theravada with an opening fricative!
Excellent, thanks, that’s really handy.
On tangentially related note, the group originally behind the Mahasangiti Tipitaka have always wanted to reform the Thai pronunciation of Pali. They have a website and app promoting it.
I haven’t looked into it in detail, but I see that they are using a “corrected” phonetic Thai spelling for Pali:
Again, just to remember, Thai, Sinhala, Roman, or any other system, records Pali quite accurately, and they are fine to use, so long as you remember that the pronunciation of letters when used in Pali is not always the same as the native language. It’s easy to learn these standards if you take a little time.
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I think we can agree to disagree; what is important is that there is no significant alteration to the meaning, despite a subtle shift in the sound.
with metta,
By the way, given the vast amount of experience and deep knowledge appearing in this thread, what I need help with the most is assembling a few key words that highlight correct pronunciation. For example, I am using ananda (unhappy) vs. ānanda (extremely happy) as a contrasting voice test pair. What other words should we use for testing voices?
It is more like, “I don’t hear what you are hearing.”
In my experience both learning to speak Sinhala and teaching Sinhala speakers to speak English, the t/th/ṭ/ṭh thing is quite maddening. Because each language has sounds that the other doesn’t and Sinhala speakers have been taught from an early age that certain sounds are equivalent when in fact they are not.
As a native English speaker, I cannot hear the difference between a dental and retroflex t. So much so that I had to work out a hand signal for my teachers and I to use to distinguish between them. I can make the sounds (because of training myself), I just can’t hear them. What was most frustrating was when my teachers would get frustrated and start saying things like, “No no, t as in ‘think, think, think!’” when they were actually saying “tink, tink, tink’”!
It is such a fascinating situation as long as you don’t get frustrated. For example, in the Sinhala language aspirated consonants have not been aspirated for almost a thousand years. So they still have all the letters, but much to the consternation of students, the sound is the same. So for example k and kh are pronounced exactly the same in Sinhala. And (using the academic way of transliteration) ṭ ට and ṭh ඨ are pronounced exactly the same.
The only time I am able to get a native Sinhala speaker to understand why we can’t use th to spell metta is by asking them, “So if you use ‘th’ to spell metta, then how would you write the mahaprana (aspirated) letter ථ ?” And they don’t have any answer because in Sinhala they don’t have aspirated consonants as a sound. It is at that point that I walk them over to the book case and show them the transliteration table in the front of every Buddha Jayanti Tipitaka volume so they can see how you represent mahaprana letters in English.
On the Sinhala speaker learning English side, it is equally frustrating. Ask any Sinhala speaker (or Indian language speaker of any kind) to say “thinking thoughts” and they will say “tinking tots.” Only after about 30 minutes of coaching can I get them to blow air between their upper teeth and tongue. Then it takes another 30 minutes to get the buzzing sound in “this, these, those.” I can count on one hand the students I have had who take the time to actually train themselves to make these sounds correctly and use them when speaking.
This all leads to some bizarre situations, like when the American born child of Sinhala parents pronounces his own name incorrectly. Poor Meth. In Sinhala, his name means loving-kindness, a shortened form of the Pal word metta. But of course his parents would spell metta as meththa. So his name has to be Meth. The parents pronounce his name like the past tense of “meet.” But every other person the child meets pronounce his name like the shortened form of the street drug methamphetamine. And because he spends 8 hours a day at school with these people, he also pronounces it that way. But because his parents can’t hear the English “th” sound, they never correct him.
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This is all making me a bit dizzy. I need clear direction here!
Do we use IPA meθθa or metta for “t”? I have absolutely no grounds for choosing for myself since I am going by my ear and what it can hear. I seek a pronunciation that eliminates confusion. Are there words with “t” and “th” that can be confused? The AWS Polly voices give us very little room for pronunciation finesse. What we need is to eliminate confusion when hearing two words that can almost sound alike. This is ALL we can do with current technology.
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I think Mat and I would agree on using /meθθa/ as the closest phonological approximation given the current technological limitations, but other people may have other opinions on the matter.
Another famous example of this phonolgical confusion is how the native speakers of Japanese cannot hear the difference between /r/ and /l/.
There are other curious cases. For example, for the speakers of Russian and German the closest approximation of /ð/ in this would be /z/, so they tend to pronounce this word as /zɪs/. My Romanian wife and all of her fellow native speakers of Romanian use /d/ instead, so they tend to pronounce it as /dɪs/. Earlier in the history of the Slavic languages the /θ/ sound was perceived as similar to /f/ much like I think is pronounced as /I fink/ in some colloquial varieties of British English. So, the Greek Θεόδωρος, which became Theodore in English, became Fyodor in Russian. On the other hand, the contemporary Slavic speakers do not associate these sounds together, resorting to /t/ and /s/ instead. Mindblowing.
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I sink I must fank you.
Note: I take it there are no confusing “t”/“th” word pairs as there are for “a” with ananda vs. ānanda?